“You are, trust me. People who rave about their independence are just lonely people who’ve given up hope.” He pulled an Exacto knife out of his back pocket and slit through the masking tape on a carton on the floor. “Besides, I’m dependent on helping her. She’s my friend. I love her.” He went through the contents of the box—probably something Melanie had picked up at an auction—and held up a gray dinner plate that had no particular style or reference to period. “Quintessential ‘80s, don’t you think?”

“Oh yes. I’d say so, sweetheart.” One of the great virtues of the 1980s theme was that it was so undefined, anything could be passed off as belonging to the period. Russell admitted that he couldn’t always tell by looking at it when a piece of furniture or clothing was from the 1980s, but as soon as he stuck a price tag on it, he knew. He had on a long-sleeved white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows and a pair of gray gabardine trousers that hung loosely off his legs. Desmond loved watching him go through all this junk—yellow eyeglasses on the end of his nose, long dark hair falling around his face—with the same studied concentration he had when he read Tolstoy. If I were a stranger, Desmond thought, and came into this store—not that he ever would—I’d fall in love with this little guy. Of course, the problem with being physically attracted to your lover was that you could imagine other people finding him equally attractive.

“You’re looking especially handsome right now,” Desmond said. “But then, you always look handsome . . .” He was about to say “to me,” but after five years of living together, those little addenda had started to sound more like narrowing qualifications than compliments. “I like the way you look in that shirt” was now less flattering than “Mary (or Tom or Theresa or Rover) likes the way you look in that shirt.”

“So that’s why you came down here? To tell me you like the way I look?”

“I just wanted one more chance to say goodbye, that’s all.” And then, feeling a sudden urge to be completely honest about the small portion of the truth he wanted to discuss, he said, “Ever since that party, you’ve been so distant, I haven’t known what’s going on with you. I didn’t want to leave town feeling there was something unspoken between us.”

Russell muttered some kind of assent. “Well,” he said, “you had to get a teaching job in Boston for the sake of the book.”

“That’s right.”

“You need the money.”

“At the moment, yes.”

“Right, right,” Russell said.