Desmond drew a bath and lowered himself into the warm water. Better already. He rested his beer bottle on the floor beside the tub and pulled a magazine from the rack near the toilet. A men’s “fitness” magazine. Now here was real pornography. Clinical text describing exercise and diet and skeletal structure accompanying lurid photos of big-breasted, dewy, depilated men bending over benches or hanging from chin-up bars with their legs in the air. He skimmed through the pages, searching for a model who looked anything at all like Russell, but no one could match the lean economy of his musculature. He flipped to the back of the magazine and found himself staring at a photo of a carefully groomed man in a phone sex ad who bore a striking resemblance to Brian Cody. He stuffed the magazine back in the rack and finished his beer.

By the time he’d dried himself off, he’d killed almost an hour. He went into the bathroom wearing the damp towel and squeezed himself around the foot of the bed. It was obvious from the way the blankets were pulled back on the unmade bed and the way the pillows were dented that Russell had been dividing his time between his side of the bed and Desmond’s, probably an indication of how much he missed him. Desmond sat on his side of the mattress. The afternoon was fading quickly, but the room was still bright with sunlight and uncomfortably warm. There was a fat yellow book on his night table, the cover a sampler of different type faces and sizes, a loud, ragged jumble of letters announcing the title: Becoming the You You Deserve to Be. They should call this genre of book shelf-help, since, as far as he could tell, no one read past the first few pages before hiding them away in a bookcase. They all seemed to boil down to the same simple message: it’s all right to be selfish and self-centered. And what if it turns out you deserve to be a homeless, penniless wreck? How awful to think that Russell, in his anger at Desmond for leaving town, in his loneliness, had descended from Trollope and Tocqueville to “Dr. Ashley.”

The book was bulging with something stuck between the pages. It fell open when Desmond picked it up, and inside was a pair of large, brown eyeglasses. Not a pair that Desmond had seen Russell wear. He slowly opened the bows and slid them onto his face. The room went blurry. Whoever they belonged to had worse vision than Russell. He looked down at the book. Bifocals. He’d never understood how people navigated their way through this bifurcated world. And with all this laser surgery going on, one day soon all glasses would be nostalgia items, right up there with typewriters.