“That’s true. But there’s really no way I could have predicted this reaction.”
“I feel like I’m talking to Vadis.”
“Well, you’re not.”
* * *
One night, I got a twofer. At first, I thought there would be no sighting. I tried to conceal my stakeout by luxuriating in the reflections of people in the windows of lighting stores and rubber emporiums, pretending to inspect the merchandise （If it’s in rubber, we have it!） or else looking out the corner of my eye while examining the panes of glass circles in the pavement. The glass was centuries old, predating the lightbulb. These were vault lights for the downtown factory workers toiling away in the basement. It would only take a few people to stop, their shoes covering the glass, and it would be a blackout below.
Every face I picked out from the crowd looked normal in that it looked unfamiliar. Perhaps Amos, Willis, and Dave had been coincidences and Jonathan had been a fluke, manifesting only because he came as a matched set. Two consciousnesses are better to manipulate than one?
But then I saw Howard, crossing Mott. At first, I couldn’t be sure it was Howard. It was dark out by then. Plus the Howard I knew had a full head of hair and a pear-shape bottom that one rarely sees on a man. This guy had neither of those things. But I could tell by the gait. Howard sashayed, which was unfortunate because Howard very much wished not to sashay. When we met, he was a pudgy adjunct professor of linguistics on Long Island, cloaking his bulges, dreaming of tenure. If Howard were a woman, he would’ve been categorized as “basic,” but as a man, the expectation of surface individuality was lower while the pressure for conformity was higher. Howard’s curiosity was limited to whatever happened to physically cross his path. He stopped for every street canvasser, tried every cookie sample and squirt of lotion. If he saw a billboard for a movie, he’d go see that movie. His sister was the most creative person he knew. She was an artist who painted woodland scenes on plaster casts of her own face. He owned a dozen of the masks, hung proudly across one wall, staring down at us with hollow sisterly eyes.
Now here was Howard again. Had I thought about this man? I didn’t think I had. Did I miss Howard or compare Boots to him or associate him with a feature of the world? I didn’t think so. In fact, if I’d assumed anything about Howard, it was that I’d never see him again. The only remnant of Howard in my possession was a postcard he’d once given me for his sister’s art show. On the back, he’d written, “please cum?” which he quite sincerely meant as slang for “attend?”
Not the most cunning of linguists, our Howard.
Howard was talking animatedly into his phone. He looked as if he was in a hurry. This gratified me as, during the months we dated, he was always blinkered by insecurity, jockeying to be needed, creating micro-situations in which I might depend on him, such as safekeeping our tickets or not telling me the letter of our row, even as we searched for it. Or withholding the address of a party so that I’d have to rely on him for navigation. I’m on it, Lola, don’t you worry. I wasn’t worried, I was annoyed. Perhaps Howard no longer needed to do this. Perhaps he was dealing with real problems, eliminating the desire to manufacture his own. Departmental drama. Arguing with a wife. Scheduling a surgery. Whatever the source of the animation, I was glad for it.
I hung back and watched, as if from the inside of one of his sister’s masks, trying to put as much distance between us as possible without losing him. I didn’t feel the need to interfere with Howard’s evening. I waited for him to hail a cab and for the cab to disappear over the Manhattan Bridge.
I was en route to report this sighting to the Golconda, defenses down, quota met, when I ran into Cooper, exiting the subway. Cooper came at me like a dart, cutting through space in that Brancusiesque way he had, the photonegative of a sashay. Cooper was deep in the closet when we were together. His father was the first Black reverend at a Baptist Church in Alabama, and his mother managed a Walmart. She wouldn’t speak to him for six months after learning he’d applied for financial aid at a college “up north” （UVA）。 I very much doubted the topic of premarital sex was on the table in that house, never mind with whom. For a while, I told myself that just because these were the kind of parents who might not rejoice in the sexual orientation of their only child, that didn’t mean there was anything for him to reveal. Maybe whatever elements of himself Cooper was concealing were more aspects than elements. More curiosities than elements. Maybe he hid himself when he went home because he didn’t want to seem too permeated by the northeast, not because he didn’t want to seem too gay.