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between the bottom of her ass muscles. We were in bed, naked … and I didn’t know .”
    “Until the shower. The act of coming clean.”
    “The shower.” Only now did he start to blush. “Lana said she had a secret to share with me, and she thought I was ready. She squatted down and it all sort of … popped out into place. I think she just wanted to see what I’d do.”
    “And what did you do?”
    “I gagged. Dry heaved.”
    “And then?”
    “And then…? I rinsed out my mouth, and … I blew her.”
    Thatcher and her amazing clinical nod.
    “It wasn’t like I was thinking of her as a man, even though she told me her name was legally Alan, still, and she just made an anagram of the letters. To me she wasn’t a man, she was … was…”
    “A woman with a penis?”
    “Exactly. I’d never had a gay experience before, and I still didn’t think I had. I mean … look. I’ve spent the last six years living off a trust fund I got when I turned twenty-one.”
    He backtracked for several moments, describing his earlier life, so different from the path he was now on. Born to a family of Delaware real estate barons, where mother and father advocated a hands-off policy of parenting, turning over such domesticities to hired help, while advocating stoicism and scandal-free civility for the good of the family name. Prep school uniforms were de rigueur, and polite conformity the norm.
    “Twenty-one years was enough. I saw too many kids I’d grown up with turn into neurotic assholes. Centers of the universe. They might end up in the highest tax bracket, but I just knew that none of them would really live . I wanted to do a one-eighty away from all that. So I’ve spent the last six years trying everything I felt like I missed out on while growing up. Even if it was bad for me. And I’ve taken a special delight in things I know my family would hate. So, this? Lana? It was just so intriguing, I couldn’t leave it alone.” Gary spread his hands. “I don’t mean this to sound callous, but I went into my relationship with Lana like another new experience. Mostly decadent, but at the same time there was something hallucinatory about it. Sometimes even soulful.”
    “Is that why you wouldn’t make any promises of something more permanent?”
    “It was a fantasy. Something forbidden. You can’t live a fantasy every day of your life — it loses power then.”
    “What about love? Did you love her?”
    The toughest question of all. The two souls/one flesh proposition. He wandered back to the window, forehead to glass.
    “I suppose I did. Yes. Yes. I did love her.” He shook his head and sighed. Scratched that nagging itch. “That was the problem, wasn’t it? Somewhere along the way I think I got scared of what that was going to mean.”
    And wasn’t it the great human irony? Most of mankind viewing monogamy as right and proper, yet so many going to such lengths to sneak around it, to exploit the loopholes. While those who condemned it from the outset eventually succumbed to jealousies and the need to bond … only to later betray.
    We never learn, he thought. That’s the only constant.

    *

    Lana was interred a couple days later, ushered into the afterlife by a minister who looked more befuddled than grieving. The square pegs of the world were always more difficult to eulogize.
    The turnout was small, scarcely a dozen paying last respects under a sky that couldn’t make up its mind between bright and overcast. The sun played masquerades with clouds, and the air was gravid with the damp of a southern spring.
    Beneath his shirt, the itch still nagged. Heat rash, perhaps, unaccustomed to such brutal humidity. He’d probably have to see a doctor.
    He knew at a glance they were Lana’s nighttime friends, a trio in gray and black who oversaw the sendoff with a melancholic brooding. Beneath overcoats worn against the unpredictably hostile sky, they were of indeterminate gender, caught somewhere between the poles of