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numerous hot spots around the Village and the waterfront, but I don’t think either one of them cruised much anymore. Harvey and Ray seemed to stick together better than a lot of straight couples I knew, though I can’t say that I knew them terrifically well.
    Both of them were actors, not terribly famous or successful, but they got by. They did bit parts in plays and movies, and quite a bit of TV commercial work for the rent and sushi money, which latter fact had caused us to blunder across each other at parties fairly frequently, a couple of years back when I still lived in the city. Harvey was a bit of a camera buff, and he liked to talk to technicians, and he used to have me to dinner once in a while to pick my brains about different equipment he was interested in. Both of them were excellent cooks, so it was an even trade.
    The walk down had cleared my head to some degree. Harvey and Ray were drinking Pernod when I got there, but I passed on that and went for a glass of ice water. The opening chitchat seemed to run out fairly quickly, and as I sat in what was dragging into a rather sticky silence, I began to wonder if dropping by here had been a mistake. They weren’t people I usually burst in on without warning; it was late enough to be weird; I might have interrupted something …
    “Oh,” Harvey said then. “I got film from our trip.” One of the catch-up details they’d told me was that they’d been to Italy in April. “You want to watch it?”
    “Sure, set it up,” I said, hoping they hadn’t seen me cringe. Like most amateurs, Harvey was infinitely more interested in the equipment itself than in anything he could possibly do with it. On the other hand, the films of his I’d seen before were as good or better than Thorazine for blunting the sharp edges of a troubled mind. The mood I was in, that might not be so bad, and it would certainly kill time. Harvey was bustling around with a projector and a screen. I knew he would flak me about in-camera editing, which I know nothing and care less about, but I had survived that before.
    Ray shut off the light, and here came the fresh marvels from Harvey’s latest super-8 wonder box. Italy. Well, I would be there in about thirty hours, after all. Maybe I could learn something.
    Picturesque natives in the Piazza Navona, the Washington Square of Rome. A shot of Ray walking past the Bernini fountain there.
    Exteriors of several Roman churches. The courtyard of St. Peter’s: Harvey and Ray together, arms linked; the shot taken by some cooperative bystander, possibly the pope.
    A big bird’s-eye view of Vatican City, shot from the dome of St. Peter’s, I would guess. Then Harvey in close-up, framed against the sky. Harvey had the sort of looks advertisers like to call rugged. He wasn’t a bad-looking guy. Ray, on the other hand, was more the Woody Allen type, though he brought home a lot of bacon playing klutzy roles in commercials: the guy who can’t handle washing the dog and so forth. He practically worshiped Harvey’s beauty. The shot held for a long time.
    “That would make a nice head shot,” I said, for the sake of moving my mouth.
    “Oh no, never,” Ray said. Such modesty.
    “Don’t know how it would print,” Harvey said. The reel ran out and Harvey got up and loaded another one. I could see that there were plenty more, enough to last me till time to go home, easy.
    Venice. Ray propped in the bow of a gondola in a sort of sultan’s pose, laughing. Harvey in the Piazza San Marco with pigeons sitting all over him.
    More of much the same.
    The third reel: Florence. Ray contemplating the Michelangelo slave sculptures. A jouncing shot across the Ponte Vecchio. What seemed to be a communist rally in front of the Uffizi, red rags in abundance and much gesticulation. My God, these two had the luck of fools and little children. I didn’t think tourists were supposed to film things like that.
    Florence from the Belvedere. Here my interest was somewhat