'Do you have a point?' Will smiled.

'Yes. Us. Sitting here looking like two guys the world has not used kindly.'

'I never-'

'I know what you're going to say: you never think about it. Well you wait till you go out cruising. You're going to find a lot of little muscle-boys wanting to call you Daddy. I speak from experience. I think it must be a gay rite of passage. Straights feel old when they send their kids off to college. Queens feel old when one of those college kids comes up to them in a bar and tells them he wants to be spanked. Speaking of which-'

'Spanking or college-boys?'

'Straights.'

'Oh.'

'Adrianna's going to bring Glenn on Saturday, and you mustn't laugh but he's had his ears pinned back surgically, and it makes him look weird. I never noticed before, but he's got a kind of pointy head. I think the protruding ears were a distraction. So, no laughing.'

'I won't laugh,' Will assured him, perfectly certain Patrick was only telling him for mischief's sake. 'Is there anything you want me to do for Saturday?'

'Just turn up and be yourself.'

'That I can do,' he said. 'Okay. I'm on my way.' He leaned over and kissed Patrick lightly on the lips.

'You can see yourself out?'

'Blindfolded.'

'Will you tell Rafael it's pill-time? He'll be in his bedroom on the telephone.'

Patrick had it right. Rafael was sprawled on his bed with the telephone glued to his ear, talking in Spanish. Seeing Will at the door he sat upright, blushing.

'Sorry-' Will said -the door was open.'

'Yeah, yeah, it was just a friend, you know?' Rafael said.

'Patrick said it's pill-time.'

'I know,' Rafael replied. 'I'm coming. I just got to finish with my friend.'

'I'll leave you two alone,' Will said. Before he'd even closed the door Will heard Rafael picking up the thread of his sex-talk while it was still warm. Will went back to the living-room to tell Patrick the message had been delivered, but in the minute or so since his departure Patrick had fallen asleep, and was snoring softly in his chair. The wash of late afternoon light softened his features, but there was no erasing the toll of years and grief and sickness. If being called Daddy was a rite of passage, Will thought, so's this: looking in on a man I fell in love with in another life, and knowing that there was love there still, as plentiful as ever, but changed by time and circumstance into something more elusive.

He would gladly have watched Patrick a while longer, calmed by the familiarity of his face, but he didn't want to be hanging around when Rafael emerged, so he left the sleeper to his slumbers and headed off out of the apartment, down the stairs and into the street.

Why, he wondered, when there'd probably been more literary ink spilled on the subject of love than any other - including freedom, death and God Almighty -could he not begin to grasp the complexities of what he felt for Patrick? There were many scars there, on both sides; cruel things said and done in anger and frustration. There were petty betrayals and desertions, again, on both sides. There were shared memories of wild sex and domestic high finks and times of loving lucidity, when a glance or a touch or a certain song had been nirvana. And then there was now; feelings extricated from the past, but being woven into patterns neither of them had anticipated. Oh, they'd known they'd grow old, whatever Patrick remembered. They'd talked, half jokingly, about withering into happy alcoholics in Key West, or moving to Tuscany and owning an olive grove. What they'd never talked about because it had not seemed likely, was that they would be in here, in the middle of their lives, and talking like old men: remembering their dead peers and watching the clock until it was time for pills.

i

Did you meet the mystical Bethlynn Reichle?'Adrianna wanted to know when Will told her about Patrick. They were brunching at Cafe Flore on Market Street the following day: spinach frittatas, home fries and coffee. Will told her no, there'd been neither sight nor mention of the woman.

'According to Jack, he sees her every other day practically. Jack thinks it's all pretty phony. And of course she charges a fortune for an hour of her precious time.'

'I can't imagine Pat falling for anything too airy-fairy.'

'I don't know. He's got that fey Irish streak in him. Anyway, she's given him these chants he has to repeat four times a day, which Jack swears are Zulu.'

'What the fuck does Jack know about Zulu? He was born and bred in Detroit.'

'He says it's a race memory.' Will made a despairing face. 'Glenn's got a great new word, by the way, which is kind of appropriate. Lucidiots. That's what he calls people who talk too fast, seem to be perfectly lucid

-and are, in fact, idiots. I like that. Where'd he get it from?'

'It's his. He made it up. Words beget words. That's the cri du jour.'

'Lucidiots,' Will said again, most entertained. 'And she's one of them, huh?'

'Bethlynn? For sure. I haven't met her, but she's gotta be. Oh, now ... I shouldn't be telling you this, but Pat asked me if it'd be in appalling taste if he ordered a cake for the party shaped like a polar bear.'

'To which you said?'

'Yes. It would be in appalling taste.'

'To which he said: good.'

'Right.'

'Thanks for the warning,'

ii

That night, around eleven or so, he decided to forgo a sleeping pill and go out for a drink. It was Friday, so the streets were alive and kicking, and on the five-minute walk up Sanchez to 16th he met the appreciative eyes of enough guys to be certain he could get lucky tonight if the urge took him. Some of that cockiness was knocked out of him, however, when he stepped into The Gestalt, a bar which according to Jack (whom he'd called for the inside scoop) had opened two months before and was the hot place for the summer. It was filled to near capacity, some of the customers locals here for a casual beer with friends, but many more geared up and wired for the weekend. In the old days there had been certain tribal divisions in the Castro: leather men had their wateringholes, drug aficionados, theirs; the preppie boys had gathered in a different spot to the hustlers, the queens, especially the older guys, would never have been seen in a black bar, or vice versa. Here, however, there were representatives of every one of those clans, and more. Was that a man in a rubber suit, leaning against the bar sipping his bourbon? Yes it was. And the guy waiting his turn at the pool table, his nose pierced and his hair carved in concentric circles, was he the lover of the Latino man in the well-cut suit who was making a bee-line for him? To judge by their smiles and kisses, yes. There was even a good proportion of women in the throng; a few, Will thought, straight girls come to ogle the queers with their boyfriends (this was a risky business; any boyfriend who agreed to the trip was probably half-hoping to be gang-banged on the pool table), the rest lesbians (again, of every variation, from the kittenish to the moustached). Though he was a little intimidated at the sheer exuberance of the scene, he was too much of a voyeur to leave. He eased his way through the crowd to the bar, and found a niche at the far end where he had a wide-angle view of the room. Two beers in, and he started to feel a little more mellow. Excepting a few glances cast his way nobody took much notice of him, which was fine, he told himself, just fine. And then, as he was ordering a third beer (his last for the night, he'd decided) somebody stepped up to the bar beside him and said: 'I'll have the same. No I won't. I'll have a tequila straight up. And he's paying.'