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Why doesn’t he love me anymore? The question is why did he love me in the first place. One never asks oneself. Even if one is neither vain nor self-obsessed, it is so extraordinary to be oneself—exactly oneself and no one else—and so unique, that it seems natural that one should also be unique for …

The studios had changed, but not the loneliness of struggling and arguing with himself unobserved. His dealer and the twenty-something East Village artists, the exuberant boys and girls who had visited his studio and danced with him at the Palladium, had perished of AIDS or overdoses or moved on to…

I SUGGESTED TO ROGER that he tell his brother about me, about us, because his brother was coming into town to visit while Roger’s wife would be away. Enlisting his brother as our ally could have helped us arrange a lot of time together, at least doubling the length of the afternoons we’d contented …

I’d like to say that I didn’t want Roger to leave his wife, but I don’t think that’s entirely true. I’m a relatively impatient person, and I can be short-tempered. I hated the new limits imposed by his illness. His marriage was an inconvenience, and one he explicitly framed as a financial obstacle …

I didn’t see Roger before the surgery, but his immediate recovery went well enough that he managed a solo trip to his DC condo about a month later, and I spent the night with him there. By this time, they’d determined that he had brain cancer and it was not curable. “If I could, I’d leave you four …