Heavy Water and Other Stories

STRAIGHT FICTION

IT ALL BEGAN that day in the bookstore coffee shop—when Cleve saw the young woman reading a magazine called Straight News. Or was it Straight Times? Straight News or Straight Times: one or the other. Take your pick.

Now Cleve liked to think of himself as a reasonably civilized guy. Live and let live, he’d say. He didn’t have any kind of problem with straights. Unlike that little brute Kico, for instance. Or unlike Grainge, who always… Cleve checked himself. Every chance he got, he was still thinking about Grainge. Grainge—oh, Grainge! “It’s over,” he murmured, for the ten-thousandth time; and then he obediently reminded himself that he was very happy with his current lover—a talented young muralist called Orv.

The young woman reached for her short espresso. Cleve proceeded with his Sumatra Lingtong. (Low acidity: Cleve was careful about such things.) He found that he was staring at her—found also that she was staring back, with intelligent defiance. Automatically Cleve bade his face to suffuse itself with tolerance and congeniality. And it worked out: there they sat, a table away, smiling at each other.

“Who would have thought it?” he said lightly. To strike up a conversation, hereabouts, was no big thing. This was the coffee shop of the Idle Hour bookstore. A bookstore coffee shop committed to good coffee (Coffee Boiled Is Coffee Spoiled). People were always striking up conversations. “Burton Else,” Cleve went on. “Burton. Burton Else for Christ’s sake.”

It took her a second to get his meaning. She pressed the magazine to her bosom and peeked down, reacquainting herself with its front cover. There was the tabloid-size photograph of Burton Else, the movie star, sashed with the diagonal caption: TOTALLY HET.

“You find it hard to believe?” she said.

“I guess not.”

“You’re surprised? Disappointed?”

“Nah,” said Cleve. Which wasn’t true. He was scandalized. “I saw his new one just last night,” he went on. That was true enough: Cleve and Orv, at the movies, with their popcorn and their Perriers. And up on the screen—Burton Else, your regular join-the-dots romantic lead. The usual kind of thing. Burton taking his young feature star Cyril Baudrillard to a disco opening. Burton and Cyril attending a yard sale, and encountering Burton’s ex. Burton cradling Cyril’s sweat-soaked nudity in the marmalade glow of the log fire, after that fight about the flower catalogs. “There he was up there,” said Cleve, “doing his dreamboat routine.”

“They say he has to be helped into his trailer after he does those love scenes. They give him a back rub and he does his breathing exercises and he’s usually okay.”

Cleve laughed. “You’re kidding. But he seems so…”

“What?”

“You know. So…”

“What?”

“I don’t know. So…”

“Hey there.”

Immediately Cleve sat to attention. The young woman was being joined by her young man. By her lover; this was instantly clear. Of course you saw it all the time these days (downtown, anyway), straights kissing in public, on the lips and everything—open mouthed, even with tongues, like a demonstration. Cleve was only thirty-eight, but in his lifetime people used to go to fucking jail for doing that. Or for doing what that portended. The young woman had her head tipped back. The young man was leaning over the side of her chair. Her face was small and round and candid, not pale, but evenly freckled—the freckles like asperities on the skin of a new potato. (Cleve found that he thought about food, or about cooking, almost as often as he thought about Grainge.) As for the young guy—dark, compact, tight-jawed, plump-lipped—and yet, in Cleve’s estimation, somehow totally un-Hot. Uh-oh: more kissing. And more whispering. He listened. It wasn’t intimacies they were exchanging. More like duty-roster stuff. Whose turn it was to do what.

In fact Cleve was grateful for the diversion. It gave him a chance to contemplate the visage of Burton Else—the shamed visage of Burton Else, which smiled joshingly on, over and above the block capitals that sliced his chest in two. At the bottom of the page it said: BURTON ELSE ACTOR. ACADEMY AWARD NOMINEE. ROARING STRAIGHT. Cleve really was scandalized. The thing being… he’d been told more than once that he resembled Else. And been pretty pleased to hear it. As the young woman whispered to her young man, her fingertips steadying his cheek, Cleve felt marginalized, and outnumbered. The young woman; the young man; and now Burton. Suddenly he saw himself from the outside. Cleve: his cropped and kitteny black hair, his heavy dark glasses, his halter straps, his gold popper holder, his rectangular mustache, his fishnet tank top. In accordance with the latest Look, he resembled a half-dressed policeman getting ready for night shift. Burton Else was clean-shaven, for some reason. Or was that a tell?

He was about to return to his book and his Sumatra Lingtong when the young woman said, “I was talking to…”

“Cleve,” said Cleve.

“Cressida,” said Cressida. “And this is John.”

John nodded humorlessly at Cleve, who nodded back.

“We were talking,” said Cressida, “about the outing of Burton Else.”

“And how did Cleve feel about that?”

“Cleve didn’t yet say.”

And Cleve thought: eek. He leaned sideways and shrugged loosely. One thing about Cleve: he was more thoughtful than he looked. Being more thoughtful than he looked was getting easier all the time, as Cleve continued to alarm himself with the development of his upper body, down at the gym off Washington Square. Recently Orv had taped him with the camcorder—at Watermill, on the Island, trudging along the shore with Arn and Fraze. Cleve’s neck was astounding, especially when viewed from the rear. His back seemed to go all the way up to his head, after the brief and minor interruption of his shoulders. He said, “Well, let me see how I feel about it. Burton Else… Okay, so Burton’s straight. Big deal. It’s a secret, not a deception. He’s not one of those video preachers. Calling down hellfire on, uh, ‘alternative lifestyles.’ It’s not like he’s some hypocritical politician.”

“That’s right,” said John. “It’s like he’s some hypocritical movie star.”

The way he said that, the way he leaned into it, leaned his practiced intensity right into it: Here we go, thought Cleve. John, the young man—Cleve now saw that he had a speckly, rough-barked layer to his face. He was young but already weathered. Cleve said, perhaps not so thoughtfully, “Burton—guess Burton could lose a lot of fans if this gets around. He could lose roles. Supposing it’s true.”

John said, “Wait a second. You don’t think Burton isn’t promoting something? Like a lifestyle, for instance? He’s up there forty feet high. With his black cap and his tank top. A regular bees-knees faggot.”

“John.”

“And you’re worried about his roles? His fans? Fuck his fans.”

“Hey,” said Cleve. Again he felt unfairly singled out. He turned his head and saw that an elderly gentleman at an adjacent table was frowning at him with comradely indignation. The old guy looked like a half-dressed policeman too, but fatter and grayer and balder (and even more junior in rank) than the half-dressed policeman Cleve looked like; he wore a black T-shirt with the white lettering: THE MORE HAIR I LOSE, THE MORE HEAD I GET. Cleve said, “Come on, John. Is Burton obliged to have a position?” His tone became mildly imploring. “Doesn’t Burton have a life here? Is he just a symbol, an icon, or is he a human being? Doesn’t Burton—?”

“Fuck Burton. And if you can’t see that he’s a disgrace to his orientation, and an impostor, and a kind of preacher, as well as a jerk, then fuck you too, Cleve.”

“John,” said Cressida.

But with a quake of crockery and a flourish of his (grimy) mac tails—John was gone.

“I’m like, ‘Wow.’” This was Cleve.

“I’m sorry—he’s very active.” This was Cressida.

They looked at each other. They were two of a kind; there was unanimity.

“You get that way. Forgive us,” she said. She was gathering her things: her bag, her book, her magazine. “Look into it and you’ll understand. I’m sorry but you get that way.”

Left alone, Cleve lingered, over his Sumatra Lingtong, trying to read—or at least skim—The Real Thing and Other Tales, by Henry James. Browsing was encouraged at the Idle Hour. All the same, even browsing was more than Cleve could manage just now. You try to be reasonable with these people and meet them halfway. And what do you get? Cleve disliked unpleasantness of any kind; he disliked aggression; he disliked being hollered at by an uppity little straight in a bookstore coffee shop. In certain ways (he guessed), yes, in certain ways he was a pretty staid kind of guy. Maybe he got it from his parents. Whoever they might have been…

On his way back to Literature he made a stop at the Special Interests shelves and found himself staring at subsections called Personal Growth and Astrology and… Straight Studies. On the covers of the trade paperbacks various man-woman pairings peered out at you in frowsy resignation. There was straight fiction too: careworn, dirty-realist, kitchen-sink. The only straight novel that rang any kind of bell with Cleve was called Breeders. Written by a straight man, Breeders, he remembered, had sparked considerable controversy—not least within the straight community itself. The author, it was argued, had dwelt too relentlessly on the negative aspects of straight life. Cleve slipped Breeders under his arm and then went back to Literature, where he found another Henry James, one he was surer he hadn’t already read: Embarrassments. And it struck him: Jesus, was James straight?

He came out onto Greenwich Avenue, a couple of blocks north of the straight district around Christopher Street.

Soon afterwards Cleve and Orv took a trip to the Middle East. They did Baghdad and Tehran and then Beirut, where they could unwind completely and concentrate on their suntans. By the pool, on the beach, and during their picnics up in the hills, Cleve read Embarrassments. He also read Breeders. The straight world, as here portrayed, seemed outré and voulu and so on—but incredibly developed, above all.

Cleve learned that there were two and a half million straights in the New York area alone: a million in Manhattan and around two hundred thousand in Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Long Island, and the Dan-bury Triangle respectively. New York was known, by some, as Hymietown; but it now contained more straights than Jews.

They drove south and did Israel. Sight-seeing and shopping in Jerusalem and Bethlehem; Herodian and Massada; and then for the final weekend they chilled out on the Gaza Strip. They drove north to Tel Aviv and hopped on a flight back to Kennedy.

“Listen. Hey, this is kind of great,” said Cleve, on the plane, looking up from his copy of Time.

Orv looked up from his copy of USA Today. He looked up interestedly, because for the past three days Cleve had been speechless with concern about his upset stomach. Cleve’s stomach was actually fine. But he had swallowed a mouthful of the Dead Sea and expected the worst.

“This stuff about the straight gene,” said Cleve. “They did an experiment on fruit flies? It’s so cute they’re called fruit flies. Now. Fruit flies are superstraight. They breed like crazy—a new generation every two weeks. In this experiment they neutralized the straight gene. And guess what. Usually, in the culture jar, the boy and girl fruit flies would be busy reproducing. Instead the boys all went off together and formed a conga line.”

“A conga line?”

“A conga line. Feeling each other up and everything.”

“A conga line?”

“You know. Like Island Night at the Boom-Boom Room.”

“Oh, a conga line. Get this,” said Orv. “Your look-alike, Burton Else. They must have injected him with the straight gene. It says here he’s straight.”

“Yeah, I heard that. Burton.”

“Burton. He denies it. He’s suing the straight magazine that fingered him. ‘Nor do I endorse alternative lifestyles.’ But they got this bunch of rent-girls queuing up all ready to blab. Burton Else straight. Jesus, is nothing sacred? Christ, where do they get off calling themselves straight? They take a fine old English word and fuck it up for the rest of us.”

“It’s a word we use a lot. I keep noticing. Straight and narrow.”

“He used a straight razor.”

“He won in straight sets.”

“It was a straight fight.”

“Is my tie straight?”

“And keep a straight face.”

“Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low; and the crooked shall be made straight.”

“What the fuck is that?”

“The Bible. I think it’s the Song of Solomon.”

“Solomon wasn’t straight, was he? Jesus. Excuse me? Excuse me. Could I get a blanket, please?… Did you see that?” said Orv, not to Cleve but to some other half-dressed policeman across the aisle. “What’s his problem?”

“We hurt his feelings. He’s straight,” said Cleve. “Flight attendants are all straight.”

“Christ,” said Orv. “I’m surrounded!”

They got their blankets. Cleve tried to sleep. He found he was still brooding about Burton Else—brooding woundedly, self-pityingly, about Burton Else. Because the guy just seemed so normal. As he stretched and twisted in his seat, and as the plane’s engines whistled and hissed, Cleve’s mind became a collage, a photo spread, devoted to the tarnished movie star. Oh, those turbulent stills: Burton, laughing, in his chef’s hat; Burton dusting down his framed dressing-table portrait of Gloria Swanson; Burton alphabetizing his guidebooks…

He ran into Cressida again. Same place, same time, same coffee, same book: The Real Thing and Other Tales. Cleve had been back for over a week. His tan was like a carapace of oxblood shoe polish. His superb upper body had had another gallon of compressed air pumped into it, down at the gym. In the last of the September humidity he wore hot-cream cycling pants with a canary-yellow singlet and Adidas low-siders. Cleve had broken up with Orv. Wretched at first, he had since fallen for a talented young bijouterist called Grove. Grove—this virile, creative, troubled, valuable individual—had moved in last Friday. He came over in a van and just dumped his stuff everywhere.

With Cressida, Cleve had a completely cool conversation: about Dickens. No tension, no jarring notes, no John: just Dickens. He sipped his Kenya Peaberry; she dispatched her short espresso. They left the Idle Hour together, lingering, briefly, in Poetry and Drama, and said their farewells on the street, ambling half a block westward, toward Seventh Avenue. So they stood on the very brink of the straight district—Christopher Street, where Cressida lived, with John. You could feel a carnival heat in the crowded middle distance, the sizzle of street music, of block party; and Cleve noticed the ass-end of some kind of parade or demo out on the Avenue, trailing loosely by. He concluded that this must be a big day in the straight calendar—parades, pugnacity, pride. Or was it always like this? He didn’t say anything. They stayed off sexual politics altogether, as if by agreement… Now Cressida said something more about Bleak House (about Esther, about Ada), and Cleve said something more about Hard Times (about Grad-grind, about Bounderby). He told her to take care. And off she went, into it. Cleve walked back down Greenwich Avenue, heading for the gym. On Eighth Street he began to feel more at ease, more at home, more himself. He often came down to Eighth Street to buy clothes, fun outfits from Military Issue, Cowboy Stuff, the Leatherman, Blue Collar. More normally, of course, he went to the smart department stores or the uptown boutiques like the Marquis de Suede on Madison or See You Latex, Alligator on Fifth… When she smiled, when Cressida smiled, Cleve was always riveted by her teeth; they weren’t pretty so much as imposingly functional, eliding matter-of-factly with her gums and involving no clear change of bodily medium. Her smile reminded him of Grainge (oh, Grainge!). How could a girl remind you of a boy? Even boy-girl twins could never be identical. Only fraternal. As he strode on toward the gym, bowlegged with thigh muscle, Cleve thought of twins (twins, which all primitive cultures feared), suspended together in liquid behind the fat glass.

Cleve returned to his Chelsea apartment a little before seven and found Grove in bed, noisily having sex with Kico, the disc-jockey cousin of the cabinetmaker, Pepe, who had built Cleve’s new bookcases earlier in the summer. Cleve went into the kitchen and fixed himself a cucumber sandwich. Annoyingly, Grove had left the little television switched on. (Grove was always doing that.) On the TV: more straight news. The straight thing—it was kind of amazing. You got through life hardly giving it a second thought and then, suddenly, everywhere you looked… Whoa: Here was a big item about Straight Freedom Day, as celebrated in San Francisco, “the straight capital of the world.” Cleve stopped chewing; his mustache was still. There was an aerial shot of the Straight Freedom Day Parade, in the Mission District, led by the Straight Freedom Day Marching Band. In cutaways, men and women of reassuringly—indeed, depressingly—earnest demeanor talked about straight concerns, straight demands, straight goals. Straight leaders and activists were coming to terms with their newfound political clout as the most important single voting bloc in a city where two in five adults were “openly straight.” In the Castro, it seemed, everyone was straight. The whole community. They had straight greengrocers, straight bank tellers, straight mailmen. They even had straight cops.

“They should be fuckin’ killed, men.”

Cigarette smoke. Cleve didn’t turn. This would be Kico. Kico: his leather pants festooned with color-coded scarves and plumes and cummerbunds (why didn’t he just stick with orange, which meant Anything?), his blood-seeping eyes, his feathery sweat-dotted mustache.

“Take them to fuckin’ Madagascar. That’s what they need.”

“Come on, Kico. Stop this ugly shit. Wow. Look at that.”

Onscreen, straight cowboys from the Reno Straight Rodeo pranced down Market Street, brandishing the flag of Nevada—and the rainbow banners, which now served (they said) as the standard of all California straights.

“So you think they okay. They the same.”

“Not the same, but they have lives to live. More than that, you could say it’s a tough call. Being straight.”

“They sick, men.”

Next I’ll be talking with Merv Cusid, said the television, who is hammering together a straight-rights plank to be presented at the convention in August. And then came a shot that even Cleve couldn’t smoothly breathe through or quite meet the eye of: a green hillside, with bright blankets strewn around, and, in queasy propaganda slow-mo, women and young children at play.

“Thass it. I see that I’m like, let me out of here.”

“Nature’s straight,” said Cleve with a sudden nod.

“And thass what they are, men. Fuckin’ animals.”

“Live and let live. Where’s Grove? Resting?”

“Sleeping.”

So Cleve, who had not had sex at the gym, blew Kico in the front hall and then set about making dinner: a Gorgonzola soufflé to be followed by the Parma ham confit with pomegranate, papaw, papaya, and pomelo. Grove appeared, in his robe, and after a while silently served Cleve a glass of chilled Sauvignon. When he’d taken a shower, Grove reappeared, with a white towel on his hips. Grove was in great shape. Cleve was in great shape. The street, the city—the world they were living in—might as well have been called Great Shape. Over dinner they had a long, loud, and poisonously personal argument about which was better: Così fan tutte or Die Zauberflöte. They made it up while Grove did the decaf.

It was too late to go to any of the things they might have gone to, the gallery openings or moonlit yard sales, the long-dong or class-ass contests, the recitals or lectures, the dinner discos—the antique-sale previews, the travel-agent office parties. So why not have a quiet one? Thus they crouched round the low table in the living room and picked through the magazines. Even Cleve, at such a time, was ready to put aside his Trollope or his Dostoyevsky and pick through the magazines. And smoke a little herb. The contemplation of great texts, in Grove’s company, made Cleve self-conscious. Or perhaps it was Cressida that made him self-conscious: He could almost hear his self-consciousness, like a shell’s imitation of the shore. Even when they are in great shape, hypochondriacs have an illness they can worry about: hypochondria. Cleve, this night, was paranoid about his hypochondria. It might get so much worse… He kept inspecting Grove: his kitteny hair, his tank top, his mustache. The way he read magazines backwards, with his lips crinkled in stoical inanity. Of all Cleve’s lovers, only Grainge had ever shared his intellectual curiosity and literary passion. Only Grainge…

Soon after eleven Grove looked up from his copy of Torso and said, “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go to the Toilet.”

Cleve looked up from his copy of Blueboy and said, “You know, that was pretty funny. The first few times you said it. Besides I know you don’t hit the Bowl anymore.”

“Who said?”

“You go to Folsom Prison.”

“Who said?”

“Fraze,” said Cleve.

When Grove was out the door Cleve went to bed with the little TV.… All this straight talk was following him around. At the Democratic National Convention, to be held in New York, the straight caucus was larger than the delegations of twenty states. There was even serious speculation about a straight vice-presidential candidate on the Ted Kennedy ticket. Cleve’s mustache smiled. Dumb thought: Say Ted Kennedy was straight. Imagine it. Wouldn’t that, in a wild way, be kind of Hot?

Grove woke him, around four, as usual. He fought off his clothes and crashed down onto the bed—comfortingly redolent, as usual, of Tattoo and amyl nitrate.

In The New York Review of Books Cleve saw an ad for an “all-straight sea cruise,” Philadelphia to Maine. Why did this haunt him so? He found he no longer laughed when friends cracked straight jokes. How many straights does it take to change a lightbulb? He seemed to see more and more straights in the street now, not just in the immediate environs of Greenwich Avenue but over on Eighth Street, over on Washington Square. Cleve continued to put in the hours at the gym. The great bolts of his shoulder muscles now brushed the very lobes of his ears. His superb upper body: would it be truer to say it was under control or out of control? Cleve’s gym was called Magnificent Obsession. How often he would plod from Magnificent Obsession to the Idle Hour, from the Idle Hour to Magnificent Obsession…

His hypochondria took a turn for the worse—or did he mean for the better? Because his hypochondria had never felt hardier or more vigorous. Cleve was already an exorbitant devourer of health sections and medical columns and pathology pullouts in the newspapers and magazines. But now a fellow hypochondriac—and self-topiarist—at Magnificent Obsession kept feeding him more and more gear. These days Cleve was even reading The Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. In its pages he had started seeing references to what they were now calling Straight Cervix Syndrome. And seeing the straights in the street Cleve would wonder if something was waiting for them, something of the same size as their newfound tautness and address.

Cleve broke up with Grove. Grove with his entirely unromantic untidiness, his intelligently selective consumerism, his dharmic trances, his foul temper, his plans for the afterlife, and his 2.7 nightly sexual contacts. For a while Cleve was two-point-sevening it himself. But now he had fallen for a talented young chinoiserist called Harv.

“Pride and Prejudice?” said Cressida.

Every winter Cleve reread half of Jane Austen. Three novels, one in November, one in December, one in January. Every spring he reread the other half. This was January and this was Pride and Prejudice.

“Yeah,” he said. “For like the ninth time. What I can’t get over is—every time I read it I’m on the edge of my seat, rooting for Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy. You know—will Elizabeth finally make it with Charlotte Lucas? Will Mr. Darcy finally get it on with Mr. Bingley? I mean, I know everything’s going to turn out fine. But I still suffer. It’s ridiculous.”

“I always thought Elizabeth would have been happier with the De Bourgh girl. What’s her name?”

“Anne. It’s weird Jane Austen never had a girlfriend. I mean she had all those babies, like you had to do. But she never got laid.”

“And she understood the human heart so well.”

“I want to know something Jane Austen couldn’t tell me,” said Cleve. “I want to know what he’s like in the sack.”

“Who? Drink your coffee.”

Cleve drank his coffee. Santos and Java: cappuccino.

Cleve and Cressida had met up here at the Idle Hour—oh, a whole bunch of times. He would say quite frankly, if asked, that he enjoyed her company. Perhaps, too, he felt it was by no means unsophisticated to number among his acquaintances an intelligent straight friend. “Mr. Darcy,” he said. “I have to know what Mr. Darcy’s like in the sack.”

“Mr. Darcy. So do I. Masterful.”

“Majestic. But gracious also.”

“Tender.”

“But kind of strenuous. ‘Fitzwilliam’ Darcy. That’s so Hot.”

“Presumably he…?”

“Oh, for sure.” Cleve hesitated, and shrugged, and said, “I think we can safely assume that it’s Mr. Bingley who takes it in the ass.”

“Absolutely. That’s a lead-pipe cinch.”

He considered her. Most of the women Cleve knew tended toward the extremes of high burnish or unanxious self-neglect. Little smocked refrigerators under pudding-bowl haircuts, like Deb and Mandy in the adjacent apartment on Twenty-second Street. Or plumed icons of war paint and body sculpture, like his colleagues Trudy (in Marketing) or Danielle (in Graphics). What did the gloss and finish of Trudy and Danielle have to say? That they were interested, active, ready? What was spelled out by the dumpy torpor of Mandy and Deb? Refrigerators and pudding bowls? A nondieting pact? He had thought, at the outset, that Cressida had the typical straight look, the no-comment look, the look that just said, Don’t mind me. Composed, but dutiful, somehow. Straight. But just recently, Cleve felt, Cressida had taken on a glow, a color, a tangible charge of life. Was she… Hot? Or just hot. There she sat, loosening her raincoat and blowing the fringe off her brow. Cressida’s so-called husband, John, who held New York in disdain (straight pride, hereabouts, wasn’t proud enough for that fiery separatist), had taken his big mouth off to San Francisco, where he was a big cheese, or a big noise, on the National Straight Task Force. Being straight was his career. Still, Cleve didn’t like to ask about Cressida’s plans for the future.

Now she said, “Do you read much straight fiction? Everyone tries Proust, I guess. And E. M. Forster. And Wilde.”

“I didn’t even know Forster was straight until I read Maurice.”

“Yes, he kind of broke cover with that one. By common consent his least good book. That’s often the way with straight fiction. It’s as if they needed the secrecy. Without it the inner tension goes. They get overrelaxed.”

Cleve said shyly, “I read Breeders.”

“John hated that book. I thought it was pretty accurate. About the whole…”

“Orientation,” said Cleve, with delicacy.

“It’s not an orientation.”

“Sorry. Preference.”

“It’s definitely not a preference. Take my word for it.”

“What would you say it is?”

“It’s a destiny. Am I dying, or is it incredibly hot in here?”

“It’s incredibly hot in here,” said Cleve—to reassure her. But then, suddenly, it was incredibly hot in there. Cressida stood up and removed her raincoat. And it seemed to Cleve that he was breathing the very snarls of the coffee machines, and that the monstrous slabs of his upper body were entirely soaked and coated by their sweaty gas. More than this: he was breathing the hot flash of biology.

“You’re pregnant.”

“So I am. Not very pregnant.”

He was already thinking that Cressida looked a lot less pregnant than Mandy, the little butter-mountain in the next apartment, under her cuboid togas and tepees. Cressida’s belly, so mildly and yet so insidiously distended. One of Cleve’s therapists had told him that hypochondria was a form of solipsism. But now he looked across the table at Cressida, who was someone else, and felt the red alert of clinical fear.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Don’t be,” she said, and briskly added: “You know, maybe you read more straight fiction than you think. I’m convinced Lawrence was straight.”

“You mean T. E. Lawrence? Sure. T. E. was straight.”

“Not T. E., D. H.”

“D. H.!”

“D. H. When I read him I keep thinking, God, what a jam this guy is. Hemingway, too.”

“Hemingway? Come on.”

She was smiling. “An obvious het. He’s like Burton Else.”

“Come on.”

“An obvious het. A howling het.”

“Hemingway,” said Cleve. “Hemingway…”

They said goodbye on Greenwich Avenue. He stood on the curb, his hardback of Pride and Prejudice almost fully concealed in the chasm of his armpit, and watched her walk toward Christopher Street.

Harv was there when Cleve got home. How about this: Harv’s birthday was seven months away, and he was talking about it already. The Antique Mart on Nineteenth Street was previewing a new glassware display, so they looked in on that, and then had a couple of white wines in the Tan Track, their neighborhood bar, followed by a simple supper of cottage pie in the Chutney Ferret, their neighborhood bistro. Back at the apartment Cleve planned the menu for the little dinner party he would be staging that Thursday. Arn was coming over, with Orv, and Fraze was coming over, with Grove; Arn and Fraze used to be together, and Grove had once had a thing with Orv, but now Grove was with Fraze and Orv was with Arn. Cleve intended to prepare marjoram ravioli and pumpkin satchels Provençale… He was doing the thing he always did after his meetings with Cressida, seeing his life as a stranger might see it: an unsympathetic stranger. Cleve kept eyeing Harv, who lay on the chesterfield, reading. Harv: his heavy dark glasses, his rectangular mustache, his fishnet tank top. He didn’t read magazines. He read chain-store romance. Chain-store romance for Christ’s sake. Whenever Cleve took a browse through one of Harv’s novels, it was always the same story, patiently repeated: stablehands getting mauled by guys with titles.

Over their cups of hot chocolate they had a vehement, repetitive, and hideously ad hominem argument about who was better: Jayne Mansfield or Mamie van Doren. They made it up while Harv unpacked the goblets that Cleve had bought him. And went back to talking about Harv’s birthday… In the middle of the night Cleve woke up and went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror and thought: I am in a desert, or a crystal world. Every few years I go and whack off into a tube of glass: It’s like jury duty. I was formed in vitro. I didn’t get born. I got laid. There is no biology here. There is zero biology here.

Spring came. Fashions changed. Cleve hung up his leathers and switched to painter’s pants and Pendletons. He started on the other three Jane Austens: Mansfield Park, Emma, Persuasion. Harv learned how to cook Japanese. They took a trip to Africa: they did Libya, Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, Uganda, Zaire, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Angola, the Congo, Nigeria, and Liberia. Cleve broke up with Harv. He two-point-sevened it until he fell for a talented young macraméist called Irv.

Just when it seemed that it could expand no further (where, he wondered, was all this coming from?), Cleve’s upper body burst into a whole new category of immensity. Hooked over the twin tureens of his laterals, Cleve’s arms now felt uselessly short, like those of a tyrannosaurus; and his head appeared to be no bigger than a grapefruit, forming a rounded apex to the broad triangle of his neck. Cressida was growing, too. On the street, on Greenwich Avenue, nobody looked at Cleve, because everybody looked like Cleve looked, but everybody looked at Cressida, whose sexual destiny, every day, was more and more candidly manifest. No need to out Cressida, not now… They didn’t talk about it. They talked about books. But as he escorted her from the Idle Hour, west, to the brink of Christopher Street, he noticed how people stared and pointed and whispered. Oh, Cleve knew what they were saying (he’d said such things himself, and not so long ago): reproducer, carrier, bearer, spawner, swarmer. On Greenwich Avenue, one time, an old woman called him a fertilizer. So they weren’t just staring at Cressida: they thought Cleve was straight. Walking beside her, now, his protective instincts were regularly roused; he could almost hear them, his instincts, waking up, yawning, stretching, rubbing their eyes. But he also felt that he was in the end zone of his fair-mindedness, his tolerance—his neutrality. How could you protect Cressida from what was coming her way? He experienced abject and lavish relief when, late in the fifth month, she left for San Francisco, to join John.

The supermarket tabloids were calling it the straight cancer and the straight plague, but even the New York Times, in its frequent reports and updates, struck a note of heavily subdued monotony that sounded to Cleve like the forerunner of full hysteria. A spokesman for the Bay Area Network of Straight Physicians noted that certain unsanitary practices, including (unavoidable) recourse to backstreet obstetricians, provided a “breeding ground” for disease. A spokeswoman for the Los Angeles Straight Women’s Health Crisis Center demanded prompt government funding to meet the emergency—a demand that was itself dismissed as an attempt to establish “the first straight pork barrel.” A spokesman for the Anti-Family Church Coalition predictably announced that the straight subculture had brought this scourge on itself. As for the new president, asked about the hundreds of known cases of ovarian infection, septicemia, and puerperal fever—all of them straight-related—replied, stoutly: “I wouldn’t know.”

Cleve and Cressida were still pals. They were pen pals. At the outset he imagined a correspondence of remarkable—indeed publishable—brilliance, all about fiction. But it didn’t turn out that way. Cressida’s letters, he soon found, were irreducibly quotidian. The cooker, the clothes dryer, the conversion of the box room—should she paint it blue or pink? “I know you’re interested in home improvement,” she wrote, “but this isn’t decoration. This is nesting.” Dutifully Cleve’s football jersey quaked over the kitchen table, leaning on the pad and ballpoint, as he attempted sophisticated riffs about exactly how Fanny Price made time with Mary Crawford, exactly how Frank Churchill strapped on Mr. Knightly. And the next morning what would he get but another nine-pager on Cressida’s health insurance or plumbing bills. Such was straight life. Her letters didn’t bore him. He found himself both gripped and frazzled. It was like getting hooked on one of those British soap operas they showed on cable: proletarian ups and downs, week in week out, relentless and endless, lasting longer than a lifetime. Cressida was really big now, splay-footed and short-winded, and constantly fanning herself.

Irv. Irv looked a lot like Cleve. Harv had looked a lot like Cleve, too, as had Grove, as had Orv. But Irv and Cleve (as Irv pointed out) were like the two sides of the same ass. That first time, when they groped toward each other through the fumes of Folsom Prison, Cleve felt he was walking into a mirror—reaching out and finding the glass was warm and soft. Sometimes, now, when Irv mislaid his house keys (which Irv was always doing), Cleve buzzed him up and waited for the knock and then went to the door, feeling entirely depersonalized, wiped out, to admit his usurper, his sharer, his shadow. It was like the recurring nightmare in the novels of William Burroughs, when your dreadful ditto comes calling. Burroughs! More straight fiction… Back in the first few days of their relationship, when they still had sex, Cleve and Irv always did it missionary, face-to-face; and Cleve was Narcissus, riveted to the reflection of his own watery being.

Halfway through the eighth month, with the onset of pelvic vascular congestion, the soap from San Francisco became sharply medicalized. Gone were the bland mentions of breathing exercises and health checks. In her letters Cressida now spoke of such things as vaginal cynosis, asymmetrical uterine enlargement, and low-albumin-count urinalyses. Cleve forged on with a florid account of his recent trip—with Irv—to Kampuchea. Then came the news that the baby was breached: It seemed that the baby intended to be born feet first… Late at night (Irv was elsewhere), Cleve was in the bathroom thinking about caesarean sections. He stood and faced the mirror. Behind which his medications were arranged in ranks, like spectators. Modern hypochondriacs are not just hypochondriacs. They are also Hypochondriacs, self-conscious representatives of a Syndrome. So even when they’re in great shape, and feeling in great shape, they remain terrified by their own suggestibility; scared of their own minds. Cleve went into the bedroom and, with the phone on his lap, touched the forbidden numbers.

“…Grainge?”

“Let’s not do this, Cleve.”

“…Grainge?”

“Cleve. Really.”

“I’m going to be good,” said Cleve in a childish voice. “I just wanted to ask you about something else.”

“Let’s make this quick, Cleve.”

“Grainge? Years ago, you had a straight phase, right? In your youth. Straight encounters or episodes.”

“What?”

“You were a kid. Just out of Boy Camp. Your first job. You were a caterer at that nurses’ college?”

“Oh that. Sure. So?”

“What did that tell you, Grainge?”

“It didn’t tell me anything. Listen, they got a name for it: situational heterosexuality.”

“But what did that mean, Grainge?”

“It didn’t mean anything. It meant any port in a storm. What’s up with you, Cleve?”

“Nothing. It’s okay. I’m good… Grainge?”

“Cleve. Really.”

“Grainge. Oh, Grainge…”

“Let’s not do this, Cleve.”

Soon afterwards he returned to the bathroom and got his mustache all warm and soapy. Then he reached for Irv’s straight razor. Cleve knew: there was a girl child coming. The wrong way up.

Overnight, as usual, spring turned into summer. The sun erected itself on silver filaments above the city and started cooking it, bringing out all its aromas and flavors and humors, the trace remains of a century’s pizzas and burgers and furters.

Attired in a magenta angel top and orange sateen boxing pants and high-sider tennis shoes with yard-long laces (and no socks), Cleve stood, one gruelly afternoon, outside the Idle Hour. Facing him, in her familiar black cotton dress, stood Cressida. They both had a battered look. Cressida, of course, had undergone the internal struggle of biology. Cleve was bruised, too, but more recently and obviously and superficially. He was with Irv. The night before, they had had a fistfight about which was better: Florence or Rome.

This reunion, so far, was being completely cool. Nothing personal. They strolled west. Cleve intended to accompany her as far as Seventh Avenue; then he would retrace his steps, and proceed to Magnificent Obsession. When he walked, Cleve’s thighs jostled and sideswiped one another very noticeably, and very loudly. His upper body was holding steady; but his lower body was hugely enlarged. Those thighs: he could only find room for them by standing with his feet about a yard apart.

“Whew,” he said on the corner, swaying there in the heat. “Good to see you again.” He reached out a hand, which she didn’t take.

“Wait,” said Cressida. “I thought you might like to see the baby.”

Christopher Street was not what he had built it up to be. For instance, it wasn’t even called Christopher Street, not this bit of it anyway: a new sign had been tacked over the old one like a temporary number plate. He might have asked his companion about that, but he didn’t need to. The straight district told you all about itself. It was out. SITE OF THE STONEWALL RIOTS, JUNE 27–29, 1969, said the white lettering on the black window of some impenetrable lockup or godown: BIRTH OF THE MODERN STRAIGHT-RIGHTS LIBERATION MOVEMENT. And the TV footage slid into Cleve’s head: cops, lights, squad cars, crime-scene tapes, the chanting, bouncing ranks of straights. Cressida looked up at him (her round eyes, her characterless nose, her flat smile), and led him on down Stonewall Place.

Cleve had imagined a little world. A world of Ant-and-Bee innocuousness, of diffident striving and inch-by-inching, with heads down and faces averted and abashed. But he found it chaotic: everywhere there was poverty and prettiness and peril. On the green triangle of Sheridan Square the “Five O’Clock Club” was dispersing; minders bawled and kids rioted. As they moved west through the sidewalk gridlock of prams, pushchairs, buggies, strollers, through smells of dairy, of confectioner, of dime-store perfumier, they passed herds of men drawn to the jaws of bars and taverns, and street-corner youths, loiterers, louts, punks, drunks, assessing Cleve from an unknown vantage of violence and boredom—and he walked on, shaped like a top when it spins, quivering with centrifugal torque.

In New York, in summer, air doesn’t want to be air anymore. It wants to be liquid. Around Christopher Street, this day, it wanted to be solid: a form of food, most probably. Paddling through it, Cleve’s thighs rasped on. They turned right on Bleecker. He looked up. Beyond the lumpen foliage of the ginkgo trees an evening sky lay swathed in its girlish pinks and boyish blues. And the tenement blocks. One-way windows, and the butts of AC units like torn hi-fi speakers, playing churned heat. The smutty fire escapes going Z, Z, Z. What are these zees saying, he wondered: sleep, or just the end of the alphabet? She hurried on ahead. With momentous helplessness he followed.

Now he was standing in a basement kitchen. Cleve assumed, at any rate, that it must be a kitchen. Cressida had called it “the kitchen.” A kitchen, to Cleve, was an arena for the free play of delectation, enterprise, and wit. Not the rear end of some desperate holding operation, a field hospital of pots, pails, acids, carbolics, and cauldrons of boiling laundry. “This is meat and potatoes,” he whispered. “Meat and potatoes tops.” He couldn’t imagine cooking anything in here. He could imagine having his legs amputated in here. But not cooking… Cressida was in the room across the passage, consulting with another straight broad, her buddy or backup. Cleve waited, listening to the saddest sound he had ever heard. It reminded him of the call of the loons on the river trips he’d gone on, years ago, with Grainge…

And now the baby was there on the kitchen table, being unwrapped as if for his imminent inspection, its hiccupy weeping growing softer, its stained and damp cloth diaper revealing itself beneath the unclasped bodysuit, its arms waving and miming at the bare bulb overhead.

“Would you pass me the powder? And that tub of cream. And that cloth. Not that one. On the faucet. The pink one.”

As he poked warily around among the jars, the pads, the balls of cotton wool, the plastic bottles, the plastic teats, the grime, the biology, Cleve wondered if he had ever suffered so. He could feel self-pity drench his heart: his heart, so deep-encased, so far away.

“Not that one. That one.”

He wondered if he had ever suffered so.

And he wondered what on earth people were going to say.

Twenty-second Street, the apartment, the bedroom: sheets, pillows, a leg here, an arm there. The acidy tang of male love suspended itself in the failing light and alerting air of autumn. Two mustaches stirred and flexed.

The first mustache said, “I mean if it was another man. That I could understand.” This was Irv.

The second mustache said, “That you could fight. You know what you’re dealing with.” This was Orv.

“You know where you stand.”

“You know what’s what.”

“But this…”

“Another man. Okay. It happens. But this…”

“I just feel so unclean.”

“Irv,” said Orv.

“The past. It’s all defiled for me. I feel so…”

“Maybe it’s some kind of midlife thing. A rush of blood. He’ll be back.”

“I could never feel the same about him. Not after this.”

“I saw him in Jefferson Market. He looks two hundred years old. He’s lost his build. He’s even lost his tone.”

“Do you think he was always that way?”

“Cleve? Jesus. Who knows?”

“It’ll get around.”

“You’re damn right it’ll get around. Where’s my Rolodex.”

“Orv,” said Irv.

“You just think of them kissing.”

“Get this. He says it’s not her tits and ass he ‘admires.’ It’s her wrists. It’s her collarbone.”

“That really does sound straight.”

“He’s coming over for his books Saturday morning. That’s right. He’s moving into that… crèche on Bleecker.”

“Oh, wow. Cleve… of all the guys we hang with. Arn. Harv. Grove. Fraze.”

“But Cleve.”

“I mean: Cleve.”

This was Orv.

“I mean: Cleve.”

This was Irv.

Esquire, 1995