I waited for him to elaborate but he didn’t. I wondered if it was supposed to be self-evident. I’d only heard the word “theme” in relation to parties. Wole continued to stand by the record player, eyes closed. Clyde had his hand balled against his mouth in concentration. I glanced over at you, perhaps wondering how long we were going to sit there around the table in silence. You had that distant look on your face when you were both in the room and somewhere else, both listening and lost in thought. A sort of wistful appreciation of life’s benevolence.

I looked out the patio-door windows into the yard, the perimeter of which was traced by the outdoor light. A snow had begun to fall without our noticing. Somewhere beyond the edges of the yard, where the darkness began, was the forest, filled with its own silences. All forests a variation on the theme of silence and darkness, all silence a variation on the theme of noise, all darkness a variation on the theme of light. I watched the snow passing through the light become movement. And then, as if I were suddenly able to read a foreign language, as if I were seeing the words emerge from the indecipherable page, the pattern of the eighteen instruments and voices emerged.

I wondered if maybe beauty was God, and could I devote my life to the search for it? Was I gay? Did you already know? I realized, as if for the first time, that one day I would die. I thought about how AIDS was like the darkness of the forest that lay beyond the perimeter of yard-light that was my life. The darkness that I could not describe and did not know but that framed and gave definition to my existence. I looked over at Clyde and Wole lost in their respective reveries, and thought of them as the men who had emerged from the forest. They knew what lay in that darkness, both wonderful and terrible.

“At any rate,” Wole said after several minutes, “one day the artistic director sat in on rehearsals and totally freaked out.”

Clyde burst into his wheezing laugh. “You’re not telling him that story,” he said, of course knowing all along that Wole had been telling that story, though in truth I had forgotten.

“The artistic director tried to pull the plug on the show,” Wole continued, “but Clyde threatened to sue him over breach of contract.”

Clyde glanced over at you and bounced his eyebrows, to which you smiled. I assumed you already knew the story.

“What was it about?” I asked.