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duplicity as a gain in style-less integrity.
    One evening, on the way to a cocktail party- being given by a colleague, I was walking alongside Jamie. I was recounting to him aU my thoughts about Richard Smith. "He's driving me crazy. He keeps calling me. I can't bear him, though he if a pretty good fuck. But you must have met him," I said, suddenly putting the pieces together, "somewhere during your social peregrinations." Then I was conscious of the stifled sob at my side. .'\1-though he turned his face away I could see he was crying.
    "Oh, Jamie," I said, "Richard is the guy—that guy—the one you . . ."
    The hours and hours of Jamie's tormented, spiritually twilit descriptions of his paragon, even his report that his love had recently developed for the first time an infatuation with a ridiculously unsuitable man, a West Village clone, an idiotic bodybuilder who spurned him—all these details came flying back to setde on my shoulders. My callous words ("though he is a pretty good fuck") hung in the air. Here was I, each day listening to Jamie's morose and labyrinthine speculations, while hoping he would eventually find comfort in my arms, whereas the very person he so hopelessly loved was this creepy Richard I was fending off. I longed to comfort Jamie, unsay my words. I hoped he'd find me attractive now that he knew his beloved was pursuing me.
    Suddenly Richard seemed much more interesting to me. The becoming aura of unobtainability he'd been lacking until now because he kept hurling himself at me stepped up behind him like the blue shadow a spotlight throws. Now he was haloed, three-dimensional, desirable. The next thing I knew he'd moved to Hong Kong to manage a branch of the family business and I never heard of him again.

    Jamie, embarrassed, dried his tears and honited his nose. A few days later (so great was his capacity for secrecy) I discovered yet another aspect of his Hfe he'd not yet mentioned in a year and a half of our sharing an office and daily confessions: he had a lover, whom he'd already been with for five years.
    Jamie gave a cocktail party for the White Russians one night while his mother was out of town. There they all were in their Harris tweeds, Church shoes, Brooks Brothers shirts and Porcellin ties mixing martinis and tinkling the ivories, talking about next summer in the Hamptons and next Monday at the opera. The house was a stately ruin in the East Fifties, wedged between massage and pizza parlors. The neon sign from the massage parlor blinked shifting pink and white light through the dusty velvet curtains. Inside everything was shabbily genteel—worn Oriental carpet, Ming figurine lamps with torn silk shades and an upholstered couch with sprung springs.
    The nicest man there was named Gerry. He was blond, tall, with a wiry body, a ski-jump nose, clear glasses perched on the end of his nose and a way of investing more energy into the story than the person who was speaking had put there. He leaned into the conversation and tapped at it energetically, like a bird sharpening his beak on suet. He laughed and nodded with sympathy, understood everything, touched people, made them drinks, found echoes and instances of what they were saying in his own life and affirmed their tentative notions with well documented enthusiasm. He was quick to say, "But you know more than I do about that," or "That's exacdy like you to say that." Although he was usually immersed in what people were saying, once in a while he'd draw back, observe, shake his head as though in amazed disapproval and then relieve his interlocutor by saying, "You're simply fabulous." If he'd been filmed while responding to someone and if later the fJm had been sped up, his head would have ticked as rapidly as a metronome from side to side during the conversation, never held steady or upright. Although he was working hard to charm everyone, the White Russians didn't like him, especially because Gerry, it seemed, was from humble origins but