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have—distasteful and repulsive as you’ve just told me you think it is.”
    I looked at him sitting on the edge of the desk with his arms crossed in front of him. He was tall and broad-shouldered, and with his sleeves rolled up and his tie loosened, I could almost imagine what he would have looked like, been like, fifteen years ago at the peak of his career—commanding, consumed, impassioned.
    “You’ll figure it out,” he said. “When you’re ready. You’ll quit this thing and find something else to do.”
    “How do you know that?” I asked, though what I reallywanted to know was how he could see my future when I couldn’t see it myself.
    “Because.” He turned and started collecting the notes and books he’d spread out on the desk at the beginning of his lecture. “Because I suspect you do know what you want to do next, but you’re not ready.”
    I felt myself blush, not only from having been found out but from the secret thrill, the flattery, of being read, of being seen so clearly.
    “Maybe,” I lied.
    He turned back to me and hooked my eyes, daring me to tell him what it was. But I didn’t. I didn’t know him well enough to admit that what I wanted to do next was have a Pickle.
    “Any guy
that
old who
isn’t
married is either a wacko or a fag,” Renee declared when I told her about the previous night’s rare verbal exchange with a man.
    It was seven-thirty—early for our office and early for me, since I usually came in around ten—and that was on good days—but not early for her. Renee was always in by seven, and her work ethic and obsessive need to be organized at the beginning of every day was only part of her arrival time. She had the kind of insomnia where you wake up in the middle of the night—four A.M. , you could set your watch to it, she always said—so after the early morning back-to-back episodes of
Perry Mason
, she’d go to the gym and then head to work, where, once she’d straightened up her already-straightened office and desk, she’d make a list of things she needed to do that day. Seven cups of coffee and ten cigarettes later, I’d arrive and she’d torture me. And then she’d really wake up.
    Coming in so early, I’d thrown her off. She took an extralong drag from one of her Marlboros and raised her eyebrowswhen I walked into her office, explaining that the reason I’d gotten to work way before I normally did was because I hadn’t fallen asleep. I sat down in one of her twin pea-green wool-upholstered armchairs and drank my take-out latte.
    “These things are so”—I looked at the white sip-lid on my paper coffee cup—“infantile. I mean, look at this—this gigantic plastic—”
    “Nipple,” Renee finished.
    “Exactly. People walking up and down the street, in offices, airports, sucking, sucking, sucking. It’s unseemly.”
    She looked completely uninterested. “So?”
    “So what?”
    “So which is he?”
    I shook my head dismissively, the way I always did whenever she made some ridiculously overreaching generalization that I suspected, deep down, was completely true. At forty-five, Renee Friedman was the head designer of our new menswear line—still in production but getting ready to debut in the fall—and my closest friend at work. She was as cynical and jaded as it was possible to become without killing yourself or having someone else kill you—a personality flaw she continually blamed on “a lifetime of dating wackos and designing for fags”—and yet few people besides me knew that she would have given both legs and an arm for a man who loved her.
    Wacko or fag?
    Wacko or fag?
    How was I supposed to know?
    “Well, how was he dressed?” she asked, lighting another cigarette and blowing the smoke into my face for emphasis.
    “Like a guy. A regular guy,” I said—
guy
being a kind of code word for
not gay
. “A suit,” though the jacket had hung on the back of his chair the whole class and not been worn. “White shirt. Armani