“What is the point, Lawrence?” Bron looked back at his cards. Several times in his life, people had pointed out to him that what friends he had tended to be people who had approached him for friendship, rather than people he’d approached. It meant that a goodly percentage of his male friends over the years had been homosexual, which, at this stage, was simply a familiar occurrence. “You’re the libidinous one. I admit it, my relationships with women have never been the best—though, by the gods of any sect you name, sex itself never seemed to be the problem. But that’s why I moved in here: to get away from women and sex.”
“Oh, really! Alfred rushing his little girl friends in here after midnight and hustling them out again before dawn—it may be screwing, but it isn’t sex. And anyway, it doesn’t bother anyone, though I’m sure it would just destroy him if he found that out.”
“Certainly doesn’t bother me,” Bron said. “Or you hustling your little boyfriends in and out—”
“Wishful thinking! Wishful thinking!” Lawrence closed his eyes lightly and raised his chin. “Ah, such wishful thinking.”
“If I remember correctly,” Bron said, “that evening in the corridor, when I said ‘no,’ you called me a faggot-hater and demanded to know what I was doing in an all-male co-op if I didn’t like to go to bed with men—”
Lawrence’s eyes opened; his chin came down. “—whereupon you politely informed me that there was a gay—you know, politically that has, from time to time, been a very nasty word, till that silly public-channel series denatured it once and for all back in the Seventies, the same one which reestablished ‘into’ into the language—men’s co-op two streets away that might take me in for the night. Bastard!”
“You kept on insisting I screw you.”
“And you kept on insisting that you didn’t want to go to bed with anybody, in between explaining to me, in the most sophomoric manner, that I couldn’t expect this kind of commune to be more than twenty percent gay—where you got that dreadfully quaint statistic from, I’m sure / shall never know; then you went on to explain that, nevertheless, due to your current disinterest in women you felt yourself to be politically homosexual—”
“At which point you said you couldn’t stand political homosexuals. Lawrence, what is the point?”
“And I still can’t. The point is merely—” Lawrence returned his eyes to the board: in the Mountains of Norhia a situation had been developing for some time that Bron had hoped would turn to his advantage, if Lawrence would only keep the transparent screens of Egoth and Dartor out of it: the Mountains of Norhia were where Lawrence was looking—“that my feelings toward you, later that night as I lay awake in alcoholic overstimulation, tossing and turning in my narrow bed where you had so cavalierly dumped me and left, were rather like you have been avoiding describing your feelings toward that woman.”
“I thought you passed out—” Bron’s eyes went from the board to Lawrence’s. “Pardon me?”
“I said, right after you so considerately put me to bed—I mean I suppose you could have left me lying on the hall floor; passed out? Ha!—I felt about you rather like you feel about her. I hated you, I thought you were hardhearted, insensitive, ungenerous and pignoli-brained; and quite the most beautiful, dashing, mysterious, and marvelous creature I’d ever laid eyes on.”
“Just because you wanted to ... ?” Bron frowned. “Are you suggesting that / want to—... with her?”
“I am simply noting a similarity of reactions. I would not presume to suggest any of my reactions might be used as a valid model for yours—though I’m sure they can.”
Bron’s frown dropped to the micro-mountains, the miniscule trees, the shore where tiny waves lapped the bright, barbaric sands. After seconds, he said: “She gave me one of the most marvelous experiences of my life. At first I only thought she’d lead me to it. Then suddenly I found out she’d conceived, created, produced, and directed ... She took my hand, you see. She took my hand and led me—”
Lawrence sighed. “And when you put your arm around my feeble, palsied shoulders—”
Bron looked up again, still frowning. “If we all had died this evening, Lawrence, I wouldn’t have died the same person as I was if I’d died this morning.”
“Which is what your initial comments about the whole thing seemed to suggest—before you began to intimate how cold, inhuman, heartless, and untrustworthy this sweet creature obviously was. I was only trying to remind you.” Lawrence sighed again. “And I suppose I did, at least that night, love you in spite—”
Bron’s frown became a scowl. “Hey, come on—”
Lawrence’s wrinkled face (below the horseshoe of white furze surrounding the freckled pate) grew mockingly wry. “Wouldn’t you know. Here I am, in another passionately platonic affair with an essential louse.”
Seeing her, Bron said: “Lawrence, look, I do think of you as my friend. Really. But ...” Lawrence’s face came back, wryness still there. “But look, I’m not seventeen. I’m thirty-seven. I told you before, I did my experimenting when I was a kid—a good deal of it, too. And I’m content to stick by the results.” The experiments’ results, confirming him one with eighty percent of the population, according to those “quaint” statistics, was that he could function well enough with either sex; but only by brute, intellectualized fantasy could he make sex with men part of his actual life. The last brutal in-tellectualizing he’d done of any sort was his attendance at the Temple of the Poor Children of the Avestal Light and Changing Secret Name; brutality was just not what he was into. “I like you. I want to stay your friend. But, Lawrence, I’m not a kid and I’ve been here before.”
“Not only are you a louse. You are a presumptuous louse. I am not thirty-seven. I am over seventy-three. I too have been here before. Probably more times than you have.” Lawrence bent over and contemplated the board again, while Bron contemplated (again) the phenomenon by which, between some time he thought of as then (which contained his experiments with both sex and religion) and the time he thought of as now (which contained ... well, all this), old people had metamorphosed from creatures three or four times his age to creatures who were only two up or less. Lawrence said: “I do believe it’s your move. And don’t worry, I intend to stay your friend.”
“What do you think I should do, Lawrence?”
“Whatever you think you should do. You might try playing the game—hello, Sam!” who had come up to the table. “Say, why don’t you two play together against me. Bron’s gone quite mushy over some theatrical woman in the u-1 and can’t get up nerve to go back and find her, which is fine by me. But it’s shot his concentration all to hell, which isn’t. Come on, Sam. Sit down and give him a hand.”
On the point of spluttering protest, Bron made room on the couch for the jovial, brilliant, powerful—should he just get up and leave? But Sam asked something about his meld strategy and, when Bron explained, gave a complimentary whistle. At least Bron thought it was complimentary.
They played. Tides turned. So did the score. By the time they adjourned for the evening (elementary players, Lawrence had explained, shouldn’t even hope to play a game to completion for the first six months), Bron and Sam were pounding each other’s shoulders and laughing and congratulating themselves and turning to congratulate Lawrence and, of course, they would all get together tomorrow evening and take up where they’d left off.
As Bron walked down the corridor toward his room, he decided warmly that the trouncing he had given the old pirate, even if it had taken Sam’s help to do it, had made the evening worth it.
At his door, he stopped, frowned toward the door opposite.
He hadn’t even asked Sam how Alfred was. Should he knock now and find out? A sudden memory of one of the few things like a personal conversation he’d ever had with Alfred returned: once Alfred had actually taken Bron to a restaurant (recommended by Flossie, who had had it recommended to him by a friend of Freddie’s) which turned out to cater almost entirely to well-heeled (and rather somber) nine—to thirteen-year-olds. (The younger ones were simply swathed in fur!) Only a handful of adolescents even near Alfred’s age were present, and they all seemed to be overlooking the place with patent good will and palpable nostalgia. Bron was the single adult there. During dinner Bron had been rambling on about something or other when Alfred leaned across the table and hissed, “But I don’t want relationships! I don’t want friendships! I want sex—sometimes. That’s what I’m doing at Serpent’s House. Now get off my back!” Two sexually unidentifiable children, hands locked protectively around their after-dinner coffee bulbs, turned away small, bald, brown faces to muffle smiles in their luxuriant collars. Yet he still considered Alfred his friend, because Alfred, like all his others, had come to him, still came to him, asking that he do this, or could he lend him that, or would he mail this coupon to that advertiser, or this letter of protest about what some other had sent him, pick up this or that on the way home, or where should he throw that out and, yeah, sure you can have it if you want it. With varying amounts of belligerence, Bron complied to these requests (to keep peace, he told himself at first), only to discover that, in his compliance, he valued the relationship—friendship, he corrected himself (because he was thirty-seven, not seventeen). I suppose, Bron thought, standing in the hall, I understand him, which has something to do with it. I certainly understand him better than I understand Lawrence. Or Sam. (Or that woman ... ? Again her face returned to him, turning in delightful laughter.) He turned to his door.