After that was clarified, he asked me some very literal questions about my life. I told him:

1. That I live with Rebecca Travers and her girlfriend,
2. That yes, that means I see the quote-unquote “lesbian poets” around a lot, Rebecca being one of them,
3. That I work at that bookstore slash café where Rebecca was a manager. That yes, it’s an okay gig, one where, thank god, I was allowed to sit down while working a cash register and a computer with BookScan installed on it,
4. That I’m not seeing anyone, but mostly because I’m not trying, mostly because I feel like I’m in an “interim period” in my life. That transitioning made me warier about the intentions of potential partners, and that yes, that’s kind of not ideal, but, like I said, interim period,
5. That yes, I know a lot more trans people now, definitely more than in school, but yeah, “queer community” is such a fucked concept, if you think about it, which I have.

In return, he told me:

1. After he broke up with Julie he started dating a cis man who made a lot of money and who was evidently a fetishist who was stringing him along,
2. This was obliquely related to Julie not giving him his furniture back — something about “boundaries,” about “disclosure,” about going to “get thrown around by some guy who smelled like dude sweat and cologne” (his words) and then getting in the same bed with his lesbian ex. Ambrose thought Julie “felt threatened” by him “exploring his sexuality” at all, despite the fact that he was always bisexual. This factors out to some kind of transphobia, apparently,
3. Julie was giving him the silent treatment, as were a host of her friends, presumably about his weird conduct after they broke up. He’d sort of been persona-non-grata’d in some dyke circles because of what happened there, which he said was “unfortunate,” but will “probably only last a few months,”
4. He had some work from home data-analyst job now. “Tech trans, you know,” he said. I did know, but I hadn’t met one. I just assumed they lived in, like, a different part of the city entirely or something, or had somehow managed to upload themselves to Twitter and Reddit. Also, that they were all girls. “Not all of us,” he said. “I’m trying to become the first male girlboss.” I could tell that he had rehearsed the joke or probably said it before.