They couldn’t believe they’d let so much time pass. They were shocked at how quickly it went. The three of them had been inseparable in college, incorrigible in Israel, and full of plans when they returned home, twenty-two and immortal.

That was twenty-nine years ago.

Then Malcolm went to Michigan for grad school. Winnie made the mistake of marriage, and moved to Atlanta with her husband. Angie remained in Berkeley, with Claude, near her parents.

They stayed in touch but the touch loosened over time; long-distance calls were expensive and writing letters was tiresome. Both Mal and Winnie visited the Bay Area every so often, at least while their respective parents lived, and Angie always saw them, but their visits never coincided till now.

Lately it seemed there was too much catastrophe. Mal didn’t have AIDS, and neither woman had pancreatic or ovarian cancer, but each of them had plenty of sick peers. Angie had spent the last four months helping a neighbor die. All three were feeling softly sad, slowly sentimental, sensitive. When Winnie and Mal learned of Angie’s latest Claude-crisis, each decided to visit her. That’s how they came to be gathered in her small study, marveling mostly at how old they’d become: grownups with traces of youth in their rippling faces.

Any witness could have seen the triangle they made. They were positioned at equidistant points from each other in the small room. Angie sat on the squeaky swivel chair in front of her old oak desk, Winnie went back and forth in the cane-and-oak rocking chair, and Mal draped himself variously over Angie’s stationary bicycle. The way they conversed made a triangle too; it had only taken them three hugs and five minutes to resume the old pattern. Angie swivelled, Winnie rocked, Mal pedaled, they all talked.

“You have to leave him, girlfriend,” Mal stated in no uncertain terms. He flailed his arms upward in an emphatic vee. He and Angie had always been more definite than Winnie, but Mal was the expressive one. They’d all known he was gay when they met as Cal freshmen, and he’d only become more so over the years. Winnie, on the other hand, presented herself as straight until a year into her marriage to Jack, when she blew everyone away by running off with Kim and changing her nickname to Fred. In time and after Kim she returned to her old name, but she never returned to heterosexuality. “This is the last straw,” Mal continued, “and we are not going to sit around and watch it break your back or any other part of you.”

“I kind of know it, Mal,” Angie sighed. She turned the chair to him, lopsiding the triangle. “But after all this time…shit: it just seems like a big deal to leave him. You realize we’ve been together over thirty years?”

“Yeah. And how many of them have been good years?” Mal asked the question with a sardonic tone, pedaling a few times and nodding his handsome head. His hair was still thick and wavy, but it had gone from darkest brown to streaky silver.

Angie swivelled toward Winnie and gave her an exasperated smile. “What do you say?”

“About good years?” Winnie smiled back. Her hair had grayed too, but she’d started out a blonde so her gray looked dull. Angie had been trying for years to get her to color it, but Winifred was one of those lesbians who believed that any cosmetic beyond hand lotion was a capitulation to the male-dominated commercial world. She was pleasantly plump, sweetly serene, and had the softest hands in the county, but above the neck she looked older than her fifty-one years. “Normally I’d stay out of it and say I wasn’t sure,” Winnie answered more seriously, “but really, Ange, you’ve done it long enough. I think it’s time for you to get out.”

It was serious advice, coming from those two. Mal had been Claude’s accidental roommate in the dorm, just as Winnie and Angie had been fortuitously paired. The four of them spent a lot of time together, and Mal and Winnie had loved Claude, who was then crazy- brilliant. He was the only one not from the Bay Area, having come to Cal from Delaware of all places; that was one of the small things that alienated him from the other three, and made a triangle instead of a square. But they knew Claude, they accepted him as Angie’s mate, and they thought they understood him as well as anyone alive: theirs was a dire recommendation.