Though the filming was taking place in exotic locations far distant from Hollywood, that summer everyone was abuzz with talk of the massive costs of Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments. Terrence and I, however, asked each other more plaintively, where is it in the Ten Commandments that we should not be allowed to fall in love? How had we so completely transgressed? We were forbidden to each other, not like adulterers skulking behind their spouses’ backs, but by pressures, dogmas, assumptions, openly hostile undercurrents we could not fight. On our own beach (for that’s how we thought of it, our very own beach, our own waves, our own horizon where the sun went down every night for our own pleasure and delight), the sight of the two of us together made other people walking the beach stare as though we were freaks or look away as though we were lepers. The pinch-lipped, fig-faced Wilburs never failed to bristle with spite, and they never once spoke to Terrence. When he and I were together publicly, we somehow roused deep, endemic anger in our fellow mortals who clearly felt they could revile us with impunity. Sometimes they would look at us as if they would just as soon throw us both to the ground and kick us as give us the time of day. Sometimes they muttered ugly things. And sometimes outright aggression popped out of people’s pores like sweat. This was entirely new and scary to me, but Terrence, I quickly saw, had navigated it all his life. I had new understanding of the necessity for The Negro Motorist Green Book for travelers, but there was no guide for lovers of different races to tell them where are the safe places, where might they be allowed just to love each other as ordinary people and not black and white.

One evening he picked me up at work, and we went to a dim little bar off Venice Boulevard for a drink before he had to return to the Challenger. We’d no sooner walked through the door than the bartender called Terrence a vicious name, and me a worse one. Terrence jumped, as though he’d been goosed, and marched me out of there so fast my head started to spin.

“Are you going to take that?” I demanded as he opened the door of the Porsche, shoved me in, and slammed the door. “Are you going to let that bastard talk to us like that? Who does he think he is?”

Terrence got in the Porsche and sped away. He did not answer me till I again demanded why he hadn’t stood up to that bastard.

“Did you see his hands?”

“His hands? No. What’s that got to do with it? He—”

“His hands were under the bar. Ten to one he had a gun under the counter. And he would have used it and been proud of himself.”

“No. That’s not possible.”