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“My dad’s nose,” I offered.
“And your voice is not the same.”
“What was his voice like?”
Harold smiled. “You’ll think I should say something romantic perhaps, given what you know of our relationship, and how I felt about him. I assume from what you’ve read in the journal and letters you mentioned, you know everything?”
I nodded.
“The truth is he had a quiet, scratchy, rather high-pitched voice. He sounded hoarse even when he was perfectly healthy. A little like Donald Duck without the dithering.”
“Really?”
“His voice didn’t fit his face. I remember the first time I heard it, I almost laughed in surprise. But as time passed…” He shook his head. “I yearned for it. Our phone calls were what I lived for. They were so few and far between.”
“In my letter, I asked some questions about my uncle.”
“Yes, you did.” Harold sighed and wiped a hand over his face. He looked older than when he’d first walked in. “Would you mind getting that water now? I think I’m a little parched after all.”
I rose and went into the kitchen, getting out two of Mom’s nice glasses, the ones she saved for guests. I rinsed them out before filling them with fresh, cool water and adding some ice cubes.
When I returned to the living room, Harold was holding my Leica. I’d left it out on the side table by the sofa the day before, after I’d taken it down to campus to grab pictures of the new holiday decorations going up and the students walking around with cold-red noses and heavy coats.
“This is a fine camera,” he murmured. “I took many of the photos in my Leisurely Lovers collection with one just like it.”
“I like to use the Summilux Aspherical thirty-five millimeter lens with it. It’s great for pushing in low light. It gives the photos a creamy, organic feel.”
“Yes, that’s a good lens.” He put the camera down and accepted the water, taking a sip. “You asked in your letter how George and I met. Believe it or not, we met in a very normal way for two gay men back then—at a house party of a friend. Bill Bryant was his name. A fine fellow. George knew him through his trade school, and I’d met Bill in a public bathroom, but the less said about that the better.”
I chuckled and sipped my water.
“I saw George across the room at that party, and it was everything they say a moment like that will be. Thunderstruck, wonder-filled, glued to the ground with certainty that this,thiswas someone special, someone I needed to know.”
“I know that feeling,” I said.
“Do you?”
I nodded. “I’ve had it twice.”
“And how did those turn out for you?”
“One badly, and the other is good so far.”
He nodded. “I never got the good. Though perhaps that’s unfair. For me, with George, it was heaven except when it was hell. He was married and committed to his family back home. Through the years, I convinced him to come stay with me for a week at a time. Beautiful, priceless weeks. That’s when I took my photos of him.” Harold sipped his water. “He was jealous, though. That was part of our trouble, too. Part of the horrible end.”
“Jealous of who?” I didn’t get it; it was plain as day from the photos and everything Harold had written or said about George that he’d been deeply in love with him.
“My other models, of course. And the other men I slept with.”
“Oh.”
“I’m not going to lie and say I would have been the very picture of monogamy had he stayed with me, had he lived in my home as my dearest companion the way I’d wanted, but it would have been so much easier. Just seeing him once or twice a year? Other men were what I needed to survive, to not feel so alone.”
I nodded.
“In your letter you said he wrote in his journal about me.”
“Yes.”
