His seats had been made up like a bed, with sheets. It looked inviting. He wanted to take his clothes off. He had never heard of anybody getting undressed on a plane but he couldn’t see any reason not to. He would be more comfortable—and more easily available to a visitor.

  He was beginning to wonder whether either of them would dare act on the boy’s brash offer. It would be even more dangerous than what they’d done in the men’s room. The stewardess might pop her head through the curtains at any moment to see if he were comfortable. Was he ready to let her find him naked with a pretty boy on his knees in front of him? He could see the headline in some tabloid: VANDERHOLDEN NABBED ON PLANE FOR HOMO OFFENSE.

  He stripped to the waist, opened his traveling case, and pulled out a sheer silk dressing gown. Throwing it over his shoulders, he wormed his way out of the rest of his clothes. Being naked in these odd surroundings completed his erection. If Pam ever stopped making him feel that it shocked her, he might get over his impulse to produce it for anybody who seemed interested.

  He turned out all the lights within his control except for the pinpoint reading light and stretched out on top of the sheet with his dressing gown on but unfastened and carelessly draped over his midsection. Returning to Variety to check the fortunes of people he knew in out-of-town shows, his attention was caught after a few minutes by something displacing his curtains from the outside. They billowed slightly as if someone were feeling for the opening. His grip tightened on the newspaper while his eyes followed the movement of the curtains. His heart was beating rapidly with apprehension; they were running an insane risk. The curtains parted. The pretty boy slipped between them and closed them behind him. Nothing had deterred him.

  Lance didn’t have time to notice what he was wearing before he was wearing nothing at all. A slim, willowy body was outlined in dim light. Lance started up with a residual instinct to resist but made amends by running his tongue along the considerable length of the erection that swung against his face in the cramped space. The boy uttered a little yelp as Lance let his dressing gown fall off to free his arms. He lifted them to encircle a slender waist and sank back, bringing the boy down on top of him. The insubstantial body lay on him lightly and went limp with a sigh of surrender. Soft yielding lips were pressed to his. His experience with Jim provided little for him to draw on now.

  He opened his mouth to a skillfully provocative tongue. Making love with him was almost the same as making love with a girl. His hands strayed over smooth delectable flesh, soft and with no pronounced muscles or hair. The slim but somehow voluptuous body coiled around him with knowing eroticism. The chest pressed to his wasn’t much flatter than one or two women he had known. His hands moved down and found richly curving buttocks. He stroked them with pleasure. He was doing nothing that he mightn’t do with a woman, only he was doing it with a boy.

  The boy drew back with lingering little flicks of his tongue, a rapturous smile on his soft lips. “Oh, God, I wish we really could,” he whispered. “Your cock, darling. Utter bliss.” It was obvious what he wanted and Lance was glad that circumstances forbade it.

  The boy snaked his way down over him, worshiping his body with his mouth as he went, and slid to the floor to make good his boast.

  Lance sat up, the ardent worshiper at his feet. He shifted so that the pinpoint of light picked out the contortions of the lips that felt so eager for him. The boy’s face looked rapt and ecstatic. He couldn’t imagine a cock inspiring such adoration in himself.

  His eyes moved to the flimsy barrier that hid them. Through a gap in the curtains he saw a light in the ceiling of the cabin outside. Thinking of how easily they could be observed set off the strange drumming in his veins. He was naked and visible to anybody who passed, having his cock sucked by a naked boy. An immediate orgasm shook him, the convulsions of his hips a tribute to the voracious mouth. His ejaculation was eagerly received and swallowed. Jim had never carried it this far. Neither had women. It was amazingly satisfying. He saw that the boy was providing his own satisfaction, holding a towel in front of himself.

  Lance shook off a postcoital lethargy. He couldn’t accept pleasure without attempting to reciprocate. He pulled the slim body up onto the improvised bed and slid down and took the boy’s place on the floor. He moved the big cock to catch the light. It looked gentle, prettily formed and somehow effeminate. Lance was reminded that until he was almost fifteen he’d thought that women had them too. If they did, he wouldn’t hesitate to make love to them.

  He opened his mouth and directed the cock into it and used his lips and tongue to simulate welcome as he had learned to do with Jim. He rolled his eyes up and saw the glitter of ecstatic eyes gloating down at him. He saw himself as he’d seen his partner, his mouth stretched to receive him, prostrate in abject worship. He cringed from the gloating eyes and his stomach knotted in protest as he steeled himself for the dreaded conclusion that he’d been spared so far.

  Violence seethed in him. He wanted to sink his teeth into the hard flesh that was sliding into his mouth again. He dug his fingernails into quivering thighs and raked the boy’s chest and flanks with them. The slight body swayed and lurched, buffeted by ecstasy. Lance’s mind exploded with half-formed images of tumultuous bodies, priapic and dangerous, clamoring for satisfaction, himself in the center of them being taunted and tormented. He caught an intimation of the absolution he craved.

  He realized that he was erect again. He heard muted cries above him and his mouth was flooded with thick pungent fluid. He forced himself to swallow it. His stomach turned over in rebellion and settled. It was disgusting but he’d done it. He was an ace cocksucker. He was always surprised to discover that he was good at anything.

  Lance returned to New York with his name, Bryan Singleton, and his Chicago telephone number, and a tendency to take second looks at the effeminate boys who had been flirting with him. If any of them had been as pretty as Bryan, he might have welcomed the opportunity to find out if a boy could make a satisfactory substitute for a woman. Bryan had left him wondering what it would be like if he could ever bring himself to take one as Jim had taken him.

  He made the most of the last few weeks of his summer freedom. Once Pam and the baby returned to the city, he was planning to become a model husband again.

  He said a dutiful farewell to his latest girl friend the night before Pam was due back. No more dates. No more parties without his wife. Probably no more boys, although it seemed less important to make hard-and-fast rules about them since a boy would hardly be a threat to a marriage.

  Pam returned full of plans for another baby although in bed she continued to act as if she would just as soon know as little as possible about how it was to be accomplished. He loved having little Angela back and looked forward to having another one, maybe a son. That might give a whole new interest to life.

  His good intentions persisted mostly because the resumption of a normal married life kept him too busy to make straying easy. The casual women he’d been having weren’t worth the trouble of a complicated double life. If he was occasionally tempted by a guy, circumstances were never right for him to do anything about it. Fragmentary fantasies haunted him from time to time but fantasies weren’t for real life. The door Jim and Bryan had opened for him threatened to lead to a radical confrontation with some new appalling reality. Despite his determination to reject everything he’d been taught and accept the promptings of his nature, he couldn’t accept being a faggot and, except for some dimly remembered moments with Bryan, he had no reason to think he was one. He had just barely come to terms with the profound changes in his life and wasn’t ready to face so soon another reassessment of his place in the world.

  He still had so little to hold on to. His theatrical success had been too easy to have any real substance or provide a sense of direction. He looked back on the first months of his marriage as the most exciting of his life, unexpectedly faced with poverty, living from hand to mouth in a tiny apartment, losing himself in an anonymous crowd of young hopefuls. When the show closed, he might once more be one of the unemployed, forced back into a couple of cheap rooms with the burden of babies, but the show gave no signs of closing. He had a strong feeling that he was waiting for something.

  When he met Scot he discovered what he was waiting for. He was waiting for love, for a grand passion with its discipline of dedication and self-sacrifice. Everything about him was wrong for Scot. She hated his background, his flashy celebrity, the triviality of his work. She was tough-minded and realistic and against her coolly rational better judgment, she fell helplessly in love with him. He didn’t leave Pam for her for the simple reason that Pam had already gone. Luck left him free to give himself to the joy and heartbreak of the most crucial experience of his life.

  Beginning to be able to talk to Luisa, rather than simply enjoy their childlike sex play, brought it all back to him more painfully than he wanted. The agony of the last weeks had locked him into himself in a way that blocked self-examination. He had been paralyzed, an inert tangle of incommunicable suffering. His faltering but increasing ability to explain himself to Luisa made things flow in him again.

  When Luisa asked if she could keep a couple of chickens, he leaped at the small challenge. He set to work constructing housing for them with bamboo and rushes, determined to prove that he wasn’t completely helpless. She watched his efforts with a good deal of astonishment and dismay. She didn’t want to become a nuisance by asking him to do chores.

  “It’s only for chickens,” she pointed out.

  “Yes, but if chickens not happy, they no make eggs,” Lance said in his erratic new tongue.

  “Perhaps in North America,” she conceded, “but here they lay eggs anyway.”

  “Yes, but more happy, more eggs,” Lance insisted and Luisa didn’t argue because he gave her the impression that he was enjoying himself. He was so pleased with his success at binding bamboo into mats that he built a palisade of bamboo around the outhouse to give it a tropical look. He started digging up a plot for vegetables.

  “There is no use doing that,” Luisa told him, convinced that this was something no one could enjoy, not even an unpredictable foreigner.

  “Why not?”

  “Because you can’t make any money farming here.”

  “I have no hope for money.”

  “Then why do you do it?”

  “Because—” It took him a moment to select his words whenever he tried to express an idea. “It is good the ground make things.”

  “But if you want vegetables, why not hire somebody to work for you? There are men here who will work for very little.”

  “No, no. It is good to put things in the ground yourself and then they grow. It is good to eat things that you put in the ground with your hands. It is an idea.”

  “It’s a difficult idea to understand—to work if it isn’t necessary.”

  “But it is good work. You will see.” He was surprised at such a sophisticated attitude toward work but supposed that it was due to his inability to express himself adequately. If there was anything good here it was that his day was regulated by the rising and setting of the sun, that he could work with his hands plunged into the earth or wander around almost naked under a huge straw hat, exposing his body to the sun and air.

  Working with his hands was a revelation. He had discovered that he liked to make things, build things. He hadn’t felt so close to finding an identity since the opening night of his show. Then, it hadn’t lasted for more than a few minutes. It was when the curtain fell on the final scene and rose again to thunderous applause that he had believed that he finally knew who he was.

  As he stepped forward to take his bow, press photographers crowded down to the orchestra pit and the theater exploded with flashbulbs. The pictures would show him standing alone, tall, blond, a faint, incredulous smile on his lips, his eyes shining with a dedicated light. A thousand voices proclaimed their approbation. The tremendous moment had been recorded for history.

  The next day as he looked at the pictures, doubts had already begun to undermine his proud confidence. The captions told the same old story: it mattered very much what his name was. The news wasn’t that the theater had acquired a bright new talent but that a Vanderholden had done something unexpected. He should have changed his name. He had wanted to be listed as Lance Holden in the program but nobody had paid any attention to him.

  Lance Holden would have had a marvelous time. Life burst like a rocket into such an array of dazzling particles—interviews, lunch parties, cocktail parties, supper parties, radio appearances, stunts arranged by the press agent to keep his picture constantly before the public eye—that for a long time he was able to dodge the fact that he had achieved very little that wouldn’t have been his by birth—a grand apartment, servants, celebrity, entrée to the city’s most glamorous social life.

  The working part, the part he was paid for, became pure drudgery within weeks. He liked having to report for work daily at the same place and hour, and he liked payday, because all that proved that he was a working man like everybody else, but when he found himself on stage repeating words and gestures that had ceased to have any meaning for him, he was depressed by the monotony of it.

  To keep boredom at bay, he reminded himself of the difficult months that had preceded his success, but he soon found himself looking back on the period with fond nostalgia. The break with his mother, the initial, essential break, had abruptly and thrillingly changed all the rules of life. He had neither sought it nor expected it, but she had announced that she would no longer consider him her son if he persisted in becoming an actor. From one day to the next, he found himself literally in the street, with a bride and no idea how to turn his improbable fantasy into reality. It took more than saying you were going to be an actor to become one.

  Overnight, the world became a fascinating novelty shop. There was the novelty of replacing the elaborate establishment his mother had been setting up for him with a cheap place of his own. There was the novelty of learning how much things cost and that some shops were cheaper than the ones he had always heard of. There was the enormous novelty of discovering that there were places where he could pawn or sell his valuable possessions. Over Pam’s tearful protests, he began to get rid of their superfluous wedding presents, including a car and his own jewelry.

  Through people he had spent a few months with in summer theater, he met other struggling actors and writers and assorted artists, including Phil Boetz, a struggling writer who was fascinated by Lance as a case study. There was the novelty of making friends with people who talked about their mothers’ cooking and their fathers’ Saturday-night binges and their own experiences of farm or slum life.

  No one knew how to achieve the ambitions they were all struggling for, least of all the actors. It was apparently a question of being in the right office at the right moment when somebody might be casting a part that you looked right for. They all eked out a living with haphazard jobs, but Lance’s attempts at finding even the most menial work came to nothing. As soon as people found out who he was, they laughed at him, thinking it was some sort of joke.

  When Pam announced that she was pregnant, the struggle took on ominous overtones. They still had things they could sell but babies seemed to be expensive. The thought of throwing himself on his mother’s mercy fanned his ambition to white heat, but it was difficult to entirely exclude the possibility from his mind.

  After a grim Christmas, the theater district was buzzing with gossip about Bernard Hoffman’s new production. The star, Geraldine Fleet, had been signed but the male lead called for a special type—a boy on the threshold of manhood with poetic good looks who could project enough intelligence to be convincing as a writer of budding genius. There was a dream sequence, so they said, in which he appeared almost naked and performed some sort of dance, so a presentable body was essential too. Word was out that unknowns were being considered. It was going to be one of the first big postwar productions so everybody wanted to be in it.

  Lance was prepared to lay siege to Bernard Hoffman’s office but when he gave his name to a receptionist he was ushered past a horde of waiting youths into a large office where people were sitting around a desk. He recognized two of them as Hoffman himself and Geraldine Fleet. He was to learn eventually that the others were the director, the producer, and a production manager of some sort. He noticed glances being exchanged as his name was mentioned and passed around the desk. He was asked to read from a script. He was told to stand and walk around the room. Additional glances were exchanged before Bernard Hoffman uttered one of his historic pronouncements: “You’re it.”

  His engagement was treated like a press event, complete with photographers. He got a taste of the future when his picture appeared on the front page of all the tabloids the next day. He hoped somebody would have the courage to show them to his mother. He got another taste of the future after the first few days of rehearsal when Bernard Hoffman drew him aside for some professional advice.

  “How are you faring with our Geraldine?” he asked. He was a heavily built man with striking Semitic features and had adopted an expensive East-Coast executive style. He was unlike anybody Lance had known and he was proud that the playwright seemed to like him.

  “Miss Fleet? We get along fine, as far as I know.”

  “Ah yes, Miss Fleet. I’m sure you’re going to have a most beneficial effect on our manners.” Lance blushed and resolved to call her Gerry at the first opportunity. “Miss Fleet is inclined to get a bit overexcited in the presence of handsome young men. I must say, for the son of railroad barons and real-estate tycoons, you’re quite a dish. I don’t know how that old battle-ax, your esteemed mother, managed to produce you.”