"He pays attention," Ben says. "He sees things."
"It's not obvious."
"That's what makes him good at it. People feel comfortable with him, they don't see the camera as an intrusion but as an extension of Barth himself — he's been doing it since he was a kid. At camp they hired him to make the promo video. He got everyone to help — campers, cooks, the mean nurse in the infirmary."
"It's very good. Do you remember, when you were younger, we'd pass a pet store and you'd be really angry with me for not rescuing all the puppies?"
"Am I supposed to think there's a link between Barth's movie and my deprived childhood?"
"I'm wandering in my thoughts. You used to want to be a veterinarian when you grew up."
"Don't anymore."
"Why not?"
"Euthanasia. I don't like that the animals don't understand they're going to die. I used to have a job walking dogs and house-sitting; the way I looked at it, people were paying me to drink their liquor."
"Did you really?"
"Sometimes."
"Well, what do you want to be?"
"Something where you don't get your hands dirty."
"Remember when I took you on vacation? We flew all the way to London, spent one night, and you wanted to go home."
"I was eight."
"You liked everything to always be exactly the same. It was kind of rigid."
"It was comforting," Ben says.
"We got home and your mother was on vacation and I stayed with you in the apartment for a week — we had a good time, we went to the Museum of Natural History, the zoo, the park."
Ben nods. "Why are we talking about this?"
"Just thinking about things."
They drive in silence for a few minutes.
"Are you really gay?"
"Yes."
"Do you think you were born gay or you became gay?"
"Are you asking because you want to know if it's your fault?"
"I suppose."
"To one degree or another, I'm sure it's your fault. Feel better now?"
IN THE MORNING, Billy picks up Nic, Anhil, and Richard in a huge SUV and takes them looking for real estate; Barth rides shotgun with the camera.
"This is so exciting," Anhil says, "going shopping with my big American backings."
"Who is watching the store?" Nic asks Anhil.
"My brother."
"So — you're opening a new business?" Billy says.
"Yes, Mr. Hill." Anhil has decided that Billy's name is Mr. Hill, and no one can bring themselves to correct him.
"It's actually a branch of an already existing operation," Nic adds.
"A donut shop," Anhil says.
"Would they be cooking donuts on site? A lot of people have problems with odors — you know, dry cleaners, bakeries."
"No cooking — the donuts will be cooked downtown and delivered to the new location," Richard says, definitively, when in fact he's making it up.
"Are you scouting locations?" someone on the street asks after they circle the same block three times.
"Yes."
"For a movie?"
"No, a donut shop; do you think this would be a good spot for a Donut Depot?"
The guy shrugs. "I'm wheat-free."
They look at locations, with parking, without parking — one was a former bakery, another a bank with a drive-through window, and one was a store that sold "pieces of the imagination" and went out of business quickly.
"They must have really believed they were going to make money, because they spent a lot on the renovation," Billy says.
"It has to be easy," Nic says. "Everything about it has to be easy. No one wants to think too hard about getting a donut— they'll talk themselves out of it."
Everywhere they go, they buy cups of coffee — hot coffee, iced soy latte.
"Did you notice the napkins in there? They had really thick napkins, not the rough one-ply ones. What's more cost-effective, a lot of thin napkins or one nice thick one?" Nic asks.
They cruise like teenage boys — except with the needs of old men. "Is there a restroom? I drank all that coffee and now I need to take a leak." They cruise and, like all guys riding in cars, they can't help talking about women, except Billy — Billy talks about men, sometimes as though they were women, as in, "He was such a bitch." They talk about women who dumped them and how sometimes they didn't even catch on to the idea that they were being dumped.
"When I was about fourteen, I was dumped by a girl at a party — she met another guy she liked better, and when I asked her what was so great about him she turned around and in front of everyone screamed in my face, 'You're a turd!' " Nic says. "It took me a full year to recover."
"I crave women, it is never enough," Anhil says, then, turning to Nic, "When you were famous, did you get a lot of girls? Ever have two at once? Three? That's my fantasy."
"I had a lot," Nic says.
"Did you do anything like take photographs of them?" Anhil has the ability to ask questions that would otherwise seem rude, but because of his intonation, the innocence with which he asks, Nic just smiles and answers.
"No photos," Nic says.
Anhil tells the story of his cousin who came to America and opened a photo-developing booth in the parking lot of a shopping mall. "No luck," Anhil says. "Everyone went digital, business was poor. And then, one day, a tractor-trailer making a delivery to the furniture store backed up into the photo booth and squashed him — he never knew what happened. He was the blind spot."
They cruise for hours and finally find a spot on Montana Avenue. "I purposely didn't show it to you first; it's small, but it's a good location. You can put tables outside, there's parking. It's a corner. I think corners are good for cafes."
"I like these trees," Nic says. "This is a place where you could sit for a while."
"Oh, it is very pretty. It is upstream," Anhil says.
"Upscale," Nic says.
"That too," Anhil says. "We can put an auto-rickshaw station out front — to make deliveries."
"What is an auto rickshaw?" Billy asks.
"Bajaj auto rickshaw," Anhil says. "It has three wheels, one in front and two in the back; the joke is, if the rickshaw can get its front wheel into a parking space you can push the rest of the rickshaw in… Good for crowded places, but here it would be for fun delivery."
"Let's do it," Richard says.
"Thank you," Anhil says to everyone. "Thank you. This is my dream come true."
ON WEDNESDAY, at breakfast, Richard announces, "I'm going to be out late tonight, if that's all right."
"You can have her over here," Ben says.
"No, I can't. I haven't dated in years — it's all too strange. At best, it's an experiment."
"Should I call and check on you?"
"I'll be fine," Richard says. "I just wanted to be sure you'd be all right."
"I'm good."
In the afternoon, Richard goes to the liquor store, prowls up and down the aisles agonizing over what the right wine would be. Finally he picks out something overpriced — decent, but nothing spectacular.
When he gets to her house, she is working in the garden. She greets him with a kiss; he can smell her scent — spicy, like clove. She leads him into the house and directly into the bedroom, undressing him and herself quickly. Nude, he is still holding the bottle of wine. She takes it from him as they lie back on her bed. They make love. He pays special attention to the scar, the absent breast, and then, feeling like he's trying too hard, he devotes himself to the one lonely breast — which now maybe isn't so lonely, because it's getting all the attention. They make love for what feels like hours; the sun goes down, the moon rises. They make love like animals, it is entirely about the body, about their most primitive needs.