Composing a Further Life

said. ‘He was only eighty-two.’ Another woman had had five husbands. I got to know these women, but it didn’t last very long. You’d go and suddenly one day they wouldn’t be there.
    “Anyhow, I got proposed to by Ted, so I was living in a very elegant address, high on top of Russian Hill. And it was a very nice existence. But Ted didn’t—He was very clear that I didn’t get a parking space in the building; I had to park somewhere on the street. There was a second parking space, but that wasn’t for me. I could tell it was a very limited kind of relationship. But he provided me with a place to live, and we did a lot of things together. I made his life work. I understood then that rich people need somebody to manage their lives, so a rich man’s wife or whatever is the one who stands there waiting for the people to come and clean the curtains or to pay the gardener, to pay the housecleaner or to find another gardener. All that takes time, which they don’t have, and you end up doing this kind of stuff. Or, you know, going shopping for food. I did sleep with Ted, but he wasn’t a very highly sexed person and he definitely didn’t care if I did anything else, and so it was like … ookaay.”
    “What kind of emotional relationship would you have with somebody like that?” I asked.
    “It was very stable in one sense. You know, you could care for him. It was a dependable thing. He had the same thing for breakfast every day. If you’re in a chaotic situation, something that’s stable can be very comforting. The excitement was outside, but you had this sort of stable core, you knew where you were going to sleep and you knew what you were going to eat. I moved into his place in August of ’seventy-seven and moved out the next year.
    “That was a different world, San Francisco in the seventies. The plague hadn’t hit yet. When the AIDS thing started, I remember they said some of these people have as many as a hundred partners. But I didn’t, and I knew people who didn’t. But there was a dark side to it. My ex-wife bought a house in Oakland with a small mother-in-law apartment, and a gay man had died there, but nobody missed him—that kind of thing happened to people you knew or heard about.”
    “People were breaking out,” I said. “It was the middle of a revolution.”
    “It was an odd breaking out because it was done … It was a strange revolution, you know. Well, in the meantime, I met Paul.”
    Paul, I knew, had been Dan’s partner before Michael and had left the little property we were sitting in to him when he died of blood poisoning, unrelated to AIDS. While Dan was with Ted, he was doing occasional house-sitting, and one day he threw a big party and Paul, who had just sold his place and was looking for somewhere to stay, turned up. “He was very shy,” Dan said, “and had injured his leg. I said, ‘Why don’t you come and we’ll cost-share with each other?’ And so we sort of got together, in an apartment in Oakland, and I thought, Well, something like this may really work.”
    Dan had gotten a real estate license, but in 1980, after Ronald Reagan was elected president, the real estate business soured and interest rates were rising. Meanwhile the alternative energy projects Paul had been working on got canceled, so Dan and Paul both took a ten-week computer programming course at Golden Gate University and became programmers. Paul was in a wheelchair most of the time, so when his grandmother died and left him some money, they bought the little Newark house, which was all on one level, where they lived for a year and a half, until Paul died.
    “You probably had to take care of him a lot,” I said.
    “He required a lot of care, and I didn’t mind,” Dan said. “He was easy to take care of. You don’t mind taking care of somebody who respects you, is light about it, and fun. He’d say, ‘Oh, this is the best piece of toast I ever had.’ And I would say, ‘No, it can’t be the best, you can’t always be that happy.’ Or ‘This is the best piece of cake.’ That was great. And he was very much into food, and he would read the restaurant reviews and we would go to the good restaurants and that kind of stuff. He was, honestly, just the best. He lived very much in the present in that way, and he was pleasant to be around. He said he didn’t want a funeral, but he would have a memorial service if I wanted it, which was in his will. So when we were doing his memorial