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marriage?” Lloyd asks. “That’s part of how we can improve on the formula. After all, haven’t Jeff and I shown, after sixteen years, that you can have a lasting commitment without being monogamous?”

    “Oh, come on,” I say, surprised at how antagonistic I’m feeling. But I can’t help myself. “You guys haven’t been together for sixteen years. Not really. You’ve had your share of ups and downs. There have been big chunks of time when you’ve been apart, when you haven’t known how to define yourselves. I know. I was there .”

    “That’s why we want you as our best man, Henry,” Lloyd says simply. “We’ve been through a lot together. You know us better than anyone.”

    The smile has faded from Jeff’s face. I can tell he’s annoyed that I’m not jumping for joy. Indeed, I’m surprised myself. Why am I being such a putz ? Why am I not thrilled? Why am I not throwing my arms around the two of them, congratulating them? Jeff and Lloyd are my best friends!

    “Henry,” Jeff says, talking to me patiently, as if he were addressing a child, “what marriage offers Lloyd and me is a public acknowledgement of our relationship. After all, I had to show up for three—count ‘em— three of my brother’s weddings, even though each one of them was a disaster and everyone knew it from the start. Now he can show up for mine—which, by the way, has lasted longer than all three of his put together.”

    I make a face. “So that’s why you’re getting married? To get even with your family? To force some kind of acknowledgement from them?”

    Jeff holds my gaze. “That’s one reason, yes. That’s the reason anyone gets married. So that the world can see and recognize and affirm their relationship. Finally the state is giving gay people that same opportunity.”

    “Henry,” Lloyd asks, “are you not happy for us?”

    “Well, of course I’m happy for you,” I manage to say. “Don’t get me wrong.”

    “It sure doesn’t seem that way,” Jeff says, clearly peeved. “Maybe we ought to skip the champagne.”

    “No, we’re not skipping the champagne,” Lloyd says. “I’m going to pop the cork as soon as Henry gives us his answer.”

    I frown. “My answer to what?”

    “Maybe you didn’t hear me.” Lloyd smiles kindly and finds my eyes. “We’re asking you to be our best man.”

    Once, years ago, during one of those in-between, questioning periods for Jeff and Lloyd, I had allowed myself to imagine Lloyd asking me a very different question. I had imagined him asking me to marry him, or at least to join him in a committed relationship. Of course, it was folly, and deep down, I knew it. Jeff was always the one Lloyd loved. But still I allowed myself, however briefly, to dream. And now, instead of asking me to marry him, Lloyd was asking me to be his best man.

    I gaze into his eyes, then look over at Jeff, who’s looking back at me.

    “You are hopelessly enmeshed with those two,” Joey once told me. “You want Lloyd and you want to be Jeff.”

    I shrugged him off, but an earlier boyfriend, Shane, had once made a very similar statement. “Henry,” Shane had said, handing me back my keys in a manner not so different from the way I’d later hand Joey his, “you won’t be able to really love anyone until you learn to love yourself.”

    I had sighed. “Please, Shane. Can we end this without psychoanalysis?”

    “No, we can’t,” Shane insisted, in the way only Shane could insist. “The problem is that you are always defining yourself against either Jeff or Lloyd, and in your estimation, you always come up short.”

    Shane was smart. Of all my boyfriends, he probably knew me best. He saw through everything. He’d met me, in fact, on the dance floor with Jeff, and saw up close and personal my early infatuation with him. That I once worshipped Jeff and everything about him was obvious. Just by asking me to dance one night, Jeff O’Brien had changed my life. I’d been