Exiles in America(25)

don’t know. I enjoyed this afternoon. But I don’t need to do it again. I was cu-

rious, that’s all. I’ve satisfied my curiosity. But we talked about maybe getting together next Sunday. Don’t look at me like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like I don’t know myself as well as you know me.”

“No, I was thinking you really do seem content and relaxed.”

“I am,” said Daniel. “Because it was fun. It’s fun to have a fuck buddy.

That’s all this is. Or was. I’m not sure I like him. We talked, but it was all

about his work, not mine. He’s utterly self-absorbed. Which is fine for a fuck

buddy, but not for a friend or lover.”

Zack suddenly understood the smell of smoke on Daniel’s skin: it was

Abbas’s postcoital cigarette. Zack didn’t picture them having sex—he neither

wanted nor needed to visualize it—but he could picture Abbas enjoying a cig-

arette afterward.

“So is he gay? Or just horny?”

“Oh, he’s gay. Or bisexual. Or maybe he just likes sex. But he loves Elena

and his kids. He made that clear.”

“Will she know?”

Daniel arched his eyebrows. “Beats me. He said she knows he’s bi, but I

didn’t come right out and ask what their rules are.”

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“Does he know that I’ll know?”

“Yes. I told him I’d tell you. He didn’t seem to care. Maybe because we’re

both gay men and he thinks anything goes with us. Or because we don’t

count. I’m not sure.”

Zack was nodding, then he stopped nodding, afraid it looked like he was

giving Daniel permission. Daniel didn’t need permission. “Well, I can’t speak

for the Rohanis. They’re both grown-ups. My chief concern, as always, is how

you might feel when this falls apart.”

“But there’s nothing to fall apart. We’re just messing around.”

“Okay. But be careful.”

Daniel smiled, a sheepish, guilty, pleased smile. “You know what’ll hap-

pen? Next Sunday, I’ll want to see him again, but he’ll be busy or have

changed his mind or have found someone else. And I’ll be pissed for a week

or two. But that’ll be the end of it and I can go back to my normal, happy, lazy

life.”

Zack found himself nodding again and stopped. “But you had fun today?”

“Oh yes. I had fun today.”

“Good. I’m glad.”

“I’m glad you’re glad.” And Daniel got up, thanked Zack with a squeeze

of his shoulder, and went down the hall to his room.

We are such a pair, Zack told himself. I am such a case. He was pleased

that he felt no pain, but guilty he felt no pain. He did not feel jealous. He did

not even feel envious. Those emotions were merely childish expressions of

private dissatisfaction; he was glad to have outgrown them. But could one be

fully human without feeling jealous now and then?

Brahms continued to whisper in the dining room, finished with the frantic

first movement and humming the middle section: mature, sweet, and melan-

choly.

11

During their first years together , Zack and Daniel had each other

and they had their work, and that was plenty. Work was important to

both men, and more difficult and challenging than love.

Zack did not have an easy time starting out as a psychiatrist. Homosexual-

ity was no longer labeled a disease in 1981, but the psychoanalytic community

still treated it as a moral failing, even in New York City. Zack’s own supervi-

sor, who was gay, advised him to stay in the closet until he got his certification.

Zack refused, and the New York Psychoanalytic Institute rejected his appli-

cation. He turned instead to the less prestigious National Psychological Asso-

ciation for Psychoanalysis, with its motley offices in an old row house on West

Thirteenth Street, and its motley people, more social workers than doctors,

flakier than Zack’s other peers but also looser and more human. Zack grew

fond of the NPAP. Their reputation may have slowed his career, but he was

later glad of that. He avoided the faster track, the traps and pressure of ex-

pensive success.

When AIDS came along, sexual honesty became not just a political good

but a moral necessity. Zack did an enormous amount of volunteer work

through Gay Men’s Health Crisis. He saw many sick men, and even more men

who were healthy but scared. It was a crash course in the dangers of self-pity

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and self-hatred. For a time Zack wondered if gay men were the most dysfunc-

tional people on the planet. Then he began to see more straight people—