I'm really a slut for, though.”
“Middlemarch is incredible.”
“I read that every few years. It practically gives me a nose-bleed. “
There was nothing unusual to say. There was a sense of occasion, occasion made out of the simplest materials, and the passing seconds were apertures, clicking by. It occurred to Will that he could be to Harry what he'd always wanted pretty men to be to him. He could be kind and intelligent, present, with a world inside him. He could stay for a while and then, when he wanted his freedom again, he could go.
With mingled sensations of pride and sympathy, Will put his hand on the bony complications of Harry's thin, pale knee.
They had dinner together two nights later. They told their stories, or parts of them. Harry came from nine children, an immense cold house in Detroit, a father who believed in military discipline and a mother who searched between the rules so hard she fell into religion. Harry's only regret, the only one he'd admit to, was music. He treated heart patients and that was fine, he liked doing it well enough, but it would never take the place of pulling in chestfuls of air and giving it back to people as one long melody.
He said, “I didn't have the courage to be a musician.” On the restaurant walls, old posters announced ocean liners that hadn't sailed in thirty years.
Will said, “It takes courage to be a doctor.”
“Not really. Not the same kind. Once you start being a doctor it just rolls you along, it has this momentum. It would take a lot more courage to quit practicing medicine than it takes to do it.”
“Do you want to quit?”
“No, I like what I do. I like playing the sax in my apartment and fantasizing about playing in clubs. Some fantasies are better as fantasies, don't you think?”
“I guess. I was going to be an architect and I've ended up teaching fifth grade.”
“Isn't it what you want to do?”
“It's become what I want to do. I think I did it at first to spite my father.”
“I've done much worse things to spite my father than teach fifth grade.”
“He had such grand hopes for me, he was so intent on my becoming some kind of big deal, and one day I looked him in the eye and said, 'Fuck you, I'm going to be an elementary school teacher.'“
“I did a lot of drugs and played guitar all the time. I had to go to medical school in Mexico.”
“I got drunk and drove too fast. My friends and I wrecked three cars before we graduated from high school.”
“That must have shown him.”
“I guess.”
“Plus, it was fun.”
“Hm?”
“It was fun to do drugs and play the guitar. I'm sure it was fun wrecking those cars. It hasn't all just been to get back at our fathers.”
“Well, no. I guess it hasn't.”
Harry smiled, ran his finger along the rim of his water glass. His fingers were tufted with golden hair. A loose thread hung from his cuff, tickling his wrist, and without thinking Will glanced at his own wrist, as if the thread had touched him, too.
He was not afraid of Harry. He wondered if he'd been a little bit afraid of every other man he'd ever known.
He and Harry made careful love. It was good sex, good enough, but it lay differently along Will's skin. Ordinarily he felt concealed by sex; he disappeared into the beauty of the other man. With Harry he was more visible. Sometimes he liked the sensation. Sometimes he thought he'd get up and leave, return to the comfort and the familiar unhappiness of his usual life.
They went to movies, they ate in restaurants. On the first sunny day they drove to Provincetown in Harry's car, walked shivering at the water's edge in sweaters and coats. Harry stood in a brown suede jacket, scraps of dark hair blowing against his eyeglasses, and a perfect beauty gathered around him, a beauty of circumstance, the bright cold sky and the fine golden stubble on his upper lip. Will and he made no declarations; it just unfolded. Another night and another, all day Sunday with coffee and the newspapers.
Sometimes Will believed he was falling in love.
Sometimes he told himself, I want more than this.
He'd been waiting so long for a dark-haired boy-man, a hero carrying all he'd learned about adventure and the body. He'd prepared himself for that; he'd turned into someone who could have it. Will had never pictured a