The bathhouse was a straight shot north of Michael’s home, tucked into the northeastern corner of Volunteer Park. Peddling into the parking lot, Michael felt serene, the cool night air cleansing him of the anxiety that had ribbed him all day. Club Athenaeum, with its Roman-inspired architecture, columns, burbling fountain, and hotel lighting, contrasted starkly with the neighboring firs. Last week, an article had come out in The Stranger called “The Commodified Queer,” in which the writer denigrated the bathhouse as the latest instance of a subculture sterilized by capitalism. Michael was not bothered by this. He locked his bike and admired the lilac bush growing behind the rack, how its glossy leaves caught the streetlights. Breathing in, he was disappointed to detect only the barest trace of their blooms. Doubt fell over him — should he have gone with Cass and Rachel to the concert in Portland? — but he cast it off. His roommates’ absence was the reason he’d been able to come. Audacity, or something like it, marched him up the stairs. He only paused when the door was halfway open.
“Welcome to Club A,” a voice called from inside. “Why don’t we keep the cold out with the cold?”
Michael swallowed and stepped into a tiled room. Bright ferns hung from the ceiling. The air, warm and suffused with the smell of passionfruit, felt tropical. Behind the faux-marble counter, a young guy in a polo said, “Come in, come in. I was about to die from boredom.” He gestured toward the countertop, where condom packets had been organized in geometric patterns. “There’s only so much you can do with a square.”
Relieved, Michael laughed harder than warranted. “That’s my favorite,” he said, pointing at one of the arrangements. “The yellow and blue are good together.”
“Have you ever used banana?” The receptionist picked up a yellow packet as if it were a writhing crawdad. “Disgusting.”
Michael hadn’t tried banana, or any other flavor; he’d never given a blowjob to someone wearing any kind of condom. He wondered if that was protocol at the bathhouse. The still-frowning receptionist seemed familiar to him. Hadn’t he seen him at Madison Beach, muscled and blonde, hairless in a neon speedo? The description matched dozens of men who gathered at the lakefront’s north end during the summer. Occasionally, Michael would watch them from the area that he, Cass, and Rachel preferred, wondering if the fastest way to queer ingratiation came through feathering oneself after a chosen flock. The beachgoers were not his clan, yet he still envied them their community, which filled the evenings with riotous laughter.
“First time?” the guy asked, sweeping the condoms into a glass fishbowl and accepting Michael’s credit card.
Michael nodded.
“Well, the most important thing here is consent. Do you consent to consent?”
“I do.”
The guy slid the card back. “Peachy. The second most important thing is fun. Duh! Put your stuff in a locker, then fly free. We’ve got a sauna, a lounge, a pool, two jacuzzis, and twenty private rooms. The boys are going to eat you up.” He added the last bit with an outraged flourish, though it was clear by its flat delivery that the line was given to everyone.
“Should I take some of these?” Michael asked, knocking his knuckle against the bowl of condoms and discovering it to be made of plastic.
Hands shooed him away. “You’re in a kingdom of latex. There’s plenty inside.”
In the empty locker room, Michael stripped, wrapped a towel around his waist, and replied to a message from Cass. She’d sent a photo of herself and Rachel flipping off the camera in the middle of a dark crowd.
Love you, too! Michael typed. Hope the show sucks.
As soon as the message sent, his phone began ringing. Michael’s shoulders tensed, as if he’d just tripped an alarm. He considered ignoring Cass, then worried this might rouse suspicion; plus, she had a habit of redialing until he picked up. “Hi, Cassandra,” he said. “How can I be of service?”
“Mikey!” Cass shouted, her voice fighting its way through hundreds of others. “We love you! Why don’t you come and dance with us?”
Michael leaned against his locker. “It’s too late for that, buggy. I’m off to bed.”
“Bed!” Cass bellowed. “He’s going to bed, Rach. Michael is going to bed.”
The two began yelling indecipherably. He nearly hung up, then Cass said, “Rachel says you’re a very boring boy. Are you in a cave?”
Michael’s body tightened further. He knew that his fear of being found out was absurd even as his pulse thumped in his neck. Cass would never be able to extrapolate the bathhouse from the sounds of the locker room, yet it felt like she might. His worry left him when he remembered his friends were on drugs. “I am in a cave,” he said. “I’m in a cave full of beautiful men.”
Cass groaned. “I want to be in a cave full of beautiful men. I’m covered in beer, Mike. It’s in my undies. Why aren’t you here? Do you hate us?”
“I love you dearly,” Michael said, “and I’m hanging up now.”
If Cass replied, Michael did not hear her. He tucked the phone in his locker and shut it.
“Parents?”
Michael turned to see a middle-aged man unlacing his shoes. With his graying beard and bald head, he looked like Kratos after a decade of easy living. Michael had always been attracted to this type: a daddy, and particularly one who seemed to have already summited his peaks, thrown his spears, and fought off his demons. A paragon for masculinity at rest.
“Pardon?” Michael asked.
“Every call I have with my parents finishes with me hanging up on them, with love.” The man unbuttoned and pulled off his shirt. His chest hair followed a gradient: across his pecs, the curls were silver; by the belt line, they were black. Michael shifted his legs, accounting for a redirection in blood flow, then met the man’s gaze. A small, zagging scar mischiefed his brow.
“Friends,” Michael said. “Wonderful, beloved, and very obnoxious on molly.”
The man’s laugh was deep and percussive. “Aren’t we all,” he said, undoing his buckle. He reached for the button of his jeans, then stopped, placing his hands on his hips and letting the loose ends of the belt sway before him. Michael sensed a taunt in the gesture, even a tease, and when he caught the man’s eyes this time, he hoped to hold his stare so that his fast-rising erection might go unnoticed. “I’m Frank,” the man said.
“Michael.”
“Michael.” Frank spoke the name as if for the first time. “Who is like God?”
It took Michael a moment to find Frank’s meaning. He was many years away from Sunday school. “Not I,” he said.
Frank grinned. “God bless godlessness. Maybe I’ll catch you inside, Michael. First, a shower. I’m straight from work and probably smelling like it.”
Michael wanted to say something smart and suggestive that would lead to a shared shower, if not an immediate takedown on the locker room floor. “Cool,” he offered. He remained fixed in his stance, hoping Frank might take charge. Only when Michael was midway out the door did he hear Frank laugh again. It would have made him self-conscious, had its sound not been so pure.
The bathhouse’s central corridor was tiled in emerald. Steam collected in a greenish haze, and glossed the ceramic with a slick sheen. Michael knew that the passage from reality to fantasy could be treacherous — there was no forgetting the disaster when he and his ex-boyfriend, Peter, tried to incorporate restraints into their sex life — yet he felt as if he’d safely reached his sought-after shore. Bathhouses had first figured into his mind during a seminar he’d taken sophomore year of college called “Queer Utopias.” He immediately coveted their classicism and raunchiness, a mutual infusion of histories near and far. Like many of his fantasies, they also intimidated him, which was part of why he had never visited one. Embarrassingly, the very sterility lamented by The Stranger writer was the fulcrum to his choosing Club Athenaeum as opposed to any of Seattle’s other bathhouses: he felt safe in its corporate gleam.
His enchantment dissipated when he entered the lounge. On one IKEA couch, a man was asleep, his naked body halfway swallowed by cushions and his naked face presented to the room with such impropriety as to be disconcerting. Adjacent, two younger men were in the midst of an argument while watching a construction-themed porno projected on the wall. The half-built brick wall behind the two actors was clearly made of cardboard.
“Prison abolition is great in theory,” one of the men said, undoing his towel and releasing a significant hard-on that emerged pillar-like from his shaved crotch. “But so many things are. Driverless cars.” He took hold of himself. “Communism.”
The other, a redhead with a concave chest, reached over, batted the first’s hand away, and began working him at an irregular rhythm. “You sound like my dad. I’m not trying to re-live Thanksgiving dinner tonight. Let’s agree to disagree.”
The first opened his mouth, then dropped the debate in place of a moan. When he reached over to the redhead’s lap, their faces fell into the same discontented expression, the projector’s light fixing them both in a staticky blue. The true countenance of the rapt audience was not one of wonder but detachment; the better the entertainment, the more thorough the facial abandon. Michael turned to the wall himself when the redhead glanced his way. The construction workers had stripped to nothing but helmets and neon vests. One was draped over a wrecking ball while the other came at him from behind.
Michael found the sauna, where three older men sat meditatively staring at a pile of glowing coals, and then the row of private rooms. Many of the doors were closed, and the few that weren’t revealed men sitting by themselves, looking like the divided occupants of purgatory. They had prepaid and were waiting for someone to join them. As Michael went by, each raised his head with timid hope. Michael tried to project benign disinterest. Though they were all in pursuit of the same grail, he found their disregard for pretense off-putting. This was the same reason he insisted on drinks when meeting someone from Grindr: stripped of all ceremony, sex felt too base. This, he recognized with dissatisfaction, was a gap between his acting and imaginary selves. Alone in his bedroom, Michael might take six men at once, or drop for a stranger midway through his morning run. In reality he wanted to be wined and dined, or at least flirted with, before any physical contact was made. He saw these particular men as residents of the other side, delightfully abject in his mind but depressingly abject in person. When the last man saluted him, Michael gave a halfhearted salute back.
At the end of the hall, the rectangular pool sat placid and unoccupied. The water was soft as silk when Michael entered it. The last time he’d gone swimming was in September, for Rachel’s 24th birthday. After sharing a bottle of wine and a block of brie, they had waded out into Lake Washington, the surface of which was gold-flecked with twilight. “I’m peeing,” Cass said, her lips stained with merlot. Michael could feel the heat wrapping around his legs. It did not bother him. It felt like one layer of the evening’s ongoing ode to friendship, joining with the light and starlings, the sailboats and mountains. He was drunk and experiencing real time through memory’s lens, each element made rich with its own anticipatory nostalgia. “Isn’t it strange,” Rachel asked, “that we haven’t known each other forever?” The question bore the stoner sincerity that Rachel was famous for, yet on that night he and Cass were dumbstruck. Because it was strange. Michael felt he’d known them not just within this life but beyond, where they had gathered together in primordial darkness.
Michael sank to the bottom of the club’s pool, feeling the corrugated scratch of the floor on the pads of his feet. With his eyes closed, he could easily imagine Rachel and Cass dancing at their concert, sacred light coming through the converted church’s stained glass. He suddenly wished they knew where he was. He felt endangered by the solitude, even at risk of vanishing. He kicked off the bottom, relieved to meet air again. Frank stood at the edge of the pool, wet from the shower, his towel wrapped loosely.
“I thought you were drowning,” he said.
Michael was disoriented, the spell of isolation ebbing off of him. “You didn’t want to save me?”
Frank frowned. “I guess not.” After dipping his foot in the pool, he shook his head and turned toward the smaller of the two jacuzzis. “I’m a warm-water man,” he said. “Meet me once you’re done with all that.”
The surface of the jacuzzi churned as Michael settled in, the chlorinated froth gathering against his body like sea foam. He sat across from Frank, and though their legs didn’t touch, the tub’s dimensions kept them close. This obscured proximity heightened the situation’s eroticism, like a bulge in boxer briefs. Michael had always delayed the removal of that final garment until he had thoroughly soaked the fabric with anticipatory leakage. The longer any barrier held, the higher the pressure on both sides had to build.
“Michael,” Frank said, still seeming to test the name, a foreign word or archaism. “What brings you out tonight?”
“The public pool’s closed,” Michael said. “I can’t miss my laps.”
“Certainly not.”
“And you?”
“Me?” Frank spread his arms royally, water eddying in the darkness of his armpits. “I’m here to loosen up. I spent all day fishing trash out of Puget Sound.”
“For work?”
“I’m a conservationist, known otherwise as a masochist. What about you? How do you fill your days?” One of his feet found Michael’s.
“I’m a math teacher,” Michael said, stretching out his other foot until it met the bench between Frank’s legs. When he maneuvered it into the crook of Frank’s knee, he saw Frank’s Adam’s apple drop and rise. The tendons behind the knee were firm, yet the skin was remarkably soft, rubbed smooth of its hair. “I haven’t unhunched my shoulders all year.”
Frank’s laugh reverberated up Michael’s leg. “It sounds like we’ve both earned a massage. What do you say? Up for a trade?”
“Yes,” Michael said, the word emerging heavy with want. Frank beckoned him across the jacuzzi’s roiling center. Michael came close enough for their chests to almost touch, and their lips, and then he turned away, settling between Frank’s legs. Something materialized in Frank’s mouth, one of those nameless, articulate sounds. His hands found Michael’s hips, then slid up the ribs before meeting at the nape of his neck.
“Why haven’t I seen you before?” he asked.
“It’s my first time.”
“I don’t mean here. It’s my first time at this place, too. I mean the other spots. Steamworks, The Z Club.” He began kneading down Michael’s spine. “I’d remember your face.”
Michael would normally have been disappointed to hear that Frank had been to other bathhouses, preferring them to be passengers on the same maiden voyage. But as it stood, Frank could have told him anything and Michael would have stayed, his broader faculties immobilized by pleasure. He debated telling Frank the truth, knowing that inexperience was a fraught condition to bear. When he said it really was his first visit to any bathhouse, Frank’s hands fell away. Michael feared he’d lost him, then Frank grasped his hips and pulled him back. Michael felt Frank’s pecs against his shoulders, his erection on the small of his back; Michael’s own twitched in response, a motion Frank perhaps intuited, for he brushed his fingertips up the shaft before hugging his arms around Michael’s waist.
“Lucky me,” Frank said. “What’s the occasion?”
To speak in the present position felt like a more complicated version of rubbing your stomach while patting your head. How Frank was managing so easily Michael did not know. “My friends are gone,” he said after clearing his throat.
“The mollies?”
Michael laughed. “Yes, the mollies. We live together.”
“I see.” Frank shifted so that his chin was on Michael’s other shoulder. “And you’re taking the opportunity to sneak off for a little homosexual romp.”
Michael couldn’t tell if Frank was being playful or critical. “I guess so,” he said.
Frank’s hands hadn’t moved, yet seemed newly confused in their purpose, holding Michael less like a person than a task. After another moment, Frank asked, “Are you closeted?”
“What? No.” The question pressed an old bruise — it was not the first time someone had asked this — and Michael shrugged Frank off, returning to his original position on the other side of the jacuzzi. “I came out before my voice dropped,” he continued. “I’m well-seasoned. Overcooked.”
Frank held his hands up. “My apologies.”
“I just don’t think my straight friends care to know about my public sex pursuits.”
Frank moved over to him. “But I thought you were here to swim laps,” he said. Michael splashed him, laughing, and Frank caught his hand. “I didn’t mean any disrespect. I didn’t come out until I was forty, so I avoid hooking up with closeted guys for fear of relapse, ridiculous as that might sound.” He let go of Michael’s hand and leaned his head against the jacuzzi’s rim. “I empathize with the straight friend dilemma, too. My closest pal is straighter than a yardstick. It gets exhausting, doesn’t it? She’s also my ex-wife.”
Michael smiled at Frank, since Frank was smiling at him, but he was struggling to keep up. In just a handful of sentences, the dimensions of Frank’s life had changed, a small tract of land giving way to vast wilderness. Michael’s own life felt miniature in contrast.
“What’s the face for?” Frank asked. “Never met a divorcee?”
“No, no,” Michael said, hoping to change an expression he didn’t realize he was making. “I feel badly. I shouldn’t have bragged about coming out.”
“Why not? It’s great that you did. Wonderful. Who could get mad about that?”
“I don’t know.” Michael wanted to prove that he understood his privileged place in history. Only once had someone tried to make fun of him in school, calling him “Mr. Brokeback” in AP Government and immediately being booed down by the other classmates. “You’re the mascot for a new era,” his mother once said, though the comment made Michael cringe. Why was progress always measured by assimilation? He knew even then that his class liked him because he didn’t run against their manicured grain. To them, he was a straight, white, cis man, only gay.
“I guess my generation is lucky,” he said to Frank.
“Life sucks in many ways.” Frank smirked. “Are you feeling boiled? I’m ready for dry land.” He stood, and Michael was disappointed to see his flaccidity, proof that he’d botched the moment. “Staying in?” Frank asked as he toweled off.
“Where are you going?”
“I was thinking I’d get us a room. If you’re interested.”
“I owe you a massage.”
“That’s true. But I have one condition.” Frank undid the towel he’d just wrapped, feigning at readjustment. “No more looking at me like I’m some sad elder. Deal?”
“Deal.”
“I’ll go pay. Meet me when you’ve got yourself under control.” He gestured at Michael’s waist. The jacuzzi’s jets had gone off and, under the stilling water, he was fully exposed, as though his longing had been turned inside out.
Michael waited for Frank to disappear down the hall, then climbed from the water, quickly wrapping himself up. He felt light and dizzy in his movements, intoxicated. When the two guys from the lounge entered the room, they looked renewed, mended into charming combatants. Michael waved and they waved back. In a different space, at a different time, they all might become friends. He didn’t know what it was like to have relationships with gay men that weren’t romantic, and let himself imagine various possibilities as he wandered over to the hall. Here they were at dinner. Here a hiking trail. The rosy visions ended when he collided with the man who had been asleep on the couch. Awake, his face had gained no barriers. It was still pulled open like a drawer.
“Pardon me,” the man said. “I’m still trying to leave a dream.”
“No problem,” Michael replied, trying to move past him.
“For twenty years the same owl has grabbed me, flown me to the cloud line, and let go.”
“Sounds scary.” Michael tried to convey sympathy, though he was more focused on Frank, who he could now see at the far end of the hall.
The man rubbed his eyes with both fists. “When I hit the ground, I break into a bunch of pieces and lay there for a century. The twentieth, to be exact.”
Michael was glad when the man carried on toward the pool. He made a mental note to tell Cass and Rachel about this — they all loved brief flights into deranged whimsy — then realized he would have to repurpose the story in several essential ways.
“I see you met Neil,” Frank said when Michael reached him. He opened one of the doors and gestured Michael inside. The room was sparse and clinical, half of it taken up by a padded table that looked like it had come from a doctor’s office. In one corner sat a fake plant. In another, a fishbowl like the front desk’s, stuffed with condoms and packets of lube. On the wall hung a black-and-white photograph of a man running naked, face obscured by shadow and hair flying wild.
Michael sat on the pad. “He told me about a dream involving an owl.”
“And getting dropped for a century.” Frank closed the door, enshrouding them in a cottony silence. “Neil’s a great guy, if a little trippy. He used to teach philosophy at UW. We both volunteer at Gay City on Pine. Great spot if you need a break from the mollies.” This reduction — the mollies — was officially the first term in their private lexicon; Michael wasn’t sure how he felt about it so directly implicating his two best friends. Guilty. Thrilled, maybe. “Neil’s got an amazing cock,” Frank added.
“You’ve seen it?” Michael asked, knowing how ridiculous the question was — they’d all seen it — but not wanting to believe Frank had had any more to do with it than that.
“Not just seen.” Frank laughed. “He’s a Steamworks regular. Last time I was there we had a long talk about phenomenology. I followed none of it.”
Michael nodded, trying to look amused, or at least ambivalent. The thought of Frank and Neil together was distractingly dark.
“What’s wrong?” Frank asked, poking Michael’s side. “Jealous?”
“Maybe.” The touch, and the way they were now angled toward one another, drew Michael back. “I guess I want you to myself.”
“Is that so?” Frank kissed Michael once, then three more times, each more open-mouthed than the last. When he laid Michael out on the pad and lowered himself on top of him, their mouths had already found a special harmony. Frank moved his tongue with a surveyor’s mix of caution and audacity, probing guardedly before giving in to the excitement of discovery. Michael, meanwhile, made sure to keep the examined terrain variable, autonomous. When their towels opened, unfastened by friction, Michael groaned at the heated contact. Frank reached down and gripped their cocks in his fist, then spoke breathily into Michael’s mouth: “What do you like?”
Michael hadn’t been asked that question before in the midst of intimacy. Prior to Peter, his sexual encounters had been largely quiet, focused only on the most standard measures of success. And Peter had been so particular about his likings that Michael let him dictate the entire operation, an agreement he’d found agreeable if boring. Needing to answer for himself, Michael met the blockade he ran against when Cass and Rachel asked after his sex life. It surprised him, given the new road bringing him there, yet it was undoubtedly the same. His various aches herded together against it like cattle.
“I don’t know,” he said.
Frank laughed. “You don’t know what you like?” Holding himself up on his elbows, he looked down at Michael and touched his cheek. “How is that possible?”
Michael tried to speak again. It wasn’t as if his predilections were beyond belief, yet even the common seemed sour when it reached his mouth. It had always been this way. He’d made a pact with himself to have gay friends in college, believing his heterosexual entanglements to be the barrier blocking him from a better self; then, promptly, he met Cass and Rachel, and they had made a social island of themselves, one that had its own language, laws, and customs, one they’d hardly vacated in the last six years. He was sure they would listen gleefully if he did talk about sex, but it didn’t matter. Perhaps it was not the object of want that was the problem, but the fact of wanting itself.
“I don’t know,” he said to Frank again.
“Okay.” Frank moved his fingers from Michael’s cheek to his lips. “Let’s find out. All you have to do is say yes, no, or maybe.” He lowered to Michael’s neck and kissed him there.
“Yes,” Michael said.
“And this?”
“Yes.”
“This?”
“Maybe.”
Frank looked up and smiled. “So-so for me, too.”
He continued until the majority of Michael’s exterior was damp. By the time Frank was back at his mouth, Michael’s legs and arms were trembling. He wanted to thank Frank. Instead he kissed him, rolling them both over as he did. “Your turn,” he said, astride Frank’s belly. “Tell me what you like.”
“What I like? We’ve barely logged your basics.”
Michael reached behind him, finding Frank’s testicles with his hand. They felt like the Baoding balls Rachel had in her room, the ones that made a delicate song when you rolled them in your palm. “I want to do what you want to do,” he said.
“Oh?” Frank’s eyes glistened, the white light overhead darting across both pupils.
Looking at Frank, Michael felt as he had while standing beneath a partial eclipse. To gaze directly was to risk something great, but the temptation to do so was even higher. That day, he’d quickly averted his eyes from the spectacle. With Frank, he did not, allowing his enrapturement its due wonder. The longer he stared into Frank’s eyes, the more complex they became, shimmering obscurely, a surface beneath which anything might rest.
An elated wind carried Michael south, the gusty warmth fending off midnight’s chill. He hardly knew if he were peddling. There were no cars around, and no people, and Michael sensed that the cosmos itself was conspiring to change red lights green.
He stopped for an ambulance at 18th and Union. Chuck’s Hop Shop was a few blocks east, a bar Rachel and Cass loved for its extensive tap list and rotating food trucks. The place was too corny for Michael’s liking, but he still went almost every weekend. In the opposite direction, and nearly equidistant, was Pony, a gay bar shaped like a metal ship, its helm jutting into Capitol Hill. Michael had only been there once, wandering in after seeing a film at the Egyptian. The bar was sparsely populated that night, and Michael felt suitably depressed. Just weeks prior, Peter had broken up with him. Clutching a tequila soda, Michael had stared into the firepit, then at the luminous skyline, and finally at the collage of beefy men plastered on the walls inside. His arousal had gone missing. He’d closed out and biked home, joining Cass and Rachel for their hundredth rerun of Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion.
Now, Michael resolved to go back to Pony and to forego Chuck’s, at least every now and then. The future presented itself to him like a piece of forged metal, steely and rigid. But by the time he reached their house, the ember of his experience at Club Athenaeum was already beginning to fade. He wanted to tell someone what had happened, to preserve it in some way, but no one was home, and he wouldn’t tell Cass and Rachel, anyways.
He went inside and drifted from room to room. Without Cass and Rachel, the house’s interior appeared different, a mirror with indeterminate warp. Just hours ago, he’d been laying on his bed with Cass while Rachel struggled to re-pierce her ear. Rachel’s ear had turned bright red, and was made surprisingly mesmerizing for that reason, as if its inner life, its deep history, had been unlocked by the recent jabbing. Michael decided to call one of them, hoping their voices would make the space legible. He was happy to discover a voicemail on his phone. But the message was mangled once he played it, a mishmash of synthpop and shrieking. If he could not share what happened, he thought, he would at least dwell with the details while they were sharp: Frank directing their bodies to lay face-to-face; Frank reaching down and drawing his foreskin over the head of Michael’s penis, connecting them like a sword and sheath; Frank saying, “This is what I like,” and Michael feeling surprised at first by the simplicity of it. How Frank had then begun to stroke him, ensuring with his other hand that they did not come unattached, and how, when Michael followed suit, Frank felt like a physical extension of himself. How that pocket eventually filled with their slippery warmth, that innermost expression of self. How Frank had held the circuit closed until they both went soft, at which point their pearlescence spilled on the pad between them. “Here,” Frank said, dabbing the pooled liquid with his finger and running it across Michael’s lips. “For you.”
Michael stopped the memory. Soon, he and Frank would be dressing, speaking like strangers. But before that, Frank would point at the photograph of the running man and say, “Hujar is the only authentic thing about this place,” and Michael would reveal that he didn’t know who Hujar was, had never even heard the name, and though they would laugh, the distance between them would feel wide, prompting them to walk several paces apart, and to hug inelegantly at the bike rack. All of that would happen, but not yet. Michael could still taste them on his lips, faintly, the flavor diminishing with each new pass of the tongue.
