LOREN K. & SETH CLARK SILBERMAN
DIFFERENT GENTLEMEN

You fuck me like you're playing a violin, he says, mouth pressed against my futon. Keep it right there, after I shoot, then get off. I tell him that I'm using that in the novel, chuckle when he says that he doesn't want to be there. In the novel, or here? Almost three months after I break up with him, he pretends that he no longer loves me, talks about his hook-ups over dinner because I ask him not to. He needs to prove to himself that he's over me, under me now. He likes it best on his belly, me kissing the back of his neck. He seems disappointed that he enjoys it now, still, as if he's only here to disfigure my imprint. I don't want anyone having any idea of me. He takes his cell into the bathroom, tells me it's the Israeli he meets at Beige the night he texts help me enough times to get me to respond, comes over trashed. They jerk off a couple nights a week. Just baby kisses, he assures me, acts like they're dating as if he knows what that means, thinks he handles his affairs with something I never see in him: perspicacity.

Heflips through the unabridged dictionary that I take from the landing in my building where we trade things we no longer need, where I leave the translucent teddy bear piggy bank he gives me on Valentine's Day. He sleeps rather than looks for a job; so, it's all he can afford. That and a Liberace card with only I love you, Juan inside. I tear it up, put it in the recycling. He goes by Juan now instead of John, not because he escorts but because he wants to create a life apart from his white parents. He uses the same name with his clients, talks to them about me, has a problem with boundaries, complains about the climb to my six-story Alphabet City walk-up. I de-friend him on Facebook after one too many status updates about other men and drunken nights. He says he respects me now, keeps talking about the Israeli and the Algerian Jew before him. He thinks that he's being funny when he says, Jews are like a used car you don't trade in because it's too comfortable, climbs back into bed, sees that I'm finally getting around to reading the chunk of a Marcel Proust biography I find on Avenue A. I read him the quote he already lives, from a letter Proust writes as an adolescent to his grandfather: Only once in a lifetime can one be so upset that one is unable to fuck. Juan says he feels that way for two weeks after I break up with him, as if that's a sign of how deeply he loves me. He looks lost because he doesn't yet realize that there's nothing to find.

The art of losing isn't hard to master, but my ex N prefers Elizabeth Bishop's National Geographic poem. Almost four years ago, N explains that it illustrates Bishop's obsession with lesbian merging. Sometimes I wonder if we're merging, she says, lacing running shoes to run with me down to Elm Street and loop to Willoughby Ave. We pass the home of the cisgender boyfriend she leaves for me and note with wonder how much more our bodies, though not our psyches, resemble one another since we're high school all-star athletes with eating disorders. When December air seeps through the broken window of her place on Dwight Street, we huddle in bed. I read aloud from Monique Wittig's Le corps lesbien, excited by the blurring of j/e and tu, by the violent hemorrhaging of lovers apart. Excess scares me, she confides. When N travels to China, I suspect that she won't return. A year after she does, as I stagger out of Cattyshack and into a cab with a date whose first name I can't remember, N sends me this text: Fuck you. I'm sick of where your dick has been. I'm never touching it again. I call from the cab as though I'm alone, as if my nameless date isn't giving the telltale pout I know so well, don't leave a message. I fist my cab-mate in her bed with bare hands, leave brusquely, soon find N sipping bourbon by the faux fireplace at the Metropolitan around 3:00 a.m. She apologizes for the text message, invites me, half-smiles, half-grimaces, pulls me atop her. Your hands smell like pussy. You bastard.

Six months ago, on eighth-floor of West 113th Street, I inject testosterone into my upper thigh. Leo gets T for free from Callen-Lorde, wants to make a buck. Twice a week for two months, he ushers me into a fog of marijuana and body odor. Man, your down-below's are gonna grow so much. His grin competes with pimples. He tells me it makes him liberated, wants to know if I feel hornier or angrier, as though those are the only two options. He pulls up on the syringe to make sure he hasn't hit a vein, continues to tell me about his rude doctor at the Harlem Hospital Center. He's just bitter because he's black and I'm a Columbia student. Leo pushes the hormones in. Or maybe it's my hair. Looks too queer or something. What do you think, dude? Should I cut off the mohawk? I think about arriving to Yale as an incoming freshman with dyed-blond dreadlocks, shove twenty dollars into Leo's hand, don't answer. He gives me money with our last exchange. I sell him my light blue fake Strat, never played, a congratulations-on-Yale gift from an apologetic uncle who tells me to stop taking my dyke-self so seriously. Leo pays me like it's a real Strat. I put the money toward car insurance for the new Honda my redhead depends upon but complains about. I wake up an hour early for work to drive her home, where she waits for me to pick her up again. Owning a car in New York City's a privilege, a luxury, she says, changing the song on my iPod. You really think I don't know?

Juan worries that his character will only give my friends reasons to hate him, like they need any. I repeat that he's merely material, part of the jigsaw puzzle Freud writes about in Moses and Monotheism. I reach over him to grab the book so I can read from it: Even if all parts of a problem seem to fit together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, one has to remember that the probable need not necessarily be the truth, and the truth not always probable. Juan thinks I'm saying he's a problem. So, I read from Proust, who explains, what we think we can tell about a character is nothing more than the effect of an association of ideas. According to Proust, we're all composed of different gentlemen, a title Loren likes when I suggest it over sushi at Jeollado, where we go to trade redhead and Juan tales, like we trade first-person narration after each of us has two paragraphs here. My response to the redhead Honda story includes me talking about Wittig's appreciation of Proust. It's not just because I first meet Loren as my student, or because he's so taken with Wittig. I'm drawn to the materials I teach, the books and papers that decorate the room where I have sex, because they identify the questions I have, the answers I pursue with my own hand.

Juan's questions are about Joey. Juan's answers all end with me getting back together with Joey ten years after the fact, all justify the fights he picks in front of my friends, the lies about what he does with his clients, his leaving me after my last violin playing for The Cock. I ask him how many sexual partners he needs in one day, text slut, whore 326 times to crash his cell. Juan goes because he's jealous of my Seth character going there, meeting Charles, who later reads the novel chapter that's published, IM's, I like the writing, haven't formed an opinion about its subject. Over lunch, he jokes, You're too smart to be on Manhunt, Googles me beforehand to build my resume, wants to know if this, us, is just research. Everything I do's research, I laugh. He remembers the blue striped tie I wear to The Cock that night his hands search my waist, tells me he works for a firm that guts tenements for condos. I'm an architect, too: I just work with different materials. After we eat, he leads me down Bedford Avenue, asks me what I want to do now. Well, how do you want to write the story? I can be democratic. He doesn't believe that any of this is fiction, thinks I'm justifying what Seth, in air quotes, does. If you think the sex is the point, read it again. He turns back to kiss me, likes it stomach down. We nap after we're done. His jumbled teeth clatter me awake, ready for another go. As we dress, he worries that he's not in grad school, wants to know how he'll appear in the novel. I talk about Freud's Moses theory: two different men combine as one character to cohere a continuous story.

The redhead and I discuss Donna Haraway, Sandy Stone, cyborgs. The first time we meet, I'm collecting money at the door of the queer play party wearing only a cocked orange baseball hat and underwear, my package visible, a copy of Best Transgender Erotica resting on my lap. It's a prop, really. My short-skirted redhead bites, asks my favorite story. An hour later, her knees burn on the wood floor in front of me, my eyes half close to create a fuzzy outline of her lips and fingers. That way, it looks real. Later, she says she's surprised I rub under my harness that night. Not many trans guys are comfortable enough with their bodies to do that. I hear that line when I write on the dry-erase board in front of my sixth graders. Students will be able to make inferences about characters based on their appearances. I only half believe in this lesson point. I vaguely hope they later re-evaluate what they judge now. Still, students notice my appearance, make inferences: Mr. K, you wear ties all the time, and that tells me you want to look nice at work and that you take your job seriously. The next time I stumble in just before the first bell, wearing the same clothes as I did the day before and gripping the coffee that will drown my hangover, I realize it. My students mean to say that they take me seriously now.

In the spring of my junior year of high school, my soon-to-be first girlfriend Marjorie drops Stone Butch Blues on my desk in our AP European History class. That's you. Read it. I consume the novel and the me I find there, in a three-piece suit and boxer briefs, slow-dancing at bars with pretty girls who must be Marjorie. In Seth's classes, Lacan, Butler, Foucault all teach me that language doesn't simply reflect reality. It orders reality, too, even the chronology here that acts differently when it happens, like the 45 minutes it takes me after breaking up with my redhead to post a Craigslist M4M ad: "FTM wants a daddy." We reunite two hours later, crying over the phone. The next day, she scours Craiglist. We'd been broken up for an hour, Loren, for God's sake! What were you thinking? Of a faceless, sex-less, markedly feminine body who cooks meals for me, takes my coat, rubs my feet when I get home from work. I want to be a father. The words terrify me. Margaritas on Metropolitan's Queereoke night help. So does realizing that this is just a story inside my head.