But later, when I was in my studio, I allowed myself to do something I had wanted to do for a long time. I went into the darkroom and found the work shirt Richard wore when he printed there, with the merchant marine logo in blue where his heart was when he wore it. I held the shirt to my nose, smelled his skin beneath the vinegar scent of fixer, the chemical that prevented photographs from fading. His odor as it reached my mind blended with the memory of my childhood and Samuel, rugged and sensitive, in-between, kindred yet thwarted. These were patterns I was destined to repeat, stories of love I told myself at night like those novels I’d read over and over, even though real love like when my partner looks at me with intense adoration, looks at me like we’re destined to be together always, this real love can coexist with the impossible love in my fantasies, where I am a woman who enraptures a man because he finds me enticing and beautiful.

Later still, in Lenora’s bed on one of our sleepovers, also in the dark except for a desk lamp on her bedside table.

“I can’t help it. I have feelings for Richard,” I said.

“But what about Ralph?”

“I mean, what about Ralph?” I echoed. Whatever I felt about Richard was just what I felt about him, as a lyric from Sondheim fluttered through my mind—“I do not hope for what I cannot have / I do not cling to things I cannot keep”—lines by my beloved Fosca from her song about reading, where she explains why she loves to read about beautiful men falling in love with beautiful women but she would never dare imagine this would happen to her in life, because she is so ugly. I was ugly too, because I was a man.

“Richard’s too much of a scientist for me,” Lenora said. “I wouldn’t date him, especially now that I know how you feel.”

—

My younger brother visited me in Boston for the first and only time, the summer of 2000. He went by his first name, Ramon, to the outside world by then, while my father, the previous Ramon, started calling himself Ray. But he was still Tonton to me, Tony when I talked about him with American friends, diminutives of his middle name, Antonio. Now seventeen, he had come to live with Papa after he had trouble getting clean in California.

I hadn’t seen Tony in a couple of years, and I wasn’t prepared for the young man who towered over me and wore a dagger tattoo on his upper arm, which I noticed as he got out of the Peter Pan bus in South Station, wearing a wifebeater shirt, baggy jeans, and a Yankees baseball cap turned backward.