Free Men Who Love Men by William J. Mann

Standing at the counter, we made small talk. “How’s the guesthouse?” he asked. I told him fine. I asked about his mother. “She’s fine,” he told me. “How are Jeff and Lloyd?” They were fine, too, I told him.

    I wanted to scream. For God’s sake, Joey, how can we be standing here talking like mere acquaintances on the street when I’ve licked lint out of your navel?

    But we kept our faces composed and our voices level. I asked him why he decided on New York.

    “I’m seeing someone there,” he told me.

    It was then that our coffees arrived. The girl behind the counter attempted to fit a lid onto mine, but as she did so, she spilled a little, burning her hand. She put it quickly to her mouth, and Joey asked her if she was all right. “I’ll live,” she said.

    That’s when it hit me. I’m seeing someone .

    “I didn’t know,” I told him as we walked out to the benches, my legs threatening to turn to jelly. “Did you meet him here?”

    “Yes,” Joey said, “at Tea Dance.”

    Where we had met, too. Where most boyfriends are met in Provincetown. I searched Joey’s eyes for something, for anything . Had he forgotten?

    What is the process in which emotions become memories? At what point does the feeling recede, the passion dissolve, and the details become merely data stored by the brain? For me, it has yet to occur, but Joey seemed to be moving along just fine.

    Still, unlike the night we broke up, I remained composed. “I wish you all the luck,” I told him. “What I want is for you to be happy.”

    “Thank you, Henry.”

    I felt absurd for having taken so long fixing my hair before I came over here. I was an idiot for trying on four shirts before deciding on the one I was wearing. Suddenly I wished I hadn’t shaved, and that the apartment I was planning to return to wasn’t quite so spic and span.

    “I didn’t go looking for a new relationship,” Joey said suddenly, defending himself even without any accusation from me. “It just happened. And it feels right.”

    I smiled at him, sipping my coffee, burning my tongue. I don’t remember what else we said. Nonsense stuff, really. About the real-estate market, about mutual funds and mutual friends. When we’d run out of even those topics, Joey stood, extending his hand and saying good-bye. But I wasn’t quite ready to separate from him forever. I stood as well, and told him I was going his way, so we might as well walk together. His presence was comforting to me after so long apart, if slightly unreal—and unsettling, too, because Joey was different, with his new clothes and his new lover. But it was preferable to being apart from him, for this time I sensed it would be forever. We walked a few blocks, and again Joey put out his hand to me to say good-bye. “I’ll walk a little further,” I said. So we walked on in silence, the only sound the squeak of his new sneakers. Still, it was something.

    “Why don’t we part here?” Joey said finally, firmly, as we approached the center of town. I knew I could go no further with him, so I nodded. We hugged, at his initiation. No last cry of yearning bubbled up to escape from my lips, just a simple, “Thanks.” I felt, fleetingly, the warmth of his body once again, a body I knew every inch of, even parts Joey himself had never seen.

    He continued down Commercial Street, while I hurried up to Bradford so I could peer down from the next block and catch a glimpse of him crossing the street, a flash of yellow and red in a crowd of people. That’s the last time I saw him. For all our time together, that’s the image that stays in my mind.

    I didn’t go looking for a new relationship. It just happened. And it feels right.

    So why hasn’t it just happened for me? I have been looking. Over and over again. Lloyd thinks that’s why I haven’t found a lover since Joey. I’ve been looking too hard. It’s when you’re not looking, he says, that you find it.

    And I wasn’t