I led him through the yard, around the side of the house, and down a flight of steps to a battered door and into my basement studio which even in the brightest light of day was funereally dark. What could I say? My landlords, the prosperous lesbian couple who lived in the mansion, only charged me a hundred and fifty in rent and had furnished the place with their castoffs. It was what I could afford.

I switched on a lamp. Adam took in the main room with its mismatched furnishings and the one sooty window through which I could see a flowerbed filled with weeds. His eye fell on my framed law degree, propped against the wall on the top of the dresser.

“You went to Linden?” he said, referring to the great university thirty miles south of San Francisco; its law school ranked, with Yale and Harvard, as one of the three best in the country.

“Yes.”

“What are you doing living here?” he asked with genuine curiosity.

“Starting over.”

I gave him an abbreviated version of my drinking and rehabilitation, watching his expression for judgment, but all I saw was sympathetic interest.

“So, you like, don’t drink at all?”

“No.”

“I don’t drink much myself. It’s bad for training plus I get that alcohol flush reaction where my face turns red and my heart speeds up. So,” he continued, with a grin, “I don’t see a bed.”

“The couch pulls out,” I said.

“What are we waiting for?”

“You want something to drink? A Coke or—”

He crushed me against his big chest and kissed me.

“No,” he said, biting my earlobe. “I don’t want anything to drink.”

As I made up the bed, Adam picked through the orange crate that held my LPs. He pulled out an Ella Fitzgerald album—the Johnny Mercer songbook—and inspected it with a skeptically cocked eyebrow.

“What is this shit?”

“It’s a great American singer singing the work of a great American songwriter.”

“If you say so.”

“Give me that.”

I slipped the LP out of its jacket, put it on the turntable and skipped to the second cut, my favorite.

“Sit, listen, learn.”

He flopped into the bed where I joined him as Ella began Early Autumn. When she sang the lyric—There’s a dance pavilion in the rain, All shuttered down—I was seized by an unexpected grief, thinking of all the dancing boys now dying in little rooms like this all across the city. I got up and moved the needle to the next track.

“You don’t like that song?” Adam asked.