In the end, it probably wasn’t productive or even possible to deconstruct attraction. One night, six months after they’d met, Desmond came out of a movie in the East Village and saw Russell walking along the street halfway up the block ahead of him. It was a warm, cloudy night and Russell was dressed in a white shirt and dark pants. From a distance, he looked short, young, and perhaps a little lost. Drifting, to use Sybil’s word. Desmond was about to rush up to him, but instead decided to follow him, hoping to discover something about him he hadn’t known before, a secret vice, perhaps, something he could use as a bargaining chip in the future—assuming they had a future together. Russell went into a greengrocer and bought flowers, paid for a magazine at a newsstand, stopped to talk briefly with a large middle-aged woman in an orange dress, picked up two coffee mugs and a small stack of books from a jittery sidewalk vendor. After twenty minutes of shadowing him, Desmond began to lose his sense of purpose. He turned and walked to the nearest subway. As he was standing on the hot platform, battered by the sound of a train approaching from the wrong direction, he realized he had discovered a secret vice; but it wasn’t Russell’s, it was his own. He’d been stalking someone for twenty minutes, stepping into doorways to avoid being seen. That had to mean something.

The next night, Russell showed up at Desmond’s apartment carrying a vase filled with the flowers he’d bought at the grocer, and the mugs and books he’d bought from the street vendor. Later, as they lay in bed, Russell suggested he move into Desmond’s apartment. “Oh, come on,” he teased when Desmond hesitated. “You know you want me to.” And lying in the dark with Russell’s head against his chest, thinking about his behavior twenty-four hours earlier, he had to admit it was true, even if he wasn’t sure why.

Pauline Anderton was singing the theme from Goldfinger. The whole album was more or less a disaster, an ill-conceived concept from the start. Anderton obviously had no feeling for the songs and took the movie motif as license to ham it up in a way that was frequently embarrassing. “His heart is cold,” she sang in a nasal whine—a failed attempt at imitating Shirley Bassey—and then dug herself in deeper by forcing out an “evil” laugh. There were so many questions he wished he could ask Anderton. The main one, in relation to this album, was: “What the hell did you think you were doing?” He turned off the record player.