Matt got off the bed and walked naked into the next room. He returned with a picture in a silver frame. His flaccid cock trailed a filament of cum.
“This is her,” he said. He showed Will a photograph of a pretty blond girl with an alert V-shaped face and a string of pearls around her neck.
“Nice, huh?” Matt said.
“Very nice. I've got to go.”
Matt stood with the photograph in his hands. His face was flushed, his eyes bright. “I want to tell you something,” he said.
“What?”
“I did this just to see if I'd like it. A guy's about to take on a lifetime commitment, he's naturally a little curious. And you know what? It made me sick. This fag stuff makes me want to puke.”
“Sorry you feel that way,” Will said. “Good night.”
“So in a way I want to thank you. For helping me know who I am.”
“Don't mention it.” Will left the room. The front door wavered in front of him as he found the knob.
“Good night, faggot,” Matt said behind him.
When Will got home he took a shower, as hot as he could stand it. He poured himself a shot of bourbon, got into bed. Later, when he told the story to friends, they all agreed that these things happened. Sometimes you picked a creep. His friend Dennis told him about a soft-voiced, neatly dressed man who'd kept him handcuffed to a bed for two days and who'd seemed convinced that all Dennis's protests were elaborate signals of his pleasure. Rockwell had a half-dozen tales of more ordinary humiliations in truck stops, in parks, in the men's room of the British Museum. Every gay man had stories. They'd been robbed, beaten up, dumped naked on a highway in New Jersey. These were usual things; they happened. They lived as anecdotes, war stories, and once you were on the far side of them they fattened your reputation. Matt the Nazi angel, as Rockwell called him, was just an episode in the passion play. He told Will, “Think of that poor fuck married to that nice dumb girl, sneaking around to bars and movies. Believe me, I've seen this plenty of times. They only get ugly when you've struck a nerve. Have a moment of silence for the pathetic schmuck, and get on with things.”
Will believed what Rockwell said. Still, the memory of Matt stuck to him. Something about Matt's calm disdain, the way he'd stood, naked, with hard white light falling on him and the girl's photograph in his hands. Will saw Matt striding, suited, firm-jawed, calmly determined, into the hush of a government building, and he was filled with a dread that stung like ice water.
1979/ It wasn't an affair. Affair was the wrong word for what Susan was having. It was—what? A mistake she permitted. An ongoing temptation she found herself, temporarily, unable or unwilling to resist. When she thought of a woman having an affair she thought of hotel rooms, tearful afternoons, a whole galaxy of longings and regrets. This was sex and something else, a modest affection that resembled, to a surprising extent, the friendships she'd had as a girl. Affairs were premeditated; they were kept alive by a tortured system of meetings. She and Joel, on the other hand, simply had sex when they felt like it and when circumstances permitted. He was a tree surgeon. She knew there was a dirty joke to be made out of that though she didn't make it to herself—she wasn't quite sure how it would go. She and Todd had been in the Connecticut house less than three months when Joel came to work on the mature elm that had somehow survived Dutch elm disease, the only one in a neighborhood once known for its trees. When Todd and Susan bought the house they learned they were considered the custodians of something precious, a monument. They were advised—ordered, really—by their neighbors to continue the previous owners' custom of having Joel out every six months to monitor the tree's inexplicable good health. The tree spoke to Darien about deliverance, a future that could not be wholly obliterated even by the bottomless appetite of disease. Susan dutifully called Joel, a short, affable man of forty or so, who smoked a pipe and carried about him a faint air of apology mixed with his scents of tobacco and wood. He was like a forest creature, watchful and ready for flight. He had an