Some nights he returned to the hot plate and garage on Naomi Avenue to be close to the Challenger, but he kept his starched shirts in my closet and his shaving gear in my bathroom, and, perhaps most intimately, he brought his portable Royal typewriter and set it up on the desk in the living room beside the two framed pictures of Julia and me. I liked to think she was smiling at him, and I knew she would be pleased to know we had found each other, loved each other. I read his columns at home and subscribed to the Challenger at the office. I smiled to hear him working in the evenings, the mad tap of the keys a kind of percussion against the jazz on the hi-fi, where I grew acquainted with Chico Hamilton and Art Pepper and Terrence learned to love Peggy Lee, though Sidney Bechet was still too old-fashioned for his taste, and he didn’t like Bill Haley and the Comets at all. The Sousa marches, needless to say, went in the trash.

We shared a sense of being somehow destined, fated for each other. We met at the right time. The longest and stormiest of Terrence’s affairs, the on-again, off-again liaison with Jaylene Henderson, had ended in January with a dramatic incident of infidelity on her part. As for me, the affairs of the heart I had known, they were like soda water, men who might have briefly sparkled but then went flat, dull, brackish as the local tap water. Charlie Frye was history. He only called occasionally when his confidence needed boosting. Professionally I obliged, usually while Terrence listened, grinning.

But I was grateful for the surfboard Charlie left on the porch. Terrence put it to good use all that summer, teaching himself to surf. He would lie on it and paddle out beyond the swells and sit there for a long time, his back to me, looking at the horizon. I lay on an old towel on the beach reading scripts, and one afternoon I looked up to see that Terrence had drifted far to the north. I ran down the beach and waded into the surf. “Terrence! There’s a riptide! Be careful! Terrence!” I cried, not even certain that my voice would carry that far. When at last he looked back and saw how far the current had taken him, he turned the board around and paddled hard toward shore, fighting the current. I ran up the beach, paralleling his progress shoreward. I plunged into the waist-deep waves to meet him as he jumped off the board and took me in his arms, and we made our way, waves washing over us, exhausted, to the beach, where we fell to our knees in the foam, wrapped our arms around each other, kissed and rolled on our backs, and caught our breath. I laughed out loud.