Maybe the Moon

can accessorize the hell out of them. For a while I used to belt them with various bright and spangled things, but I gave up the effort several years ago. When you’re builtlike I am, there’s not much point in pretending to have a waistline.
    Renee was chirpy all the way through the canyon. She could hardly wait to buy oil paints, she said, because she’d been watching a guy on TV who showed you how to paint snowy peaks with Christmas trees on them, just by stubbing the brush against the canvas. He wasn’t that cute, she said—in fact, he was kind of old—but he had this deep, velvety voice that made you feel so calm , even if you weren’t painting. Already I have a creepy image of future nights at home: me on my pillow with this diary, and Renee at her easel, stubbing out snowy peaks in perpetuity under the weird spell of some bearded guy in a cardigan. She pumped me about Neil again too. She hasn’t asked me to negotiate a date with him, but I think she’s on the verge. I’d be more than happy to oblige, if Neil weren’t my employer and I didn’t know Renee as well as I do. Neil and I have a nice uncomplicated professional relationship, and I think it’s wise to keep it that way.
    When we got to Gloria’s, I gave Renee directions to the nearest art supply store and sent her on her way, making my entrance on my own. The restaurant was packed, so I forged a path through a forest of legs, most of which were sheathed in the trousers du jour: those neon-print muscle pants that make gay boys look straight and vice versa. Halfway in, I made eye contact with a gap-toothed boy in peacock-green bicycle shorts. He smiled and said: “Hi, Cady,” so I smiled back, though I couldn’t place him. His groin hovered above me like a dirigible, iridescent as a butterfly’s wing in the morning light.
    “Over here.” Jeff signaled me from a table. Behind him loomed a trellis of white bougainvillea, through which I could catch the angry blur of traffic on Sunset. “I brought you a pillow,” he said, lifting me into a chair.
    “You didn’t.” It was a paisley pillow, wide and flat enough and suitably firm, exactly what I needed. I settled into it and rearranged my T-shirt, then surveyed the room. “Now I suppose you expect me to tell your fortune.”
    Jeff chuckled.
    I bounced a little on my new throne. “You brought this from home? Really?”
    “Not far.”
    “You’re sick.” I gave him a quick once-over, reacquainting myself with that generous, dark-eyed face, the slate-blue shadow on his jaw, even at noon. His eyelashes have always been his best feature, and somehow they seemed lusher than ever, as if in compensation for his thinning hair. He wore green corduroy slacks and a plain white shirt, sleeves rolled up to the elbows. If memory serves, that’s how he was dressed the night I met him at the Blue Parrot, so many years ago. It’s his uniform for being a writer.
    “I ordered us margaritas,” he said.
    I told him he could have mine, since I was on a diet.
    “Have one .”
    “Do I have to be drunk to hear this?”
    He smiled. “No.”
    “You look nice,” I told him.
    “Thanks. You too.”
    “So…if you’re not gonna read to me, I hope it’s about sex.”
    He chuckled.
    “Last night?”
    He nodded.
    “Was it bigger than a bread box?”
    “Don’t jump ahead.”
    “Tell,” I said. I folded my arms across my chest and waited.
    “Well, I went running in Griffith Park yesterday afternoon. I parked in my regular lot and saw this kid leaning against a car.”
    “Description, please.”
    “Oh…about twenty, twenty-one. Sandy hair, dressed like he’d just come from a class at UCLA.”
    “Cute?”
    “Very.”
    “Go on.”
    “So I just headed up the path on my run, since that’s what I came there for…”
    “Of course.”
    “…and I ran for half an hour, nearly killed myself, and came back to the lot, and there was the kid, still leaning against his car.”
    “Uh oh.”
    “What?”
    “He wasn’t a cop, was he?”
    “No. Just be quiet and let me finish.”
    “Sorry.”
    “So I started to get in my car, and he sort of…you know, headed over toward me, and made this really clumsy effort at conversation. Sort of hesitant and scared, but completely charged with lust. It was the oddest thing, like stepping back in time somehow. He reminded me of me back when I was first trying to be a homo. It was touching, almost.”
    I nodded. I wasn’t about to get smart with him while he was