From: Arnold M. Zwicky
Subject: fiction: roseate tom, parts 1-4
Summary: work-in-progress
Date: Wed Aug 14 14:52:44 1991

[remember that this is a work of fiction, though loosely related to
events in my life.  listen to "a note from the narrator".  (at the end
of the book, i have my own "author's notes", by the way.)

this is HIGHLY CARNAL stuff; some of it is an eccentric type of
self-conscious porn, in fact.  use your judgment.]


Roseate Tom

AMZ - ver 1: 7/20/91 - ver 3: 8/12/91


SCHERZO

I come here once every week or two, during the odd hole in my teaching
schedule.  I love this place; it's where I really learned to suck
cock.  (My previous experiences, though fairly numerous, were all
awkward, trembly, inexpert.  One kind-hearted gentlemen suggested that
I should just go home and stick to my wife.)  In part, I've learned by
discovering what another man can do for my cock when I offer it to
him.  Mostly I'm just comfortable in a t-room in a way I never was in
any other setting; the point of the place is to maximize everybody's
satisfaction, as quickly and easily as possible.

(My routine is to suck guys off - one man, two, three, however many
make themselves available - for maybe 45 minutes, climbing a ladder of
arousal, then shooting my load in another cocksucker's mouth as a
finale.  Well, it usually isn't that easy; there are all these other
guys at various places in their own programs, and a fair amount of
negotiation is always in order.  Like I say, maximizing satisfaction.)

There are three stalls, all empty today.  I know enough to take the
middle one: Keep your options open.  Could be a zero, though.  There's
usually some action at this time of the day, sometimes all stalls full
and extra guys standing outside them, eyeing each other (a little
anxious about having identifiable faces, even just among the
fraternity of cocklovers) and tuning in to the sexnoises from the guys
inside, sometimes even a couple of guys in one stall, with fucking on
their minds.

(I find it incredible that guys can fuck in public like that.  Now, I
have no problem with fucking; in fact, the very first cock I took was
up my ass, and it was so deeply satisfying that I realized instantly
that I was going to have major trouble looking like a garden-variety
straight married man.  And, of course, I eat dick in public, in this
very place; if things are slow, guys peer under the adjoining
partition, watch us through the crack where the door fastens, even
stand on a toilet seat to get a hawk's-eye view from over the
adjoining partition.  So what is so gross about fucking in a t-room?
In only a couple of years I will have no answer to this question.  I
will be writing little notes on toilet paper inviting the man next
door to come on over and fill my butt with his hard dick, and I will
never have reason to be dissatisfied with the service these men
provide.  I will in fact be very noisy.  We will give good shows.)

Pants down around my ankles, I sit on the toilet, stroking my cock
with my left hand to keep it hard and ready, thinking about my next
lecture, to keep from getting too close to the top of the
rollercoaster.  (And to get my next lecture prepared.  Use unscheduled
time wisely.)  Today's hole in my appointment book is several hours
long, so that I feel no pressure to hurry through the program.  But
life must go on; I'll wait no more than an hour, then it's back to the
office.

Five minutes into the hour, the outer door is wrenched open...pause
four beats...then the inner door.  (That awkward long entrance hall
with obstinate, creaky doors at each end - an early warning system -
makes this a really first-class t-room.)  My quarry walks right past
the urinals.  That is good.  (Sometimes a guy stands at a urinal with
his dick just hanging out, checking out the stall scene over his
shoulder.  I like a man who goes right for what he wants.)  He walks
past the first, empty, stall, the obvious convenient one, slows
slightly as he gets to mine, and then continues to the third, the one
furthest from the doors.  That's very good.  In he goes: SNAP with the
lock, little domestic sounds of buckle being undone, sweet unzipping,
jeans falling down onto his shoes - nice loafers, I notice, craning my
neck in shameless curiosity about my prospect - white jockeys snapped
out and down.

Time to communicate with the mystery man behind door number three.  I
tap my right foot, the one he can see if he's looking, tap it slowly,
the way any man might do aimlessly while he's waiting for a shit to
happen.  (No point in alarming a straight man.)  He taps back, two
taps to my two.  I do three, he does three, in my tempo.  One more
exchange of two.  Looks like we're in business, partner.

I reach my right hand near my shoe and motion for him to come under
the partition.  (I *could* just be starting to pull up my pants, in
case there is some later disagreement about what was going on here.)
He needs no further invitation, stretches himself out for me easily
under the partition: strong slim legs, dusted with red-blond hair,
legs spread out in a V, at its apex a handsome straight-standing cock
anchored in red-tinged pubic hair, two tight young balls screened
slightly by this hair.  I am down on my knees, crouched across the
stall, arched over the body he is offering me.  Both of us are
aroused, neither of us is anxious.  My mouth fills with spit, getting
ready on its own.  I hold his hips gently but firmly, enjoying the fit
of his hipbones in my hands, and slip my mouth onto his cock, working
it back almost immediately into my throat.  (Even with the practice
I've had in this t-room, I can't usually take a cock this way.  I am
exceptionally open to this man.)  He gasps and rushes too fast towards
coming, no, no, moves my head off him with one hand.

Red moves back and motions for me to stick my cock under for him to
take.  Now I stretch out for him and he arches over me.  He has good
loving hands.  He takes my cock in one smooth motion, sighs in
pleasure with his nose buried in my pubic hair.  Leaning back,
supported by my left hand, the muscles of my belly tight, I stroke his
cheek with my right hand, stroke the short hairs on back of his neck
(feeling the power in his muscles as he sucks my dick).  I want to see
his face, I want to see him happy; I hate the wall that comes between
us.  Then I too am losing control and pull back, wanting not to come
yet but to go on giving him my cock and feeling the tension of his
desiring me.

We both retreat some, sitting back on our heels, panting.  We are
overwhelmed by this sense of fitting together, being together.

"Do you have a place?"  I whisper.  (Why whisper?  We are in this
out-of-the-way men's room just so we can be cocksuckers alone
together.  No one could conceivably hear us, down here in an awkward
corner john in an otherwise-unused basement of the university's rather
disregarded entomology museum.  No one ever hears the noisy fucking in
here, even.  But we whisper.)  "I don't," I add in despair.  (I have
never before asked to put a face and a name to one of my t-room men.)

Pause...three beats.  "I do."  He puts both hands under the partition
and I clasp them in mine, feeling the heat of his palms.  After a
moment we break.  Stand up, fold cocks back in our jockeys, pull up
jeans, tuck shirts in, zip up flies, do up buckles.  Each of us
listens to the sound effects of the other's dressing next door
(usually sad epilogue to t-room sex, today a bit of foreplay).

SNAP, SNAP go the catches, and we step out and face one another.
(Will he look at me and decide it was a bad idea, stammer a suddenly
recalled class or appointment?)  His red hair confirms the prediction
of his crotch.  Actually, his cock represents the whole man well;
straight-standing, neither thin nor bulky, economical.  Nothing about
him is remarkable except those intelligent green eyes, everything
about him is...nice.  He smiles broadly at me - hey, I'm not
unacceptable, after all! - and I grin back.  I lean forward, surprise
him by kissing him full on the lips, so that each of us can imagine
he's smelling his own cock (just now) on the other man's lips.  (Only
two other men have been interested in kissing me, or perhaps I should
say willing to kiss me, and their kisses were perfunctory early steps
on the road to our crotches.  Now this man responds flat-out, and I am
washed with pleasure.)


     I could have stopped here and been a very happy man.  I would have been
     able to use this much of the experience - a connection far more intense
     than any in my life as a closeted faggot - as springboard for months of
     enthusiastic jacking-off in toilet stalls.

     Actually, just writing about it, over twenty years after the fact, in a
     different life entirely, has gotten my dick hard and my underpants soaked
     with pre-cum.  I take a break from writing this for you, read my own words
     on the screen aloud and stroke my dick through my fag-lavender bikini
     briefs - a political statement and a fashion statement rolled into one -
     and bring myself off with my voice and my hand.  And soak my briefs and my
     crotch hair with cum, just like a furtive teenager giving himself a
     quickie.  Except that I'm sitting here at my desk, shamelessly enjoying
     the wetness in my crotch and the strong smell of my cum on my hand - sniff
     it, bitch! - and I have no immediate plans to do anything but go on
     enjoying them both and telling you about it.  I hope I'm making you hot.
     If the stuff so far doesn't get you wet and twitching, skim ahead; there's
     some great dirty stuff down there.

     I hope you don't think that addressing you directly like this is some
     cheap trick.  It's a venerable narrative device; think of the marvelous
     *Tristram Shandy* and other 18th century novels.  Here it's homage to a
     couple of my favorite movies, *Tom Jones* - ah, the 18th century again -
     and *Annie Hall*.  (It's even in *Tampopo*, though there we are
     addressed as participants in the action, not as viewers of the passing
     scene.)  Ok, name three movies with lobsters in them...

Subject: roseate tom, pt. 2

[the story continues, back on its main line.  HIGH CARNALITY
warning remains in force.]


Red and I realize we are standing there, evident hard-ons in our
jeans, kissing one another, in the middle of a men's room, which,
though isolated, nevetheless gets used, sometimes even by guys with
nothing more complicated on their minds than the release of a piss or
a shit.  Faggots don't own this place; we just borrow it for our
picnics.  We shuffle out, Red first.

Out on the street, I extend my hand.  We shake, introduce ourselves
like businessmen working on a deal (though we seem to have signed the
contract first).  He's Tom, I'm Arnold.  Walking to his apartment,
only two blocks off campus, in Champaign rather than Urbana, we fill
in background.  He is a grad student in Classics, nearly finished with
his dissertation, single, living alone, very much in the closet (he's
looking to teach Latin and Greek at a private boys' school, probably
coach soccer and maybe tennis or swimming; this is 1967, after all,
and he can't even start to think about imagining being openly gay in
this setting, or maybe in any).  I am a junior faculty member in
Linguistics, in my second year of teaching, husband of Marianna and
father of Beth, equally in the closet (I'm just beginning to think
about imagining being out, but it's not at all easy).

I tell him much more about Marianna than I intend, surely more than
any man could ever want to know about the woman his trick-of-the-day
loves.  He tells me only that he has always found his partners the way
he found me, and that only a few have even been able to spend a night
with him.  No rancor or self-pity; it's just the way things are.  I am
less balanced about my own, largely parallel, situation.  I don't have
to mention that I won't be staying the night.

Tom's apartment is neat, modest, pleasant; it feels like someone lives
there and cares about how it fits him.  We discover an extraordinarily
unfaggy shared taste: chamber music.  Tom finds Schubert piano trios
to fill the apartment with sound.  We agree it's a little silly to
choose music we care about so much when we are surely going to
disregard it almost entirely; still, it suits us both.

We stand in the middle of the tiny living room, on a nice imitation
Oriental rug, and undress one another, slowly.  Unlike my liftetime's
fantasy lover (who is shorter than I am, compact, muscular, dark) but
like every one of the real lovers who will come, Tom is enough taller
than I am that I have to look up to him.  We kiss, also slowly, and
deeply, playing around with our mouths.  He presses his body hard
against mine, matching part to part, all his parts lapping over mine.
It is April, and we are both sweating lightly.  The sweat in his
armpits smells spicy - this is new for me - while mine is musky.  I
rub his crotch, to gather its sweatsmell, and hold my hand to my nose,
so that the scent (coriander, cumin, cardamom; ever since, coriander
makes my cock rise) fills my head.  He does the same for me; I am
afraid that the powerful muskiness of my sexsweat will repel him, but
it makes him want me ferociously.

So we reverse the order of the t-room.  He goes down on me first,
again with a motion that has no parts, no structure, only the seamless
satisfaction of taking me fully into his mouth.  He holds one of my
asscheeks in each hand, massaging them and pressing me urgently
forward.  (I want him in my asshole, want him to feel me spasm tight
on his finger as I come, but he steers clear of my asshole.  I guess
that he is shit-wary.)  He releases my ass with his right hand and
runs the nails of two fingers down my lower spine, making me shiver
and buck.  I cannot imagine how he manages not to gag, but seeing that
he hasn't, I drive on and begin to fuck his face, smoothly and not
ungently, but fucking it is.  Then I give up control to Tom, let him
have me, lose all sense beyond knowing that I am a beam of light, gold
white red, focused on the warm wet point where I enter the space of
this astounding man's body.  Seconds after this I shoot in his mouth.

He stays kneeling in front of me, his arms around my hips, his eyes
closed ecstatically, my cock slowly shrinking in his mouth.  He teases
it with his tongue, milks final droplets of cum from it, bringing me
(in sudden exquisite sensitivity) close to pain, so that I shake my
head no, no, and hold his head still.  He opens his eyes, stares up
into mine.  My elegant red dog, my Irish setter with his best bone, my
good boy fulfilled at my feet.  I stroke his hair.  I'm afraid I'm
going to cry and he won't understand, so I roughen the waters a
little: "Sweet Tom, sweet cocksucking Tom, super cocksucker Tom, you
suck cock like no one else sucks cock, keep licking that cock,
Tom,..."  A chant, decrescendo, to accompany his saying goodbye to my
cock.

He rises smoothly, now very much a man, his own cock jutting straight
out against my belly, demanding service from his slave (or so I feel;
probably he has a completely different take on what we're doing now,
probably he wasn't even a dog just a minute ago - but I'm not going to
suggest that we compare interpretations).  He kisses me, harshly this
time, his tongue marking out the space that his cock will fill,
claiming it as Tom's territory.  (I am already getting hard again.)

He must sense something of what I am feeling, for instead of letting
me slide to my knees to suck his cock, he grabs the hair at the back
of my head and pulls, drags me down so that I'm suddenly confronted by
his prick, by his smell.  He grinds my face into his crotch, rubs my
nose in his fucking sexuality, and just as I am about to beg for cock
(*saying the words*, not just making the motions, something I've never
felt trusting enough to do before, with any man) he fills Tom's
territory with that fucker in me, makes me cockslave, prickbitch, pure
dickloving faggot, essence of t-room down-on-your-fuckin-knees
drooling-for-dick cocksucker taking four guys at once.  And nice,
neat, kind of conventional Tom is fuckin' *dirty*, sexy-mean, rolling
his hips, holding my head and ramming his fuckrod down my throat,
sweat pouring down his red-gold body.


     See, I told you there'd be some good stuff down here.  I'm taking another
     break, to read that last paragraph out loud a few times, one finger
     pleasuring my asshole, the other hand beating my dick off.  You interested
     in playing around?

     Look, you aren't reading this to learn about some part of the gay world
     that's unfamiliar to you, are you?  You know, this stuff isn't journalism
     (about some secret gay fraternity), it's not social science (about how gay
     men negotiate sexual interactions in public settings), and it's not an
     analytic essay (reflecting on how attitudes about sex and sexuality give
     rise to the t-room subculture).  It's not supposed to be *typical*,
     *illustrative*, or any of that shit.  And certainly not *explanatory*.

     It's a story, a fairy story.  (You may guffaw here, if you wish.)  I can't
     deny that i take a moral stance in telling it, for by telling it so
     directly (I hesitate to say "straightforwardly"), I'm standing with my
     1960s self and defending him, and Tom, too.  True, they were ashamed,
     sometimes devastatingly so, of their feelings and their actions.  But I've
     dismissed their shame - deported it, exonerated them - and instead I
     recall their joy, and celebrate it.

     This wasn't going to be pornography when I started to write it.  Things
     just veered in the direction of some complex mixed genre - part
     reminiscence, part short story, part something to submit to a jack-off
     magazine - when I began celebrating that joy.  The undiluted recollection
     of sexual pleasure is strong stuff.

     So it's *supposed* to make you hot, and maybe a little anxious at the
     same time.  (Every story stretches your horizon a bit: *The Secret
     Garden*, *The Queen of Spades*, *Alice in Wonderland*, *This Side of
     Paradise*, *Cold Comfort Farm*, *The Periodic Table*, *Pride and
     Prejudice*, take your pick, nominate your own.  I figure this one
     stretches a lot of horizons pretty far, and we all know about the anxiety
     of seriously stretched horizons.)  But you must have realized it was
     pornography even before I broke in this time.  I mean, "fuckrod" is a
     giveaway.  No one has ever uttered this word without quotation marks; it's
     like "joystick" or "shitchute", a word ineptly thrown into a piece to
     avoid repeating one of those fine old powerful words like "cock" or
     "asshole".  (Then there is "pee-slit", which I recently came across in an
     issue of FirstHand and which struck me as so
     *peculiar* that my progress towards happy ejaculation was completely
     arrested.)

Subject: roseate tom, pt. 3

[the story continues, once again back on the main line.  HIGH CARNALITY
warning remains in force.]


I'm not very experienced, but I know enough to realize that a good
clue to what a man wants is what he gives you.  I hang on to Tom's
asscheeks, pulling him further into me.  And when he draws back for a
hard drive down my throat, I run two fingernails down his spine.  (I
don't go for his asshole, not pushing on him what he chose not to
offer me.)  As his face clenches for the last few seconds of the run
over the top, a flush spreads across his chest and belly, a wave of
bright pink, instant sunburn, just as hot.  (Something I've read
about, but not experienced.  This man is a real education.)  My
roseate Tom.

He shoots his load, and I swallow, then try to roll the cum around in
my mouth to savor every bit of him.  I want to take Tom's cum all
afternoon, I want him to shoot his stuff in my mouth until my jaws
ache hopelessly, I want to drink everything from his beautiful cock.
(A startling thought, never fully brought to consciousness before:
*including his piss*.  A wish I will eventually get, but not from
Tom.)

Within seconds he is chuckling with embarrassment.  "I should have
told you about that.  It scares the hell out of some guys, they think
I'm dying or something."  He chuckles his cock out of my mouth, and
(dog for a moment) I retrieve it, lose it, take it again; he feels
almost nothing now, so that I can mouthplay with his dick as much as I
please.

The flush subsides, as does his cock (but not mine).  We sit on the
small sofa - Schubert is now audible - and hold one another tenderly,
and with quiet fingers trace creeks of sweat down our chests and
bellies.  We small-talk about ourselves.  We try to explain our sexual
adventures and tastes to one another.  For a man with such wildness in
him, he seems terribly constrained.  Yes, his asshole is completely
off-limits in love-making; his nose wrinkles up when I chatter on
about how much I like being fucked (maybe a fleeting worry on his part
here that he cannot give me what I most desire, as if I wanted only
one thing, always the same thing).  And he maintains that he finds
pain a complete turn-off; I wonder.

But we end up finding a space to play in, spinning out dirty bragging
fantasies about what brought us together: sucking cocks.  Many cocks
at once, many cocks in succession, one perfect cock a month, wrinkled
delicate cocks, alarmingly long cocks, fat cocks, elegant cocks, oddly
tilted cocks, cut and uncut cocks, cocks of all races, cocks of all
ages, cocks with gray-blue veins popped out like dark hoses, cocks
delicately veined in purple tracings, cocks shooting cum on his face,
in my hair.  We build on the experiences we've had and give each other
the imagination of all the experiences we want to be going to have.

I invent the Gayity, an all-night porn theater in Chicago.  He spends
six exhausting but gratifying hours in the back of the balcony there
without getting up off his knees and never going more than a few
minutes without a dick down his throat.  He maintains he doesn't look
at any of his customers' faces, but that he remembers how their balls
hang, how they smell (none of them very raunchy, it seems), most of
all how their cocks feel in his mouth and how their cum tastes.  He is
untiring, always satisfied but never finished.  He is heroic
cocksucker, fabulous faggot.  (I cannot imagine he's ever stepped so
far out of himself to talk like this before.)  He makes me laugh, he
makes me horny.

I call him a dirty fuckin' slut, and (relief!) he takes it as a
compliment.  I have never called a man a slut before; it seems like
such a queeny way to talk.  And this one doesn't fuck; but he doesn't
take the word literally, either.

We are in another movement, andante.  I drop to my knees and stare
expectantly in his eyes - they are wide with arousal, enigmatic dark
green - I am happy to be back in my sexslave skin.  Now we trust one
another enough to go all feral.  No distinguishable words.  Grunts,
moans, whimpers.  (If we'd known one another a little better, I might
have trusted him to say the litany, not just hum the tune: SUCK that
hard DICK, cocksuckin' FAGGOT, EAT it, take it DOWN your FUCKIN'
THROAT, fuckin' QUEER.  DO ME, suck my BIG DICK, jocksniffer,
crotchboy, fuckin' SLUT.  ASSHOLE, LICK that shaft, ya hungry FAG,
SWALLOW my WHOLE FUCKIN' PRICK.  suck that HARD DICK, COCKSUCKIN'
faggot, EAT it...)  I think that it might been within his range.

Filled by my his sweetstrong cock, I watch my man (he throws his head
back, the cords in his neck become ropes binding me) and listen to him
(dog, wolf, red fox, he growls, and I feel his growls vibrate in my
throat, through his cock; in my hands, through his hipbones), and in
loud slow motion he comes.

The flush is darker than before, almost a flamingo passing between us.

His cum is sweeter the second time.

For his second suck, Tom the dirty fuckin' slut asks me to kneel on
the floor the way guys do in the t-room.  He stretches out belly-down
on the floor - "I've always wanted to do this on the john floor,
spread out over two stalls," he admits, "the hell with the dirt and
stuff" - and gets me off presto, in a shout that wants to be the word
F-U-U-U-C-K but never makes it past the vowel.  Gets me off because I
have been hard I think forever, because I am staring right down at his
beautiful (unfuckable) ass, covered like his legs in reddish downy
hair, finally getting to study this ass (until now turned away from
me, protected from the intrusion of my gaze), to watch it humping up
and down as he swallows my dick.

When I come to, I have a fierce need to piss.  I ruffle Tom's hair,
reflect on the fact that his head is resting in my lap, that his mouth
surrounds my cock, that if I simply hosed out hot piss he would have
to swallow it.  (More new, exciting thoughts.  But somewhere, in a
review of a boring book on art, or maybe religion, or maybe both, John
Updike cites the author's arresting opinion that at some time during
the act of love every man has fantasized about urinating within his
beloved.  Am I never going to have a truly fresh idea?)  When he
stopped being surprised, would he like it?  Would it be like soaking
up the piss-smell that surrounds us in our t-rooms and puts an edge on
what we do there, like taking everything I could offer my roseate boy?

Or would he choke on the piss, spit it out in my lap (*I* wouldn't
mind that at all), and roll away from me, hurt, angry, calling me a
disgusting sicko, and meaning it?  (That I would hate.)  I raise him
off my cock, whisper to him (Why whisper, when I have just been
shouting?) that I have to go to the john (suddenly polite,
euphemistic).

I rise shakily and walk to the bathroom, leaving the
door wide open (I want him to come watch me), and stand over the
toilet, immediately spraying out an uneven and poorly controlled
stream of piss.  (I want him to stand behind me, hold my cock, direct
the stream into the toilet for me; I want him to be in charge of my
piss, to help me to the end of this release just like the other.
Years later, Marianna will do this for me, and say that she quite
enjoys being in control of my cock.).  Oblivious to all of this, he is
flattening out the rucked-up Oriental rug in the living room, humming
along with the piano part.

Schubert comes to an end.  The April afternoon comes to an end.  I
have a family to go to, and I dress, without hurry.  He dresses too -
whether to keep me company in the act or to return to conventional
life, I can't tell - though I would have liked to part with him naked
and vulnerable and me in my hip-college-professor costume.  We kiss

goodbye, just on the lips, almost shyly.  He tells me he is moving to
Chicago in a few weeks.

Subject: roseate tom, pt. 4 (the last)

[the conclusion of "roseate tom".  there is no carnality warning
needed for this section.]


CODA

Seven, eight years later I am giving a talk, as usual, at the annual
meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society.  Another April day.  A
table of linguists for lunch before my paper, a kind of celebration.
We are noisy and noticeable; linguists talk a lot, and eat a lot too.

I glance out across the dining room and see that someone is staring at
me.  A lone man at a small table against the far wall.  Tom, wearing
his prep-school-master costume (handsome grey tweed coat; I assume
that his loafers are as before, maybe a little better leather, though
I can't see them).  We smile together, broadly, at one another.

I jump up - "Be back in a minute" - and go to his table, take the
other chair, hold both his hands, as I once did under a partition in a
notorious men's room.  I would lean over the table and kiss him (I am
openly gay now, but only close friends notice, since I'm also still
married), but I can see him predicting that this replay too might be
on the program, can see him sitting back slightly, making himself not
available for any further public display.  But we continue to hold
hands.  His palms are just slightly warmer than mine.

I am flooded with affection, blurt out, "I thought I'd never see you
again!  I can't tell you how happy I am to see you here."  Am I
presuming too much?  Why do I think our brief past means for him what
it does for me (whatever that is)?  Not to worry.  He grins, pulls a
self-deprecating face.  "I've just been sitting here, not eating my
lunch, trying to get up the courage to come over and talk to you, but
there are so many of you, and you all seem so absorbed in your
conversations, and I wasn't even sure you'd remember me.  So all I
could think to do was to try to stare you into noticing me, or maybe
to get someone at your table to notice my peculiar behavior and ask
you why that guy has been staring at you for fifteen minutes."  He
gulps for breath.  I had forgotten what a nice voice Tom has, a warm
baritone.  I hadn't forgotten that his sentences used to be a lot
shorter, and slower.  He is rattled, just as stirred as I am.

We chat about our lives.  Each of us has gotten the career he wanted,
and a certain success within his chosen world.  He gets enthusiastic
about his prep school boys, I get enthusiastic about my graduate
students.  Tom is here for a conference of secondary school teachers
of Latin and Greek; there is a session in fifteen minutes.

He points out the woman who had been sitting next to me, who is now in
animated discussion with two people across the table from her.  "Who's
she?  I've been watching her too.  She has a lot of style."

"That's Marianna, Tom."

"I thought so.  I'm glad I saw her."

I can't imagine how to pursue this thought.  I tell Tom that I am out
now, ask if he has someone to love him.  Milliseconds after the words
escape from my mouth, I realize that I shouldn't have chained these
ideas together this way, and that I should never have asked that last
question.  But he holds my hands, looks directly in my eyes, answers
without rancor or self-pity.  (Oh!  His eyes!  I have found the color
of those eyes in other lovers.)  "No, no one to love me.  I'd lose my
job in a day if I did anything that suggested to anyone I was gay.
Just having a male roommate might not look right."  A look of red
mischief: "But I know some great t-rooms."

I am waved at wildly.  Mustn't be late for my own paper.  I let go of
his hands, he smiles a red gold smile, my face flushes in response, we

say goodbye.  Good luck.