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these flowing gowns like Greek statues."
    "They sound like Isadora Duncan," I say.
    "They sound like dykes," Mona declares emphatically, then turns to Gray. "Weren't they?"
    I feel this sudden protective urge toward Gray, as he lays the steaks sizzling on the grill. He has barely ever admitted to me that he's gay himself. There's not a whole lot to admit, I gather. He seems to carry on his rounded shoulders centuries of repression. But now he shrugs easily as he slathers on the barbecue sauce. "You'd have to ask them," he declares. "I never really gave it a thought. Something tells me they never really did either."
    Mona is very quiet, but the answer seems to satisfy her. I have a bit of a brood myself, thinking how much the history of my tribe lies behind veils of ambiguity. Ever since I've been at the beach I've had this romantic longing, wishing I'd lived here during the aunts' heyday. But now I wonder, were they happy? Or were they trapped, making the best of it, away from the rigid straightness of the ranch? They seem more real to me tonight than half the people I know in L.A., who can't take my illness and talk to me funny, as if I'm a ghost.
    "Isn't it curious, Tom," Mona says softly. "They ran a little art space, just like us."
    Gray laughs. "Not quite. You guys are much more over the edge." He says this proudly. "Their stuff was more like a school play. Historical pageants, that kind of thing."
    He bends and studies the meat, poking it with a finger. And yet, amateur though the aunts may have been, they were obviously the core influence on their oddball great-nephew. Gray Baldwin was subsidizing beat poets and jazz players in Venice—a hundred here, a hundred there, covering rents and bad habits—when he was still in high school. If you were way-out enough, dancing barefoot on broken glass, painting the sand by the Venice pier, Gray was your biggest fan. All the while, of course, he was having a sort of extended breakdown, growing more and more dysfunctional, estranged from the Baldwin throne. And no one pretends that Gray put his money on names that lasted or broke through to greatness. Marginal they stayed, like Gray himself.
    "Still," Mona says puckishly, "I wish I'd had women like that around. In my house the drift was very home ec."
    "I don't want to overcook it," Gray murmurs gravely, "but I can't really see."
    "I'll go get the flashlight," pipes in Mona, darting for the kitchen.
    "And I'll set the table." I hurry in after her. We are both laughing, at nothing really. Not drunk at all, just glad to be here together. Mona doesn't have to say she finally gets Gray Baldwin; I know it already. She grabs the flashlight from the shelf above the stove, while I fetch plates and three not-too-bent forks. We will have to share the steak knife. Minimal, everything's minimal here—that's the way the beach house works.
    Mona is lurching toward the screen door, I am making for the dining room, when suddenly she turns. "I love you, Tom," she says, blinking behind her tortoise rims, half blushing at the overdose of sentiment.
    "Yeah," I reply laconically, but she knows what I mean.
    In the dining room I set us up at the big round pedestal table, the base of which is as thick as the mast of a schooner. In the center of the table is a bowl of white-flecked red camellias, three full blooms floating in water. These I picked days ago from the bushes behind the garage. They last a week in water, which is why I like them. Most cut flowers are dead by morning, just like all my friends. I move to the sideboard and pull a drawer. Laid inside are heaps of mismatched napkins, from damask to burlap. I take out three that are vaguely the same shade of green, and caper around the table setting them under the forks.
    Through the window from the courtyard Gray and Mona call in unison: "It's ready!"
    "Great!" I bellow back at them, tucking the last napkin, and then I look up—
    And Brian is there.
    For a second I think I've died. He's