Free Night Kites by M. E. Kerr Page B

tabletop. “Jim Stanley went to work on me,” he said.
    He started to get up, for something to wipe up the coffee.
    “I’ll get it,” I said.
    I went into the kitchen for a sponge. I was trying to remember Jim Stanley. I’d met him only once. He wrote science-fiction stories and screenplays as J. J. Stanley, and called himself “bicoastal” because he traveled back and forth from New York to Beverly Hills. Pete had gone to Europe with him last summer.
    When they came back, we’d all had dinner together, at a restaurant in SoHo, in lower New York. Pete and Jim had just come from having drinks at Stan and Tina Horton’s loft down there. Jim was Pete’s age, tall, sandy-haired. I remembered he’d talked a lot about Rachter, this program that rigged a computer to write novels. He was working on an idea for a TV series about a Rachterlike character in an office, who told stories about the employees I couldn’t remember anything else about him.
    While I wiped up the coffee, Pete said, “Jim’s a political gay. I used to hate gay activists! I used to think they were a bunch of self-pitying sissies who blamed everything on the fact they were homosexuals. I used to tell Jim that what I did in bed was my own private business. Jim said that was right: What I did in bed was, but what about life out of bed? What about lying to everyone, trying to pass for straight, never letting family or friends know what was going on in my life? … He convinced me the only way to get past that kind of self-hatred was to come out of hiding. He said anyone who loved me wouldn’t love me any less if I came out, and I’d like myself a lot more. So I started with Mom. You were next on my list.”
    I tossed the sponge at the sink, missed, left it on the kitchen floor. “What’d Mom say when you told her?”
    “She said she wasn’t surprised. She said she was glad I told her. And she said she used to worry that I was too much of a loner.”
    “That’s what I always thought you were, too,” I said. “A loner.” I sat down.
    “I was. A busy loner.”
    “What’s a busy loner?”
    “Active, but not really attached,” Pete said. “Too busy…. That’s why I never did anything about finishing The Skids —or finishing my Ph.D.”
    “Oh, that ,” I said a little contemptuously, as though Dad was in the room with us.
    “Dad was right about that,” Pete said. “I should have gone to Columbia, or N.Y.U., and finished it. I should have worked on my book, too,” Pete said. “But when I landed here right out of Princeton, I couldn’t believe the gay scene. It was still the seventies. There’ll never be another time like it. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. I wasn’t out at Princeton, naturally. When I saw all the gay bars and discos here, I just wanted to dance and drink and play.”
    I couldn’t imagine Pete dancing with another guy.
    I said, “When I get out of college, if I ever get into college, I’ll probably want to dance and drink and play, too.”
    Pete shook his head. “No. You’re having your party right now. My adolescence was on hold…. I could hardly take Tim Lathrop to the Seaville High Prom, or Marty to the P-Party. We sneaked around like guilty thieves. Tim spent half his time at confession, and Marty was seeing if a shrink could make him straight…. That’s when I became the world’s foremost authority on gay books.” Pete laughed. “Migod! I don’t think there’s a book that even remotely touched on the subject that I didn’t read. I spent hours in the library looking under H in the card catalog!”
    I was remembering Tim Lathrop as Pete talked. Tim had been a lifeguard on Main Beach when Pete was. He was this blond hunk who was at our house a lot when Pete was in his teens, one of the star tennis players at Holy Family High…. Marty Olivetti was still one of Pete’s closest friends. He was from Tulsa, Oklahoma. He’d come from Princeton with Pete for weekends years ago, and they’d