Paul was coming to Seattle on business. He’d run into my brother Sean at a Red Sox game and he’d mentioned I was living out there. Did I want to have a drink next Tuesday night?

I went through the motions of checking the calendar and coming back to tell him I could get free.

He suggested 7:30 at his hotel.

“Great. I’ll put it right on the calendar,” I said, not knowing what was coming out of my mouth and Steve still hopping around me.

“You and your calendar,” Paul laughed, as if this were a thing he’d known about me for years. “You won’t remember?”

On Tuesday night I left Steve pouting in the apartment. He couldn’t understand why he couldn’t come along or at least meet us for dessert.

“We’re having a drink, not dinner.”

“Then let me meet you for the last drink.”

“The last drink might be the first drink.”

“Then let me just go to the bar, pretend to run into you. I don’t have to be your boyfriend. I can be a coworker. I can be your masseuse.”

“Like I want him to think I have a masseuse. It’s bad enough I’m gay.”

Steve shut his eyes and shook his head. “All the years your therapist and I have put into deprogramming you and it just doesn’t make a dent, does it?”

“It’s bad enough to Paul that I’m gay. It ruined our friendship.”

“He ruined the friendship.”

“Yes. Goodbye.” I kissed him on the lips, which he liked. We weren’t doing a whole lot of that lately. He held on to me and I let him, knowing that it increased the chances that he wouldn’t follow me.

Paul was at the bar, elbows on the counter, looking over the bartender’s head at a ballgame on the flat-screen.

“This place is like a morgue.”

He turned to look at me. “Welcome to my world. Hotel bars and conference rooms.”

He was middle-aged. His hair had retreated toward his crown, his shoulders had fattened and curled in. We didn’t shake hands. I didn’t want to. I busied myself with my jacket, made an unnecessary fuss about where to put it, and came slowly back to the chair beside him. It was anger that was making my heart thrash. I was still angry at him. Whether it was because he had dropped me or because he was no longer a god on earth but a middle-aged salesman, I did not know.

“But I like places like this,” he said, shaking the ice in his glass. “Everyone drifting in from everywhere, from nowhere. Look at the woman in the corner. God, what is going to happen to her tonight?”

“A man in white polyester pants is going to walk in and spot her.”