Years later, when everything was done, he would look back at that moment. A fear had been tickling him that Ben would leave him stranded, no matter his previous tenderness. He would simply never show up at the door again. Nothing like this could last very long. The dread became more and more. So he walked in the yard while the sun dropped behind the trees; suddenly the shade under the branches grew to gloom, the watery light ebbed out of the cove, a yard light flickered on, the dogs began to bark. He would be here forever, alone, or somewhere like this, alone: but before the fear could solidify there it was, the old Impala, headlights yellowed, horn blaring, turning into the driveway. There was Ben stepping out of the car, and Ronny slowly ambled in his direction while the shadows pooled and the owls sang.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

There was a boardinghouse that I knew and lived in, and a landlady who lived there too, and other similar circumstances, enough to make it necessary to note that this book is set in a fictional place, a 1976–77 of my imagining. The Chapel Hill depicted here is very like the one I knew in those days. But there are gaps in the portraits and places that I have filled in with my own details. Much of the campus has changed, and I might have erred here and there in peeling back the years. The schedule of games for the football season is from the real year but there is no congruence between the inhabitants of the Ehringhaus of my book and the people I knew or encountered. I do not think the Carolina Gay Association had its meetings in the student union but that change of venue is a very minor invention. The movie That Obscure Object of Desire was not released until later in the year than I depict, but the title of the movie suited my purposes too well to lose. In fact the whole of the book should be taken to exist in a parallel world in which everything was exactly as I say it was. I have not attempted to discover the real dates of the academic calendar for 1976–77. Other departures from reality are likely but not of much consequence to the story.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My thanks to the late Lynna Williams, who was my first reader for the manuscript; further thanks to Frances Foster, Elisabeth Lewis Corley, Madeleine St. Romaine, Peter Hagan, Elisabeth Scharlatt, Ina Stern, Craig Popelars, and to my former colleagues at Emory University, including Jericho Brown, Tayari Jones, Natasha Trethewey, Joseph Skibell, Hank Klibanoff, Ben Reiss, Sheila Cavanagh, Laura Otis, Michael Elliott, Carla Freeman, many others. I retired from Emory just as the pandemic took over the world. I am grateful to Melanie Jackson for her guidance; to Arthur Levine for his careful shaping of the manuscript; to Meghan Maria McCullough, Antonio Gonzalez Cerna, Alex Hernandez, and the people of Levine Querido for making this book; to Trent Duffy for relentless copy-editing; to Jonathan Yamakami for a moving design. I am grateful to my family, as always.