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disappeared on me, but then returned. “Who? Kyle?”
    â€œNo, Bruce.”
    â€œI made it clear not to wait around. It was a kindness, really. He was mooning around my yellow apartment one evening, waiting for Chloe to collect her clothes for a sleepover. I sat him down in the kitchen, I put a Scotch in his hand, and I said, ‘There’s something I want you to understand. Even if this thing with Marek Grunbaum doesn’t work out, even if it doesn’t work out with the man
after
him, I will never, under any circumstances, come back to you.’”
    â€œJesus.”
    â€œHe needed to hear it. Bruce was one of those men, you know the kind: A woman leaves them and they take on a look of wounded confusion, as if the whole thing is a kind of
problème psychiatrique.
A fit of madness that could, conceivably, vanish as quickly as it came on. You know how it goes:
My wife went nuts, but I’m being patient.
They overlook the fact that you’ve hated them for years. They overlook the fact that you’ve got a new boyfriend, lost twenty pounds, wear different clothes and have an expensive new haircut.”
    â€œDid he believe you?”
    â€œHe looked at me with those half-closed eyes and said, ‘I’m not in any hurry.’ At which point I snapped at him. I regret it. Sort of. No, I don’t. I said, ‘For God’s sake, Bruce, you can’t jerk off for the rest of your life!’
    â€œChloe and I flew to Mexico City and then took a bus for a couple of hundred miles north through the desert and up into the mountains. A friend of Peter’s, Freddie Steigman, met us at the bus station. He was a native New Yorker, a pensioner, thirty-five years with Allstate Insurance. He used to be roommates with Edward Albee. Back when they were in their twenties. Albee was a poet then, apparently a very bad one. You know him?”
    â€œThe
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
guy.”
    â€œYeah, that’s him. When he retired, Freddie came to San Miguel for a holiday. But he fell in love with the Mexican boy who looked after the hotel swimming pool. The boy disappeared after a couple of weeks, but Freddie stayed on.”
    The candle sputtered. Sally watched it for a moment, her eyes sleepy. Getting ready to leave the party.
    â€œWhat was Albee like?” I asked.
    Â 
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Two
    S he looked up from the candle flame. “Are we going to do this thing?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œAnd you’ll stay?”
    â€œOf course I’ll stay.”
    And I thought, Nothing works out the way you think it will. And this won’t either. So I know which way it won’t work out. But the other way, the way it will, that I don’t know. How was it supposed to go again? The climb up eighteen flights of stairs, the quick walk down the hall, into the apartment. But then what? I can’t seem to recall. What did I think would come
after
the apartment? The next day, the next week. A year later. Five years later. Surely I must have thought about that: that the end of something isn’t necessarily the end of it. A man parts the curtains one morning and discovers an entire
planet
revolving just outside the window. Oh, I
see.
    Sally looked back at the flame, nodding. “What were we talking about?”
    â€œEdward Albee.”
    â€œSomebody asked Freddie about him one night when he was holding court in the Cucaracha bar. ‘If homosexuality had not existed, Albee would have invented it,’ Freddie said.” Sally smiled affectionately. “You could tell he’d said it before. Please, another Drambuie.”
    In the kitchen doorway, I turned around. “I have to turn the light on now. Close your eyes.”
    ***
    Settled with a brandy snifter that burned like dark gold in her hand, she continued. “Freddie Steigman dressed like a slightly down-at-the-heels salesman from the fifties. Heavy New York accent. A face part bulldog, part