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“I’m a photographer. I do nudes, you know, males, art studies. Would you want to pose for me tonight?”
    The boy looked surprised, then something else—alarmed? Amused? His eyes were too dark for Jay to read.
    â€œI can’t do it tonight,” he said. “There’s a big rave in the Warehouse District, and I have a great dress. But maybe some other time?”
    â€œUh … sure. Fine.” Jay knew he should suggest a date, but he had expended all his nerve on the first proposition. Without some sort of drink or drug in him, he could not make another.
    â€œOK, see you ‘round.” Tran blessed Jay with a sunny grin, then turned and walked away down one of the cobblestone alleysthat led away from the square. The spires of the cathedral loomed oppressively overhead.
    That smile … it was as sweet as sex, as succulent as meat. But the boy’s refusal had been too quick, and Jay thought he’d seen a glimmer of something distasteful—pity, revulsion?—in the elegantly tilted recesses of his eyes.
    It was humiliating to be brushed off by a Quarter brat nearly ten years his junior. But through his shame Jay still felt a flicker of desire. He wished he could have brought the Vietnamese boy back to his house on Royal Street, his house set behind a locked iron gate, nestled like a dark jewel in a courtyard fringed with leaves and shadows. There he could have borne those insouciant lips, those slyly condescending eyes. He could have photographed and catalogued them, examined them, discovered exactly how they broke down, how they came apart.
    The boy-children of the French Quarter didn’t trust Jay, though they allowed him into their circle occasionally because he bought them vast quantities of drinks and drugs without batting an eye. Sometimes they posed for his Polaroids too, but with the locals that was as far as it went. He never touched them in any of his more arcane pursuits. If he couldn’t find a tourist, there were always stragglers from the housing projects. He’d offer a kid money to pose, make sure little homey wasn’t carrying a gun, then get him fucked up …
    Jay often wondered why the local boys tolerated him at all. Certainly there were plenty of well-heeled men around the Quarter, ready with the price of a drink or a meal for a smooth-skinned, long-limbed boy. Probably there were women too, a little older, uncertain of their own allure, wanting the ego boost of a younger lover. The boys didn’t need Jay; in fact, he knew he gave them the creeps. He had heard them saying so when they thought he wasn’t around. He had a knack for not being noticed, for hearing things he wasn’t meant to hear, for blending in and observing.
    He supposed he was something of a curiosity to the boys. Probably they would ignore him altogether if they didn’t know his last name. Even his notoriety wasn’t his own; he stood exposed and shivering in the few scraps of notoriety tossed to him by his lusciously clothed family.
    Lysander Devore Byrne,
he’d signed in a small crabbed hand at the hospital desk before going up to see his mother, with her shriveling, collapsing face and her rotting brain behind it. He’d never answered to Lysander, which was his father’s name. He had been Junior to his family as long as he would tolerate it, then just Jay.
    The pain-besotted skeleton in the hospital bed had once been Mignon Devore, daughter of an old uptown family, former Queen of Comus, ostensible beauty. She had married a rich boy from Texas and brought him home to get richer. Ensconced in a Gothic mansion on St. Charles, she had put up with Lysander’s mistresses as long as he didn’t open bank accounts in their names. She had consumed quantities of Pernod, an ersatz form of absinthe that was equally loathsome but legal. She had paid little attention to her only child. She had entombed her husband in style, and she would fill an