I told Paul last. First I told my mother (she said she’d tell my father herself, but I don’t think she ever did), and then I told my brothers, one by one, in an elaborate fashion involving a letter and a gift and a surreptitious meeting in the telephone closet beneath the stairs one Christmas that will be mocked forevermore. Pssssst, is all one brother has to say to another, pointing to an imaginary telephone closet (my parents are both dead now, the house sold), and everyone is practically peeing their pants. For Paul I had no letter or gift or telephone closet. We used to meet a few times a year when his work brought him to Boston or mine brought me to New York, but I couldn’t do it in person. He called me up one night (he was usually the one to call, late at night, some awful music on in the background) and when he’d gone on too long about his kid’s strep throat, I blurted it out. “By the way, I’m gay.”

He surprised me. He took it badly. He was silent, then grunted out a few measly sentences about being glad to have been told and got off the phone. He never called back. I lost him, just like that.

I got out of New England. I went to Seattle with my boyfriend Steve. I had been about to break up with Steve, but then he told me about a possible transfer to the West Coast. He was my first real boyfriend, and he’d been so generous and tender, helping to peel back all my prickly layers of fear and self-loathing, but I felt like it was time to move on, see what else was on offer.

Moving, resettling, making new friends, reconfiguring routes to coffee shops, bookstores, restaurants, clubs—all that can delay the end of a relationship indefinitely. We were still in that stage, our third year in Seattle, when Paul called.

Steve answered. We didn’t have caller ID then, so phone calls were still a mystery. Steve started flapping his arm immediately, waving me up off the couch with huge sweeps while carrying on in a flat, placid voice, saying, “Yeah, I think he’s here somewhere. Unless he fell off the balcony into the neighbors’ weed.” Steve loved that we overlooked an illegal garden. He told it to everyone we met. “I hope you’re not a cop,” he added before covering the receiver with his palm and mouthing the words Paul Donovan over and over. Steve and I had been together eight years by then and though I’d tried to downplay my attraction to my college roommate, it was clear to me now that I’d hidden nothing.

During that whole short conversation, Steve was leaping from sofa to sofa, a mockery, a parody of my slamming heart.