Lawrence moved away from me and pulled his shirt off to shake out the sharp fragments of his shorn hair. His shoulders were bony, and the skin on his chest hung down in flaps, his muscle nearly gone. He noticed me staring and turned around shyly. I could see the outline of every rib in his rib cage as he leaned over. The entirety of how his spine curved.

“The only people who’ve seen me without my shirt off lately are nurses,” he said.

“I can leave.”

“Girls used to call me a beefcake. I could show you pictures from my physique pictorials.”

“I’d like to see them,” I said, even though I had already seen them online.

“I want them around me when I self-deliver or whatever you call it.”

I stared at Lawrence as he surveyed his own body.

“What a strange thing that happens to us,” he said. “The deterioration.”

I could hear Bethanny knocking on the apartment door.

Lawrence said, “We don’t have to let her in.”

“Have you changed your mind?” I asked.

33.

A week later, I was standing outside Nathan’s house holding a fruit salad I had bought at Ralphs, hoping no one could hear the doorbell so I could go home.

His building was a beige stucco monstrosity built in the eighties with the curved balconies and wooden railings prevalent in the Valley, places that had names like Rancho Park or any number of words followed by the word “Villa.” And even though the Valley was fifteen degrees hotter than the city, the courtyard pool was empty. All around Southern California, apartment courtyards resplendent with forever-empty pools. I rang the doorbell again, and Lorraine answered. She looked surprised to see me, like she didn’t know I had been invited. Or maybe I was just being paranoid.

“I love mango!” she said, looking down at my plastic-wrapped fruit salad.

“Good!” I said.

“Everyone’s back there.”

I followed her in and saw all the shoes lined up next to the door.

“Nathan has a shoe-free home,” she said. He also had a plastic liner on the entryway, signaling that he was some kind of germophobe. Why did he want to fuck a stranger in a hotel room, then?

There were also no signs of cohabitation.

After I took off my shoes, I walked through his apartment. It had accumulated the volume of knickknacks and furniture, and evidence of life, that led me to believe he had probably lived here for twenty years or more. Perhaps roommates and girlfriends had come and gone, but he could still not let this place go. I wanted to know where his daughter slept. He seemed to have scrubbed any sign of a wife away. Maybe they had never been married. He suddenly seemed interesting to me again.