“The next morning I couldn’t face her. Neither of us—it just went on like that. We talked of annulment, finally. It wasn’t fair to keep her but I didn’t know what to do. I was so damned afraid of being found out. Then she told me she was pregnant. It was odd: I was shocked and then that wore off, and I was relieved. I had something to forgive now, too, and she needed me.” Henry paused, finishing in a hollow voice, “And God help me, I knew people would think it was mine.”

He looked up—for a question, something to keep him going. I just watched him. His face fell and he lapsed into a drone. “Lydia made it easier, in a sense. I asked who the father was. She tilted her chin in that pose she had, sitting right where you are now, and told me never to ask again. When we stepped from this room, the lie began, and grew until it cut across all our life. We were faithful in our way: she played the gracious hostess and I the contented husband and father. But there was little between us except appearances and less between me and Jason. She mothered him as if to say, ‘Look: here’s someone I care for.’ But when I looked at him, I saw my failure: the weakling, the one who’d let down his wife and father, the closet homosexual.” His voice was bleak. “And still I wanted to know how that would be.

“For years I wondered, playing out my part. I’d never—I’d never had a man, never had sex with anyone. The evening it happened I was driving back from a business trip. The boy was thumbing by the shoulder of the road: a tall, slim boy in blue jeans. I stopped for him. He was hungry and dirty and needed money.” Henry’s voice turned raw. “When I put my hand on him, he didn’t move. My throat was tight. He was young and empty-looking. I drove to a motel with a smirking nightman. It was dirty and there were stains on the sheets. But that blank-faced boy was exactly what I needed.

“At the moment they burst through the door I was the happiest I could remember. And then they were pulling us apart and calling me an ‘old queer.’ It was like being trapped inside someone else’s body. I rode to the station in the back of a prowl car with the boy chewing gum and a fat policeman in between. All I could think of was to be free. When we reached the station they took the boy somewhere and dragged me inside. I never saw him again.