One of my earliest childhood memories is my father taking me in the evening to Samena Swim & Recreation Club in Bellevue. It was just him and me. I’d taken swim lessons and could hang out by myself with the help of water wings, goggles, and a kickboard while my father swam laps in a nearby lane. I loved the echo in the cavernous room, the way the sounds and voices melded into each other, gurgling, muted, watercolors for the ears. I spun around, did the dead man’s float, watched pale, distorted legs dangle down into the blue. I kept one eye on my dad and another on the pool’s edge, my two sources of safety.

Too young to get changed in the women’s locker room alone, I’d accompany my father to the men’s area. Once my clothes were tugged back over my arms and legs, sticky from inadequate toweling off, dampness seeping through in the creases but warm nonetheless, I’d wait for my father to shower and dress. As I sat there I wasn’t looking anywhere in particular: at the rubber mats on the floor, the slats in the bench, at pale toes like gnarled gingerroots, calves with hair worn off in patches from dress socks, and knees everywhere, those scrunched-up, featureless faces. “Stop staring,” my dad would insist over and over again, sounding admonishing and embarrassed. I kept my head down. Later I realized that this reminder, this reprimand, was likely something my father was saying to himself more than to me. The shame of looking, of wanting to look.

And then there was that time we were pulling the car into the garage and from the backseat I yelled the word “penis” for no reason other than that I was eight years old and at that age it’s fun to call out the words for genitalia in a loud voice. One day I’d come home from kindergarten and repeated a term I’d heard on the playground: “motherfucker two-ball bitch.” Whether it was at my ignorant daring or at the perplexity of the phrase itself, I’m not sure, but my parents laughed. Here I was now going for the encore. But saying “penis” in front of my father, while he was trapped in a car with me, and thus trapped with that word, and whatever he pictured in his mind when he heard that word, whatever feelings he felt about that word, that thing, resulted in me being dragged upstairs and getting my mouth washed out with soap.

Oh, we also received the International Male catalog, a men’s underwear catalog that is essentially a showcase for big European cocks.

Only in retrospect can I find clues to my father’s gayness. Sometimes the dull detritus of our pasts become glaring strands once you realize they form a pattern, a lighted path to the present. I have to turn over and reimagine certain moments from my childhood and make them conform to a different narrative, a different outcome.

When my sister and I were both away at college, my father, still living in the house we grew up in, informed us that he was going to start taking in “boarders.” I imagined something out of a W. Somerset Maugham novel: doilies, stale biscuits, afternoon tea, a collision of international seekers. Except our house was in the suburbs, carpeted, with an open layout, replete with landings and those bulked-up banisters that were good for jumping off when adults weren’t around, or for hide-and-seek stealthiness. The playroom, with its sloped ceiling, old striped couch, and first-generation CD player, would be the “room for rent.” The idea of a boarder seemed odd, even seedy. I was indignant. This was a childhood home, not a hostel!

It wasn’t for financial reasons. My father’s rationale was that the house was unnecessarily big for one person—true. And empty—also true. I suppose he was staving off loneliness. They were always men or college-aged boys. They were unlike my father: One was a snowboarder with beachy, blond hair whose family owned a water sports business. Another was a part-time musician who sold me an Ampeg amplifier head and cabinet that he was storing in the garage. My garage! One man I know nothing about save for the fact that his car was repossessed right there in the driveway. If they had one thing in common it was that all of them were slightly wayward, rough-hewn, jocose. I would occasionally come home on the weekends and no longer feel like the house was a retreat, or even mine—I was simply crashing there like anyone else. There was a new sense of transience to the house, of transition. It was a husk, emptied of sentimentality, populated by strangers, and by that I don’t just mean these men, I also mean my father. I am certain nothing happened between the renters and my dad. The men, the boys, were unaware, in between and on their way. But for my father this was a rehearsal, a way of circling around a new kind of male intimacy.

My father was a corporate lawyer. He went to work in a suit and tie. He had a secretary. He left the house before seven a.m. His professional life felt generic, like a backdrop, a signifier more than a life: office job. I knew very little about what he did. He traveled to China, Russia, Australia, sending home postcards and returning with stuffed koala bears or wooden nesting dolls. He collected toy trucks and paraphernalia with company insignia that he displayed atop credenzas or that my sister and I would grudgingly mix in with our other toys, as if we didn’t want to sully our Cabbage Patch dolls or My Little Ponies with crass corporate sponsorship. My dad had work friends whom we saw infrequently. It was all trousers and ties. Grays and browns. There was a sterility to it that I found both exotic and comforting. The office was in a nineteen-seventies high-rise next to a mall. A swift-moving elevator, a destination we’d reach undeterred, a telephone number I had memorized, a secretary who knew my name.

My father wasn’t just taciturn—it was like he didn’t want to be heard.

I don’t know if he had nothing to say or if he didn’t know what to say. Perhaps his reticence came from not being able to name what or who he was, or what he felt. So he stayed quiet, and he waited for the words to find him.

This is what I knew about my father: He grew up in Evanston, Illinois, outside of Chicago. He attended Duke University and then the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for law school. He has one brother. He was the assistant coach of my soccer team, and the head coach of my sister’s. He ran marathons. He mowed the lawn. He was always working on something called a sump pump in the crawl space. He was slight and handsome, dark-eyed, wide-eyed, wide-nostrilled, looking curious and confounded, boyish. He was stern yet timid, a disciplinarian with no follow-through, self-conscious, not prone to affection, undemonstrative. He liked liver pâté. He had a mustache and then he didn’t; I cried when he shaved it off because I didn’t know he had a space between the bottom of his nose and his upper lip, like a pale secret.