because it was a different mode of coziness. I was so—not happy but peaceful with her that I thought. How ironic, just as I've finally managed to finish my gay novel I'm ending up in a woman's arms.
One day at breakfast she said, "I keep talking about transparence but I haven't told you about Gunther." She said that until recendy she'd lived with him, a chemist from Hamburg, but that things hadn't gone all that well with him and besides, "I wanted to be unencumbered in case there was a chance of you and me getting together" She spoke in a high, soft voice with her head lowered and her eyes closed and I saw how embarrassed she was, especially since she must have known that if I spoke so often of the distant past it was to avoid talking about the recent past or the future and if I dwelled on childhood fears it was because I didn't want to tell her about my adult anxieties.
"I have something to confess, too," I said. "I've had quite a few affairs with men."
I let a long silence hang in the air and looked out the window.
"I never would have guessed it," she said. Then, in a firmer tone, she added, "It doesn't make the slightest difference."
But it did. I didn't dare tell her that many of these "affairs" had not been the twilit, star-crossed romances she might imagine but had rather been conducted kneeling on the fioor of a public toilet, my vows exchanged only with the red unsheathed fury of the third penis of the afternoon. I had no tattoos or piercings but my nipples had a history, they were enlarged and they stiffened when brushed by a callused hand, just as my ass arched and filled out in my skintight jeans under a man's admiring scrutiny and my cock stiffened after the third glance back, a heliotrope trained to follow the light emanating from male eyes only.
When I was alone with Christa, as when I'd been alone with Maria years before, I could imagine myself at ease, the two of us happy. But one cold wet night after work, Christa and I took in a movie in the Village,
The Farewell Symphony
then ducked into the Riviera Cafe on Sheridan Square for a bowl of chili. It was an island of boisterous heterosexualiry- in the flood of gay male life that flowed around it and I'd chosen it precisely because there, stupidly, I thought I wouldn't be tempted, .^nd yet as we sat on the glassed-in terrace I saw wa\'e after \\a\e of handsome young guys go past, their voices ringing out above the rumble of sub\\'ays passing under the sidewalk, their powerful young bodies, pale faces and black, slicked-back hair materializing in the mist rising from the grate, only to vanish into the dark of West Fourth Street, one man's hand around another's waist, a star of complic-iU' glancing off a smile or eye, and I wanted to be with them, I felt I was trapped with my mother. Poor Christa suddenly looked much too adult and dowdy and her conversation sounded fatally innocuous.
When we were alone again in her apartment I sank into the eiderdown comforter of her love, but I felt something shameful about it. I wasn't a real man, I could barely keep it up. usually not at all, but despite my inadequacy Christa looked at me with such affection and admiration that I feared growing accustomed to it. Male indifference was bracing, Spartan, whereas female indulgence was corrupting, Persian. WTien I was with a woman I felt good, but was that realistic, ad\asable? I dreamed I was a coyote looking from a mesa down on a cheerful fire. I was cold and lonely, but if I approached the campsite it would be to kill or be killed.
I thought of Butler and Lynne; although they seemed happy enough, I imagined Lynne must always be afraid of losing Buder to another man. There was something hectic about her vivacit)' that seemed a continuously chanted spell to ward ofl just such a defection. Not that I wanted to deny the possibility of bisexuality, which suited my conflicting feelings for Christa as well as a novelistic craving for complexity. Everyone had been talking
One day at breakfast she said, "I keep talking about transparence but I haven't told you about Gunther." She said that until recendy she'd lived with him, a chemist from Hamburg, but that things hadn't gone all that well with him and besides, "I wanted to be unencumbered in case there was a chance of you and me getting together" She spoke in a high, soft voice with her head lowered and her eyes closed and I saw how embarrassed she was, especially since she must have known that if I spoke so often of the distant past it was to avoid talking about the recent past or the future and if I dwelled on childhood fears it was because I didn't want to tell her about my adult anxieties.
"I have something to confess, too," I said. "I've had quite a few affairs with men."
I let a long silence hang in the air and looked out the window.
"I never would have guessed it," she said. Then, in a firmer tone, she added, "It doesn't make the slightest difference."
But it did. I didn't dare tell her that many of these "affairs" had not been the twilit, star-crossed romances she might imagine but had rather been conducted kneeling on the fioor of a public toilet, my vows exchanged only with the red unsheathed fury of the third penis of the afternoon. I had no tattoos or piercings but my nipples had a history, they were enlarged and they stiffened when brushed by a callused hand, just as my ass arched and filled out in my skintight jeans under a man's admiring scrutiny and my cock stiffened after the third glance back, a heliotrope trained to follow the light emanating from male eyes only.
When I was alone with Christa, as when I'd been alone with Maria years before, I could imagine myself at ease, the two of us happy. But one cold wet night after work, Christa and I took in a movie in the Village,
The Farewell Symphony
then ducked into the Riviera Cafe on Sheridan Square for a bowl of chili. It was an island of boisterous heterosexualiry- in the flood of gay male life that flowed around it and I'd chosen it precisely because there, stupidly, I thought I wouldn't be tempted, .^nd yet as we sat on the glassed-in terrace I saw wa\'e after \\a\e of handsome young guys go past, their voices ringing out above the rumble of sub\\'ays passing under the sidewalk, their powerful young bodies, pale faces and black, slicked-back hair materializing in the mist rising from the grate, only to vanish into the dark of West Fourth Street, one man's hand around another's waist, a star of complic-iU' glancing off a smile or eye, and I wanted to be with them, I felt I was trapped with my mother. Poor Christa suddenly looked much too adult and dowdy and her conversation sounded fatally innocuous.
When we were alone again in her apartment I sank into the eiderdown comforter of her love, but I felt something shameful about it. I wasn't a real man, I could barely keep it up. usually not at all, but despite my inadequacy Christa looked at me with such affection and admiration that I feared growing accustomed to it. Male indifference was bracing, Spartan, whereas female indulgence was corrupting, Persian. WTien I was with a woman I felt good, but was that realistic, ad\asable? I dreamed I was a coyote looking from a mesa down on a cheerful fire. I was cold and lonely, but if I approached the campsite it would be to kill or be killed.
I thought of Butler and Lynne; although they seemed happy enough, I imagined Lynne must always be afraid of losing Buder to another man. There was something hectic about her vivacit)' that seemed a continuously chanted spell to ward ofl just such a defection. Not that I wanted to deny the possibility of bisexuality, which suited my conflicting feelings for Christa as well as a novelistic craving for complexity. Everyone had been talking
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