Certain guys—Angie coached me from her bitterest experience—take their sports metaphors to the metaphysical. “For such fellows as our CPA, Hartley, the sex act is Scoring. My good breasts here, pips, hunh? Signify second base. The goal? It’s this. —By your last athletic quarter—you’ll wanna get as many other human beings to say ‘I Love You’—without ever giving up even one of your ‘I Love You’ points aloud to them, see? Now you understand the object of life’s game. Okay. And, for them, that means we’re losers because we give so much away, to our work, to complete strangers, to playing around in our work, and with each other. They’re devoted to a lifetime spent holding back. That alone makes your Mars-hating CPA-guy a real end-zone winner, see? How have they stayed in charge so long? Has to involve our own self-loathing. —Sad, because he was not half-bad looking, really, the CPA. —Just joking, sheesh. Don’t go ballistic on me.”

About Stepping Out

t was easier being half of a decorative boy-girl unit. Simpler to turn up at some East Side literary party as a conventional couple, not your usual self—gay and alone or with some person of your own sex.

All eyes turn toward the door, assessing the newly arrived pair shedding their coats, smiling greetings at the hostess—all eyes judging them—separate, together, eyes then turning back to drinks, each other, the door-entry score made as surely as at some Olympic diving event.

After that, Angie and I could split up, solo handshakers, sex-seekers unimpeded. And if I was still alone by party’s end, she’d be there to leave with. We could then do a long party post-mortem (best part?) on our train ride downtown.

Awkwardness set in when one friend found one, and the other was forced to subway it home alone. It could feel somewhat hurtful, your leaving the party unasked-for. Odd, it always seemed a judgment on your work.

The two of us soon fought like longtime spouses. Knowing how to wound each other best. (References, not to looks, but work—proved most painful.) Sure, I understood I was not quite Angie’s lover, okay, okay. But did any of Ms. Byrnes’s one-night-standers know, as I did, precisely what her uncle (Fern Jewel’s shrimp boat captain brother) had done to her, at age eight, behind a white sail at a Savannah boatyard? Which of Angie’s latest married executives knew that her cranky painter mentor, Joan Mitchell, had not co-starred with Bruce Cabot in some Lost City flicks from the forties?