"I owe you a lot," he said.

"Stop saying that. You make me feel old."

"You're only in your twenties," he said.

"I feel like I'm eighty. An old man. A defeated old man.' "Umm."

"I thought you'd be married now," I said, "with a wife and a couple of kids. But here you are. As fruity as I am. I never thought you'd admit you're queer. I was convinced you'd make what they call a heterosexual adjustment.' When I saw you in that gay bar tonight I was shocked. Now I feel like it's all my fault, somehow."

"It's not, really," Mike said. "If it hadn't been you, it would have been somebody else."

He suddenly swerved and turned into the driveway of a hamburger stand. He stopped the car with a flourish and left the headlights on to attract the car hop. A woman in her forties limped over to us on aching feet and stooped and peered into the window.

"Couple of hamburgers and Cokes," Mike said, flashing her one of his brightest Joe College smiles. Unimpressed, she went back to the stand and called in the order.

"I love the rain,” I said, looking out the window at the slow, steady fall of it. It was cold, but everything smelled fresh. The smog-smoke smell of L.A. was temporarily washed away by it.

"Remember that night when it was raining and we went up to Stadium Hill?" Mike asked, leaning back and putting his arm across the back of the seat.

Oh, God help me. Did I remember? How painfully and pitifully I loved Mike? With what trembling hands and sweating palms I drove my old convertible up that hill in the rain that night? It was so sad, so sad now to remember the wild glory of being made love to by Mike-the sound of him saying "Oh God, oh God," over and over again, while my white-socked feet waved a merry salute to the departure of innocence. How fiercely I held him against me, feeling all that hair and muscle and maleness.

"Yes," I said, still looking out the window. "I remember."

There was a long pause. I could feel Mike's hand on the seat behind me, and it was all I could do not to lean back and touch it with my shoulder. "I've often wondered how you did it," he said.

"Did what?"

"Have a mutual climax."

"Oh Christ," I said, laughing helpessly. "Oh shit."

"What? What's the matter?"

"Is that all you remember? I mean, is that what you remember most about it?"

Mike was looking at me with an idiotic half-smile on his face, like someone who had not quite caught the point of a joke.

"I. . . ."

"I'm a fool," I said. "I should know by now that you didn't give a damn for me. But for five years I've nursed the hope that you did—just a little."

He was trying to think of something to say. He opened his mouth, then closed it again, then wet his lips, then rubbed them dry with the back of his hand. He looked down at the palms of his hands-curiously, as if they were something new and slightly alien.