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Would not fantasy begin to dissolve at the touch of real life? Why else is “the morning after” as terrible a term in gay as “no exit” is in hell?
    Yet Mac’s fantasy held. I saw it in the way he spoke of Nick and to him—and Nick, fascinated by the gestures of hand and face that made words for the rest of us, would stare in smug wonder and cry, “Go for it, sport! Go for it!”
    Mac did, all the way. It was dinners with Nick, cinema and hamburgers with Nick, Monopoly with Nick—the first American I’ve known, by the way, who couldn’t play the game. You don’t realize how broad our range of kind is here in the magic city till you meet someone who doesn’t know what Monopoly is. I’ve played it with Ph.Ds and little kids, with the birthright wealthy and users of food stamps, with actors and construction workers, with competitors and nerds. Some had mastered it—to the point that they virtually knew where they would land when they were shaking the dice—and some learned by playing, and some were frankly not apt. But everyone knew what it was. Nick had never heard of it—could not, moreover, pick it up no matter how carefully we explained it. My friend Carlo, who likes just about everyone and has a superb ability to forgive hot men their little misdemeanors, walked home with me after this Monopoly game and, in a lull, pensively regarded the traffic and said, “Tell me, who was that extremely terrible boy?”
    Mac’s coterie shook their prickles at me for bringing Nick into his life, and, believe me, I did not rejoice. But the man was happy. No, he had always been happy; now he was cocky, getting around more by himself, doing what he wanted to on spunk, not on the assistance of his chorus of Rolfs. I found myself sounding, again and again, “I am glad,” for him. I hear tell of a chemistry bonding the socioeconomically energetic with the intellectually needy: yet what lies below Baltic Avenue?
    I learned what at one of Mac’s dinners. He was held up at the office again, and the other guests, respectably employed, could be reached at their places of business and told to come along later. But I had been out mooching around in the streets, viewing the town for adaptable incidents, and so arrived for the party before I should have: when Nick was alone.
    *   *   *
    “This fantasy I must not share” ran through my mind that evening, as the Theme of Alberich’s Curse runs through Der Ring des Nibelungen. And there before me was a kind of Alberich, the dark lord, wearing nothing but navy blue corduroy pants held up by suspenders. Just as Nick was ignorant of this nation’s essential board game, so was he a gracelessly unknowing host. He offered nothing, not even a chair. He said nothing, not even about Mac being held up. He seemed to regard me as if I were a movie: he paid complete attention without doing anything himself.
    I went into the kitchen and poured myself some wine. When I came out, he was where he had been, spread out on the sofa, idly shifting a suspender arm from the curve of his left pectoral to the nipple and back again.
    “So whattaya say?” he finally uttered.
    What does one say to the kind of man who looks naked in pants? “How does it feel” was what I came up with, “to switch from free-lancing to a steady position?”
    “Yeah.”
    “You don’t miss the scene?” Living as I did along Hustler Alley on East Fifty-third Street, I had seen the dire fascination that brought certain of Nick’s colleagues back to the neighborhood night after night, some restively pushing the agenda early of a Saturday or dully clinging to the illusion as the sun came up on Sunday. Passing by with my groceries or my playbill, I had the impression that they had nothing but this for life, that the success of a paying rendezvous was less important than the simple fact of membership in the club of hot.
    “Miss the scene?” Nick repeated. “I miss it like my last case of crabs.”
    “Ah.”
    “Miss