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By Root 1893 0

BART over to Berkeley once and had a sidewalk vegetarian lunch, mock duck tacos, she says, at a seedy little restaurant devoted to higher consciousness. On another day he drove her to Mount Tam in his rattly old blue VW. He’d brought sandwiches and wine and some pastry concoction he had made himself, as a picnic offering. They ate their picnic in the shade of a tree with the FM radio in the car serenading them with Glenn Gould. Why had he gone to all this trouble? Emily says he was just being a friend, and then she pauses. “His boyfriend had left him a month before,” she says, looking at her bare feet on the floor of our empty living room. “So he was lonely. And he was one of those gay men who have a latent hetero-thing going on.” How does she know this? She shrugs. She could tell by the way he looked at her, sometimes. On a few rare occasions he looked at her the way a man looks at a woman.

It’s true, I haven’t heard this story. “So?” I ask.

So one day Jeffrey didn’t show up for work. Or the next day or the day after that. He was sick, of course, with pneumonia, and after he recovered, he came back to work for a few days and then disappeared again for another two weeks. But everyone knew he had the plague, and this is before all the antiretroviral drugs broke through to the population at large, so at work everyone avoided the subject of Jeffrey, whom they had all liked.

By this time I am looking out the front window at our street. It’s a nondescript neighborhood of similarly designed brick semi-colonials like ours, and as I’m watching, I see a guy in a Santa Claus suit jogging by.

“Look,” I say. “It’s Rolf, from down the block. He’s wearing that goddamn Santa Claus suit again.”

Emily glances out, bending upward, lifting herself halfway. “He must not be taking his meds.”

“It’s not that,” I tell her. “He thinks it’s better for visibility than a running outfit. Drivers see him right away. ‘You don’t accidentally hit Santa,’ he told me once. At least he hasn’t tied on the white beard. At least he’s not wearing the cap.”

“Who’re you kidding?” Emily asks me. “The guy’s bipolar. The Santa comes out in him whenever he gets manic.”

“You could do worse,” I say to her. “You’ve done worse.”

We sit there, looking at each other for a moment, unsmilingly. Neither of us says anything, and I hear the furnace come on. The light flaring through the window has that burnished autumnal warmth. The furnace creates this low hum. Outside in the yard, the leaves could be raked, but I’m not going to do that now.

“What happened to Jeffrey?” I ask, after another long pause. “He died, right?”

No, he hadn’t died, but he was in one of the Kaiser hospitals when Emily went to see him. He didn’t look good. “Wasted” is probably the right word here. She tried to cheer him up, but he resisted her efforts. Still, he had one request. He wanted her to take some pictures of him, as a keepsake of how handsome he was despite his illness. He thought his looks had trumped the virus, somehow; beauty had staged its victory over infirmity, he thought. So she did it: she bought a camera at Castro Photo and took some pictures of her friend sitting up in the chair next to the hospital bed, out of his hospital clothes and into his best black jeans and a leather jacket, etc. “You probably didn’t know it,” he said, as she took his picture, “but I’m an aristocrat.” He posed as if he were a rake and a bit of a snob, smiling an old-money smile.

But once the film was developed, the pictures were unshowable: his skin wasn’t just sallow, but waxlike. His face seemed rigid, a staring mask. She didn’t know what to do with these pictures. Ten years ago, retouching photographs digitally wasn’t as easy as it is now. But if the guy could tell lies to himself when looking into the mirror, she thought, maybe he could tell himself the same lies when he saw these photographs.

She arrived at his apartment—he was convalescing at home—and sat down next to him at the dinette table. One by one the pictures were laid out, like playing cards, like the hand he’d been dealt. With his