“About?” Clyde replied. “It was —” He looked over at Wole as if making sure he was getting it right, as if he hadn’t been asked that specific question in a long time. “A friend of ours, when he was dying, he held my hand. And right before he passed he smiled and said, ‘It’s not the worst thing, really, to be a body.’ And I remember thinking what a strange and beautiful way of putting it. And the dancers onstage — I tried to make them just bodies, in a sense, limbs and torsos, sometimes very sexual but also sometimes like corpses.” He thought about this for a moment and then, as if satisfied with his answer, met my gaze and smiled.

“Anyway,” Wole continued, “there was this big back-and-forth and eventually it was decided that Clyde would choreograph a new production of Giselle instead of his Reich piece, which was quietly dropped from the season. Well” — Wole grinned and sat back down at the table — “on the opening night of Giselle, at the top of the first act, the dancer playing Duke Albrecht entered with a giant purple dildo up his ass.” You laughed and I was too surprised by your laughter to register any reaction myself. “The audience gasped and some of them, yes, burst out laughing,” Wole said, gesturing to you and chuckling himself. “A few old ladies stood up and walked out. And then the dancer playing Hilarion entered wearing fetish bondage gear. The show ended with Giselle blowing a French horn into her vagina. None of which had been vetted by the powers that be. A reviewer the next day called it ‘the most extraordinary act of artistic terrorism in the history of Canadian dance.’ ”

Here Clyde jumped in to nab the punchline, explaining how the artistic director threatened to sue him and cancel the rest of the run, but when tickets started selling out the next morning, not only did those threats come to nothing, the artistic director allowed the show to be performed exactly as it had been on opening night.

As everyone laughed, it occurred to me that Clyde was in some way a kind of extreme version of the two of us — your spirituality and some still-dormant and unknown aspect of myself. Both aspects, I’d later learn, were in perpetual conflict within him.