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Peter being sarcastic? His face was serious, his blue eyes wide.

      “Thank you,” Martin said.

      “I wish you’d talk to me about things. I’m a good listener. Maybe it would help.”

      Martin shrugged. “You’ve probably been in the sun long enough.”

      Peter huffed. Martin moved the blanket under a tree. Peter stretched out in the shade. In less than a minute, he was dozing.

      The breeze shifted branches above them. Leaves, beautiful in death, swirled across the grass. The creek prattled out of sight. The air was rich with the smell of decay, the shadows long and hard, the sky a passionate blue. Autumn. The time of homesickness.

      Chapter 3

      God’s Mistake

      “What courses do I teach?” Martin answered Peter after breakfast the following Friday morning. “This fall two sections of elementary harmony and a sophomore survey of Romantic composers. Four of my harmony students have real talent. Three are incompetent. The other ten are average.” Martin grimaced. “Best student I ever had died of AIDS. Bright guy. Great future. His death was a real shock. Got me to thinking about working with AIDS patients.”

      “Guess I’m indebted to him,” Peter said.

      “He drove me nuts.” Martin gathered laundry. “He wanted to use the harmonic progressions of Stravinsky and Charles Ives. Not in my class. In my class, you learn to write like Bach.”

      Peter chuckled. “When I was studying at the Academy of Dance in New York, I was the same way. I couldn’t understand why we had to learn the classical approach first. I stuck with it. Got to love it. I dreamt that someday I’d dance at the Kennedy Center. They didn’t ask me to join the company. Not even the corps de ballet. I was crushed. So I tried out for every dance part on Broadway, off Broadway, and way off Broadway. Got a total of three chorus spots the whole time I was there. So I modeled for a while, but I couldn’t make enough money to keep myself in cigarettes.”

      “You’re handsome enough.”

      “Not rugged enough. Most of what I got was for gay magazines and shops. Then I worked as a translator for the New York branch of Nürnberger Spielsachen until they fired me for coming on to the stock boy. In ’82, I came to Washington. A guy I was seeing lived here. I stayed with him while I hunted for temporary work until I could get a dance role somewhere. I landed at the Riche, and the money was good, so I settled down to have a good time.”

      “Sit at the desk while I change the bed.”

      “A little pot, a little coke, lots of booze.” Peter flapped his hand on his outstretched arm. “I dressed in the latest and felt like I was it, honey, I mean, it! Had a different trick every night, several on weekends. Went to parties where we got into pot and coke and three-on-one and four-on-one scenes.” Peter raised an eyebrow. “You know what I’m talking about? Sort of a ménage à beaucoup.”

      Martin tucked the blanket at the foot of the bed. “I get the general idea. But you did, um, tricks? You got paid?”

      “That’s breeder’s speak. In the gay world, a trick is just a guy you have sex with.”

      “Oh.”

      Peter chuckled to himself. Poor Martin. He’d never understand the gay life. “Never mind, Martin. It’s all beyond you. Anyway, it was getting passé. I got back into German poetry. You know Gerhardt Müller? I translated some of his unpublished stuff and the German Literature Review printed it. And I discovered Mahler and Strauss. Do you know the Mahler Ninth? I started working at the barre again.”

      Martin’s hands stopped smoothing the bed.

      “B-a-r-r-e,” Peter said. “Where you do ballet calisthenics. Started writing poetry again. Hadn’t done that since college. One day I felt punk. Next thing you know I had night sweats and fever. I was terrified that I had AIDS, but there was no HTLV-III antibody test then, so I couldn’t even find out if I’d been infected. Then I came down with pneumocystis carinii. You know the rest.”

      “You said something one time about a lover.”

      “Didn’t amount to anything. I’ve never really lived with anybody.”

      “You can get in bed now.”

      Peter obeyed.

      Martin pulled the covers over him. “Have you ever been in love?”

      “Had a crush or two. Never really fell for anybody.”

      “You never loved anybody?”

      Peter laughed. “Love’s an illusion.”

      Martin said nothing.

      “You’ve got a class to teach,” Peter said.

      Martin glanced at his watch. “Yep. Be back about six.” He rolled down his sleeves, straightened his tie, and was gone.

      The apartment was smaller after Martin left. Peter did his mandatory daily exercises—walking, squatting, bending—for fifteen minutes and dropped into bed, winded. As his breathing returned to its phlegmy normal, he braced himself for the boring day ahead. He was too tired to read, and nothing was on television this early. So he studied the ceiling until he had memorized every pock, then turned on his stomach. He decided to nap if he could.

      Had he ever loved anybody? Sally had come closest. But she didn’t count. She was a woman. Nanki-Poo, his Siamese cat? She—it turned out to be a she after he’d named her—had been devoted to him throughout his childhood. She died in his arms when he was in high school. Peter had loved Nanki-Poo. Anyone else?

      The phone rang. Peter jumped. It hadn’t rung in days. He lifted the receiver. The rasp told him who it was.

      “Hi, Mom,” he said, trying to sound pleased.

      “Hello, darlin’. Hadn’t heard from you for so long I’d begun to wonder if you’d run off and joined the circus or something.” Cough. “I told your father you were probably working hard. And he said, ‘Alicia, if we don’t hear from Peter, it’s because Peter is too busy having a good time to get in touch with us’—or something like that.”

      Peter rolled his eyes. Sure. Probably more like, “That lazy no-good doesn’t have time for us anymore. He’s too busy wasting his life.”

      “How are things in Baltimore?” Peter said.

      “Same. Your Aunt Helen and Uncle Bud might be coming east for Christmas. They’d been wanting us to come out there, but your father can’t ever get the time to take off.”

      “How is he?”

      “Uncle Bud?”

      “Dad.”

      “Fine, Peter. Why do you ask?”

      “Wanted to know, that’s all. Still working hard?”

      “He’ll never change. Tried to get him to go to Hochschild’s with me to pick out drapery material, but he said he had to get ready for his hearing on Thursday, so I ended up going by myself, as usual. We’re redoing the living room, did I tell you? I’m sick to death of that mauve sofa and chairs, and we can certainly afford better.” She broke into a wheezy laugh. “So anyway, I picked out this lovely peach blossom pattern . . .”

      Peter closed his eyes and listened. Would his speaking voice be in ruins, too, at her age if he went on smoking? Then he remembered. He’d never live to her age.

      All at once, oddly, surprised at himself, he felt sorry for her. His father was as disappointed in her as he was in Peter. He hadn’t shared a bedroom with her since Peter was a child. Had he ever been unfaithful? Peter was sure his mother never had. She’d done her best to piece together some kind of life for herself. She’d tried hard, with mixed and sometimes hilarious results, to overcome her southern country speech. Always dressed in the latest, though not always in the

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