Early Warning

Henry was naked. The windows of the bedroom looked south, onto a tiny little square of green surrounded by cats and flowerpots. The apartment was on the third floor, and there were blinds; Basil had drawn them but not closed them. Henry supposed that north-facing windows across the alley had a view of their misdemeanors. They had kissed. They had stroked. Basil had warmed some baby oil and started at his shoulders, then moved farther down, lingering over Henry’s arse, admiring the fact that Henry’s body hair was fine and blond. Henry had rubbed Basil down, also, lingering a little around his shoulder blades before descending to the arse (hairy, not like any girl Henry had known). Until now that was all they had done, besides sleep side by side, though Henry wore shorts and a shirt and Basil wore pajamas (a word that was, indeed, related to “penis”). Basil had buggered and been buggered by, but he was patient. When Henry visited in March, Basil had walked around the apartment naked, sometimes with an erection, and he had done nothing with it except touch it from time to time, letting Henry get used to it. Watching him, without saying anything, Henry had imagined Jacob Palmer doing the same thing. Jacob had finished his doctorate at Wisconsin — highly motivated by the cold, he said — and was now married to one of his fellow graduate students, a Yeats scholar from St. Paul. They had a six-month-old baby boy. Jacob had gotten a good job at UCLA.

They were going slowly. Maybe Henry should be embarrassed, at his age, but they both knew that Henry had offered himself up for an education, and that Basil was perfectly agreeable to the terms, whatever they were.

The question was whether to walk over to Amsterdam and up a couple of blocks to Barney Greengrass, or down Broadway a few blocks to Zabar’s, and the answer was — did you want the best bagel or did you want the best lox? Henry let Basil decide, and it was always Barney Greengrass, where they were even ruder than at Zabar’s. (“My dear boy, manners are the key. If he ejaculates, ‘Whaddaya havin’, bud?’ then the bagels will be just a little chewier and the lox just a little loxier.”) As they walked up the street, Henry thought, they revealed nothing about misdemeanors they might have committed or be about to commit. Basil changed his posture slightly, slouching his hips and straightening his shoulders. He could feel himself do the same thing. Did they know each other? Only slightly — colleagues who happened to meet and were catching a bite.

At Barney Greengrass, there was a lot of talk about the protesters, crazy hippies, what was wrong with those people, wasn’t LBJ doing the best he could, these kids didn’t know from trouble if they thought the draft was trouble. Henry and Basil exchanged a glance, even though Henry hadn’t yet told Basil about Tim, or, indeed, anything at all about his family. Onion bagel, toasted, cooled, easy on the cream cheese, no capers, a little onion. Black coffee, two sugars. They took their plates to a table by the window.

—

CLAIRE DREADED the hot weather and the muggy noise she would have to endure at the state fair, but since Paul had informed her that irritability was a classic symptom of pregnancy, she didn’t say a word. Paul might not be pregnant himself, but when, on his thirty-eighth birthday, he burned the manuscripts of his partly written plays in the backyard, he had done in his mood for the rest of the summer. It didn’t matter that his practice was booming so that he’d had to take on a new partner. He considered his new partner merely the best of a bad bunch — Cornell University undergraduate and Wake Forest Medical School. He was great with kids, but Paul didn’t like him. Martin Sadler, his name was. He thought going to the doctor should be fun for a kid, or at least not terrifying.

Dr. Sadler was friendly. When he asked if he could tag along, Claire said yes, and began to think going to the fair might not be so bad after all in spite of the belly. He was there when they pulled into their parking spot. Paul snapped, “Well, I’m still not in favor of closing the office on a Friday,” but then, because it was cool and the weather looked like it was going to be unusually pleasant, he said, “But we did pick a nice day.”