Years and Years

Ed had never planned to retire, so it didn’t surprise him that at seventy-four his days still beat to the irregular rhythm of working life. He was traffic-bound in the morning, ate lunch in a hurry, rushed to rescheduled appointments—always reaching for the buzz in his pocket with whichever hand was free—and was stuck again in tail lights by nightfall. His muscles ached for home at the end of each day. Mediocre meals and bits of internet news awaited him before bed, a phone call if he was lucky.

Ed’s friends were deep in the twilight of their lives, soaking up time like comfortable sponges. Successful friends, the ones who had flowered endlessly in early adulthood. A psychologist, a doctor, a teacher, a lawyer. All formers. “Ed, are you still running around town?” the doctor would ask him. “You checking your blood pressure?” Cards shuffled in the background.

Old people were in demand if you knew where to look. If you had to because you hadn’t saved much more than a millennial on his first career and your parents were miraculously both still alive at ninety-four, burning through money. He’d never been a very successful actor, but it seemed like he was finally finding his niche. Though he wouldn’t call much of his work acting, exactly, more like simulating.

Today, for example, he was dying of emphysema at Johns Hopkins Hospital. A neighbor had called an ambulance to bring him to the ER. He didn’t say much. He wanted badly to answer the students’ questions—“how’s the pain?” “Is there someone we can call?”—but he was supposed to be disoriented and possibly alone, with no kin; the more confusing for them the better. Did this man have a designated decision maker? No, just a vague living will. His name was Cyrus, Ed decided, and he was deeply religious. He didn’t want to be intubated, but he couldn’t say it. “I’m known for my backstories,” Ed had told the staff before they started, hoping for a laugh.

Mercifully, after some credible labored breathing, Cyrus died.

Ed had lain in his bed the night before and rehearsed, breathing and all. It was tough not to think too much—Cyrus isn’t thinking, Ed told himself, he’s dying. It takes a lot of energy for organs to fail. Thankfully he got closer to some vague sort of mindfulness than bodily breakdown and accidentally fell asleep, which was nothing like death, after all.

The students and faculty didn’t seem particularly concerned with his authenticity. He supposed his liver spots were authentic enough. It did get to him that these patients he was playing were meant to be around his age, requiring little suspension of disbelief. And anyway he was usually ignored to the point of being practically as dead as they were. It was a lonely work environment, though occasionally there was a young doctor-to-be who took an interest in Ed’s role, like Tom.

Ed had a vision problem. When he saw younger people, those in their forties, thirties even, he still assumed that he was looking at a reflection of himself, just another member of the club. It often took a minute to realize they didn’t reciprocate. Oh right, he would think, getting a glimpse of his hands or his face in a window.

It didn’t help that they always reminded Ed of someone, people from his past, frozen in time. Tom, the resident, was an old love named Patrick staring at him from above the hospital bed, winking in the way that few men can. Ed was always drawn to those that treated their love like a secret, something to be passed back and forth behind others’ backs. His love life had accordingly amounted to a series of dead ends and reversals. The secrets ran their course, the men left, and Ed rarely heard from them again. They stayed put in their decades, with their flat stomachs and heads full of hair.

Playing a dying man while being winked at by this specter from younger days––the past and future were at war in him. It took him out of his character and made him wish he were dressed up for company, not prostrate in a papery gown with the tender bits of his limbs exposed. They didn’t spare him that discomfort in this roleplay. He wanted Tom to see that he still knew how to dress, he stayed with the times, his denim tapered but not skinny, his layers soft and complementary, see––but Tom was gone by the time he’d become himself again.

The hallways of the hospital had grown familiar to Ed, the way a new neighborhood is gradually more than a series of surprising intersections. He’d worked enough of these gigs that he knew how to get down to the cafeteria from most wings––even the operating rooms, where they somehow let an actor traipse about. His presence seemed disrespectful to the patients who lay sedated in those hallowed, antiseptic chambers. But not everything could be learned from the real thing.

The cafeteria was busy. To Ed, it represented the full spectrum of human experience whenever he stopped in for a cup of chicken soup or a salad––parents waiting for their children to have children, children waiting for their parents to die, all in the same room. It was the closest he’d come to communal living, to the elders and the mothers and the siblings and fathers confronted, together, with life’s grim and miraculous landmarks. He was an anomaly, unattached, not part of the camaraderie of the staff or the solidarity of the family, but a solo observer, a fictional presence.

At a small, porous table in the center of the cafeteria, Ed sat with what he thought would be a mild lunch, taking care not to end up gassy and bloated on a bed in front of a bunch of doctors-to-be, lest he have to incorporate flatulence into his character arc. He tried to eat slowly, something he still hadn’t mastered in his seven decades. He’d come closest with the Tom lookalike, who told him, nearly every meal for three years, to slow down. Patrick, meanwhile, ate like a bird, pushing his food around and cutting it into tinier and tinier bits. But Ed said nothing about it, as with Patrick he had been trying something new, taking more criticism than he gave.

Every day these days was a reminder of some old failed attempt, a puzzle left unsolved. Young men like Tom, approaching the small, porous table with a grin of surprise, descended on Ed like handsome ghosts.

“Howdy,” Tom said, joining Ed without asking, likely seeing––in spite of his carefully constructed pride––the sheer need expressed in the tension of Ed’s jaw and the squint in his eyes. You know I want you, they said. “Howdy back,” Ed said instead.

“You’re really good up there. I’m Tom, by the way.”

“I know, Tom. We’ve done this before, remember? Ed. Tom.” He pointed to each of them in turn.

“Oh God, I’m sorry. I can never seem to remember anything anymore, it’s in one, out the other. You must understand that.”

“Why’s that?” Ed asked.

Tom stared at him, expressionless.

“God, I’m just going to keep stepping in it today, aren’t I?”

“That’s entirely up to you,” Ed said.

This was perfect, just how he preferred to start with attractive, young bucks––a bit of an upper hand, control at the expense of their blunders. Now he just had to keep quiet, withhold, the next best way to retain the advantage. Give less than you receive, and they’ll leave agonizing over everything they’ve told you, everything they need to clarify. You’ll wake up to a string of texts.

Tom sighed as he slapped his cafeteria tray down on the table. He stared at his food and scratched his ear, looking like he was about to say something. Instead he cringed, as if reliving some past mistake or humiliation.

“Long day?” Ed asked.

“Long year,” Tom said.

“I could never do what you do,” Ed said, deciding to flatter instead of withhold. Some conversations required a strategic shift in approach.

“I don’t do much of anything yet,” he replied. “You’re an actor?”

“Guilty.”

“Go through a lot of training for that?”

“Not formally. I learned on the job, you could say.”

“A good friend of mine from high school is an actor,” Tom said. “He lives in New York. The other day I saw him in a commercial for a drug for ulcerative colitis. A bunch of our friends were sharing it around.”

“That’s the dream,” Ed said. “A couple days of work and you’re set for months. Nothing like a pharma budget.”

Tom nodded slowly, still staring at his untouched English muffin. “Yeah, he played at illness for an afternoon and then went on a vacation to Provence, ulcer-free.”

“Well, I can assure you I’m making no such bank playing your patient,” Ed said.

“Good. Otherwise, I might ask you to switch places.” Ed thought he detected a small smirk.

“No thank you, I’ll keep my position,” Ed said, his heart thumping with potential. “I’ve got it down by now.”

Tom held his gaze for a second or two, long enough to indulge him the innuendo. Ed had varying degrees of success with a blunt approach, and if you asked him, he frowned on vulgarity, the kind of crass talk inevitably engaged in by a group of gay men at a party, reviewing sexual histories and horrors with abandon. But he took part all the same. Initiated if he wasn’t careful.

“To be honest, I can’t help but think of so many of my decisions as economic calculations,” Tom said, preferring his own train of thought. “It’s crude. But everything feels like an investment, measured in returns. Otherwise, I don’t know if I’d be able to get through this. It’s certainly not doing anything for my personal life. So I have to imagine the future gains….”

As Ed got older—and older—he found mostly that he was ignored: fewer sidelong glances from other men, fewer introductions in unfamiliar settings, longer wait times at no-reservation restaurants. He had to remind others that he was there, at regular intervals, or the world would close up shop around him, lights dimming until he was left in the empty dark. But then there were a select few cases where the effect was inverted, and someone homed in on him with a level of personal attention unlike the casual sexual interest of contemporaries. Through a fog of obscurity, an occasional arrow shot with surprising intention in his direction. It usually involved a desire to tell one’s story, and––Ed imagined––have oneself mirrored in the knowing eyes of an elder. These archers might have had him in their sights but their concern, mostly, was self-directed.

“Things fall apart,” Tom continued, “people leave. But then we keep on working, isn’t that right?”

“You’re going to have to be a bit more specific than that doctor, for me to properly diagnose.”

“I’m just saying,” Tom said, “that we act like life isn’t work, but, at the end of the day, work is how we spend our lives, so you better get something from it in return.”

“I thought doctors went into the field to give, not receive,” Ed said.

This man was having some sort of crisis, and all Ed could offer was double entendre. And he wasn’t eating. He looked too thin, like he stared at his food more often than he ate it. But it brought out an animal angularity in his face that Ed couldn’t help but admire. There would come a day when gauntness would be ghostly on Tom, but he wasn’t there yet, he wore his deprivation as rugged asceticism, his scrubs hugging his ribcage like a tunic of a bygone era when food was meant for fuel, not pleasure.

Tom pinched the bridge of his nose. “You have to be careful not to give too much though, right? There’s a danger in giving. You wake up one day and your house is empty except for your scrubs and your childhood mementos, and you realize your whole adulthood has just been for someone else’s benefit––right?”

Ed hated this tendency in young people, to assume the validity of their argument while they laid it out, filling in your small expressions of assent for you.

“Look at you,” Tom pressed on. “Still working at how old?”

Another rhetorical question––perhaps I should adopt this as my age, Ed thought: how old. Something undefinable, mythical, only ever referenced as an estimation.

“I bet you’d like a little break from giving so damn much, right?”

“I like to work,” Ed said. “Granted, maybe not in a hospital.” He looked around. “It feels too much like the underbelly of life. Bar fights and drunk drivers and angry lovers––it all ends up here, it’s like a well-funded underworld, one you can get stuck in if you’re not careful, addicted to its morphine or its misery. Not like out there where you can avoid the reminders of death and disaster if you make an effort. I prefer to hop around and work in different places, never one for too long, but I do like to work all the same. I’m suited to acting.”

Tom folded his arms, leaned back into his chair and smiled with teeth, finally. It was worth the wait.

“You sound more like a poet.”

Ed blushed, he could feel it. Ah, what a drunken feeling.

“So, then, Mr. traveling thespian, where to next?”

“Well, I’m doing a corporate communications campaign after this gig is up today, and then a small production of a play called Proof.”

“What sort of corporate communication?”
“It’s silly. An orientation video on ageism in the workplace. It’s for a pharmaceutical company, maybe one of your future malevolent overlords.”

Tom grunted at him. “And who are your malevolent overlords?” he asked.

“My exes,” Ed said without flinching.

Tom finally took a bite of his English muffin. “That I can relate to,” he said, before stuffing the rest of it into his mouth.

––

Ed liked his apartment, but there were certain elements of his persona that were hard to maintain while inside it. He stepped across the threshold and deflated; he felt the air escape from some hidden puncture. He grew accustomed to his puffed-up performance throughout the day, and without it felt frail and feeble––his back pain began to make itself known, he hobbled. He changed into sweatpants and saw the slightly darker-gray spots around the soft crotch, evidence of his growing incontinence. His apartment would smell of oncoming death, he was sure, if he wasn’t careful to bathe it in simulated pine and sandalwood.

He wondered about his contemporaries and their houses, he wondered about the feeling of coming home to a foundation of mutual support––twice the brainpower, twice the effort to tackle life’s inconveniences and sorrows as they accumulated at a faster clip.

Everything seemed to accumulate faster these days––bad news, bad ideas, trash, trash of all kinds reaching a tipping point, he thought, pouring himself a glass from a twenty-five-dollar bottle of some California red blend. Two a night. He was grateful for his nightly isolation, in a sense––no one could witness his waste. Just add it to the pile, toss the bottle onto a small heap of glass and plastic, hear it tinkle.

His chair, the single most expensive item in his apartment, hugged him snuggly. Mementos and small gifts––from others, from himself––encircled him. Lights dimmed to his preference, he reached for a photo album he’d left out. He practiced nostalgia, it was a habit he preferred to the blurring of years into decades, eras. He’d prepared well, documenting his relationships with frequent snapshots: trips to Southampton and Nantucket on other people’s dime; other couples’ houses; a lover twirling homemade spaghetti; a friend with a joint hanging from her lips. The memories survived, the relationships did not. But Patrick could always be found there, twirling homemade spaghetti.

The 80s. No filters, just mediocre camera skills. The friend with the joint had since married a man eighteen years her senior, birthed two children, divorced the man and married another ten years her junior. He had postcards from her in a box somewhere, tucked inside another, larger box. The apartment had a useful amount of hidden space for his compartmentalizing. Enough space to occasionally find more unlikely things hidden in boxes, too, like a container of kibble, dried out from the years since any boyfriend’s dog paid regular visits.

Ed had been single for nine years, and yet the influence of his past lovers did not feel almost a decade distant. They lurked in familiar faces like Tom’s, in memories revisited more frequently than he’d admit, superimposed on his daily life, flitting in and out of view. He creaked around the apartment making chili, a recipe he’d perfected for another man’s palate. He flipped through the internet, brushing up against opinion pieces written by his most recent, ten-year love. That man had a husband now, and an egg donor, and two children by surrogate, who was another old friend, another face in one of Ed’s books, the one with the aughts. Tucked away for now, awaiting its turn.

Children were mostly absent from his albums, but he didn’t feel this absence as acutely as his friends did on his behalf. They were always trying to understand it or explain it away.

“You’re lucky,” one said. “You’ll never be hated like your child can hate you. I mean really despised.”

“But won’t you miss it?” said another, in a frank conversation that later required an apology. “Really seeing life from the beginning?”

As they aged, his friends were often biting their tongues, letting slip a judgment or a worry that betrayed their bewilderment at his life. But he’d stuck with them through these minor slights, as they had stuck with him through the labor of supporting an artist. All those shows to attend and projects to invest in. Few other fields demanded as much tending from the friends. Perhaps that’s why he kept so many, to allow for a wide rotation. It helped that the shows were usually followed by a gathering of intelligent people, well-read in their fields, who knew how to drink and smoke enough so that everyone seemed familiar and worthy of interest. Enough to occasionally hint at the discussions they must’ve carried on about him with their partners once the after-party wrapped: “He’s a strange case of arrested development.” “I’m surprised he never got into harder drugs.” “Maybe he loves himself enough for two.”

The gathering of like minds from unlike origins, that was perhaps Ed’s true skill. Introducing friends across disciplines. Sometimes their friendships outlasted him. Sometimes they lay dormant in his photo albums. Sometimes they called together, preferring to catch up as a group.

But tonight, the phone didn’t ring––his friends were tending to their homes, their spouses, their adult children in various stages of crisis, their grandchildren. His own parents tended to their herbs and ailments. Ed tended to his memories, which eventually turned to dreams, as he dozed in his too-comfortable chair. He roused at 2 a.m. and dragged himself to bed, ignoring his dry mouth and headache, frequent byproducts of the two glasses a night.

––

He woke up thinking about the hospital, about Tom. They’d parted on a personal note, talking about their past relationships. People shared so liberally these days––Ed had gotten used to it. Trading in embarrassments, in lessons learned. It was democratic: Ed remembered years when it was a privilege to share intimacies, only for some.

He made his way to rehearsal, the first for Proof. It was a large part at a small theater. Sitting in traffic, he should have been thinking of his lines for the read-through. But Tom. Tom had said his last boyfriend counted their days together with tallies, those tidy groups of five, the diagonals marking small achievements of commitment. “How suffocating,” Ed had said, thinking himself quite capable of such a charade.

Ed didn’t know when he’d be back in the hospital. And he didn’t get a chance to make much of their goodbye––Tom had dashed off, he was late. No numbers were exchanged, there was no way for him to let Tom know in a week or two that he’d been thinking of something he’d said.

He’d told Tom about Patrick, about their resemblance. He’d lived with Patrick for three years in a five hundred square foot box on 2nd Avenue in the East Village. They called each other lover; it was their lover’s den. They said it only a little ironically, and only to one another. They were always plotting to change their lives, change each other. Days were never enough, but they commemorated their passing by mixing Modelos with cheap whiskey. They never cooked and hardly exercised, except for long walks to the Met, where they’d talk and talk about forgotten wars and old Egyptians and time passing. Slow down, Patrick would say to him, about the way he ate, talked, rushed around to auditions. They fought, the result of living beyond their means and in such close quarters. When they weren’t at their jobs they were within inches of each other––they barely shut the bathroom door. Misunderstandings sprang from a change of tone, a single word. Sometimes Patrick would lie next to Ed in bed repeating “I love my life, I love my life” while Ed read Eve Babitz stories about women having sex for days with beautiful vampires, convinced he should move to L.A.

They had very little sex in those three years on 2nd Avenue. Fear put a damper on their libidos. When they went to sleep, they’d tussle for sheets like siblings sharing a bed on a family vacation they hadn’t agreed to.

He’d told Tom all of that, for god’s sake.

––

Ed arrived at the suburban theater. He parked far from the entrance, facing the highway from which he’d come, and with his gaze he followed the cars as they raced by. Occasionally his stomach dropped, the fleeting feeling he was after. It reminded him of being little, like certain other phantom sensations––something rolling under the tongue, or his index finger and thumb circling a plush softness. Subtle ties to infancy, still.

Sometimes we really had loved our lives, he thought. Hadn’t we? Patrick brought new flowers home every week for a vase on the mantel, and they laughed at themselves while walking around the neighborhood. Ed would know which buildings were for sale for how much and Patrick would criticize him for always looking to skip three rungs on the ladder. “Three? You think only three?”

There was a knock on his passenger side window. Caroline, the actress playing his daughter. She looked puzzled, annoyed. He didn’t roll down his window at first, long enough to appear rude, to annoy her further.

“What’re you doing in there, Ed? We’re starting soon.”

“Morning Caroline. Excuse me, I got a little lost in thought.”

“How appropriate,” she said, reaching in to unlock the door. She sat next to him and looked out at the highway, too.

“That’s so like you, dad.”

Then she said a line from the play. Warm, unpleasant air wafted in through the open window. He said his line back to her, he was glad to remember it. They went on like that for a few minutes before she patted his knee and they made their way to the theater.

He’d done quite a few regional productions with Caroline over the years. She was taller than he was, had long blonde hair with prominent highlights, and acted in a confident way that Ed found overconfident, like she was muscling their dialogue into submission. She was also married to the director, the sort of man who kept one too many buttons undone, who was proud of his chest hair and his cultivated sensitivity. Sitting around an eight-foot table set up in the middle of the stage, Caroline delivered monologues with pummeling gusto while this husband-director watched her with a look of exaggerated seriousness. Ed thought he looked constipated, his brow heavy with expectation, longing for a satisfying release.

Around this banquet table, Ed had a hard time getting into the role, which required him to gradually unravel, to lose his mind and memory. He could sense the expectant, constipated gaze of the entire cast and crew on him when they reached his most demanding moments, when the depth of Ed’s dementia was revealed. Jesus, people, it was just a read-through.

It wasn’t that Ed was disinterested in this role, this play, these colleagues. He was grateful for the part, it was a big win for him. He’d invite that wide circle of friends and have a night of celebration; it had been a couple of years since a worthy opening night. But he imagined it with some dread, too, not having a co-host, no Tom to squeeze his hand through Caroline’s mindless nattering about the joys of a creative marriage, no Tom to have the final word at the end of the evening, to be the authority on their shared life. Instead, the last person he talked to would likely look around in surprise at the thinned-out crowd and apologize for needing to go, embarrassed to leave Ed alone.

Silly to think of Tom squeezing his hand, the long, meticulous fingers around his own, mottled and grandfatherly. Silly to think of Tom at all, of the flattering fit of his scrubs, of his youthful cynicism and premature exhaustion. Wondering if life is more than work, looking to Ed for an answer, to a man whose work was his companion.

Dementia, aphasia, disorientation, death. Would Ed be better prepared for his own demise thanks to his rehearsals? He looked around at the cast, grown men and women with colorful notebooks open and ballpoint pens at the ready, prepared to record whatever bits of wisdom they could find in this elaborate fiction. Ed would rather have been with Tom at that plastic two top, recounting true tales of disappointment and heartbreak, hoping Tom could make a map of his memories.

After the read-through he had to rush to a small recording studio in DC for the ageism gig, another 45 minutes of driving. He didn’t have Tom’s number, but at a bad backup he did try searching for him on his phone. No luck––he had very few inputs, not even a last name, just Tom and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. There were quite a few, none as handsome. Someone behind him leaned hard into their horn. The line had moved.

When he reached the accident the honker sped past him with fury, but Ed couldn’t help but crawl by the wreckage: a station wagon all smashed up, the front bumper sliced off and the machinery mangled and exposed like the scene of a botched surgery. The wagon was from another era with its wooden siding and bike rack, suggesting trips to the beach, rides where the driver can’t see out the rearview. A middle-aged man in flip flops sat in the median with his head in his hands, but before Ed could scrutinize the details of his misfortune any further, it was time for him to drive away. He kept his phone out of reach for the rest of the ride, newly preoccupied with the idea of sudden impact. Not a long, drawn-out deterioration for younger people to witness in disgust, but a single moment, a slicing off. Nothing to rehearse.

D.C. was hot and languid by midday. The neighborhood felt vaguely blighted, but without any boarded-up windows or overgrown lots. More like emotional blight, like no one thought to give it any love or attention. He parked on the street and found his way to a nondescript steel door with an elaborate panel of identical buttons presided over by a security camera, a large pupil embedded in the wall. He imagined himself, fishbowl-like, on the other end, his aged features enhanced to humorous effect. The pupil buzzed him in and he traveled down a wide hallway, past a series of blonde wooden doors, like rows of fateful choices.

He found his own and entered a soundproof den where a group of hired hands quietly set up the scenarios he would plug himself into. Room 136 opened up into a spacious studio where a generic office had been staged: a pod of four cubicles, a sliding glass door, and a small conference room with another eight-foot table.

“Ed Millstein?” asked a heavily bearded man whose eyes were somewhere else, certainly not making contact. This felt ageist.

“That’s me, reporting for duty.”

He met Patricia, a woman in her mid-sixties. “Thank god this is such an issue these days,” she said out of the side of her mouth. They didn’t have any joint scenes, since old people don’t work together, only with groups of skeptical youngsters as the odd one out.

Ed was Don. He had a temper, he’d decided, but kept it under wraps until he got off work and went to hit golf balls at the range with wild, frightening inaccuracy.

“I’m going to give this project to Jason,” said the boss. “It really needs a quick, modern sensibility.”

“Are you sure?” Don said with contained rage. “Jason just told me he’s over hours. I’m pretty free next week.”

“Yup, don’t worry about it, we’ll put you on something you’re more suited to soon.”

To be fair, Don was impossible. And notoriously slow––he was too busy gritting his teeth.

For much of the afternoon, they filmed stock video. No dialogue, just suggestions of contentious meetings and conversations where he sat in a chair and someone else stood over him. The director was the bearded man with vacant eyes. Once was always enough for him, they didn’t do any second takes. It felt like Ed was fast forwarding through a lifetime at the office, back and forth across the same short distances with the same people.

“Look offended but like you’re trying to hide it.”

“Look like nobody ever told you about this.”

“Look like this is the last straw.”

The final scene was a birthday party. Someone had prepped a cake with so many candles it resembled an anemone.

“Look like you’re pretending to be grateful.”

Pretending to be pretending to be grateful, Ed felt very far from gratitude. Am I a sad man? he wondered, staring into the tendrils of his fake birthday cake. Is it a surprise I never got into harder drugs?

After they wrapped, Patricia asked if he wanted to get a drink. She was smoking a cigarette, standing on the curb and blowing the smoke out into the street. Her hair was long and gray and full with a streak of white. Her face was natural, no evidence of surgery or enhancements. Ed could see sweat accumulating on her neck, reflecting the late afternoon sun.

“Around here?” he said loudly from across the sidewalk.

“Sure, I know a nice place.”

She took them to a fake speakeasy that you accessed through a burger joint. She smiled knowingly at the man guarding the door, which was made to look like a laundromat washer and dryer. Inside, the booths were green velvet and only sparsely populated. They picked one toward the back and waited for menus.

“I don’t really smoke, by the way. I just keep them around for emergencies.”

“Oh, yeah? Everything alright?” Ed asked.

She narrowed her eyes. “You, too, must have found that depressing.”

“Oh, sure,” he said, relieved. “But at least it was quick.”

“Do you think they’ll show us the finished product?” she asked.

“Do you want them to?”

She laughed, throwing her head back flirtatiously.

“Touché,” she said. “This is new for me, doing things like this. I can’t decide if I want the evidence. My children will want it.”

“Like a career change?” he asked.

“If you will. To be determined, I suppose.”

“Good for you. Explains why I’ve never seen you before.”
“Are you a regular?”

“I get around,” he said. They’d still not received a cocktail menu.

She leaned in across the table with mischief in her eyes; it made her look youthful.

“Is it brutal?” she asked.

He held back a laugh. “More thankless than glamorous, I’ll say that.”

“You’re plenty glamorous.” She reached under the table and squeezed his knee.

Time to put a stop to this, before they got drinks. He told Patricia he was gay and she slumped back into the green velvet, disappointed but gracious. She said she needed another cigarette, and they both laughed tentatively. Then she said, “but you’re too old to be gay,” which he found genuinely funny, leading them to share in a fit of giggles like they were a couple of mismatched kids caught up in the absurdity of their new personalities.

“So tell me, Ed, what are some of the meanest things you’ve been told in the business.”
“What’re you, some kind of sadist?”

“Oh, come on, a couple horror stories before I go. Penance for leading me on.”

“One time a director told me point blank that bottoms can’t be leading men.”

“Ding, ding, ding!” she said. “Hit me again.”

“A straight male castmate once asked me if I ever got tired of having gayface. But that was only after I told him his British accent sounded like he had a mouthful of dicks, so fair’s fair.”
“Gayface,” she said. “I don’t see it.”
“I think I’ve aged out of it. We all end up looking like babies again, anyway.”

Patricia gave him her number and said she needed friends in the business. He refrained from telling her she’d need to stop calling it ‘the business,’ preferring to part on good terms. As he watched her leave through the washing machine, he wondered if she got lucky very often, if straight men still found her attractive or if their eyes strayed to women with more elastic skin and fewer experiences. Did they prefer the faulty flashbacks to their former lives? It was disturbing for Ed to have so much in common with straight men.

He went up to the bar and stared directly at the bartender’s head until he got a drink. He decided to stay a while in his comfortable booth. After a few sips, he scrolled through his contacts and found Patrick. They were all in there, a few clicks could bridge years of silence. He composed a message:

I met a man who looks just like you at 33.

I remember everything so clearly. Except if we were happy.

He knew Patrick had managed to stay alive, at least, he’d kept close enough tabs to be reasonably sure of that. He imagined him getting a cryptic, sentimental text from a man he lived with forty years ago and sharing it with whomever he was with; or worse, ignoring it. He deleted it.

How much of life is enough? Ed wondered this on the mediocre days, the months between the good days, when life was happening, but slowly. He’d be hoping for a new love, thinking of the next trip, wondering how his friendships had turned perfunctory, a far cry from those wine-drenched nights of laughter and approval from a group of allies, all in a similar stage of their lives.

And he wondered it now, sitting there in a backroom bar with his mediocre martini and his summer sadness. How many more memories did he have to make to look back on? Did it count to take pleasure in the solitary woman sitting nearby, spread out at a table for four, drenched in a gray shawl on a warm evening, looking up occasionally like he did to find the source of her next thought? The potential of their kinship seemed more powerful than the consummated connections of the couples near the front, dried out from juicing their pleasure.

When he arrived home, his tiny puncture began to leak again, and he imagined accounting for his day, someone demanding he explain the disappointment he felt from seemingly good moments: a new part, a new friend. Tonight, he was glad to be free of it. Sitting in his chair, with his 80s photo album, his leftover chili, and his two glasses of wine, was no such disappointment.

––

Much can change overnight, though, especially when you fall asleep in your chair. Ed awoke, achy and alone, surprised by a weekday morning with nowhere to go, nothing in particular to do. No gigs, no rehearsals. Just the lure of a much younger man in need of a visit, that’s all, a fortuitous, encouraging encounter.

He shaved, careful with the stubble that still littered his neck. He showered, lingering over the abdominal muscles he could still feel under the bagging skin. He dressed in tapered denim and a designer t-shirt. He strolled to his car, unlocking and relocking it a few times as he approached, the chirps it made pleasing and predictable. He turned the radio to a popular station, letting the beat reverberate through the steering wheel. The car made its way from garage to road to highway. Ed kept the music loud the whole drive. There weren’t any accidents this morning, of course, when he had nowhere to be. He wondered what part of his shift Tom would be in, he knew they could be twelve, fourteen hours long. He figured an iced coffee would cheer the man up, and a gift of some kind, maybe a book, something Rilke-like. He grabbed his phone to look quickly for bookstores in Baltimore around Hopkins before an SUV to his left cut him off and ran him clear off the road.

By the time the ambulance arrived, Ed was unconscious. Limbs weren’t severed, but dangling. The car was upside down and he’d hit his head badly, his brain colliding with his skull and then ricocheting back again. He regained some semblance of awareness inside a hospital elevator, but it was an awareness flattened beyond thought or recognition by overwhelming pain, nothing like any other waking:

He could sense movement, and light too bright, and an awful whirring, but not the others, not the men and women standing around him, attempting to shepherd him to safety.