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“Not that I’m against Republicanism,” he added diplomatically. “I’m no Puritan. I just don’t enjoy having sex with other guys.”

“You’ve never given it a chance.” She spoke in an aggrieved tone.

“Sure I have. Plenty of times.”

“Then why is your marriage breaking up?”

Tears started dripping. He cried all the time nowadays, like an air conditioner. Shrimp, skilled in compassion, wept right along with him, wrapping a length of wiry arm around his bare, exquisite shoulders.

Snuffling, he threw back his head. Flip flop of auburn, big brave smile. “How about the party?”

“Not for me, not tonight. I’m feeling too religious and holy, sort of. Maybe later perhaps.”

“Aw, Shrimp.”

“Really.” She wrapped herself in her arms, stuck out her chin, waited for him to plead.

The dog in the distance made new noises.

“One time, when I was a kid… right after we moved here, in fact…” Boz began dreamily.

But he could see she wasn’t listening.

Dogs had just been made finally illegal and the dog owners were doing Anne-Frank numbers to protect their pups from the city Gestapo. They stopped walking them on the streets, so the roof of 334, which the Park Commission had declared to be a playground (they’d built a cyclone fence all round the edge to give it a playground atmosphere), got to be ankle-deep in dogshit. A war developed between the kids and dogs to see who the roof would belong to. The kids would hunt down off-leash dogs, usually at night, and throw them over the edge. German shepherds fought back the hardest. Boz had seen a shepherd take one of Milly’s cousins down to the pavement with him.

All the things that happen and seem so important at the time, and yet you just forget them, one after another. He felt an elegant, controlled sadness, as though, were he to sit down now and work at it, he might write a fine, mature piece of philosophy.

“I’m going to sail away now. Okay?”

“Enjoy yourself,” Shrimp said.

He touched her ear with his lips, but it wasn’t, even in a brotherly sense, a kiss. A sign, rather, of the distance between them, like the signs on highways that tell you how far it is in miles to New York City.

The party was not by any means a form of insanity but Boz enjoyed himself in a quiet decorative way, sitting on a bench and looking at knees. Then Williken, the photographer from 334, came over and told Boz about Nuancism, Williken being a Nuancist from way back when, how it was overdue for a renaissance. he looked older than Boz remembered him, parched and fleshless and pathetically forty-three.

“Forty-three is the best age,” Williken said again, having at last disposed of the history of art to his satisfaction.

“Better than twenty-one?” Which was Boz’s age, of course.

Williken decided this was a joke and coughed. (Williken smoked tobacco.) Boz looked away and caught the fellow with the red beard eyeing him. A small gold earring twinkled in his left ear.

“Twice as good,” Williken said, “and then a bit.” Since this was a joke too, he coughed again.

He was (the red beard, the gold earring), next to Boz, the best-looking person there. Boz got up, with a pat to the old man’s frayed and folded hands.

“And how old are you?” he asked the red beard, the gold earring.

“Six foot two. Yourself?”

“I’m versatile, pretty much. Where do you live?”

“The East Seventies. Yourself?”

“I’ve been evacuated.” Boz struck a pose: Sebastian (Guido’s) spreading himself open, flowerlike, to receive the arrows of men’s admiration. Oh, Boz could charm the plaster off the walls! “Are you a friend of January’s?”

“A friend of a friend, but that friend didn’t show. Yourself?”

“The same thing, sort of.”

Danny (his name was Danny) grabbed a handful of the auburn hair.

“I like your knees,” Boz said.

“You don’t think they’re too bushy?”

“No, I like bushy knees.”

When they left January was in the bathroom. They shouted their good-byes through the paper panel. All the way home—going down the stairs, in the street, in the subway, in the elevator of Danny’s building—they kissed and touched and rubbed up against each other, but though this was exciting to Boz in a psychological way, it didn’t give him a hard-on.

Nothing gave Boz a hard-on.

While Danny, behind the screen, stirred the instant milk over the hot-coil, Boz, alone in all that double bed, watched the hamsters in their cage. The hamsters were screwing in the jumpy, jittery way that hamsters have, and the lady hamsters said,
“Shirk, shirk, shirk.”
All nature reproached Boz.

“Sweetener?” Danny asked, emerging with the cups.

“Thanks just the same. I shouldn’t be wasting your time like this.”

“Who’s to say the time’s been wasted? Maybe in another half-hour …” the moustache detached itself from the beard: a smile.

Boz smoothed his pubic hairs sadly, ruefully, wobbled the oblivious soft cock. “No, it’s out of commission tonight.”

“Maybe a bit of roughing up! I know guys who— ”

Boz shook his head. “It wouldn’t help.”

“Well, drink your Koffee. Sex isn’t that important, believe me. There are other things.”

The hamster said,
“Shirk! Shirk, shirk.”

“I suppose not.”

“It isn’t,” Danny insisted. “Are you always impotent?” There, he had said the dreaded word.

“God, no!” (The horror of it!)

“So? One off-night is nothing to worry about. It happens to me all the time and I do it for a living. I’m a hygiene demonstrator.”

“You?”

“Why not? A Democrat by day and a Republican in my spare time. By the way, how are you registered?”

Boz shrugged. “What difference does it make if you don’t vote?”

“Stop feeling sorry for yourself.”

“I’m a Democrat actually, but before I got married I was Independent. That’s why, tonight, I never thought, when I came home with you, that—I mean, you’re damned good-looking, Danny.”

Danny blushed agreement. “Get
off
it. So tell me, what’s wrong with your marriage?”

“You wouldn’t want to hear about it,” Boz said, and then he went through the whole story of Boz and Milly: of how they had had a beautiful relationship, of how that relationship had then soured, of how he didn’t understand why.

“Have you seen a counselor?” Danny asked.

“What good would that do?”

Danny had manufactured a tear of real compassion and he lifted Boz’s chin to make certain he would notice. “You should. Your marriage still means a
lot
to you and if something’s gone wrong you should at least know what. I mean, it might just be something stupid, like getting your metabolic cycles synchronized.”

“You’re right, I guess.”

Danny bent over and squeezed Boz’s calf earnestly. “Of course I’m right. Tell you what, I know someone who’s supposed to be terrific. On Park Avenue. I’ll give you his number.” He kissed Boz quickly on the nose, just in time for the tear of his empathy to plop on Boz’s cheek.

Later, after one last determined effort, Danny, in nothing but his transparency, saw Boz down to the moat, which (also) was defunct.

When they had kissed good-bye and while they were still shaking hands, Boz asked, as though off-handedly, as though he had been thinking of anything else for the last half-hour: “By the way, you wouldn’t have worked at Erasmus Hall, would you?”

“No. Why? Did you go there? I wouldn’t have been teaching anywhere in your time.”

“No. I have a friend who works there. At Washington Irving?”

“I’m out in Bedford-Stuyvesant, actually.” The admission was not without its pennyworth of chagrin. “But what’s his name? Maybe we met at a union meeting, or something like that.”

“It’s a she—Milly Hanson.”

“Sorry, never heard of her. There are a lot of us, you know. This is a big city.” In every direction the pavement and the walls agreed.

Their hands unclasped. Their smiles faded, and they became invisible to each other, like boats that draw apart, moving across the water into heavy mists.

227 Park Avenue, where McGonagall’s office was, was a dowdy sixtyish affair that had been a bit player back in the glass-and-steel boom. But then came the ground-test tremors of ’96 and it had to be wrapped. Now it had the look, outside, of Milly’s last-year dirty-yellow Wooly© waistcoat. That, plus the fact that McGonagall was an old-fashioned-type Republican (a style that still mostly inspired distrust), made it hard for him to get even the official Guild minimum for his services. Not that it made much difference for them—after the first fifty dollars the Board of Education would pay the rest under its sanity-and-health clause.

The waiting room was simply done up with paper mattresses and a couple authenticated Saroyans to cheer up the noonday-white walls: an 

and:

Fashionwise, Milly was doing an imitation of maiden modesty in her old PanAm uniform, a blue-gray gauzy jerkin over crisp business-like pajamas. Boz, meanwhile, was sporting creamy street shorts and a length of the same blue-gray gauze knotted round his throat. When he moved it fluttered after him like a shadow. Between them they were altogether tout ensemble, a picture. They didn’t talk. They waited in the room designed for that purpose.

Half a damned hour.

The entrance to McGonagall’s office was something from the annals of the Met. The door sublimed into flame and they passed through, a Pamina, a Tamino, accompanied appropriately by flute and drum, strings and horns. A fat man in a white shift welcomed them mutely into his bargain-rate temple of wisdom, clasping first Pamina’s, then Tamino’s hands in his. A sensitivist obviously.

He pressed his pink-frosted middle-aged face close to Boz’s, as though he were reading its fine print. “You’re Boz,” he said reverently. Then with a glance in her direction: “And you’re Milly.”

“No,” she said peevishly (it was that half hour), “I’m Boz, and
she’s
Milly.”

“Sometimes,” McGonagall said, letting go, “the best solution
is
divorce. I want you both to understand that if that should be my opinion in your case, I won’t hesitate to say so. If you’re annoyed that I kept you waiting so long,
tant pis,
since it was for a good reason. It rids us of our company manners from the start. And what is the first thing you say when you come in here? That your husband is a woman! How did it make you feel, Boz, to know that Milly would like to cut off your balls and wear them herself?”

Boz shrugged, long-suffering, ever-likable. “I thought it was funny.”

“Ha,” laughed McGonagall, “that’s what you thought. But what did you
feel?
Did you want to strike her? Were you afraid? Or secretly pleased?”

“That’s it in a nutshell.”

McGonagall’s living body sank into something pneumatic and blue and floated there like a giant white squid bobbing on the calm surface of a summer sea. “Well then, tell me about your sex life, Mrs. Hanson.”

“Our sex life is pretty,” Milly said.

“Adventurous,” Boz continued.

“And quite frequent.” She folded her pretty, faultless arms.

“When we’re together,” Boz added. A grace note of genuine self-pity decorated the flat irony of the statement. This soon he felt his insides squeezing some idle tears from the appropriate glands; while, in other glands, Milly had begun to churn up petty grievances into a lovely smooth yellow anger. In this, as in so many other ways, they achieved a kind of symmetry between them, they made a pair.

“Your jobs?”

“All that kind of thing is on our profiles.” Milly said. “You’ve had a month to look at them. A half hour, at the very least.”

“But on your profile, Mrs. Hanson, there’s no mention of this remarkable reluctance of yours, this grudging every word.” He lifted two ambiguous fingers, scolding and blessing her in a single gesture. Then, to Boz: “What do you do, Boz?”

“Oh. I’m strictly a husband. Milly’s the breadwinner.”

They both looked at Milly.

“I demonstrate sex in the high schools,” she said.

“Sometimes,” McGonagall said spilling sideways meditatively over his blue balloon (like all very clever fat men he knew how to pretend to be Buddha), “what are thought to be marital difficulties have their origin in job problems.”

Milly smiled an assured porcelain smile. “The city tests us every semester on job satisfaction, Mr. McGonagall. Last time I came out a little high on the ambition scale, but not above the mean score for those who eventually have moved on into administrative work. Boz and I are here because we can’t spend two hours together without starting to fight. I can’t sleep in the same bed anymore, and he gets heartburn when we eat together.”

“Well, let’s assume for now that you are adjusted to your job. How about you, Boz? Have you been happy being ‘just a husband’?”

Boz fingered the gauze knotted round his throat. “Well, no … I guess I’m not completely happy or we wouldn’t be here. I get—oh. I don’t know—restless. Sometimes. But I know I wouldn’t be any happier working at a job. Jobs are like going to church: it’s nice once or twice a year to sing along and eat something and all that, but unless you really believe there’s something holy going on, it gets to be a drag going in every single week.”

“Have you ever had a real job?”

“A couple times. I hated it. I think most people must hate their jobs. I mean, why else do they pay people to work?”

“Yet something is wrong, Boz. Something is missing from your life that ought to be there.”

“Something. I don’t know what.” He looked downhearted.

McGonagall reached out for his hand. Human contact was of fundamental importance in McGonagall’s business. “Children?” he asked, turning to Milly, after this episode of warmth and feeling.

“We can’t afford children.”

“Would you want them, if you felt you could afford them?”

She pursed her lips. “Oh yes, very much.”

“Lots of children?”

“Really!”

“There are people, you know, who do want lots of children, who’d have as many as they could if it weren’t for the Regents system.”

“My mother,” Boz volunteered, “had four kids. They all came before the Genetic Testing Act, of course, except for me, and I was only allowed then because Jimmy, her oldest one, got killed in a riot, or a dance, or something, when he was fourteen.”