9781555834920

Chapter One

I waited for the all-clear alarm, pressing my face to the library's plate glass doors. Below the front steps, trailing a guide in top hat and tails, my fellow foreigners from the Theatre Programme began the Jack the Ripper London Walking Tour without me.

I felt as excluded as a grounded child by the time the last stragglers skirted the British Museum, leaving my field of vision, and disappeared to murderous localities beyond. Though scheduled for us by the Summer School, the Jack the Ripper tour meant more than an evening's homicidal lark for me; my research project involved "monstrous constructions" of human sexuality. In fact, during the library alert, while security investigated the package or character suspected in the bomb threat, I'd searched for legal accounts of Oscar Wilde's "sodomite immorality" with consenting adult Lord Douglas.

When the all-clear sounded, staffers unlocked the doors, releasing scores of scholars outside into twilight. It was too late to catch up with the tour, swallowed by now in the West End's roaring crowds, so I strolled, drinking the fresh, rain-washed air, back to Hyde Hall. The sinking sun flickered in theatrical shafts between the university buildings, certain to withdraw behind curtains of pounding rain before deep night descended. Grateful the library had released us before full dark, I was conditioned by now to be on guard, as any resident of London was that summer, against the almost daily terrorist threats. Not to mention, of course, the expectation that Prince Bi was due to strike a young male before midnight. Wrapped in a vague gauze of self-protection, how could I have guessed that one of my closest friends in the Programme would not survive to hear midnight strike?

Before I could cross Russell Square, a small, giddy mob approached me, shiny in their Summer School best, some of the boys even in bow ties, the girls in flimsy, silky evening things: the Collegiate Americans in London on senior year scholarships, Strand-bound for Miss Saigon, opening tonight in a new revival. Arm in arm, the group halted in front of me, a chorus line of adults-in-waiting, inviting me to inspect their shining shoes and careful coifs. "You're beautiful," I said, "all of you. You do us Yanks up proud."

"Come with us, Ray," Iris said, linking arms with me. "We've even got an extra ticket."

"Good God, why?"

"Derrick's not coming. He's feelin' poorly. Some awful English bug," Iris drawled, pouting. "So, Ray...I do need an escort."

I explained that while I'd be honored to escort Atlanta's loveliest flower, I'd been trapped for hours and was starving for air and food. "Besides, I saw Miss Saigon the first time around."

"Great," Iris said, trying to continue pouting, but breaking out into one of her huge, freckled Miss America smiles. "I've been turned down by three men. My own boyfriend, and you, and even Price."

"Price!" I asked her why the school's director, engaged to a wealthy socialite, would even be available.

"Well, it turns out he wasn't, Ray, at least not to escort poor ol' jilted me." I smiled at the sight of the cheap fabric friendship bracelet under elegant silver loops on her wrist; Iris and Derrick had tied one around each other's wrist when they'd decided their flirtation was evolving into a summer romance.

We parted, with poor jilted Iris in fact escorted by four dashing American boys, while I took giant-steps toward Hyde Hall's basement bar in hopes of finding some overlooked portion of shepherd's pie or a Cornish pasty.

Wolfing down both in the good company of a pint of brown ale and a photocopied account of the Wilde trial, I ingested the unexpected peace of the residence hall. In the six weeks since I'd arrived for the Programme in British Theatre Studies, after grading my students' finals and boarding a plane in a mid-June blur, a scholarship boy myself at 35, life had become a happy but overscheduled jumble of lectures, tutorials, efforts at research, and evening outings to plays and pubs. Hyde Hall was an eternal crowd scene, abuzz with Summer School folks from every part of the world and every stage of adulthood--especially the bar, which normally raged in a Babel of conversations and shouted orders to the single beleaguered barkeep. I realized that except for sleep, this was the first time I'd been alone, in the quiet, since summer term began.

Or so I thought, until I sensed a presence I hadn't noticed in a dark corner of the lounge behind the bar, ensconced in a heavy velveteen armchair: "Aren't you going to join me, Raymond?" Damn, it was Ursina: "I'm very lonely over here."

After chomping down the last of the pasty, I asked from the bar, "How long have you been there?"

"The whole time that you've been eating like an animal. But I am smart enough to wait until you consumed my competition for your attention."

I laughed, an involuntary reflex, the reaction I'm sure she wanted. Ursina, a translator from Latvia, had a wondrous command of English, but her linguistic talents led me to overestimate her discernment. Now I'd become wary of the seductive, mysteriously injured, hyperfeminine persona she seemed to produce solely for my benefit. I swiveled around, still swiping crumbs off my chin, then held my beer aloft. "Why don't you join me here, Ursina? I'll treat you to an ale."

She tsk-tsked me, shaking her head and holding up a half-full cocktail glass. She clinked the ice, shaking her mass of smoky-blond hair, then leaned forward to put out her cigarette. "A gentleman should never expect a lady to cross a room. My dear, you must join me over here."

Thanks for the lesson in Euromanners, I thought, hesitating just long enough to annoy her. I had no desire to trap myself in a corner for a tête-à-tête with this snaky Baltic seductress--being female, she wasn't my type--especially because she was married to a ferociously jealous and temperamental theatre director. However, courtesy demanded I accept Ursina's invitation and pray that someone other than her husband would wander into the bar to distract her. I sank into the armchair catercorner from hers. "So...where's Boris?"

She frowned, concealing her annoyance with a dainty sip of whiskey. "Visiting some theatre contacts. A London group may ask him to direct for the next summer's International Festival."

"You don't sound too thrilled."

"I'll never hear the end of it, my dear. My husband is very ambitious. But none of this can possibly be interesting. You know, Raymond, I've been worried about you." She placed a Marlboro between her lips and waited for me to light it. In her company I felt stranded in a self-consciously noir, antifeminist '40s movie. "You and the Argentine came in so late last night."

I smiled. Ursina could so quickly manipulate the conversation to her only real interest, the vast universe of everything that was none of her business. I had seen her door wedge open when Eduardo and I eased down the hallway past midnight. "Why would that possibly worry you? We're both big boys."

"Are you ever! But size hasn't stopped Prince Bi. His last male victim was quite as tall as either of you. You'd be quite a tasty morsel for him, of course."

"For Prince Bi? I'm too old for him."

"He would know that only if he checked your identification papers before he seduced you."

I ignored her attempt to sweet-talk me. "I try not to visit the places Prince Bi finds his boys." I hadn't come out to Ursina, which explains the fix I was in now. It was a rule of mine to be forthcoming about my sexuality with women who seemed interested, precisely to avoid being cornered like this and wasting my London summer entangled in misunderstandings. And I needed my rule's discipline: Though I had only the idlest interest in heterosexual intercourse, I was easily seduced by the pleasure of being attractive to a mature, experienced woman. Ursina certainly fit that description but was also, in her post-Communist sexual reactionary way, a terrible homophobe. I knew it was either endure this misunderstanding or spend the rest of the term having to debate her view that homosexuality was decadent, a result of social maladjustment, easily cured by a spell in the sack with the right Latvian beauty. "Eddy and I went to a Fringe play," I told her, "that ran late."

"My dear, you don't need to explain. We've all grown used to the fact that you and the Argentine enjoy each other's company to the exclusion of the rest of us. In fact, I was certain that you and Eduardo would be off tonight, prowling London for God knows what."

"Actually, I don't know what Eddy is doing. I got trapped in the library and missed out on the Jack the Ripper tour."

"Another bomb alert? I was caught in Harrod's just yesterday."

"Eddy and I got sealed in at the National Gallery Wednesday evening."

"Boris and I had to endure a long delay in the Tate Gallery last week."

Our gruesome one-upmanship that summer had us all comparing the inconveniences of terrorist bomb threats, searches, and delays as if there were a grand prize waiting for the Most Detained at term's end. "So why aren't you on the walking tour, Ursina?"

"I have an aversion to murder," Ursina said, apparently expecting me to take this at face value. In fact, she had been an official Latvian translator of Tony Hillerman's Navajo murder mysteries and hoped to visit my home state, Colorado, because she expected the entire Mountain West to be crawling with homicidal Native Americans. "I find this English fascination with brutality quite repulsive."

As if on cue, and most welcome, Sandy appeared in the bar just as I slammed back the last of my ale. He had a fresh batch of "Caning" cards that he collected from all the phone booths nearby and saved to send as notes home to Texas. "Hey, you guys, I got me a bunch of new ones." He sat opposite Ursina, fanning the cards out on the table for our inspection. "Look at this here: 'Lady D, Dominatrix on Duty.' Isn't that a sweet little drawing? She's got cat ears and a devil tail. And this one, "Gwendolyn, the Little Mum who'll whip your naughty bum.' Kinda creepy, huh?"

Right, I thought, almost as creepy as posting it to his family in Corpus Christi. I rose, excusing myself and surviving the daggers Ursina shot me for leaving her alone with Sandy.

"I so deplore sadomasochistic violence," I heard her say as I bounded upstairs into the deserted lobby.

"Quiet night, eh, Mr. O'Brien?" the evening porter asked me, tipping his cap. He set his eyeglasses further down his nose, then held up his current mystery novel. "Dorothy Sayers, Gaudy Night. May actually get a chance to find out who did the dirty deed, on a night like this."

"Good luck," I said, continuing up the flight of stairs. Normally the plate glass doorway was so perpetually buzzed by residents that secured passage seemed absurd before midnight. Jack the Ripper and Miss Saigon had conspired to depopulate Hyde Hall of the second-floor Theatre Programme, while the third floor's Modern Novel Programme was attending a special evening lecture on William Golding. I decided to take advantage of the quiet to draft an outline of my project on monstrosity.

The second floor was a catacombs. I thought of its baby-barf–green ambience as "the cloister of closets" because of its narrow passage and odd dead ends that led to the tiny compartments the college liked to describe as "private suites"; so cramped that when Boris and Ursina had tried to combine their two twin beds from their separate suites into one conjugal bed in Ursina's room, even after removing her study desk, luggage, and chair, they could not squeeze the second bed in place. "The English!" Boris had scolded, breathless from the struggle. "Always determined to extinguish every healthy erotic impulse!"

My closet was at the far end, the distance exaggerated tonight by the dark silence. Normally at this hour I'd be struggling along, dodging Sandy on his way to one of his several daily showers, sidling past Iris holding court in the hallway in her bathrobe, brushing her long, silky hair while her boyfriend, Derrick, and a batch of Collegiate Americans clustered on her bed to watch her tiny TV. Four of the six overhead bulbs were out, victims of Hyde Hall's ongoing Great Lightbulb Famine, and with all the doors closed, I realized how much safe night passage depended on the friendly light spilling from the open suites. Finally, passing Derrick's room, a symptom of life: Along with a seam of light under the closed door came Derrick's unmistakable laugh, a hoarse, helpless series of barks. He must have borrowed Iris's telly, I thought, trying to kill his virus by exposure to ITV sitcoms.

I thought better of checking in on him, knowing how much I loathe being fussed over those rare times when I don't feel well. A few doors past, our housemother Sibyl's door was ajar. Her TV droned, her teapot whistled, and I heard Marcus say, "I must be off, Auntie. I'm already past due at the club." I caught a glimpse of her nephew moving toward the door in the white shirt and black bow tie he wore to tend bar in a Soho club. Sibyl reached to adjust the rabbit ears, lost her grip, and knocked them to the floor. Marcus stretched to retrieve them, laughing. "See? See what happens when you try to fix things? Now let me have a go at them, Auntie, whilst you get that teapot..."

Sibyl was an almost complete failure at the custodial side of housemothering, most notably when she'd tried to repair the broken canopy outside my window and ended up knocking off a support rod, which, though missing a student's skull by inches, still injured her shoulder. But Sibyl was a great success at the mothering side. She had a warm, distracted presence, regaling all with soothing words, Band-Aids, needles, threads, and her eternal whistling tea pot. Even the brief glimpse of family life in Sibyl's room acted on me like a tonic, as if it were a little skit performed to heal the homesickness the second floor's abandoned disquiet might have inspired.

A note slipped under my door also brightened my outlook:

My dear Ray,

If you're not too late getting in, can you join me at the Globe for afternoon coffee? I will be meeting an old London acquaintance, an actor, and I've also invited the Beautiful Boy. Your company would make a perfect quadrangle. We'll be there long after, I'm sure, you finish at the library, so I will look forward to seeing your smiling face...

Hugs,

Eddy

Given that I'd been imprisoned in the library all evening and that the "Beautiful Boy," Derrick, was alone in his girlfriend's room with a laugh track and a virus, I presumed Eddy had had a long intimate visit with the actor. Did I feel a nudge of jealousy? That'd be stupid.

Determined to work, I scrunched myself up on the bed, my notebook resting on my upright knees, and wrote out my working title: "Constructing Monstrosity: The Demonization of Homosexuality in Post-Elizabethan Drama," the first, last, and only words I would write on the subject until the entire crisis had been outlived.

* * *

I woke, startled out of a strangled dream by a rap on my door, wondering how long I'd napped. The reading light still blazed. The notebook flew off my bed when I got to my feet. Eddy smiled at me when I opened the door, then frowned. "You were sleeping! I'm sorry...but I saw your light."

"It's fine. I didn't want to nap anyway..."

"Ah, the Hyde Effect?"

"Yep, I was in dreamland the minute I wrote my title." Many of the foreign residents believed that something in the hall, some chemical in the paint or fumes in the vents, induced narcolepsy the moment any of us tried to study or write in our closet-suites. It might have been the pale lime green of the walls, ceilings, and trim, creating an aura of hospitalized narcosis; or perhaps we were all suffering from a weeks-long case of jet lag; or maybe, with all of us attempting to be serious students in the long beckoning days of late July, with our final theses due in just three weeks, we needed an external excuse for slacking off. But standing before me now, in the darkened hall, shadowy, lit only by the glow of my study lamp, Eddy looked vigorous, even manic. His huge hazel eyes combusted energy as he toweled his wet hair. His bathrobe fell open at the chest so that I could follow the progress of a droplet traveling along his tan, bare chest, past his leather necklace, down to the dark hairs curled around his navel.

His eyes had followed the progress of mine. He smiled, pulling shut his robe. "Why don't you join me in my room? I just bought some whiskey on the way back."

"How late is it?"

"Not much past 11. The pubs just closed. I'm sorry you didn't make it to the Globe, Ray. I missed you. If you'd been there, I might not have behaved so badly." He pursed his lips, self-mocking, sly: "I'm afraid I've done something terrible."

"Really? I want to hear all about it. Sure, I'll join you." As if there had been any doubt. "I'd like a shower, too, then I'll report to your quarters as soon as I can pull on my skivvies."

* * *

I saw a pair of pale feet in the shower stall next to mine. Meticulously clipped toes ensconced in rubber thongs: "Is that you, Sandy?"

"The one and only," he drawled. "What the hell you doing in here at this hour?"

"I'm washing off a nap. And you? Trying to squeeze in your seventh or eighth shower today, before midnight? Setting a personal record?"

"Not that anyone's countin', right? Naw, I went for a late run at Regents Park. Didn't want to sleep in my own sweaty stink, if you gotta know."

"I don't, thank you. I'm sorry I brought it up." Night jogs were another of Sandy's eccentricities. He believed the traffic fumes were less likely to be toxic after rush hour subsided, and, having breathed my share of London's leaded exhaust while jogging the choked miasma of streets to the park, I was sure he had a point. "Ever think it might be dangerous out there at this hour?"

"Who's gonna mess with me?"

"Well, there is a serial killer due to strike a male-type person. Tonight, most likely."

"What's Prince Bi told the Evening Criterion this time? That's he's gonna strangle a middle-aged Texan dragging his fat behind around the Outer Circle?"

"There's nothing wrong with your butt, Sandy. I'm sure Prince Bi would go for it. The Brits are queer for Texans, anyway."

"Well, he better not, 'cause I got a wife and kids who are dependin' on me back in Corpus."

Sandy never missed a chance to remind me of his marital status. "Did you send that latest batch of caning cards off to your little girl, you pervert?"

"Who you calling a pervert, Ray? Besides, I don't send the really nasty ones home. And my littlest gal, she doesn't even know what it's all about. But my wife gets a charge out of 'em."

"I've never understood the pleasure of pain, myself."

"You think I do? I never heard of such things until I got here, to Sodom-on-the-Thames. Yep, I've had a glimpse of a whole universe of sin no Bible ever taught me. You just wait till I get back to Corpus. The juicy things I'm gonna warn my Sunday School classes about."

"You are a scary man," I said, shutting off the water and hoping to get out of the shower room before the scary man got a glimpse of any things of mine.

* * *

While Eddy told me about his evening at the Globe, I sat in his desk chair with my legs spread across the upper end of his single bed. He rested his head against a pillow he'd placed over my legs and squeezed his long body, so that he reclined, facing me. In the glow of the candle he'd lit, I admired his bare, gym-toned torso, his skin as silken as his indigo boxers. His new haircut pleased me because it made him less intimidating, slightly less of a fashion-cover god and slightly more of an ordinary mortal. It even added a fraction of dorkiness, because his round skull wasn't quite right for the buzz cut that we'd both gotten, side by side, after deciding that without blow dryers or sunshine, without enough towels and with too much rain, there was no point in having hair at all in London. His sacrifice had been far greater than mine; his hair had been shoulder-length cascades of blond-brown waves framing his strong, angular, masculine face. When we walked into the dining room together after our haircuts, there had been gasps of surprise at Eddy's transformation.

"Yes, I was terrible," Eddy said, smiling, though I noticed his hand shaking when he lit another cigarette. He poured me more whiskey, straight up in the sink glass I'd brought from my room, then refilled his own. He'd been telling me about his rendezvous with the actor, Peter Twigg, whom Eddy had met when Peter had a small part in a film being shot on location in Buenos Aires the previous July. "Have I told you how Peter has been pestering me with cards and little gifts? And...these..." Eddy said of two tickets he held up, to a concert at Albert Hall. "He said he would give them to me, so I could decide whether I wanted to go with him...or someone else of my choosing. 'I don't want to pressuah you,' " Eddy mocked in a fairly good and fairly vicious imitation of a London accent. "All this when he knows about my relationship with Luis, not to mention his wife and three children hidden away in Islington. He went on and on about how he wanted to explore his 'special feelings' for me, that he hadn't been able to get me out of his mind since he left Buenos Aires, that it was time that he cultivate a deep relationship with a male. Oh, Ray, it was all so contemptible, with Peter being so red-faced and so sincere, sitting there like a vulnerable puppy dog. Coming out of the closet at 40! Half of me felt pity, but the other half wanted to swat him across his flabby cheeks. And I was trapped alone with him at the Globe until Derrick finally arrived late..."

Actually I felt sympathy for poor Peter Twigg. I had no trouble imagining how easy it would be to carry a crush for Eddy across all those months and all those lines of latitude and longitude. As if to embellish upon his unavailability, Eddy always wore the simple leather necklace, its narrow strap tied around two intertwined silver arrows, because Luis had given it him after their first gay pride parade. Tonight it made me think of that chintzy cloth bracelet that connected Iris to Derrick. I felt not only distinctly unaccessorized, but completely unconnected...to anyone.

Eddy had papered his little room with snapshots of Luis, his boyfriend of almost a decade, back home in Buenos Aires. Luis stared back at me from Eddy's balcony, from the roof of Eddy's apartment house, from Eddy's bed, holding Eddy's Persian cat, or at the beach, in a tiny string bikini, with muscles for days, or in black tie and tails, going to the reception for the public housing project he'd landscaped. Eddy had mentioned casually that he was "used to missing" Luis, whose work as an environmental designer took him all over Argentina, and had implied some nebulous "problem" in the relationship, but the photographs always reminded me not to cultivate my crush on Eddy or else suffer Peter's fate. Still, I wound up in Eddy's bedroom virtually every night, at his invitation, and when we kissed good night a little too long, I never asked any questions--of Eddy or myself. I simply retreated to my solitary cell and fell asleep with the pressure of his kiss fresh on my flushed, euphoric face.

"So, did Derrick rescue you?" I asked.

"Yes! The Beautiful Boy was wonderful, as always."

Eddy had his own pet crush on Derrick, whose classic blond good looks, highlighted by enormous azure eyes and thick, dark lashes, had captivated the entire Summer School. His physical beauty was complemented by his open, amiable, good-humored exuberance. He had the compact, perfectly proportioned body of the athlete he was, a distance swimmer and lacrosse champion. His sexuality was markedly ambiguous--he was comfortable joining Eddy and me at the Globe, a gay coffeehouse near Covent Garden, but had selected Iris, the Programme's prettiest belle, as his summer steady. Born here in London, spending his childhood in Hampstead and his adolescence in Ontario, he was the only son of an English consul long assigned in Ottawa. His boyish affability disguised keen intelligence; Derrick had studied theatre in Chicago and, working on an advanced degree, now wanted to direct. His background made him the ultimate Anglo–North American, alert to all the accents and nuances of both Atlantic shores. When Eddy and I took to calling him the Beautiful Boy, we really meant much more than his charming face and shapely physique. Derrick was a kind of human ideal, someone who improved the species by his presence. "So what," I asked Eddy, "was the terrible thing you did?"

"Before I tell you, remember that it's not my fault that Derrick is such a clever improviser. He seemed immediately to assess the situation for what it was--Argentine gentleman trapped, paralyzed by desperate Englishman--and before the waiter had brought his cappuccino he'd invented the moment's scenario. The actor, Peter, would become the helpless audience for our performance."

"So, the Beautiful Boy was in one of his...inspired states?"

"Even more than usual. Not a thing Derrick said was true, but he was absolutely spontaneous and convincing. He began by wondering if Peter knew that his father had been the first English airman shot down in the Falklands War. Yes, due to Margaret Thatcher's war against Argentina, Derrick said he hardly remembered his own father, just a vague memory of a sweet man in uniform kissing him goodbye. Poor Peter! He was beside himself with sympathy but wary of saying the wrong thing in my presence.

"Then it was my turn. I remarked how curious it was that Derrick and I had become friends at all, given that my uncle, who was also my godfather, was second in command in planning and executing the recapture of the Malvinas, I was careful to emphasize. My uncle too had sacrificed his life, the first Argentine officer to give his life to end the British imperial occupation of our soil.

"Derrick was brilliant. He hesitated, looking at me as if with new insight. 'I hope you're not meaning to imply, my dear Eduardo, in front of two loyal British subjects, that my father gave his sainted life as an imperial aggressor...' and so on, carefully calibrating his outrage and inviting more of mine, until we were finally shouting like idiots, 'Falklands!' 'Malvinas!' 'Falklands!' 'Malvinas!' back and forth until Derrick stopped.

"Dead cold, he quietly removed our accumulation of cups and saucers before he let out a terrible growl and tipped the table over. Then we resumed, dancing around the table in fury, with Peter cowering among the crowd that had assembled, while Derrick had the idea of calling me a Latin fascist and proposing that Britain take over the mainland of Argentina as well, to save it from itself. I told him such aggression and arrogance was a worldwide specialty of the British...but by that time Peter had disappeared into the crowd completely. Stunned by the audience we'd attracted, we paused, took a bow, then shook hands. Wonderful applause--we laughed, and Derrick and I restored the table, replaced the cups, and went on to share a meal and a delightful chat, and Peter was nowhere to be seen. I'm afraid, under the circumstances, I'll have to return the concert tickets he gave me. Won't I?"

"Just promise the two of you will never gang up on me, OK?" At times Eddy and Derrick fed off each other with an intense, symbiotic energy that channeled into performance art, such as this improvisation at the Globe, and at others had them competing and arguing like brothers. They were both natural mimics and were currently in the throes of trying to perfect imitations of Ursina and Boris's Latvian-English, after having easily mastered my slow-talking Colorado twang, which came back to me in their mockery--not really such a feat for Eddy, who had lived for several years in California. Even as a child, he'd traveled throughout North America while his mother, the opera singer Mercedes Hausmann, was on tour.

Amused as I was by Eddy's story, I was curious about this vigorous image of Derrick, shouting and turning tables over, when less than hour later he would be begging off his date to Miss Saigon due to a virus. "So was Derrick affected by something he ate, do you think?"

"Well, he did have the Globe's horrible microwave lasagna. But he seemed fine, Ray, when I went off to Covent Garden to join the Jack the Ripper tour. Derrick said he was off to join Iris for the premiere. Maybe he felt sick on the walk back here."

"Oh, I didn't know you made the tour. How'd you like it?"

"I...I'm afraid I left it early. I didn't expect to be so appalled by the crimes. The guide was very ironic and morbid, and everyone thought it was funny. But I guess I just wasn't in the mood. It made me sad. I thought of all those poor women...and with the Bi killer, well...it was too much for me just now." He snuffed out a cigarette and stared at a photograph of Luis smiling astride a bronze lion in a city square. "And...I was disappointed that you weren't there."

I put my hand on his. "So, what did you do?"

He shrugged, locking my fingers in his. "I went to a pub in St. Martin's Lane for a whiskey. I just stood there by myself brooding, wishing you and I had gone out strolling, to that spot on Waterloo Bridge..."

"Derrick's spot? The lamppost dead center?"

"Exactly." He smiled, as if to mock his self-pity. "I'm good at brooding."

I leaned forward, sipped the last of my whiskey, and slipped my legs out from under his pillow. Wanting this intimacy with Eddy to intensify exactly as much as I dreaded pressing too hard for it, I was oddly comforted by the commotion in the hallway, signaling the Collegiates' return from the theatre. One of the boys must have teased Iris, calling her "honey child." Then, outside the door, I could hear Iris's Georgia drawl plainly, the way it slowed and dragged even more when she was tired: "Maybe I should let the poor boy sleep."

As I hoped and feared, Eddy pulled me toward the bed, making room for me. But the only position possible on the skinny bed was to lock our legs and arms together as well. "Poor guy," I whispered into his ear. "What were you brooding about?"

"I was thinking about what I must tell you...about Luis and me..." He kissed me, lightly, on my neck.

"So, tell me..." I was about to position myself to kiss him less lightly, on the lips, when someone--a female, very close by--began to scream, then stopped, as if out of breath. Then she shrieked again, even more strangulated and shrill.

Excerpted from Nothing Gold Can Stay by Casey Nelson. Copyright © 2000 by Casey Nelson. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Nothing Gold Can Stay

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