cherubs, to my office, there to await the rich cream of the patient’s voice.
In my absence, the radiators evidently had come aboil, for now they chuffed and clanged as steam surged through the building’s aged pipes. The dry heat was almost unbearable. I envied the man in the Hotel Palace across the way, who, as I watched, threw open his window and, heedless of the rain, stood naked to the street.
I doubted that the man could see me—I kept my light off, lest Dr. Schussler look up and see the glow at her neighbor’s window—yet I could see him clearly. His body protruded past the plane of the window directly opposite mine, and the gray light of the sky cast an even, silvery tone upon his skin, so that he appeared to be made of marble, one of the statues that lined the hotel’s venerable roof. He was tall and well made, muscular yet not overly so: the sort of body that would neither repulse nor intimidate if encountered in the locker room. A look of pleasure passed over the man’s face, which he lifted up to the sky and rain. Then, his face still uplifted, he took his genitals in both hands.
Not since boyhood—since Paul, my best friend—had I seen another male touch himself. I gaped as the man fondled his testicles and stroked his penis softly, almost absently. After some moments, he encircled the base of his penis with the thumb and forefinger of one hand and began to pull upon it with the other. He gave himself long, full, strong pulls, and his member responded by steadily growing in length and girth. He continued in that full, slow rhythm until his penis achieved an impressive size, protruding some inches into the narrow width of New Montgomery Street, so that he seemed very near to me, almost at a touching distance, the eye of his penis looking directly at me, as it were. All the while, he kept his face uplifted to the sky, blinking with delight as drops played upon his eyelids, his mouth opening and closing as if to taste the rain. My own member begin to stir—it was normal, I told myself; I was responding to the memory of my boyhood games; also sex begets sex; the sight of the man’s penis, of his pleasure, his delight, merely made me think of my own.
But then, suddenly, without ever quickening his rhythm as I would have done near the end, the man closed his eyes, arched his back, gave one great thrust, and ejaculated forcefully into the air.
His seed dripped from the ledge.
I shut my eyes in disgust.
13.
When you’re adopted, you don’t look like anyone.
It was Paul, Paul Beleiter. We were in his bedroom. The light that pressed against his venetian blinds was the hot sun of an August day. From down the hall came the static of a drifting radio station, a melody now surfacing, now fading, then a stern voice: talk of war in Europe. Paul and I did not listen. We were boys, twelve years old, indolent in the last days of summer.
When you’re adopted, Paul was saying, you don’t look like anyone.
We were sprawled across his wide bed. I looked at Paul: sculpted lips, curls of near-black hair, smooth skin—swarthy, a shade too dark for the liking of his adoptive parents. His nose was pointed, his eyes too close together, fortunate imperfections that gave him a ferocious gaze. No, he didn’t look like anyone, not even the other boys. He towered over us; his beard was beginning to show; his voice was already lowering—he was years beyond us, it seemed. His father was pale and slight; his mother pallid, tight. Why would he want to look like them?
He was angry. Something about some art classes in New York; a scholarship he’d won; his parents forbidding him to go. We were stranded in Ovid, our town named for the poet. But the artists who had settled and named the place were long gone. Now only fields and dairy cows stretched out in the heat beyond the window; farmers and the people who sold them things. Paul’s father sold tractors, mine insurance. At least we didn’t have cow shit on our shoes, we said.
They don’t know anything about art, I said to Paul.
I’m never going to be like my parents, said Paul. Never.
He leaned down, reached under the bed, and came up holding a box, the sort that once might have held a pair