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from under the couch and untied his other shoelace.
    “Wait a minute,” I said. “I’ll be the last to discount the importance of a healthy physical appearance in gay courtship etiquette. But what’s this guy’s personality like?”
    “If you saw the way that tiny waist draws up to those en garde shoulders,” said Peter, retying his shoelace, “you wouldn’t ask.”
    Then Dennis Savage came in, and Cosgrove served the coffee as Peter tried to bring Dennis Savage up to speed. But the Master simply held out his hand, saying, “Let’s view the evidence.”
    “What evidence?” Peter asked.
    “You must have a selection of photographs for us to consider. George Bush wouldn’t. Rudy Giuliani wouldn’t. You do.”
    Peter hesitated, blushing, then dug a few snapshots out and passed them around. An opulent silence filled the room as we examined and shared.
    Cosgrove asked, “What type is this?”
    “Big blond boy,” I said. “With intelligent eyes. It’s a seventies build with nineties details. Or no—”
    “You cannot type him,” said Peter. “He is beyond type.”
    And yet. Lars Erich Blücher belonged to some category; every beauty does. He was in his early thirties, with a Teutonic face at once buoyant and hard. His hair was a blend of yellow and light brown, cut short around the ears but thick on top, he sported one of those lean torsos, all the muscle packed into the arms and thighs, and, in these snaps, he was clad only in dark green Lederhosen and kitschy suspenders. The silly clothes on the astonishing person created a paradox: the grinning man, the authoritative boy. He respected the taxonomy while outwitting it, which made him impossible to categorize.
    “If you knew what it is to love as I suddenly know it,” said Peter as we studied the pictures, “you would flee from love.”
    “Why is it,” asked Dennis Savage, “that everyone who finally falls in love thinks he’s discovered radium or something?” A sip of coffee, then: “And when do we meet the prodigy?”
    “Gradually,” said Peter. “You know? He had me to dinner two nights ago, and I thought it would be we two and a meat loaf. Well, ha!: seared tuna, spinach almondine, silver on the table, and six of his friends. I felt very, very auditioned, my pals. Inspected. At least they were mainly gym bunnies. The most incredible stomach crust but very little between the ears.”
    “How did you know they have crust?” Cosgrove asked.
    “Well, they’re always pulling each other’s shirts up and holding mini-contests, aren’t they? If I weren’t so hefty myself, they … well, they’d turn quite against a fellow. Now, imagine plopping Lars Erich among you intellectual cut-’em-ups all at once. What would occur?”
    Cosgrove said, “I dread to think”; and Dennis Savage snapped back, “Everyone knows you dread to think.”
    Without shifting his seat on the couch in the slightest, Peter held them apart while continuing, “So I thought, let’s not have a general scrutiny of my … Yes, Lars Erich wants to expand his CD collection. Weak in his classics, it seems, though like all Europeans he’s horribly brisk on the rudiments. Knowing how many symphonies Brahms wrote and even the D Major or e minor part. Does the key matter, one wonders?”
    Taking advantage of the altercation between Cosgrove and Dennis Savage, Fleabiscuit had slithered out from under the couch to reopen Peter’s right shoelace.
    “A symphony in D Major,” I observed, “really is a different type of music from one in any minor key. Boys, ” I then warned Cosgrove and Dennis Savage, who were winding down anyway. “Each type creates a different drama.”
    “Yes, but so I thought if you alone went with Lars Erich and me to Tower Records for an expert’s buy, it would smooth my friend’s way into the … well, coterie. I was thinking this Sunday, with lunch after.”
    “This guy with the gym-bunny friends and the Lederhosen,” I said. “What does he do