“Angel Island,” he said, coming up behind me. “My ex took them.”

I turned. “And your ex would be a boy or a girl?”

“Candace,” he replied, “and don’t call her Candy. Hey, you want something to drink? I could use a beer.”

“A glass of water.”

He left the room and padded down the hall toward what I assumed was a kitchen. On either side of the window were tall bookcases filled with books in English and Chinese and a photo of Adam and a beautiful girl with sleek black hair and intelligent eyes. Candace, I guessed.

“That’s her,” Adam said. He offered me a glass of ice water.

“What happened between you?”

“We dated our junior and senior years at State, and then she went to Boston for med school. We tried the long-distance thing but neither one of us has the time or money to be flying back and forth across the country. She doesn’t know if she’ll be coming back to California and I plan to stay here for biz school, so it didn’t look like it was going to work out.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Me too.”

“And guys?”

He sat on the beat-up sofa and patted the cushion beside him. “Have a seat. Stay awhile, okay?”

I sat down. “That depends on what you tell me.”

He took a swig of his Tsingtao. “I’m a straight guy who likes having sex with other guys once in a while,” he said. “It’s the same thing as, you know, once a year I crave Indian food so I go out for curry, and it’s great, but the rest of the time I don’t think about it.”

In law school, I’d slept with a closeted classmate who ended up marrying a woman because he wanted the kind of career in the law he didn’t think would be possible if he was openly gay. I remembered there was a tension in his face that nothing could dissipate. Even in sleep, there were faint frown lines at the corners of his mouth and a seam etched between his eyebrows, the visible marks of his internal conflict between who he was and who he pretended to be. I searched Adam’s face carefully, looking for the same lines, the same conflict, but found no trace of it and it occurred to me, as improbable as it sounded, he was telling the truth about who he was.

My silence must have begun to worry him because he said, “Hey? You there?”

“Yeah, sorry. I don’t know what to say. No one’s ever compared me to curry before.”