"This guy has done things that turned your stomach."

"He's also done things I approved of. Bruno Slinger, for one, had it coming." This was the state senatorial aide who had lobbied vigorously, and successfully, to have a hate-crimes bill killed. I said, "Having that low slug sauteed was a public service worthy of a Nobel Prize."

"The Nobel Prize in outing?"

"Biophysics, then."

"Except the stunt backfired, because Slinger is a man comfortable with the big lie. He just denied it and said the fags were trying to smear him. What good did any of it do?"

"It did some good," I said. "People believed it. They don't take Slinger as seriously anymore. His effectiveness could be cut down. People snicker at him behind his back."

"Indeed they do," Timmy said, looking both smug and disgusted, one of his more practiced expressions. "But they don't laugh at him because he's a liar and hypocrite and probably borderline psychotic. They do it because he's gay. He's another wretched homo. See, that's my point: When Rutka outs the monsters, people start talking about monstrous homosexuals. When he outs nice guys who are just well-known, then people talk about gay people as pathetic victims. Either way distorts the truth and hurts the cause. Rutka is unfair and he's wrong and he's dangerous."

I said, "I know. I mean, I agree with you up to a point."

"Which point?"

"Irrationality has its uses. Irrational people have theirs. They draw attention to a problem that's pretty much ignored otherwise, and then the more rational people on the same side of the issue move to the forefront and get taken seriously and the problem starts to get solved." Then I added, all too superfluously, "Sometimes you have to crack a few eggs to make an omelette."

"Oh. Oh, please."

I hardly believed I had uttered anything so callously puerile to Callahan, no matter how offhand. I knew that it would not have passed muster at Georgetown, to which Timmy returned every five years along with other alumni to have the gilt on his high moral tone freshly applied, and I doubted the argument would even get by at Rutgers anymore. But I played out my assigned role in our customary dialectic nonetheless, and said, "Progress is necessarily messy. Simply getting straight America's casual acceptance of gay people requires a lengthy battle in which collateral damage is inevitable. Some people are going to get hurt.

But it's necessary and it'll all be seen to have been worth it in the end."

He made a little explosion of air that sounded like "Sploooph." He said, "I thought you were in favor of the all-volunteer army.

And I know you're against cruelly mindless euphemisms."

"Yes, I am against conscription," I said, "unless people are routinely offered a choice to do something nonmilitary that will contribute to the common weal. And I'm not even so sure about that."

"Right, you're not so sure. Because you believe that in a civilized society people should pay taxes-even plenty of taxes-to buy civility and to help out the unlucky, but otherwise people who obey just laws should be pretty much left alone. I've heard you say that."

"Yup. Pretty much."

"So if the government of a nation that calls itself civilized should let people alone, why shouldn't John Rutka let people alone?"

He raised his voice, a rare occurrence.

I'd had enough. "Well, on second thought, maybe you're right. As usual."

He snorted and began gathering up the soiled china and utensils. "Donald, I cherish you." He snorted again and turned on the hot-water tap all the way, as his mother had taught him, to prepare for scalding the dishes and cleansing them of the Trichomonas, cholera, scurvy, and athlete's foot that surely were lurking there. He said, "So it sounds as if you're going to go to work for this man you disagree with and don't like. Why?"

"I've worked for lots of people I disagreed with and didn't like. If I hadn't, I'd've starved."

"But this is a special situation. And I know you don't need the money. What you made from the Hapgoods should carry you well into the fall." This was a recent case wherein I discreetly recovered a purloined family portrait-the grandmother of a Presbyterian grande dame from Latham in a pose startling even by present-day standards and barely imaginable in 1878, the year of its creation-and received for my efforts an appropriately obscene fee.

"No, I don't need the money," I said. "Though Rutka claims he can afford it and he's paying me."

The scalding process began; you could almost hear the little screams of the rinderpest. "Then why are you doing it?" he said.

"Three reasons. One, I don't need the money now, but

I might need it later. This is a chancy business. The second reason is, Rutka is in danger and he's frightened. He needs protection

— not from criticism or maybe even from the odd sock in the jaw. But he does not deserve to be shot and killed."

"That's two reasons. What's the third?"

I knew he'd guess. "It's the least important of the three."

"Uh-huh."

"You don't know?"

The faucet was shut off, the cloud of steam began to dissipate, and he looked at me. "You want to get a look at his files."

"I'm curious. I admit it."

He began to laugh. "People deserve their privacy. Except you'd like to get just one little peek."

"Something like that."

"I know what you mean. Naturally I recognize the impulse."

"Except you would never act on it, would you?"

He thought about this. "I can't say never. I'm not perfect."

"Yes, but your imperfections lie in other areas."

This was irrelevant and unfair and I wasn't sure why I said it. He knew exactly what it meant, and briefly he was struck uncharacteristically speechless.

Timmy's imperfections had been a sensitive topic in recent months. The previous spring he had had a terrified hour-and-forty-five-minute sexual assignation with a diminutive huge-eyed Bengali economist who was passing through town. It had been Timmy's first lapse from his fourteen-year pledge of sexual fidelity. (I had made no such promise, and we had survived the onset of the HIV plague by the skin of my teeth.) Though health precautions were taken, he had done it, he immediately confessed, when he'd become unhinged, he said, by the little professor's uncanny resemblance to the district poultry officer Timmy had had the unrequited hots for in Visakhapatnam in 1968.

It may have been the briefest midlife-crisis fling on record, and it was only minimally hurtful to me-except to the extent that the incident was so out of character I feared that Timmy might be coming down with Alzheimer's, rare as it is among men in their forties. The event passed quickly by and was rarely referred to anymore, except on those occasions when I would get to point out that even a man educated by Jesuits could make a mistake. "Yes, every fourteen years," was the usual reply to this.

This time he was late for work, he said, and didn't have time for a nervous jocular exchange at his expense. He trotted upstairs to finish getting into his legislative aide's duds. With an hour to kill before I headed out to Rutka's house in Handbag, I read the newspaper account of Rutka's run-in with "an assailant possibly angered by exposure of his homosexuality." When Timmy sped through, I kissed him, careful not to leave egg on his lip. end user