The Front Runner

budget. He could carry a heavy sack into the kitchen and announce proudly, "Hey, I got you some sirloin on sale at $1.95 a pound."
    One day, though, he came back and announced that a strange car had tried to crowd his bike down into the ditch. After that I made him go shopping in the car.
    While marriage had brought his $10,000 salary into the house, we lived leanly. I was still supporting my children. Traveling to meets cost us money every time we turned around. We had everything budgeted right down to the last pair of running shoes for Billy— and he went through a pair every two weeks.
    Every day, after breakfast, we worked on our school programs for the coming academic year. Billy was full of ideas for expanding the gay studies program.
    By 12:30 we were usually fixing lunch. I might eat some soup or a sandwich or whatever else was handy. Billy's lunch never varied. He always ate a special whole-grain cereal—oats, barley, millet, etc.—that he
    ground just before cooking. I had long ago stopped asking him if he didn't get bored with it.
    When he worked out on the tartan track, Vince often joined us. In July Vince was going to Europe with the pro tour, and was resting now. Sometimes reporters and track people dropped by to watch them.
    The press had found out about our marriage almost immediately. When questioned, we didn't deny it. It was all over the papers. Bruce Cayton sold his photographs and his story to Harper's Bazaar. The track people were still in a state of shock about it, and when they came around, they tried not to mention it.
    In the afternoons, with study and workouts over, we sometimes went over to visit Joe and Marian. Everybody lay around their pool and swam. Friends dropped in. The sun poured down on us, and we chatted and laughed. I got bronzed, and Billy got as speckled as a quail's egg.
    In the evenings, we usually retreated to the house. We liked just doing nothing together, and didn't permit anybody to break in on this. We sometimes cooked dinner outside—Billy's potatoes and my steak roasted a decent distance apart over the charcoal. He dexterously grated raw carrots and beets over the potatoes. With a salad and nuts and more sour milk, that was what he ate.
    After dinner we studied some more, watched films of races to study Billy's Montreal opponents, analyzed his performance, read, took care of mail. Even if he wasn't in the room with me, some gentle sound told me he was in the house. His transistor radio playing rock softly out of respect for my eardrums. Or a cup clinking in the kitchen, or the sound of his bare feet across the old board floor.
    Occasionally, if John Sive was in town, we all went down in the middle of the afternoon to Manhattan for dinner and a movie, getting back about 9:30 P.M. We also accepted a few of the many invitations to speak before gay groups in the city, doing it free for fear the AAU might slap Billy with a trumped-up money-accepting charge.
    Before going to sleep, we often lay propped in bed, reading. Billy was reading Steve Goodnight's Rape, I remember. I often read the Bible, letting its comfort and truth sink into me. Jesus had said that the last would be first. Society said that we were the last. It could be Jesus had meant the gays.
    The bedroom window would be wide open into the summer night. We could hear the warm wind soughing in the cedars and spruces. If it rained, we could hear the eaves dripping softly, and smell the wet earth. We made love and went to sleep with our bodies touching under the sheet.
    On weekends we worked in the yard. It gave me a good feeling to hear the lawnmower from the back of the house. I had gotten rid of the power mower and hunted up an old-fashioned manual one because I was always afraid Billy might cut some toes off.
    Joe's ex-head gardener had left a fine planting of perennials about the house, and we tried to tidy up the neglected beds a little. We had day lilies, iris, poppies, delphinium, even a few scraggly roses. I can still see Billy down on his hands and knees sniffing a few petered-out hyacinths.
    "Did you know these are the Virgo flower?" he said.
    I got down and sniffed them. They were headily fragrant. "How come you don't smell like that when you run?" I teased him.
    "We ought to plant some more this fall," he said. He pointed at the poppies. "Your poppies look fine, though."
    Behind the house, there was an overgrown plot where the gardener had had his kitchen garden. "Next spring we'll get an early