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was, well, what I imagined the other colonists took me to be: bourgeois visitor, friend, possibly suitor. Yes, complete with bourgeois male anxiety about who drives the car.
    Maria led me in the slow dance at the bar, a noisy friendly hangout illuminated by the endless Niagara of the Miller’s High Life sign and by the bubbling jukebox. I was too young to be in a bar legally, but no one noticed and we drank beer after beer and danced to polkas or slow hillbilly songs. Maria said she loved the hillbilly songs because they were about grown-ups, adultery, divorce, heartache. With her, even loss sounded as glamorous as gain.

TWO

            My last year in boarding school during Christmas vacation in Chicago, I met a small Texan with bad eyes, bad skin, and the smell of Luckies on his breath. Tex ran a book and record store next to an art house showing movies near the Loop. “Art movies” were still new then. The label might mean Gina Lollobrigida jiggling provocatively up and down hills on a donkey or it might mean Gérard Philipe meeting an early death as the crazed painter Modigliani. Despite the range, art meant Europe, and something European shed its glow on Tex. I’d get on the elevated train in Evanston and ride an hour each way late in the afternoon just to escape my mother and sister and spend thirty minutes with him.
    He loved books. I remember running with him down the street one gray winter afternoon when the sun, discouraged by a cold reception, had withdrawn. Tex had nothing on but a tweed jacket and a ratty scarf steeped in smoke, itself the color of smoke. He was racing like a kid to the post office to carry back to the store two boxes of books, all copies of The Outsider by Colin Wilson. I carried one box. Tex hadripped open the other and was juggling with it as he read random pages to me. “Listen to this, will you,” Tex shouted with a sudden reemergence of his warm Southern accent. Generally he tried to sound contained, as though he’d just sucked a lemon, but now his mouth was filling up with hot sweet potato pie.
    In another instant we were back in Tex’s cozy store, which had been temporarily confided to the care of his pouty assistant, Morris. We settled into a heap on the pink velvet loveseat by the window to read The Outsider to each other in excited snatches. That was the way Tex read, as though a new book were a telegram addressed to him personally. This one was about a whole fortune that a spiritual uncle somewhere off in England had willed him, since the book told us about existentialism and its roots and suggested that, over there at least, to be an outsider was not a cause for shame but a condition that could be capitalized on, even capitalized. Tex talked to me about the Human Condition. Because he didn’t introduce his ideas and he threw away the ends of sentences, he seemed to be letting me in on a conversation I’d be gauche to interrupt and question. The bitter coffee we drank, the sound of the discreetly murmuring announcer on the classical music radio station, and the sight of reflected spotlights tilting off varnished new books and records still in their cellophane wrappers—all of these things came together to excite me, especially since I knew Tex was gay.
    Morris, the assistant, even used that word when there was no one else in the shop. He’d pulled up one trousers leg and caressed his calf and said, “I’m feeling so gay tonight.” Then he shook his head as though he had curls instead of a close crop. He wasn’t smiling; he was completely serious. I didn’t know exactly what he meant but I knew he meant something quite precise.
    “Shut up, Morris,” Tex snapped in a cruelly direct voiceand jerked his head to indicate me. I turned just in time to catch it. “And Morris,” he added, “lay off the fuckin’ eyeshadow for chrissake. I’m running a respectable operation here. One more warning you’re out on your little depilated tush.”
    I looked more closely