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breath.
    “Like a terribly sophisticated cabin. A pile of upright logs against a steep bank. Big windows. It’s hard to describe. Ask him. Did you ever get to the interview?”
    “Next week. I think.” Stella smiles across at her friend, taking breaths. “So, now. About this marriage idea,” she says.
    Justine flushes, looking younger yet. And she begins to talk. About Collin Schmidt. And herself.

4
  More Friends  
    Like many men, Richard Fallon is not given to close friendships with other men, although he has, perhaps, more friends than most men do. He has certain teasing intimacies here and there; bantering connections involving silly names and punch lines from old jokes. These friendships, with both straight and gay men, are all lightly flirtatious, in their way.
    Richard has names for everyone. His name for Collin Schmidt, whom he has known almost since he first came to town, is Bunny. What he calls Andrew Bacci is Dog Shoes, a senseless name that made Richard smile when he first thought of it and that he likes to use privately, with Andrew. Sometimes, though rarely in public, Andrew calls Richard Dickie Bird.
    Andrew does so now, on the phone. Andrew takes his majorrisks during phone conversations; he has been known to leave incriminating messages on tapes.
    “Dickie Bird,” says Andrew, “you’re not doing a damn thing this weekend, you said so yourself. You might as well come to this tiny party, up on Potrero. The big love of a friend of mine is in from New York, and my friend wants to impress him with local talent. You can be the token straight.”
    And that is how Richard finds himself on Potrero Hill, in the very same bare flat in which Stella was interviewed (one more filament in the web that will bind them together). Although today the flat is somewhat less austere. For the party for Simon Daniels, his lover, Jacob has placed what look like tiny test tubes, each containing a single flower, a ranunculus, here and there. And in one corner there is a very discreet table of white wine and Perrier.
    Simon Daniels is talking about the interview for which he ostensibly came to San Francisco—this odd woman named Stella Blake. “Quite an amazing young woman,” says this New York product, this bald and spectacled Harvard-speaking (Richard imagines these to be Harvard vowels) person. “She grew up in a way that one might romanticize, all those marvelous dead poets, in the last old days in the village. And then there was her mother, the Mexican, Delia, the pal of Frida Kahlo, in fact the old man likes to suggest something going on between those two ladies, but
quién sabe
, and how would he know, any more than his poor biographer does?”
    (“It was almost as though he was trying to fix us up, advertising you to me,” says Richard later to Stella. “But I was just scared.”)
    At the time, everyone laughs a little, as Richard wonders about all those names just dropped; the only one he caught and knew was Frida Kahlo, whose work he does know a little, sufficiently to arouse violently ambivalent feelings in himself: he sees the terrific skill, even the beauty. But all that blood, all those intensely female wounds—he finds this unbearable. She reminds him of something within himself, something hateful, frightful. Frightening.
    However, Richard would like to make it clear to this groupthat he knows who Frida Kahlo is. Was. He feels uneasy—not so much because everyone else is gay as because they all seem to have gone to Harvard, or some Ivy place, and although Richard has often been told that he sounds very Ivy, he painfully knows that he is just a good mimic, good with accents. He barely got through junior high, back in Paterson. He just reads a lot, mostly magazines and newspapers. He’s good at remembering names and certain facts—usually irrelevant ones.
    But before Richard can say “Frida Kahlo,” this Simon Daniels is going on about Stella Blake, who certainly seems to have made an impression