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before, a voice that belonged to Greta Garbo—he said to Eliot, "I am yours."
     
    For three weeks now they had been lovers, and they had not spent one night apart. Eliot hadn't wanted to. He lived a life unconstrained by schedule, futureless, open-ended. At the dentist's office Philip had read in Mademoiselle that it was dangerous for newly formed couples to spend too much time together at the beginning, but when he asked Eliot about it, Eliot seemed unconcerned. "Why should we stay away from each other when we want to be together?" he said. "The only reason to stop, it seems to me, is if we stop enjoying it." Philip agreed. He had absolutely no desire to spend a night away from Eliot; he had slept alone his whole life. Still, he worried that Eliot might grow tired of him if they spent every minute together, might get bored, go to a different party, meet someone else. It seemed he could do that easily. Although Eliot had hundreds of friends, who called and sent him invitations to downtown art openings and parties, he had no Week-at-a-Glance, no crucial dinner dates to change or commit himself to. His days were his own, devoted to a variety of mysterious "freelance" projects. Philip, by contrast, was burdened with commitment, compelled five days a week to be at a desk in a midtown office building. His friends all worked as well. They formed a complicated network of petty betrayals and loyalties in which his participation was often demanded. During working hours they met for lunch at Amy's, and on weekends for long drowsy dinners in Ethiopian restaurants, after which they would divide the check down to the penny. It was not a life he relished, and he believed he would do a lot for Eliot, who had saved him from it; he had done more for boyfriends who deserved less, arranging his life around their more important lives, making his first priority men for whom he was fourth or fifth at best. These other boyfriends had made no pretense of loyalty or love and were always on the lookout for someone richer, or more handsome. Eliot at least seemed to delight in Philip; he like to rumple his hair like a little boy's, and say, "You're really cute, you know that?" But he never seemed to think more than five minutes ahead of himself, and this worried Philip. He insisted that he "lived for the moment," an instinct Philip did not trust. What happened when the moment that was him ended?
    This cold afternoon they drank coffee as the sun set. They were going to spend the night at Eliot's place in the East Village. "It's too cold for the subway," Eliot said, as they put on their coats. "Let's take a cab." A beat of worry. "I'll pay, don't worry," Eliot added. He generally paid. If the pattern of the past three weeks continued, Philip knew, they would spend four nights downtown before shuttling back up for another three. Prepared, he carried with him several changes of clothes, his toothbrush and nasal spray, and the bioflavonoid tablets for his gums. Eliot had nothing; he never brought anything with him when he came up to Philip's. He used Philip's toothbrush; he wore Philip's clothes. Afterwards, Philip sometimes slipped on the shirts Eliot had borrowed and breathed in his smell, faintly redolent of honey.
    They rode down Broadway, blocks lined with Korean fruit-stands and laundromats and newsstands. Men were struggling to cover piles of the Sunday paper with tarpaulins. To Philip's surprise, a few flakes of snow started to fall, then more and more. He remembered coming out of a movie theatre in the East Village when he was a teenager to find that a snowstorm had come and gone while he was inside. The streetlights reflected off the white carpet that seemed so suddenly to have covered the city, creating a light as brilliant as in a skating rink. No cars could pass. Philip had to squint as he walked out into the middle of Third Avenue, where prostitutes in sequinned skirts and fur-trimmed jackets were throwing snowballs at one another. "Come play