“You mean his failure to put me off?”
“No. He’s put you off repeatedly. He puts you off every time we come in here.”
“No.”
“Yes. He just never does it by mentioning girlfriends or all that. If he was—you know—‘normal,’ he would have said so ages ago. He obviously likes boys.”
“But he finds me repulsive?”
“An old, leering drunk.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“But he’s always so chatty, serving the drinks and taking the tip and all.”
“He’s the waiter.”
“Well, sometimes when I come in alone, I mean without you, in midafternoon when it’s not very busy and poor Tristan isn’t bombarded with all this work, he has gotten very, very flirty with me.”
“Mmm.” Suddenly he was at our table.
We looked up as this blessed angel lifted our drinks from his tray. (A small twinge here tells me it is demeaning and wrong to have condemned anyone, even one so incidental as our waiter, Tristan—though let me point out that he later, in fact, became Herbert’s intern, excelled at courting collectors of all persuasions, was hired away by a famous art center in Minneapolis and then a museum in New York, where he has now become the golden boy of contemporary art curating, exactly as Herbert predicted and despite being just as stupid and poorly educated as I had suspected he was, a fitting poster child for America’s fantastically undiscriminating upward mobility, where anyone with minimal beauty, a pleasing ignorance, and initiative can rise to any height—to condemn him, that is to say, to the tired idealizations of romantics and colonialists [angels, sylphs, savages, and the like], such as have been routinely inflicted on women and other exotics, like children. Too bad. Herbert and I gave Tristan a gift when we elevated him to such heights, especially considering that the alternative was a life of dull, respectful sobriety and caution so boring we all might as well have been dead.)
“Scotch neat,” our servile Eros mumbled as he set Herbert’s drink in front of him.
“The usual,” Herbert answered brightly, smiling at the boy.
“Uh-huh, whatever. And a gin and tonic here for your, uh, partner in crime.” This absentminded aside sent a jolt of electricity through both of us, lifting Herbert’s eyebrows as he stared at me across the drinks, silent, until the boy wandered off with his enormous tip (40 or 50 percent, whatever change was left on the tray).
“Partner in crime, did you hear that?” Herbert asked rhetorically, because of course I’d heard it. It was all either of us had heard. “He is such a tease.”
“He probably thinks we’re boyfriends.”
“Don’t be idiotic.”
Tristan shuffled out of view—my view, in any case. Herbert kept his marksman’s stare fixed just to the right of my face, beyond which the boy, to judge by the sound of what I could not see, was adjudicating a dispute between the two lady customers (one still unwrapping) and a wonderfully tall Nigerian “croupier” who, in the lilting British tones of a public-school boy, had ridiculed the ladies’ objections to “an awful lot of indoor smoking.” Shackles routinely allowed what state law evidently forbade. Tristan offered them a table near to ours (no smoke here), still behind me, and they took it. I could feel the weather arriving with the coats. I slouched a little closer to my drink so Herbert could see better.
“I wasn’t being idiotic. We certainly look as though we’re married.”
“Mmm, that’s a thought, not a pretty one.” Herbert sipped his drink and continued his surveillence.
“You’re handsome. Everyone says so.” This drew a brief glance and a smile.
“Well, it’s not true. I look like a doll whose head has been chewed on by a rat.” In fact the description was a good one. “‘Gnawed Doll’s Head,’ like some sort of Swedish porn star. You look that way too.”
“Hmm, really?”
“Yes. Hank says we’re practically identical. We would have handsome children, all sculpted and chewed upon.”
“Would you have sex with our son?” I asked. “I mean, if we had one?” Herbert grimaced, as though his drink were bad. Tristan appeared beside us, and the grimace became a leering, amplified smile.
“We were just discussing you,” Herbert announced, ignoring my question. “I mean the work you’ll be doing for the museum.”
“Hmm.” Tristan might have been amused. At the very least he was cheerful.
“It looks fairly certain I can get you credit for that Stein project.”
“Oh, right, the Stein project.” Tristan squatted by our table and smiled. (I know for a fact Herbert was making this up. Tristan had been carrying a copy of Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives one evening when we were drinking, and Herbert managed to turn this assigned text into Tristan’s métier simply by prolonged badgering of the boy, plus Herbert’s poor memory and fulsome imagination.)
“I mean in addition to the stipend. But you’re going to have to start this—what is it you have here?—this term, or semester.”
“Block.” We both stared at the boy. “You know, seven blocks, five interims, plus the optional summer block?”
“Right. This block, which must be coming up soon, since there are so many of them. The work can go on however long you like, but we need to get started on it very soon.” The boy’s absent, cheerful face gave no clue what he was thinking. He might have been a genius or the victim of some experimental surgery. “You did tell me you were a big—what was it, fan—of Gertrude Stein, didn’t you?”
“Oh, yeah.” He perked up at her mention. “Big-time fan.”
“Well, this is your chance to put that expertise to work—I mean, not much work, it’s really very easy, but your enthusiasm for Stein will be an asset.”
“Terrific.”
“I have a sheaf of family letters, amazing stuff, mostly from her nephew and sister-in-law, which are just a joy to read.”
“It sounds completely fascinating.”
“Was he gay?” I interrupted, hoping to steer us, at last, toward the shoals of the Tristan question.
“‘He’? Who ‘he’?” Herbert’s sour tone and grimace swatted at me, like hands chasing away some buzzing insect. “Gertrude Stein was gay, everyone knows that. You don’t mean ‘she,’ do you?”
“He.” I strained. “The nephew.”
“Oh, I don’t know. He was certainly miserable enough.” Herbert turned his very broad and cold shoulder toward me. “Anyway, Tristan won’t be concerned with all that. He’ll be too busy going after these missing drawings. We’ll probably have to send someone off to Paris to get them.”
“Cool.” It was me, interrupting before the boy could get this word in edgewise. In fact Tristan never used the word, nor was he about to use any word, because duty had called him away. “Super cool.”
“Thank you very much for frightening the boy.”
“What, with the word ‘gay’?”
“With your rudeness. Why do you have to make a wreck of every conversation I have with anyone else?”
“I asked one question.”
“You derailed the conversation.”
“The question