A few days later, Desmond was sitting at the sidewalk table of a Newbury Street café, eating a cheeseburger. He’d wanted to order a crusty pastry with mocha frosting he’d seen on the dessert tray, but had decided against it at the last moment, imagining how he’d look, sitting there with a cup of tea, daintily slicing through it with the edge of a fork. It was a bright windy day and all the foreign students from Boston University and other nearby schools were out in force, shopping aggressively and turning that particular Boston neighborhood into a perfume ad—threesomes and foursomes of androgynous young people in Armani sunglasses and expensive clothes behaving toward each other in suggestive ways. Deerforth drew an intelligent and relatively sedate student body, but was too far from the downtown nightclubs to give it a competitive edge in the sought-after foreign markets. Most of these kids appeared to have arrived in the U.S. by way of private schools in Switzerland, and judging from their sleek bodies, they all used personal trainers and had access to high-grade drugs. The strong, warm breeze blowing off the river gave them an especially dashing appearance.

The packet of mail Russell had forwarded had arrived earlier in the day. Uncertain what to expect from the note from his editor, Desmond had decided to escape the confines of his room before opening it. Now that the phone company had finally shown up, he found himself waiting more attentively for a call from Russell, and the anticipation made it feel to him as if the walls were closing in. He was still trying to decode the comment about Boris taking up painting. Last night, lying in bed with the window open above him, he’d begun to wonder if it had something to do with the lanky contractor in the building next to Morning in America, who was, after all, a painter of sorts.

Sometimes Desmond worried about his own sexual restlessness. In his pre-Russell days, he’d found himself becoming ravenously promiscuous as soon as he started dating someone. Did it mean he was unable to commit to a relationship, incapable of dealing with intimacy, afflicted with a sexual addiction he’d have to struggle with in some humiliating twelve-step program? What worried him since he and Russell had been together was that he’d felt virtually no sexual restlessness. Did it mean he was getting old, his hormones were getting sluggish? Most worrisome of all was the possibility that it indicated some lack of ambition that perhaps leaked into other areas of his life. Yesterday afternoon, he’d sat down at the table in his room and tried to write a pornographic story about the bleached blond Roller Blader. But halfway into it, he realized the boy had miraculously metamorphosed into Russell, and he couldn’t very well construct a lurid fantasy about someone he’d been sleeping with for five years.