Men Who Love Men. William J. Mann

myself. Until then, I’d thought we were made for each other. We both had been devoted to Kurt Cobain in our youth. We both owned every album put out by every Seattle grunge band that had ever caused teenagers like us to pogo or headbang. Yet by the time our musical tastes had been co-opted by Kelly and Justin, any relationship between us was probably doomed.

      “Just like that?” I asked on the night Joey broke up with me. “You’re ending our relationship just like that?”

      “Henry, I fell out of love with you. I don’t know how else to explain it.”

      I was incoherent. “How does one fall out of love? Tell me that, please, Joey.”

      Joey was short for “Jomei,” a Japanese name that means to spread light and awareness. But that night Joey was offering no such enlightenment. “I don’t know how it happens,” he told me. “It just did.”

      In that circus of illogic, I was grasping for some shred of rationality. “All right,” I said, attempting to calm myself. “I will grant that maybe it’s impossible to stay ‘in love’ forever—though I was hoping maybe it might endure past our ten-month anniversary at least.”

      “I’m sorry, Henry.”

      Forget calm. I blew up again. “What I’m trying to say is, this is natural, Joey! Don’t you see? This is the way it happens! Being ‘in love’ eventually morphs into just ‘loving’ somebody. That’s all this is. It’s just a transition for us.”

      “I don’t think so, Henry.”

      “Look,” I said. “I’ll accept that you’re not ‘in love’ with me anymore. Fine. I’ll deal with that. But you still love me. Right? You do still love me?”

      Yes, I actually asked him that, and in a voice that sounded even more pathetic in person. I’m not proud of that fact. No more than I am of voting for Justin Guarini on American Idol. But I did both things. And in neither case did I get the answer I was hoping for.

      Joey said nothing more. He just turned around. Walked out that door. Oh, I know I should’ve changed that stupid lock, I should’ve made him leave his key.

      But it didn’t matter. Not for one second did Joey ever come back to bother me.

      “Are you humming something?” Ann Marie asks.

      “No.”

      “You are, too,” she says. “‘I Will Survive.’”

      I roll my eyes.

      “And you will, Henry. You are a survivor. Hey, I know about surviving. More men have dumped me than have dumped you.”

      “Oh yeah? How many?”

      “Five.”

      “Okay, so you beat me by one. Congratulations. You win this round. Rah, rah, let the balloons fall. Let me buy you another drink to mark the occasion.”

      She smirks. “I think if we play our cards right, we can get someone to buy them for us.” Her eyebrows rise as she turns slightly, pretending not to notice that the Exquisite Lollipop is making his way through the crowd toward us.

      I have to laugh. “You are so like your brother.”

      The kid saunters up, his fingers hooked in the pockets of his low-rise jeans. “Hey,” he says, in a deeper-than-expected voice.

      “Hey,” says Ann Marie, fluttering, tossing back her blond locks. “I was wondering when you’d come over and introduce yourself.”

      “I’m Luke,” he says, offering his hand.

      “Well, hello, Luke, I’m Ann Marie,” she says, grasping his hand and pumping it like a man, “and this is Henry, who I’m sure is the real reason you came over here.”

      His soft hazel eyes flicker over to me. “Hey,” he says.

      “Hey.”

      We shake hands, though I don’t pump him like Ann Marie did.

      “Where are you from?” Ann Marie asks.

      “Well,” Luke says—and I try to detect just what kind of accent he has but I can’t, just something broad and flat—“last stop was Tucson, but I was thinking of trying a winter here.”

      “Really? In Provincetown?”

      “Yeah.”

      “No way! We live here, too.” Ann Marie seems absolutely tickled. “Don’t mistake us for tourists!”

      The boy is looking at me. “Year-rounders, huh?”

      “Well,” Ann Marie says, “I go back and forth to Boston. I work there during the week. But I’m here every weekend, because my son is here.”

      He seems surprised. Most people are. Ann Marie is in her mid-thirties. She might be as old as thirty-eight, I’ve never been sure. But she can pass for twenty-two. Good genes, she says. And, of course, good access to Botox in the city. She works for a dermatologist.

      “How old is your son?” Luke asks.

      “He’s nine, almost ten. His name is J. R. Want to see a picture?”

      I’ve seen this little ritual before. Whenever anyone inquires about her kid, Ann Marie immediately slips her purse off her shoulder, like she’s doing now, and starts riffling inside to find her wallet. “Here he is,” she says, flipping open to J. R.’s fifth-grade mug shot. All freckles and big blue bug eyes. Not so different from pictures I’ve seen of his Uncle Jeff from that age.

      “Cute kid,” Luke says, but I notice he’s looking at me again. Could Ann Marie have been right? Is he really cruising me?

      It seems unimaginable. I have, this summer, entered into what Jeff calls the “shoulder season” of gay life. It’s a term he derived from living here in Provincetown, where the “shoulder season” consists of those few months at the end of summer when the weather is still pleasant enough to pull in some business. Guesthouse managers, of which I am one, can still hope for a few knocks on our doors in the shoulder season of September and October. If it’s not quite the thrumming vitality of summer, it’s still something to keep us going for a while longer. Now, to apply Jeff’s analogy, let us consider that the season ends for gay men sometime around the age of thirty—maybe thirty-one, if you’re lucky. I myself, refusing to go gracefully, hung on for still another year after that. But now I’m thirty-three, and at long last the crow’s feet and receding hairline have forced me to accept without further struggle my inevitable entry into the “shoulder season” of gay life. It’s by no means retirement, but you can’t expect the business you got at peak.

      On the other hand, this young man standing in front of me has a long, long way to go before he hits his own personal September. Early twenties, I suspect. Twenty-three, tops. Now I don’t normally go for twinkies. Ann Marie’s right. I like the muscley ones, and unless a boy has been pumping iron since high school, it’s unlikely he’ll have the bulk and hardness that I find so fetching. But this boy, this Luke, is looking at me with those big hazel eyes of his and for some reason I can’t quite look away. He is cruising me. The first to do so in quite a while. It is, quite unexpectedly, exhilarating.

      “Do you want to dance?” he asks.

      I don’t know how to respond. I turn rather helplessly to Ann Marie.

      “You boys go ahead,” she says, pleased that I seem to be hooking up at last. “I should be getting home anyway. I’ve got to get J. R. his dinner. And later we’re going to the drive-in movies in Wellfleet.”

      “You sure?” I ask her.

      “Absolutely,” she says, kissing me. “Nice to meet you, Luke. You boys have a good time!” She winks at him. He winks back.

      My dick gets hard in my cutoff camouflage pants.

      And so—we dance. We don’t speak. We just shoulder our way onto the tiny