Chapter 2

“Lulu’s coming over now. With les viandes chinoises.”

Bill put the porn magazine back under the divan, turned off the TV, and resumed his prone position. He stuck out his feet as far as they would go.

“So, William, how is everything in La-La Land? Ever run into Andrew?”

“Who?” Bill pulled the blanket up to his neck. It was as old and as worn as everything in David’s apartment. Stealing a glance, he realized that everything in the apartment was vintage.

“Andy. You know. The old sauna denizen. Old Alan’s friend. Boyfriend.”

Bill didn’t go to gyms anymore, and neither did David, though they kept paying their membership fees. Bill wondered who old Alan was. David remembered more people than he did.

“Everything’s fine. I can’t say I miss the East Coast.” Bill wiggled his toes underneath the blanket.

“Sheeeesh…who would? It’s hateful here,” David said. “The heat, the cold, the people. Maybe I’ll move, too. San Diego.”

“You’ll never move. How could you abandon Philip?”

“That imbecile? That defective? That throw-back? In a second!”

Bill turned the TV back on and was watching PM Magazinewith the sound off when he heard a key turn in the door again. He looked up at David, who was sitting at his little writing desk next to the divan flossing his teeth and snacking at the same time.

“Lulu has her own key,” David explained though a mouth full of Fritos. Tiny orange-yellow pieces of processed corn, shiny with saliva, flew onto the carpet.

But it was Philip who came into the living room. Always dressed too fashionably for Boston, he began his signature Judy-Garland welcoming dance. David provided the accompanying prattle.

“Okay, now, watch. Watch the jaw. There it goes! He doesn’t even know he’s doing it. The idiot! Look! Those skinny legs. Judy before the pills. No, after. Stop it, Philip, stop it! Arretez, Baby Gumm!”

Philip continued to pirouette and feign his drunken-Judy near-falls.

Bill was giggling but he stopped because it was true that Philip, the product of a neurotic Brooklyn family, couldn’t help himself. Bill adored the love-hate antics of his Boston friends’ antics, but he never joined in. The internecine, sisterly squabbling that David, Philip, and Lou indulged in was something that the three of them could do, but no one else was allowed to join in. Not even someone who had known them as long as Bill. They had been at Harvard together in the old days; Bill a beginning graduate student, the rest of them just finished or nearly so. Bill was an outlier in this coterie and had always been so, even when he lived in Boston among and with them. Once Bill thought it was because he wasn’t Jewish, but Lulu wasn’t Jewish either, though David and Philip made their auntie an honorary yid long ago. Later, Bill flattered himself when he concluded he was less neurotic than they were, and so less close. But something else tied them together and Bill was envious of it.

“Oh, Davie, you’re so mean.” Philip stopped his pirouette. “Pauvre petiteWilliam, so good to see you!”

“So good to see you! So good to see you!” parroted David.

Philip went into David’s bathroom to wash his hands. When he came out, using his elbow to turn off the light switch, he asked David if he had provided Bill with his own towels and bar of soap.

“Philip,” intoned David with disdain, “you are a miserableexcuse for a human being. The whole world will notconform to your pitiable sick germophobic phobias.” Then, in an aside to Bill, he added, “He’s worse than ever.”

Bill got off the divan for the first time since he’d arrived at David’s. “Philip, Lou is coming over with Chinese food.”

“Chinese food? Chinese? En garde, ma petite William. Lulu will eat everything, and stick his saliva-coated chopsticks back into the cartons. Divide it up on the plates first, and don’t let him help himself.”

“You’re pathetic,” David said, flossing his back molars now.

“That’s not true. Don’t listen to him, William. The fact is that I’m not staying for dinner. I’m going to Bruce’s.”

David, done with flossing for the moment and reclining on his bed while eating Fritos, explained.

“Bruce. The amante du jour. Half her age, if that. Can you believe it?”

Bill listened to David through the sound of corn chips being chomped. Philip tried to scowl at David, but it turned into yet another Judy-gesture that even Philip giggled at.

“Actuallyhe’s verynice, William. Some evening while you’re here we’ll have to go have a look at him.”

“A look?”

“A look. As in ‘peep show,’” jumped in David, now reaching into a box of Entemann’s cookies on his nightstand. “He’s a bartender at the fanciest bar in the Copley, and you can’t go in unless you’ve got a sports coat on. So we look at him through the glass.”

“Bruce makes the best martini in Boston.”

“Oh, Mistress Bill will like that. She’s already looking forward to that bottle of vodka Lou keeps hidden somewhere.”

Philip was feigning shock at David’s insinuations when Lou’s piercing voice could be heard from the sidewalk, soon followed by the deliberately noisy insertion of his key in the front door’s lock.