there's one thing more."
" Gay-based."
"Is this getting boring?"
"Lord Jim is boring." We had to read it. "So what's the question?"
"Is being gay a choice. Their opinions, of course."
"Have you looked online for any of this?"
"I've been trying something." He tells me this, like a secret. "If there's a thing I want to know, that actually matters to me, I do people."
"Do them?"
"Ask them. I like when someone doesn't know an answer right off, where what they say first is just a start, that can wind up anywhere. Where answers don't end things." He gets a text. It's from Shannon. He shows it to me. The tenth grade has spoken. Now, let us heal.
"But what about you? Do you think it's a choice?"
He says some words, to himself. They're new words. "Gayitude. Gayology. Gaydaism." He finishes his fetus cookie. "I don't know yet. I'm sort of tired. It's been a big day."
And there we are, about thirteen inches apart, when he raises his hand and waves at me, as if he is in a cab that is driving away and is about to disappear. I wave back, and soon he is gone. I remind myself of the other thing that happened today. "Theo's president," I say, "which makes me Secretary of Everything." I head for the 6 train and decide to shake it up by becoming the Blind Guy, this person I invented. You go as far as you can with your eyes shut tight until you hit someone, at which point you have to say, "Sorry, I'm the Blind Guy." It's more fun than it might sound. So I start, and I don't take more than a couple blind steps when I bump into someone. Someone who knows me, it seems, because they say my name.
"Wesley?"
When I unblind myself I see Shannon Traube, crushed by Theo just hours ago.
"What are you doing?" she says. "You looked crazy."
"I had something in my eye," I say. "It was excruciating. In fact, I may need medical attention. So I'd better get home. See ya."
As I turn back for the subway I hear her again. "Wesley? You live that way," she says, pointing east. "One thirty East End."
I laugh, not well; it's as big a dud as the laughing I did with Theo just a few minutes ago. "It so happens," I say, "that I have two residences."
"You do?"
"I've been at my dad's for the last like approximate two months."
"Your dad the gay guy."
I look at her while Theo's questions clop-clop in my head, whinnying a little like horses in front of the Plaza; all the answers he's asked me for. When did you know? Do you think it's a choice? "Yes. That dad. And he's a big deal, too, in gay circles. If you care."
"Whatever," she says. "I'm tolerant. Even about Theo. People are People, is my motto."
"That sort of sucks as a motto."
She sighs. "I know. I'm working on it. My college coach says I should have one, just in case. In another language, preferably. You want to know a secret?"
"It depends."
"Donatella Gould blew Morgan Blatt. Or blows him, actually. It's ongoing."
" Really?" I hear my own voice, piping embarrassingly. Then I lie—"I knew that, of course"—in the deepest voice I have; Chef's voice on South Park; that deep.
"Do you blow Theo?"
Somehow I don't mind her asking; maybe because she seems genuinely interested, like she's trying to figure out a thing bigger than blow jobs. "Actually," I say, "I don't."
She sighs again. "I believe you. Don't ask me why."
There's a ding; it's a text for Shannon.
"Fuck," she says. "My mom. She texts me all day, with potential SAT words. She says if I don't get a head start I'll wind up at B.U., or Bowdoin, or something. And then she'd have to jump from the roof of our building."
"What's the word?"
"Gnostic. G-n-o-s-t-i-c. The g is probably silent?"
We pass the word back and forth, like a puppy you're trying to socialize, when something happens that makes no sense. I have a boner, in the street, while trying to define an SAT word with Shannon. How could that be possible?
"I have to go," she says, as if she senses it, as if she's as alarmed by the boner as I am.
"Me, too. Sorry you lost."
"Oh, well," she says, as she walks away, "tell Theo to bring us together."
When I get to Grand Central I remember something George once said, that every person moving through it has one secret they believe they could never tell. I stand there for a moment, right in the middle of it, and wonder: What would my secret be? Is it something you know, or a thing you discover, but that's been there all along, waiting? And say you never discover it; what then? I worry about these things. I'll ask George; he's the one who brought it all up in the first place.
I hit the street and walk the few blocks west, and I'm glad I do, for just as I get near the theater district it seems all the lights go on. As I head up Eighth Avenue I hear someone say, " Young man?" and I turn to see, unfortunately, a large clown; he holds out tickets to me, which happens at least nineteen times a block around here. All I want is to get home so I can talk to my dad and George as Theo has asked, but I try to be polite to the clown, as he probably has a family and would prefer to be playing Tom in The Glass Menagerie or Tom in The Grapes of Wrath (which I happen to be reading in school), parts George says were his favorites in what he calls the Time of the Toms, when he was an actor, long ago.
"What's it for?" I ask, pretending to be interested.
"The circus!" he says, much too loudly. " Bring your kids!"
"I don't have any," I say. "I'm sixteen." And it's at this point, with a typical ticket giver, that I'd take the ticket and move on, but I can see that this guy is falling apart in front of me. He takes off his wig, and red nose, and tells me he went to Juilliard, where he studied commedia dell'arte, whatever that is. He never thought he'd wind up as a clown, handing out tickets to a circus where the animals are abused and the midgets hunch down to seem smaller. To top it off, he's HIV-positive, a condition I learn is rampant in the clown world.
"That sucks," I say.
"Have safe sex," he tells me.
"I do. Or, in the interest of clarity— I hope to."
He asks if I have a minute, and I nod; I'm not sure why. He tells me he saw the Towers fall and that nothing's been the same, really, since. I'm not sure I believe him, but I have a motto that if someone tells you they saw the Towers fall, then they saw the Towers fall, and that's how it is. Period.
"So that's my minute, I guess," he says.
