I am being asked to reinforce the natural order, their own middle-class romance. I imagine how they see me, a boy charming, young, and tender as the flowers he’s paid dearly for. They note my pressed suit, but cannot smell its aura of Niagara spray starch. I washed this seersucker thing in Woolite, dried it on towels spread across my tenement’s tar roof, then ironed it myself, unable to afford both dry cleaning and nosegay.

“For my boyfriend.”

I say it louder than I even planned. The tram driver checks his rearview mirror. Ladies’ faces shift. I haven’t spoken “boyfriend” to hurt them, to teach them, or to scold them.

I just want some of my complexity known (since they asked). There are stemmed and petaled layers of complexity, involving the weird unexplainable innocence of all this, of simply He and Me and Us in the World. Is pleasure such a threat? Is a little privacy too much to ask? It all seems, to me, as innocent as the phrase “for my boyfriend.”

Itself, a bouquet.

The ladies look hard at one another, then some glum muttering. Their leader checks back, describing, debating. An argument’s in progress. Do I fuckin’ need this? Why do I keep doing this to myself? Which means, of course, Why does the world keep doing this to me and my kind? Dan, among us. How much pain can be inflicted for one species of involuntary joy?

Then something happens. It again proves how complicated, the world. Shoulder to shoulder, they’re all smiling back at me, anyhow; their leader lady nods.

They have—through knowing each other so deeply, through a basic lack of experience with anyone “out,” through some abiding belief that every good-looking boy on earth is really created for one equally fine gal—decided that “boyfriend” can’t possibly mean that.

They opt for thinking I don’t quite know how my statement might be misread—by other minds, far dirtier than theirs. They decide male friendship is nice but not so important as actual love. They choose to feel I am too fresh-looking and ethical-seeming. I’m visibly from far too good a Caucasian family (I could almost be a son of theirs). And so they’re going to go ahead and enjoy all this—me, the flowers, seersucker, spring. They are going to pretend I didn’t really say that. I didn’t really mean that I was … one.

Despite them, thanks to my mission, Brookline’s street-center tram line smells improbably today of woods abloom, citric-scented wildflowers in late April. Despite Boston’s Athenas’ indicating what I’m not to do, the town still feels whimsical, this Northern spot I came to to come out in. Its central lake in its emerald park has boats shaped like giant swans. Even here, Wagnerians hold sway.

So I get away with it again. I am not arrested. And when I rise to leave, my honey-colored hair ruffled by breeze, as I pull the cord, and hold my floral tribute, bridal before me, the ladies wave. Their leader mutters fondly, automatic, as if speaking nonsense syllables to some grandchild, “Toodles. Enjoy.”