Eddie finally left his wife and Waldo announced that they wanted their own place. Bill helped them find one, not far from the old apartment, and sobbed himself to sleep the night Waldo moved out. He presented Waldo with a Cuisinart as a housewarming gift, observing, “I never thought you’d settle down before me.” He and Michael broke up for the last time and Michael slowly transitioned from lover to friend. When that transition was complete, Bill found himself truly alone for the first time since he had arrived in the city. His solitude terrified him because now, he worried, there was nothing to stop Bad Bill and, for a while, he went wild, reaching depths of degradation he had not imagined existed until he found himself dragged along their bottom. Self-disgust finally stopped him and he searched desperately for a distraction.

That was when he threw himself into the task of restoring Mrs. Donohue’s duplex—now, his—to its 1878 glory. The Donohues had purchased the house just after Mr. Donohue returned from the war and married his best friend’s high school sweetheart. To them the duplex was simply an old, cheap house near their families with a rental to help pay the mortgage. Mr. Donohue covered it in vinyl siding. The stately Queen Anne, submerged and denuded, faded from view, replaced by the family house of a plumber and his wife and their two kids with an upstairs tenant. Fortunately, Mrs. Donohue had kept some old photographs, black-and-white, curling at the edges, of what the house had looked like when she and her husband had bought it. She gave them to Bill with the comment, “I don’t know why you want to change it back, dear, it’s so much trouble to paint.”

He studied the pictures carefully and spent his spare time walking through the Castro, the Haight and Hayes Valley photographing similar houses. The Donohue’s house, like most of the survivors of the 1906 earthquake and fire, was a row house intended for the middle class; the mansions of the rich had perished in that disaster. The row houses were two stories, some with attics, under steeply pitched roofs, each floor with its characteristic bay windows. The entrances were set back on porches framed by columns. The sides and backs of the houses were plain; all the distinction was in the street-facing facades where, it seemed to Bill, the builders had vied with each other to see who could ornament them with the most detail. Like master bakers in a wedding cake competition, the builders buried the redwood planks in friezes, shingles, brackets, scrolls, wreaths and garlands and pilasters; put up Juliet balconies above the porches and crowned it all with elaborate finials.