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but I went along to keep him company and make sure he didn’t get lost, hold his head while he barfed into gutters or toilets; the next day I often brought him porn videos and chicken soup when he was too hung over to get out of bed. Since three years before, when Max had discovered his HIV-positive status, I’d known that my role of his nursemaid wasn’t over by a long shot, depending on how long his regimen of pills kept symptoms at bay. I also knew that I’d be around when he needed me, because my own HIV status was negative, by some minor miracle, and I intended to keep it that way.
    I’d also, as it happened, never spoken to or met Ted’s parents, Chet and Betsy Masterson. Photographs of them showed a look-alike pair of tall, craggy-faced, well-groomed, fiercely smiling Connecticut Yankees,sheltered, correct, and set in their ways. Ted called them Martyr and Farter behind their backs, but to their faces he was a model son, courteous and solicitous to a degree that nonplused me, when I happened to overhear his side of their telephone conversations, as much as Max’s hangdog filial obedience did.
    I seemed to be slated to spend my life with closeted men—I, who’d announced that I was a homosexual one night at the dinner table at the age of twelve. At that time, we lived in a normal suburban house like a normal family for the first time ever, because my mother had finally burned out on her Bobby McGee vagabondage and utopian bliss. She’d married an architect and installed her brood in his split-level Phoenix ranch-style cinderblock house, complete with yard, dog, and TV set, our first.
    I said out of nowhere, through a mouthful of potato, “I have an announcement to make, which is that I’m gay.”
    Amanda rolled her eyes; it was all over the playground at our school. Lola, who was eight, ignored me, her usual policy when confronted with something she didn’t understand. My stepfather, Lou, shook my hand and said, “Congratulations, Jeremy, good for you.”
    To my puzzled irritation, my mother burst out laughing. “Oh, baby,” she said. “Have you slept with a boy yet?”
    “Mom! I’m only twelve.”
    “That is pretty young,” she said, smiling.
    “I’m gay, Mom,” I said levelly.
    Then I saw a flicker of something in her eyes, as if a wave of the New England Puritanism she’d spent her entire adult life striving to eradicate had risen up against the internal dam she’d built against it. But evidently her convictions held, because she eased back into her chair again.
    “Well,” she said. “Good for you for telling us, Jeremy, that took a lot of courage. And I hope you won’t ever hesitate to ask for help or advice, and if there’s any way I can give it to you, I will.” She took a bite of pot roast, and that was that; the subject was changed, and dinner went on as usual.
    But I remained edgy and tense throughout the meal, a feeling that had returned frequently since then. I had seen what I was up against.

3 | DOWNTOWN
    I sat at my desk while Juanita unraveled the sleeve of my sweater, hopped along the back of my chair, perched on my shoulder, and nuzzled her hard little beak into my scalp. I always listened to NPR when I wrote; it provided such a soothing backdrop. My private motto for NPR was “Story time for grown-ups.” The announcers’ calm, correct pronunciation of every word, no matter how formidable, foreign, or vowelless, no matter what faraway or nearby calamities they were describing, allowed me to bask in the happy illusion that the world was safe and orderly and this latest catastrophe only an aberration.
    Angus in Efes
was my own small way of making sense of the rest of his life after my father vanished, and laying him to rest. When I’d begun the novel, it was with the idea that I’d bash out a first draft, revise it quickly, publish it, and move on, but after ten years I was still adding episodes, deepening scenes, polishing passages I’d already polished twelve times.