The Front Runner

fantasy, huh? In the grass, huh, like in the movie?"
    "Yeah," I said, "what's yours?"
    He laughed out loud and took my hand. "Oh, I have a lot of them," he said. "Making out in Loon with you, for one."
    We had a dangerous drive back up to the college. I was so shaky that it was a wonder I didn't smash up the car. Billy lay with his head in my lap the whole way, and I kept running my fingers through his hair, and told him the whole story of my life. I had never told it to anyone.
    I unloaded the whole thing on him. It should have given me some relief. But instead, the more I talked,
    the more nervous I got, the more flimsy my reasons seemed for giving in to my feelings. I kept looking down at his profile eerily lit by the dashboard lights, at his hand on my thigh. He still didn't seem real. I thought to myself: You're out of your mind. You can still back out.
    EIGHT
    I'D given Billy this big lecture about how we both needed a good night's rest. But I didn't sleep at all that night. I spent the whole night tossing around in that creaky Victorian bed, torturing myself with thoughts. I was going to do the wrong thing. I was going to destroy his running career, just to satisfy my selfish feelings. If we became lovers, the fury would hit us. It would obliterate us. It might even destroy our feeling for each other. I wasn't so sure that love could survive something like that. Having had no experience with love, I had no data on which to base an opinion.
    Finally it was just getting light, and the birds started to sing off in the nearby woods. They sang wildly, sharply, sweetly. I lay listening to them vibrating with nervousness.
    Finally I got up and shaved. I had the shakes so bad I could hardly hold the shaver. I looked at myself in the rust-specked old bathroom mirror, and the great gay dread about aging hit me. There is no society, no law, no social convention to keep two gays together. Everything is based on feeling and on personal attractiveness. The moment you cease to be desirable to your partner, he decamps.
    I ran my hands back over my close-barbered curls. My hair was still good, though its brunette color now had a gunmetal tint. But sooner or later I'd start to bald. My tanned face was still recognizable as the Villanova miler of twenty years ago, but sun and bitterness had cut hard lines in it. My body and skin were the best things I had, but for how much longer? I wondered if I'd ever get paranoid enough for cosmetics and hair transplants. I needed a love that I could lean on for the rest of my life, and that was too much to
    hope for. By the time Billy was my age, and still a healthy vigorous man, I would be nearly sixty. Sooner or later he might elbow me aside for someone younger, the way he might elbow some stranger in a race.
    My heart almost stopped when I heard him knock on the door. I looked at my alarm clock. He was fifteen minutes early.
    When I came out on the verandah, the sun was just Showing through the trees. Billy was kicking around in the pine needles by the house. He was wearing a faded red long-sleeved T-shirt, his old blue shorts, his spiked cross-country shoes, no socks and his headband. "Hi," he said cheerfully. "Did you sleep?" I said as I shut the door. "Some," he said, smiling a little. Now that the uncertainty of the past months was resolved he was his normal relaxed self. He wasn't nervous at all, I could see. He could hardly wait. Fifteen minutes early.
    We set off across the field, and shortly we were in the woods. It was an unseasonably warm morning, and we started sweating right away.
    "Stay at a seven-minute pace," I said. "This is going to be a rest day."
    "Seven minutes?" said Billy. "Christ!" He was used to clipping along out there at a five-minute-mile pace. But he struck a seven and stayed on it with his usual uncanny precision.
    At first I was so shaky that my legs felt bad. But after I warmed up, I felt a little lifted. The woods smelled fresh and spicy—there had been no rain for a week, and the leaves sent up their herby smell. The bird songs were everywhere, echoing through the groves and hollows. They stopped singing as we passed, then started up again, or flew off and started singing farther off. We could hear no other sounds but the steady crunch of our spikes along the soft trail, and our breathing.
    Billy ran about ten feet ahead of me, not looking back. Even on his way to make love, he was businesslike about running. He seemed hardly to touch the ground—I had