Richard and I grew closer the more we both immersed ourselves in art, and he got me into the habit of taking walks together around the MIT campus, where we enthused about our latest artist finds. There was one day when we walked to the lunch truck and back, with him talking the whole time about a documentary he had watched about Andy Goldsworthy, an artist who rearranged natural elements like rocks along a riverbank or twigs in a forest to create exquisite, ephemeral artwork. As Richard went on, I couldn’t help but reflect on how multifaceted he was, logical yet artistic, both rugged and sensitive, an in-between like me.

One of our frequent walks together was to ZONA, the photo lab close to MIT where we got our film processed, a walk that included a long pathway with an open field on one side, a line of trees and benches on the other. We made a habit of sitting on one of those benches to extend our conversations, especially after seeing movies together at Kendall Square Cinema, since that path lay in between the turn he took to walk to his apartment a few blocks away and my turn toward the T station to get home to Boston and my life with Ralph.

One evening in May, Richard and I decided to catch the photo lab right as it was about to close, so he ended up inviting me to dinner at his house. Over time, the distance between us when we walked grew smaller and smaller, so that by then, my shoulder intermittently bumped his upper arm as we ambled to his place in silence, unusual for us, but I sensed that he was not in the mood to talk.

Richard also seemed subdued over the dinner he heated up, lentil soup over rice, spare and simple the way he was. Afterward, we sat next to each other on his living room futon, him with one knee up while I’d taken off my shoes and sat cross-legged, so close to him that I could feel his breath when he sighed. We’d neglected to turn on the halogen lamp and neither of us seemed inclined to stand up, so when I turned my torso in Richard’s direction, half of his face was shrouded in darkness, the other half dim and pale from the light of a streetlamp outside.

“I’m thinking of leaving science,” he said.

He might have been talking about his career, but I knew that for Richard, expressing doubt about science, so much that he wanted to quit, might have been the most intimate thing he could tell another person.

“What would you want to do instead?”

“Maybe I’ll be an artist like you.”