I agreed to help him open the Boy Bar. “Dress down for once,” Robbie coached me well, “got a torn T-shirt?” “No, but I have a T-shirt and two good hands.” “You’ll overdo it. I know you Wagnerians. You wear the shirt, I’ll do the tearing.” “Best offer I’ve had all day.” “Oh, that again? Hartley? I’ve heard Sisterhood is powerful, what say we stick with that forever?” “Fine, my powerhouse sistah. Ma’s napping. —Would you now consider incest?”

The fact that, on first sight, I loved this guy insanely made me in no way unique. But it just got worse, or better.

Many local boys who’d heard, “You’re too handsome to waste that grade of face here, you deserve to go to New York,” had by now. At the bar’s gala opening, such a smoky din—former small-town camouflagers blazing all the primary colors of Broadway Boogie Woogie. I heard others say, Robert was the god, terminally attractive, and had just one competitor: that gladiatorial towhead. The guy was named Horse, for reasons beneath mentioning. Robert’s hair shone platinum, Horse’s mane a mere corn yellow; I felt relieved to soon overhear Horse called “the other blond.”

From the Boy Bar, Robert was whisked off in a white limo owned by someone older, the surviving lover of an early film star thrown out of the movies for being too incautiously gay and so became the adored interior decorator to his fellow actors. And me? I got squired home on foot (twenty block hike, freezing cold) by one Ed, who worked in “drapery alterations,” whatever that was. Next morning, Robert gave me my second New York phone call.

He told me what he’d discovered from his date: One reason Wallis Warfield Simpson had had such a hold over the former king was that she had such a hold on him, his. The Duke, just the tallest in her kennel of popeyed pugs, was pitiably endowed, apparently, and always had a premature ejac apparently. But that slyboots Wally had learned, from some madam in Hong Kong, a vaginal clamp technique that could bite right down on her lover, very severe.

“And she could hold the Duke until he achieved at least a brief reign.”

“Oh,” I said. (Sister, I don’t think we’re in North Carolina anymore. In Falls, such morning-after conversations concerned which socially prominent doctor did the least obtrusive ingrown toenail removal.)

“And what, my dear Airedale—(’cause if you were a dog you’d be no pug, but a noble Airedale)—what, Hart, did you learn?”

“‘Learn’?” I asked. “Oh … learn. Last night?”

And then, thanks to Robert and Manhattan, I learned that learning was really a main part of it. To learn. From sex, from everything. We soon lived life in order to learn and then report it to each other, facts rouged and pumped some.