The Fancy Dancer

were in their last flush of bloom. Petals littered the rich soil under the plants. The thought of Clare Faux and Missy Oldenberg came to my mind.
    “I don’t mean anything much different by the Lover idea that the traditional theologians do,” said Doric. “There’s nothing shocking about it at all. It’s just a different way of saying the same thing. But it frees us from that awful complex. I don’t know what to call the complex. It ought to have a helluva name, like the Oedipus complex, or something. Part of your mind was trying to tell you the truth with that dream. The other part masked the truth with fear, so that you experienced it as a nightmare.”
    We sat on a stone bench, with the perfume of the doomed roses floating around us. It was a splendid day, and the usual inversion layer of blue haze had lifted from the Denver flats, so that you could clearly see the blue mountains all around.
    Doric kept talking. Years of thinking must have gone into the ideas that he now dumped in my lap.
    “If there was sex between man and woman before the fall, then there must have been sex between man and man, and woman and woman,” he said. “For us to argue the validity of our love, we have to go all the way and say that it is rooted in original innocence, like heterosexual love is. Isn’t that innocence what we’re really trying to recapture in our relationships?”
    I shook my head. “You make me dizzy,” I said. “Now I don’t know what to confess. It’s been months since I confessed, and I’ve been dying of guilt. But...”
    “Think a few more days,” he said. “Then if you want to confess before you leave, I’ll be glad to hear your confession.”
    That night I went back to the professor’s house in the usual state of mental shock. Vidal had gone out again, without leaving a message.
    The professor and I ate a little supper and talked about Dignity, and then I took a Valium and went to bed.
    About midnight, Vidal came in. I could barely open 189
    my eyes, all woozy in that golden haze. But when I saw that Vidal was badly beaten up, I woke up a little. “What happened to you?” I asked.
    ‘Was hanging around in a leather bar, a place called the Golden Spike,” Vidal said bluntly. His lower lip was split and swollen, and it was hard for him to talk. “I went home with these two guys. I thought they were just into games. Turned out they were into heavy stuff. They tried to tie me up. They were going to beat the living shit out of me. I just about wrecked their place on the way out.”
    He was climbing stiffly, sorely out of his clothes. “First time you’ve been in a fight since I met you,” I said.
    “Felt pretty good too,” he said. “I missed it.”
    “Going to blackslide, huh? Throw away all the progress you’ve made.”
    Vidal sat down creakily on the edge of the bed, naked. He had bruises everywhere.
    “Can’t you really see what’s the matter with me?” he said.
    “You’re bored with me,” I said.
    “Not exactly,” he said. “Maybe I'd better tell you what’s on my mind.”
    “All right, let’s get it over with,” I said hollowly, out of the yellow haze.
    "All summer, you’ve made me feel guilty and inferior,” he said. “And everybody else here makes me feel guilty and inferior.”
    “That’s the last thing I want you to feel.”
    “You don’t understand what I mean. I’ve accepted being gay, but where does that leave me? There I am creeping around Cottonwood with my fake wife. I’d like to be free and open like some of these people I’ve met here.”
    “Ah right, you want to come out. What else is new?” ‘You make me feel inferior, because you’re doing something with your life and I’m not. Even if you are a mess, you’re committed to something. In a way, your ministry is your lover. I can always feel it between us. And here I am just wasting my life around cars and bars. I’ve got to get going.”
    We were silent for a moment.
    “So you want to leave me,” I said.
    “What I really want is to go back to Missoula this fall and finish college,” he said. “I’ve saved a little money, enough for the first semester. There’s a new state scholarship for ex-cons, maybe I can get it. Winter said he’d give me a recommend. And he said he thought Father Vance would give me one too.”
    I would be left alone in Cottonwood with an aborted pastoral mission and a frightening new identity.
    “And Missoula’s kind of a liberal town,” he said.