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spotlight stare until he finally says, “I see you.”
    Seems simple enough.
    I stroll around the room, making eye contact with people, but they just glaze past as if I weren’t there. Finally a man stops in front of me, a cadaverous executive with gray hair and a gray face to match.
    “I see you,” I say.
    He stares into my eyes, like he’s looking for something he lost in there, then just shakes his head and skulks off.
    I turn and there’s a leathery woman with skin like a topography map. Even her tan has a tan.
    “I see you,” I say.
    She breezes right past me. “Sorry.”
    I begin to sweat. I’m trying too hard. I’m not capable of revealing myself, of making myself vulnerable. Once again I’m Morales in
A Chorus Line
, feeling nothing. Except the feeling that this bullshit is absurd.
    I approach a tiny woman, no more than five feet tall, slender, but with hips like parentheses. Before I can say anything, she grabs me by the elbows.
    “Can you see me?” she asks.
    “Yes.”
    “You sure?”
    I take a moment to look at her. She wears the short, layered haircut of someone with neither the time nor the inclination to bother, a pair of round tortoiseshell glasses, and the kind of worried expression you see on child actors when they say, “Please, mister, don’t hurt my dog.” Her eyes have gray circles under them, like she’s been up since 1972, and her mouth is surrounded with those hairline fractures that smokers get.
    “I see you,” I say.
    “Oh, thank Gawd,” she squawks with the distinctive nasal whine of the outer boroughs. “I was beginning to lose it.”
    “Can you see me?”
    “Of course,” she says. “You’re right in fronta me.” She puts out her hand. “I’m Sandra Pecorino,” she says. “Like the nutty, flavorful cheese.”
    “Edward Zanni.”
    “No talking!” says one of the Growth Facilitators.
    Sandra grabs me by the hands. “Don’t leave me,” she whispers. “I can’t take any more rejection.”
    We stand there awkwardly, a pair of thirteen-year-olds at their first slow dance. Finally Sandra whispers, “I came here to work on my relationship issues. And because I thought there might be men who are triple-S.”
    “Triple-S?”
    “Sensitive, single, and straight.” She rolls her owl eyes at me. “Two outta three ain’t bad.”
    Yikes. Does it show? I feel like gay bits of me are just slipping out every which way. I’m about to tell her that women are my second-favorite people to have sex with, that I’m not so much gay as gay
ish
—Almost Gay—when she says:
    “I don’t know what it is, Edwid. I’m a magnet for the gays. Like Barbra Streisand or Bette Midlah. Lemme guess. You’re an actor, too.”
    “How’d you know?”
    “Also a magnet. Hence my relationship issues.”
    A gong sounds and once again we clap rhythmically. Then we’re informed that we’re to separate into two groups—those who have already done EGG’s three-day introductory course and those of us who have not. Willow takes her place with the Haves, while Sandra and I remain with the Have-nots, which are then split into smaller “Hatcheries.” As I follow Sandra into a meeting room, I ask one of the Growth Facilitators where the bathroom is.
    “After,” he says.
    “Excuse me?”
    “You can go after.”
    “But—”
    “Don’t say ‘but.’”
    “Why?”
    “It’s like your body. The only thing that comes from a but is shit.”
    And an egg, I suppose, but I don’t want to argue. Instead I sit down, crossing my legs to keep from wetting myself. The chairs are arranged in pairs so that each one of us gets our own personal Growth Facilitator; mine is a guy with the wide-eyed look of someone who uses coffee-bean suppositories. His name tag reads Bruce. Or Bryce. I can’t tell.
    “Why are you here?” he asks, his eyes like headlights.
    “I don’t know.”
    “Don’t say, ‘I don’t know.’ You do know. That’s an excuse you use to avoid taking responsibility for your