Cheap diversionary tactic, too, she thought. Maybe he was still in the closet, a depressing, boring possibility. She hardly knew any gay people who were still in the closet. Then again, if they were, how would she know? She’d often wondered if Rosemary didn’t have some lesbian tendencies—it might go a long way toward explaining why she’d married Charlie—but she hoped not; if she found out ten years hence that she’d been a dyke after all and had never once made a pass at her, Jane would be crushed. Desmond appeared to be nervous, too, with a slight sheen of sweat on his forehead. Not the best way to make a good first impression on David, who valued cool, capable characters like Chloe and mistrusted apprehensive types like himself.

“So you are single?” she tried again.

“No,” he said. “Not really. I have a lover.”

Lover was infuriatingly vague, although no heterosexual would use it in this context. “Oh?” Jane said. “Is it a long-term relationship?”

“We’ve been together for five years.” Then he looked up from his busywork at the useless machine and said, “He and I.”

Thank God that was out in the open. She put her teacup on the floor, took off her suit jacket and hung it from the bedpost. She sprawled out on the mattress with her head propped up in her hand and kicked off her shoes. “Five years is infancy,” she said. “Although your average gay man acts as if it were three quarters of a lifetime. I have a theory gay relationships age in dog years. What do you think?”

“I can’t say I know much about ‘your average gay man.’”

Open mouth, insert foot. “I didn’t mean it like that,” she said. “But understand, Desmond, I don’t have a homophobic cell in my body, so I just blurt out whatever comes to mind.”

“It’s fine, really.”