“Fifteen years,” Ted replied, taking a coy sip of his tea. “Can you believe it? Sometimes I wonder if I became a monk because of AIDS,” he added with a wry grin. “I wasn’t having sex because I was scared shitless.” I’d never heard one of your friends swear before, and it felt thrilling for you not to react to it, as if I had now entered the fold of adulthood where swearing was commonplace. “I had just switched to Zen at that point and figured, well, if I’m not having sex I might as well join a monastery.”

“Do you know what AIDS is?” you asked me.

I nodded, brow furrowed, as if I resented the question, even though I had only the vaguest of ideas.

“How long were you a monk?” I asked.

“Nine years,” he said. “The both of us.”

“Nine years,” I said, as if it were a prison sentence.

“I don’t regret it.”

It sounded to me a little bit like he did. The monastery was outside of Perth, Ontario. From the way he described it, it sounded more like a family farm. He and Wole had been the monastery’s chief cooks and grew all of the food in the back garden.

“I stopped choreographing,” Clyde said to you, as if explaining his absence. “A few friends visited from time to time. Mostly former dancers from my company.”

“You must’ve missed it,” you said.

“Dance?” He shrugged. “Maybe a little. Not the art world though.”

While you and Clyde caught up, Wole spent the rest of the dinner telling me about Clyde’s former life as a choreographer. “His work made everything that had come before it, particularly in English Canada, seem like dusty museum relics. The critics called him an enfant terrible. And then the National Ballet commissioned a new piece from him. This was during the height of the epidemic. All of our friends were dying and he wanted to respond to it, especially because classical ballet was basically ignoring the crisis while losing scores of its dancers to it. So Clyde started choreographing a piece to a Steve Reich composition called Music for 18 Musicians. Here.” He got up from the table, plucked the needle off the Cuban jazz that had been playing, and put on Reich’s album.

“Oh god, why are we listening to this?” Clyde groaned from across the table, where he’d been immersed in conversation with you, pretending not to be listening to Wole extol his virtues.

Wole turned up the volume and closed his eyes as if channelling the marimbas, violins, sopranos, piano, all pulsing like the subatomic strings that knit together the universe.

“It’s all variations on a theme,” Clyde said to me.