The waitress came with another bowl of chips and menus.

After she departed, Bill said, “You don’t have to be nervous. It’s just a lunch.”

But Bill was nervous too, though he concealed it, and the conversation moved awkwardly until Nick asked him about his work. When Bill began to talk about the houses he sold and what they meant to him his nervousness faded away. Nick, leaning toward him, listened with rapt attention and asked him questions that displayed intelligence and sensitivity. A different Nick emerged—not the callow eighteen-year-old boy—but a curious, thoughtful young man with definite opinions he was not shy about expressing. As he had at the diner, Bill’s impression of Nick was of someone who had been protected from the worst of life and that this had produced an innocent self-confidence Bill found moving and hugely attractive. Bill could not help but contrast his own terrified and injured eighteen-year-old self with the cheerful, assertive boy talking through a mouthful of food, oblivious to what anyone else might think when he put his hand on Bill’s and squeezed it. Bill, who in this situation might have self-protectively withdrawn his hand, was emboldened by Nick’s openness and instead squeezed back. He experienced with Nick a moment of true freedom—liberated from his own self-consciousness and anxieties, and in that moment, he could almost forget that he and Nick were gay. They were simply two people, mutually attracted, enjoying each other’s company, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

After their meal, Bill offered Nick a ride back to school.

“I’m done with my classes for today. I thought, um, maybe we could go for a walk.”

Bill thought about the piles of paperwork on his desk and the sheaf of phone messages waiting for return calls. “A short walk.”

“Ocean Beach?” Nick suggested.

It was one of those afternoons, rare in San Francisco, of such clarity that the blues of ocean and sky blurred together at the horizon. Nick, gazing at it with his hand shading his eyes, murmured, “And yet this great wink of eternity.”

Sitting beside him on a log someone had dragged to the edge of the sea, watching a flock of gulls scribble their way across the sky, dipping and rising, Bill said, “What?”

“Oh, that’s from a poem about the sea I read in my American lit class.”

“Wink of eternity,” Bill repeated. He could see it—the sea one eyelid and the sky the other, slowly closing and opening. “Who wrote it?”

“His name was Hart Crane. He was gay. He threw himself off a boat.”

“Because he was gay?”

“I don’t know why,” Nick replied. “A lot of poets kill themselves. Like Sylvia Plath. She stuck her head in an oven. Um, it’s what you call an occupational hazard, I guess. I want to be a writer.”