we should call each other up and go out on a date.”
“That's really terrifying.”
“I know.”
“If I told you my phone number, would you remember it?”
“Sure.”
“You won't remember it. Let's go to my place right now.”
“You think it's a good idea?”
“No. But let's do it, anyway.”
Harry lived on the second floor of a brownstone. He was a cardiologist, he played the saxophone. Naked, with one small lamp burning, he was small and chiseled, nearly hairless. He didn't exercise. He'd been a fast-moving, sinewy boy and now as a man he had the body of an aging acrobat, thin snakes of muscle on his arms and legs and an incipient belly, round and hard and economical under the smooth flat squares of his chest. Will knew right away that if anything happened beyond one night, he'd be the beauty and Harry the one who paid cool, humorous tribute. Will loved and hated the idea. It surprised him. Here in this expensive but haphazardly furnished apartment, he was the one with the body and no cash. It wasn't where he'd expected to go.
In bed, Harry kissed the muscles of Will's chest. He ran his tongue over Will's nipples, worked his way down. Will liked it well enough. The sensations, Harry's tongue and Harry's bed, were pleasant, just that. It was neither large nor dangerous. There was nothing to fail at. Will stroked Harry's shoulders, and did not worry. He let it happen. When Harry kissed his way back up to Will's face, they moved carefully together, as if they held an egg pillowed between their stomachs.
Harry, Will thought. Why does his name have to be Harry?
Afterward, they slept. Will started to leave, more out of politeness than desire, and Harry held his arm. “Just stay,” Harry said. And he did. It seemed right to stay. He fell quickly, deeply asleep with his back touching Harry's back.
When he was still Billy he sat in the dark of his father's closet, exploring. He burrowed amid the wreckage of shoe-polish tins, brushes, lost coins. The closet floor was snug and blackly glittering as a storm drain. Things drifted down and settled there. He groped around on the floor until his hands touched something solid—a shoehorn, perfect as a floating keyhole. He put the shoehorn to his lips, tasted the slick rubbery non-taste of the new. He bit down hard, then held it in the strip of light that shone under the door. His toothmarks were surprisingly perfect, symmetrical.
His mother's closet, next door to this one, was a garden of color and sweet, flowery smells. He liked that closet, too, but found its lushness overpowering and its heavy, perfumed air difficult to breathe. In his father's closet, things were spare and disorderly. Things were the color of night. Overhead, the dangling sleeves and cuffs disappeared up into blackness. On the linoleum, his father's shoes waited silently. Billy put his face down close to one of his father's black dress-up shoes. It was titanic, nearly as long as Billy's arm, and even in the dark of the closet it put out a dull, brown-black shine. Billy inhaled. The shoe had a ripe but strangely compelling odor. It smelled of polish and it smelled in some unspeakable way of Billy's father's secret life. A strong, foul, fascinating smell. He was lost in the smell when his father opened the closet door.
In the morning, early, Harry got up to make coffee. Will lay in bed, half awake, returning from his dreams. Small incidents of gray, rainy light played on the keys and bell of a saxophone. There were shelves crowded with books, books piled in corners, books stacked on a rickety chair. There were daffodils dried to scabs in a drinking glass. Harry came back from the kitchen, bare-assed and sleepy in a white tank top. Just Hanes, the kind old men wore. He gave Will a mug of coffee, got back into bed.
“Could you sleep?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Will said.
There was nothing unusual to say. They sipped their coffee. “I have to be at school in an hour and a half,” Will said.
“I go in late on Fridays.”
“Nice.”
The coffee mugs were heavy and white, the kind waitresses slap down on diner counters. On the table beside the bed: a Kleenex box, a notebook, a scattering of pens, a solemn-faced stone angel, and a paperback copy of Anna Karenina.
“You're reading Tolstoy?” Will said.
“I read Anna Karenina every few years. I'm a Tolstoy slut.”
“I love Tolstoy, too. George Eliot is the one