“Remember that time you guys came to the hospital with the guitar?”
“I do,” Jimmy said.
“What a year,” Frank said. “It’s hard to believe you’re here.” The silence that followed held them. Frank stood and drew a pint from the small keg on the counter. “Anybody else?” he said, getting no takers. “What is it, Jimmy? You know I just don’t know. I can’t see it from here. How did you know? Did it creep up on you, or did you always just know? Did you know in the day?”
“Jesus, Frank,” Mason said.
“No,” Jimmy said, “it’s good. Frank said it: we’re talking. Mason started it. What do you want to know, Frank?” Jimmy settled in and put his arm on the back of the deep couch.
“Wasn’t Winger gay?” Mason said to Frank. “You knew him.”
“Winger, Big Bob, who bartended for me for six or seven years, not to mention Duane Boorman, and Tim’s brother. I’ve known plenty of gay guys, okay?” Frank said. “But I’ve never, ever talked to one about it. Have you?”
Mason looked at Frank. “This isn’t truth or dare.”
Everyone watched Frank push his beer onto the tabletop, shifting dishes two then three deep. When it balanced, he lifted his palms. “Let it go,” Frank said. “I’m just not as evolved as you, Mason. You got out of town, had a big life. Jimmy, I’m so goddamned glad to see you again, no shit.”
Jimmy pointed at Frank, his face a joyous smile. “When we showed you that guitar, you were scared of it.” He nodded at Larry and continued. “We took him a bass guitar in the hospital, and he looked at it like it was a torture device.”
“It was, for a while,” Frank said.
“Only for our audiences,” Craig said.
“A good bass player is key,” Jimmy said, “and Frank was.”
“Is,” Sonny said, and everyone turned to her. “He still plays pickup with some of the bands.”
“A ringer,” Craig said. “Good deal.”
“I knew in high school,” Jimmy said. “I knew it, and I knew it wouldn’t pass.” He folded his hands in his lap and spoke again softly, just over the Zombies singing “Tell Her No.” “You take it as a kind of unhappiness for a while. I’ve talked to a lot of people about this.”
“You wrote about it,” Mason said.
“You’re a misfit, which is exactly what everyone is for a while. Everyone. Then you see your friends start to sort themselves out, get married, like that. I was alone for a long time. I knew what it was, and I was surprised when others started to see it in me. Pleased. I spent almost five years in St. Louis, working for the Street Sheet, learning to write, and I met some people at the paper who were great. It was incredibly sweet to belong.”
“What were you doing?” Frank said. “You mean dating?”
“I saw a lot of people way before anybody got sick. Yeah, it’s dating.”
“When two gay guys go out to dinner, who pays?”
Marci laughed, and Mason rolled his eyes. “For god’s sake.”
“No, really,” Frank went on. “Who pays?”
Jimmy was wide awake now, his fatigue burning in his knees and back; he could feel himself smiling. “The answer is the same for all of us, Frank. Whoever has come courting. That’s universal etiquette. And etiquette is everything. Daniel, my partner, loved to quote the movie Gigi. ‘Bad table manners, my dear Gigi, have broken up more households than infidelity.’” Jimmy regretted the joke immediately, but he was out of breath now.