geography of my desire. A particular boy I saw sometimes at the corner newsstand, with unkempt hair and an irritated expression, could make me tingle by brushing my elbow with his sleeve. The man I slept with seemed sketchy and remote.
Erich and I made love once or twice a week, usually at his apartment in the East Twenties. We’d met two years earlier, in the restaurant where he tended bar. I was reviewing gay restaurants that week—my column would evaluate the various places gay readers could go with their lovers if they wanted to hold hands across the table. I’d eaten alone that night, and I stopped at the bar for a brandy on my way out. Although the bar wasn’t crowded, the bartender took nearly five minutes to ask me what I wanted to drink. He was hunched at the bar’s opposite end, his forearms folded on the splashboard like a Flemish housewife leaning out her door, nodding with steady emphatic little bobs of his head at a story being told by an elderly man wearing gold jewelry and an emerald-green scarf. While I waited I watched the bartender’s ass, which was small and compact, twitching in counter-rhythm to his nods.
Finally the old man who was telling the story inclined his head in my direction, saying, “I think you’ve got a customer.” The bartender turned with a startled look. His face was thin, the nose and chin too sharply pointed for ordinary handsomeness, though his color was good and his eyes were as milkily, innocently blue as a child’s. His was the sort of face that, given a proneness to vanity, could be agonized over in a mirror—a face that could switch from beauty to plainness and back again. New York is full of faces like that, the not-quite-handsome faces of young men and women who have been fussed over by their mothers and who believe, with rigorous if slightly apologetic hopefulness, that they can make a future with their looks.
“Oops, oh, sorry,” he said. “What can I get you?”
I ordered a brandy. “Business a little slow tonight?” I asked.
He nodded, pouring brandy into an oversized snifter. The elderly man in the emerald scarf pulled a cigarette out of the pack he’d set before himself on the bartop and slipped it into a short gold cigarette holder with elaborate concentration.
“It’s been, you know, a little slow in general,” the bartender said.
I suspected the restaurant wouldn’t last much longer. It had an air of decline, and I knew more or less what I would write in my column the next day. A few phrases had already suggested themselves: “A fifties-ish nowhere zone that serves formal, vaguely embarrassing food”; “like a ghostly ocean liner that steams into port at midnight every hundred years.” It was the sort of place a rich old aunt might take you, except that the customers were older men and bright-eyed, hungry-looking boys instead of dowagers in furs and brooches.
“Well, to tell you the truth,” I said, “this place is a little frightening.”
He set the brandy in front of me on a cocktail napkin and glanced at the old man, who was languidly expelling plumes of smoke through his nostrils. “Isn’t it just the creepiest?” he said in a low voice. “I’ve been looking for another job.”
“That’s probably a good idea,” I said.
He glanced again at the smoker, and settled himself at my end of the bar. He folded his arms on the splashboard and nodded his head.
“You’d be surprised how hard it is to get bartending jobs,” he said. “I mean in, you know, good places. You haven’t been here before, have you?”
“No.”
“I didn’t think I’d seen you.”
A depth of scrutiny passed briefly behind his pallid blue eyes. He was trying, without deep conviction or curiosity, to figure me out. I imagined the bar was frequented by young men looking to meet up with money. I was neither handsome enough to be on the block nor prosperous-looking enough to be a buyer.
“I just wanted to try it,” I said. “You can’t keep going to the same old places over and over again.”
He nodded, unconvinced. It was not a casual restaurant; not the sort of place for people without an ulterior motive.
“Do you, um, work around here?” he asked.
“Downtown,” I said. “I was just in the neighborhood. I’m a writer.”
“Really? What do you write?”
I told him the name of the newspaper, and he nodded with particular zeal. The paper was hot then. “What do you write?” he asked again.
“Oh, different things. Listen, do you get off soon?”
“Well, we close in another hour.”
“You want to meet me for a drink in a less creepy place?” I asked.
“Well, okay,” he said. “I mean, yes.”
“My name is Jonathan.”
“I’m Erich. My name is Erich.”
He nodded as he announced his name. His eyes lost their uncertainty. Here was my subvert business—I’d come to pick up the bartender.
I went for a walk, and met him an hour later at a place in the Thirties. He’d arrived ahead of me. He stood at the bar with a bottle of Budweiser, feigning interest in the Esther Williams movie on the videoscreen. He said hello and nodded slightly, as if agreeing with his own salutation.
I ordered a beer, and we worked our way through a conversation. We talked about the usual things, delivered brief accounts of our origins and ambitions. It was a Wednesday night, the crowd at the bar was sparse. Technicolor chorus girls splashed in a brilliant aquamarine world on the videoscreen, filling the room with a colored, shifting dusk. Erich was all edgy inattention, the sort of person who shreds napkins and taps his feet and fails to hear fully half of what’s said to him. His hair was already thinning on top—I would be surprised to learn he was three months younger than I.
After what seemed to both of us a decent interval—two beers—we went to his apartment on Twenty-fourth Street, where he introduced his second surprise.
He was great in bed. There is no other way to put it. It seemed nothing less than transfiguration. Conversing, he was fidgety and evasive, given to arrhythmic pauses and odd spasms of laughter. But when he got out of his clothes he took on the fluid self-assurance of a dancer. His physique was modest and sinewy, with veined arms and a prominent rib cage. That first night, when we got to his studio (a single room with a Pullman kitchen and bath), he was naked so quickly he might have been wearing a breakaway suit, the kind comedians use. He was dressed one moment and nude the next, while I was still unfastening the last button of my shirt.
“Hey,” I said, “how did you do that?”
He smiled, and helped me out of my own clothes. His movements were swift and efficient but gentle. He had abruptly traded his skittish, roving manner for calm focus and suave, unhurried competence. He unbuttoned my jeans and slid them tenderly down to my ankles, wrapped his arms around my waist and lifted me, with only a hint of strain, up onto the bed.
I was not excited by him. I was excited by the idea of sex, the ease of it—I had gone out and caught someone, an unacclaimed man who was mine to do with as I liked. I admit it—there was a streak of sadism in my lusts. There was the taint of vanity. I chose ordinary men who would not refuse; who would feel lucky to have me. I did not thrill to the sight of their flesh—which was either bulky or scrawny but always abashed and grateful—so much as I did to the fact of their capture. As Erich set me on his bed I was aroused in the general, unfocused way that had become familiar. I would let him command the sex but I would leave his apartment undefeated. Part of me was already gone, even now, as our chests touched for the first time and our legs fumbled for position. I was more important than this. The excitement I felt was edgy and not entirely pleasant, like a swarm of bees inside my chest.
Erich nuzzled my shoulder, ran his fingers lightly along my ribs. He had a dry, powdery touch. There was something sweet about his earnestness and his balding, elusive beauty. There was something dreadful about it.
He lay for a while on top of me, peppering my chest with kisses. Then he deftly revolved our bodies so that I was on top. I got a thorough look at him, for the first time. He was thin but big-boned, his abdomen more densely furred than his chest. His cock angled off to the right, raggedly skirted by a vein. His gaunt, hairy stomach and skewed cock suddenly repulsed me. Usually with strangers there was a moment of shock like this, when I fully comprehended the privacy of their bodies. Looking at Erich’s thin torso, I felt as if I had caught him in some
