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TWO

“ I t’s four o’clock,” Albert says, startling Eddie awake. “Sherry hour.”

Eddie looks at him, not understanding. “Sherry hour?”

“You think sherry hour is canceled just because Cookie isn’t here? It’s four o’clock, you’ve been asleep all afternoon, and it’s sherry hour.” Albert unwraps the giraffe-print silk scarf from around his neck and stuffs it in his shoulder bag. He smooths his tunic over his belly and turns back into the hallway. “Up!”

Eddie rubs his eyes. He could sleep for another eight hours, maybe sixteen, all the way through till morning. But Albert has a point. Sherry hour should go on. So he swings his feet off the edge of the bed, pulls on a sweatshirt, and shuffles out to Cookie’s bedroom.

“Out here!” Albert calls from the living room.

He’s right about that, too, Eddie thinks. It feels too raw in Cookie’s room today. Eddie sits on the marigold settee, next to the headless mannequin draped in the beaded cape. The coffee table is overloaded with snow globes, leaving barely enough room for Eddie’s tiny sherry glass.

“Sorry,” Albert says, leaning against one of the barstools. “I took all the snow globes out of the hutch. I was looking for the one with the von Trapps inside, but she must have tucked it somewhere else. You can put them back later.”

Eddie has a sip of his sherry. It’s sharp, acidic, smoky, bitter, a complex flavor more amplified than he remembers from before. He’s not sure he wants it. But he won’t say so. He’ll just sip.

“I haven’t sat out here in this room for ten years,” Albert says, scanning the portraits that crowd the walls. “Maybe longer. Cookie and I used to have cocktail parties out here. We had the wedding out here, too.”

“I thought you said you and Cookie got married at City Hall.”

“Oh, not my wedding to Cookie. My wedding to Lyle. Of course, it wasn’t officially a wedding. Not as far as the government was concerned. Even if it had been legal for two men to marry back then, which it wasn’t, I already had a wife, Mrs. Gagné, so it would have been bigamy. Lyle thought the whole idea was absurd, but Cookie insisted. And what was he going to do? He was in no position to argue by then. He could barely dress himself, let alone lodge a protest.”

Eddie notices Albert’s shoes, brocaded yellow slippers with blue tassels. Albert notices him noticing.

“Oh! There’s a coincidence. These are the same shoes I wore that day. Cookie picked them out. Lyle thought they were absurd, too, and he was right.” Albert’s breath catches, and his eyes well with tears. Sorrow. “I loved her so much, you know?”

“Yeah,” Eddie says, hearing the fatigue in his own voice. “I know.”

Albert straightens his back and cracks his knuckles. “Enough with this melancholy!” he barks. “Don’t get old, Eddie. Old men are weepy, weepy things.”

“You’re not old.”

“Says the child.” Albert smiles.

(Yes, you heard that correctly: Albert smiles.)

“Anyway,” Albert continues. “I don’t know what you’re going to do with all this crap in here, though, now that it’s all yours.”

“Mine? What are you talking about?”

Albert pulls a piece of paper from the sleeve of his tunic and hands it to Eddie.

“I stopped by the landlord’s office this morning and put you on the lease,” he says.

“Me?”

“Who the hell else? Of course, you. This is your apartment now. The apartment, and everything in it.”

Eddie tries to read the document, but the print is so small and dense, he’s not sure what any of it means. “I don’t understand.”

Albert taps his finger on the paper. “See here? Where it says lessee . Cookie’s name has been blacked out with a Sharpie, but yours is right there. It doesn’t look official, but it is. As her widower, I have that power. The landlord had no choice but to approve. He initialed it here. He’ll slip a fresh copy under the door whenever he gets around to it. But the apartment is yours now. Your place, and your responsibility.”

“But I’m only—”

“You’re eighteen, aren’t you? An adult?”

“But I can’t afford—”

“Eddie, don’t you know anything about New York City? It’s called rent control. This is one of the last units in this neighborhood with that designation. Incredibly rare, a double unicorn. Your neighbors all pay ten times this much, maybe more. But not you. You just need to come up with two hundred and ten dollars a month. I’ve already paid for July and August, so you don’t need to worry until September. That’ll give you time to find a job.”

Eddie stares at the lease. It’s just a piece of paper in his hands, but it feels like so much more. Eddie expected just to come here for a couple of months, wasn’t even sure he’d like it, and now here he is holding the lease on a unicorn, a golden ticket, the kind of prize that even he, who hasn’t yet begun to understand the extraordinary complexities of what it means to live and rent in New York City, knows is impossibly rare, and impossibly valuable. Does this piece of paper mean he’ll… live here? Does it mean he’ll never go back to Mesa Springs? Does this mean—

He looks at the paper again.

“I don’t know,” Eddie starts. “I don’t know if I—”

Albert cuts him off. “You don’t have a choice. You have to take the apartment. It has to stay in the family.”

“But what if Donna doesn’t want—”

“Donna is not the family I’m talking about, Eddie,” Albert says. “I’m sure she’s very nice, but I’m not talking about Donna. I’m talking about us.”

“Us?”

“Are we a parrot? Yes, us. You and me. The queers. We are a family. For better or worse, whether you like it or not.”

Eddie looks again at the paper. “I’m confused.”

“Listen, Eddie. I know I’m a cranky old bitch, but I know a few things. It took me way too long to understand our worth, to understand that being gay is not a curse, but a blessing. I don’t know what they teach you out in Mesa Ranch—”

“Mesa Springs.”

Albert waves the words away. “Whatever. Just don’t take as long as I did to catch the train. Don’t let anyone tell you that this is all something new, that we just invented it, that someone just had this idea and decided to design a flag and throw a parade. We are not a piece of arts and crafts. We are a culture, and not only that, a multiculture, a history, a past and a present and a future. We are everywhere. That is the reality. That is the truth.”

Real , Eddie thinks. True .

Albert is still talking. “What you need to do now is live here. In this apartment, in New York City. Don’t you see? You can be yourself here. You have examples here. Ideas. Shoulders to lean on. Elders to talk to. Maybe one day you’ll go back to Mesa Falls and—”

“Mesa Springs.”

“Jesus, Eddie, let this old queen finish, would you? Maybe one day you’ll go back there and show them something real, but right now you need to be here, in New York. You need to live here. To embrace this city and embrace yourself. Don’t you see? There are a million others like you here, like us. Every age. And you have this goddamned gift of an apartment in the center of it all. Step in, step up, be who you’re meant to be. Not just for you. For us. It’s up to you to take us further.”

Eddie doesn’t understand what Albert’s talking about, not exactly. He will, one day, but for now he nods as if he does.

“Speech over,” Albert says, dabbing his upper lip with the sleeve of his tunic. He holds up his glass, with just a drop of sherry left. “To Cookie.”

And with a great, emphatic, almost aggressive sigh, the kind only Albert can emit, he gets up, slides his bag over his shoulder, and sweeps the giraffe-print scarf around his neck with a dramatic flourish. The gust from his gesture causes the pink crystal chandelier above them to tinkle. Albert and Eddie look up at it, just as a single crystal dislodges and falls into one of the Dutch wooden shoes with a loud crack.

“I swear this place is haunted,” Albert says. He puts his hand on the front door handle. “But don’t burn it down, okay? And don’t expect me to come by and vacuum anymore. I’m retired.”

“But what about—” Eddie’s voice is anxious, tinny, very small.

“What about what?”

“I don’t know how I’m going to—”

“To what?”

Eddie looks up. “What if I need you?”

“Don’t you have my number?” Albert’s eyes soften, just slightly, just for an instant, but in that instant Eddie can see that Albert will be there, if he needs him.

“Thank you,” Eddie says finally. “Thank you, Albert.”

“Oh, shut up.”