Finding he’d secured himself two whole hours by his lonesome (unusual back home), maybe Dan checked out the mall’s haltered adolescent girls. They drifted to and fro across the vast space, always tacking at obliques in bright attracting “schools” of three to five. Not unlike the pet store’s neon tetras glorifying aquarium windows of that shop exotically stinky.

It is our rarest luxury, sufficient time alone. How often we forget, it is a “hall pass” we so crave. Solitude becomes especially precious to a father of three this overtaxed and hectic with blood drives, land closings, putter practice, sidewalk edging, car-pooling kids from dressage to clarinet lessons. Today, atypically wifeless (her asthma acted up each August), now briefly unhooked from children, Dan must have felt like some once-clunky appliance suddenly retooled to be, the miracle of 1957, “A Portable.”

Alone at last, free of wall sockets, maybe he probably got so doggone horny. Maybe it crunched his lower body like his wife’s worst cramps coming on all at once, doubling her over. Was it a nausea of displaced attraction? What made Dan feel this strengthening weakness for some action now?

If the female genitalia can be considered (in certain magical functions) an inward-looking device requiring plug-in, the male ones remain perversely, indeed sinisterly, portable—extruded, independent, air-able, always primed for the latent test drive.

They’ll get a guy—unchaperoned—into all kinds of freelance trouble, quick, even at a fluorescent mall. What to do with a healthy set of portables, at 2:30 p.m., at Big Elk Browse ’n’ Buy, before the baby-sitting Disney animation ends?

Maybe surely Dan endured the driven sexual thoughts of a young man—in so tumid an August—just at the peak of his need to implant. Maybe these two hours among attractive strangers helped Dan admit to a more unsettling itch. It was an itch you couldn’t even name, much less sate, slake, or properly dig at in reputation-conscious yard-work Falls.

Itches can go unscratched only so long. Watch.

VI. He Grows Up, Anyway

Soon as I got older, I got out.

It’s 1970 and I have just bought a batch of spring flowers. Not a single dollar-bunch, but three I’ve artfully merged. That’s a notable percentage of my weekly food money. I now take night courses at Harvard. I sell art reproductions at the Coop. I am studying painting and have allowed myself to be in love. With a. Man.

He’s ten years older, four inches shorter, Japanese American, also a painter, a fellow Gemini. It seems ordained. A Columbia grad, he once published a prose poem in the Saturday Review. It concerned the first winter snowfall in a gray city—imagistic if not controversial.

All this impresses me, but what matters most, his kindness, his deft watercolor hands, the sense of shelter his basement apartment provides. It is full of cloisonné and mirrors and screens—gold-leafed cranes flying. Our sex depends on adolescent friction and it smells of Johnson & Johnson baby products, both clear and pink ones. His laughter contains all the lucid giddiness hidden in puns, unguents, and champagne. A buzz available anytime I can get him giggling, which is most anytime.