Having met both sober Cecily and drunk Cecily, he was fairly sure this was the latter. Or at least the buzzed version. Maybe there was a happy medium, an ideal Cecily Pearce who would neither threaten him about bequests nor molest him.
Charlie was across the room, talking to people Yale didn’t know. But just then, Julian came up and put his arm around Yale’s waist, his chin on Yale’s shoulder.
Cecily said, too brightly, “Hi! I’m Cecily, from Northwestern! It’s great to meet you finally!” She squeezed Julian’s hand and said, “You must be so proud!” Whether she meant proud of Yale or proud of the party, he didn’t know.
Yale could feel Julian’s chin press into him when he answered, his stubble move against Yale’s neck. Julian said, “I am very proud. Yes. Indeed. Proud.”
And because Yale could see this turning bad quickly—could imagine Cecily, on her way out of the party, telling them what a cute couple they made, with Charlie in earshot—he said, “Julian just likes to lean. Charlie Keene is my partner. He’s around here somewhere. He has a beard.”
Julian said, “I hate his beard, I’ve told him. Why hide such a pretty face?”
Cecily found this hilarious, or at least pretended to. She laughed with the desperate air of someone who didn’t want the conversation to turn uninteresting lest you leave her alone with no one to talk to. Yale spotted Gloria, Charlie’s reporter with all the earrings, and waved her over. “Gloria went to Northwestern,” he said, and the two women started talking, and within a minute Yale and Julian were making their escape.
“Bathroom,” Julian whispered right behind Yale’s ear, and it didn’t sound like such a bad idea. There was a lot of beer in his bladder.
The bathroom was empty. Julian, instead of heading into one of the two stalls, splashed water on his face and then stood there as if he expected to chat. He twisted his forelock. When Julian went bald someday, he’d have to find something else to do with his hands.
Yale said, “That woman is not exactly my boss, but she’s not not my boss.”
“She didn’t seem so bad.” Part of Julian’s beauty was the way he looked at you. If you stared at the ground, you’d find that Julian had ducked down and was catching your eye from below, as if to pull you back up again. He would rub his fingers along his own ear and blush at you, and that was oddly beautiful as well.
Yale headed into a stall. No urinals here, thankfully.
Julian’s voice: “Have you ever seen a snake dancer?”
“A charmer? With a basket?”
“No. Usually they’re women, like belly dancers, but they let a python crawl all over them when they’re dancing. Anyway, Club Baths is bringing in a guy, like this bodybuilder guy, who does snake dancing.”
Yale laughed as he zipped his fly. “What could possibly go wrong?”
“You’re no fun!”
“Sorry. That’s probably the safest thing going on there.” Yale came out and washed his hands. Julian looked in the mirror.
“You wouldn’t mind if they all closed.”
“Honestly, Julian—yeah, I think it might be for the best. For a while. I don’t blame them for everything the way some people do, but they sure as hell haven’t helped. And it’s not about shame or regression or anything else. It’s just, like, if there were a salmonella outbreak at a restaurant, you wouldn’t keep eating there, right?”
Julian shook his head. He didn’t seem inclined to leave the bathroom. “You don’t even know what you’re talking about. I’ve heard more condom propaganda there than anywhere else. You’re just parroting Charlie.”
“Charlie’s right about some stuff.”
“But Yale. After they cure this thing, there won’t be any place left to go.”
Yale felt a hundred years older than Julian right then—Julian, who was, in fact, examining the pores of his forehead in the mirror—but instead of saying what he thought, which was that there was never going to be any cure, he said, “When they cure it, we’ll open new ones. And they’ll be even better, right?”
Julian turned and gave him a sad, beautiful smile. “Can you imagine the party? When they cure it?”
“Yeah.”
And Julian didn’t look away. It was a small bathroom and they were only two feet apart, and the longer they stood there, the more Yale felt as if he and Julian had entered into physical contact, chest to chest, thigh to thigh. The fact that they hadn’t, that the room smelled like