On the night before his week’s rent was to run out, therefore, I proposed to call for him before sunup next day, take him to the market end of the Bridge of Lost Desire, find a wagoner finished with his morning deliveries who was returning west, and pay an iron coin or so for his day-and-a-half’s ride home. Just to show you how naïve he was, he hadn’t even known you could do that. Today, of course, it’s an established institution, but at the time I don’t believe the empress had yet set up the passenger shelter that’s been rebuilt twice in the last decade. You just had to go and ask around till you found a wagon going where you wanted—though enough folks did it, anyway.

  Anyway.

  The next dawn I got myself up from my cluttered bed, went to his room, rolled him sleepily out, and we walked to the market. The second driver I asked pointed us to a third, who hailed us heartily as we strolled up. A pleasant and blustery fellow, in my memory, he was then the spit of my erstwhile friend today. Sure, he’d take the young man to his village. His journey passed right by it.

  Good, I said, as my friend climbed up into the cart to grip the back and sides, blinking about at the market square still dim in the summer dawn. You’ll be there by tomorrow afternoon, I called as I handed two coins to the driver.

  Tomorrow? the driver demanded. We’ll be there by tonight! and returned me a coin. You’ve overpaid me, and I’m a good and honest laborer! It made me smile and I wondered how this further confirmation of the physical nearness of his home struck my young friend, who blinked, still red-eyed, in the back of the wagon, as they rolled off by the fountain where the first of the stalls was only then being set out.

  His room, of course, was paid for till sundown and supper that day—a custom I miss in these times when innkeepers expect you out and off by noon. If I recall, I was back there an hour later with another…friend. This one was a little older, a little more experienced. At the time I thought myself far more attached to him than the young man I’d just sent off to the country. We carried on lubriciously till I realized I was late for my performance—a sin I have committed only three times in my life. And today, though I have tried many times, I cannot recall the name—much less the face—for whom, then, I committed it.

  3

  HE WAS GONE SOME three or four weeks. However or whenever he came back I’m not sure, for he had the tact and good sense not to look me up immediately on his return. He had interpreted my sending him off, however friendly I’d been about it, in the terminal sense I’d intended it, a sensitivity, I confess, I admired him for, and which no doubt eventually influenced me to see him again. Was it a month later that I glimpsed with some surprise someone I thought was he turning onto the bridge? A day or two after that, as I was crossing, I nearly bumped into him—though he was deep in conversation with a barbarian youngster and an older man who, no doubt, wanted them both; he didn’t see me, or pretended he didn’t.

  I thought it politic not to interrupt.

  A few days later, I was on my way to join my fellow mummers at a street carnival in another neighborhood where we were to perform. Some had left with the wagons in the morning to set up. I was to join them that afternoon. I recall, I didn’t have to cross the Bridge of Lost Desire to get there; I could have gone the few streets north to the perfectly unexceptional overpass that leads to those ethnic enclaves in the city where, on carnival days, our theatrical talents are so in demand. It was just habit, sedimented no doubt by past pleasures, that took me over the bridge.

  He was leaning there in what I’d come to think of as His Spot.

  We smiled; and while I was wondering if I should stop to talk, I found myself slowing.

  —Hello! How you doing?

  For a moment I wondered if he actually remembered me:

  —Fine. How did your trip go?

  —Fine. Fine…! It was great! Fine!

  He’d seen his aunt. Yes, he knew who I was. No, his mother hadn’t been as pleased to see him as he’d hoped. There’d been some problems before he’d left that, though he’d mentioned some of them to me before, he’d all but forgotten till, really, the cart had pulled up by those familiar fields. Still, he’d had a couple of good, or at least interesting, evenings with his village friends. But as he talked, every now and again he would glance at me curiously. Did we discuss it that afternoon, or did I only have the strong feeling that it was now known? Today I couldn’t say for sure. But from somewhere I gained the conviction that it was clear to him that the vast distance to his home over which he had tramped for four aimless days to reach Kolhari was not that of stade after stade; rather it was a distance of mind, of temperament, created by his urban education even in so vulgar a version as he had received it during his handful of months on the bridge. And that was far vaster than the one he’d imagined he’d crossed by foot or by wagon. In comparison, save by some machinations of the unnamed gods beyond both his powers and mine to conceive, the true distance could not be retraversed.

  That was why he was back.

  —Where you going, today? he asked as I was about to leave.

  I explained about the street fair.

  Take me with you? he asked. After all (and he stepped from the wall to look down at himself, naked on the bridge flags in the warm autumn evening), how long can I hang around here, shaking this old turkey neck, hoping some guy with bad breath and no teeth is hungry enough to buy my turkey milk.

  I have work to do there.

  Oh, come on, he said. Take me. I won’t be in the way.

  Well, I suppose you can come. But I made it clear to him there would be nothing monetary in it. He made it equally clear; he’d heard of the various Kolhari festivals since before he’d come to the city, but he’d been afraid to go to any of them himself. If he went with a friend, like me, he wouldn’t be scared. And he couldn’t pass up a chance to go with someone actually part of the festivities.

  As he fell in beside me, he called to a stranger a little way down from us: another young man, I realized, working the bridge.

  —Hey, give us a swig of your beer?

  At which the youngster pulled his drinking skin from the wall, beat it against his thigh, and (to my surprise) stalked angrily off! I raised an eyebrow to ask my friend what that was about. Grinning, he explained:

  —Oh, I stole an old man of his this morning, who always comes around here looking for him. Only today, I was here first! When I came back, I told him about it—about how much money I’d been given. (He nudged my arm, his grin gone broader.) I lied…about the price, I mean. Nobody gives that much. But I tell a good story. And now he thinks anyone who walks by and talks to me was really going to talk to him first.

  I began to protest, but he went on:

  —It doesn’t matter. Last week, every time someone came near me, he was in my face, with his dumb smile and his stupid boasts about how much he can do and how long he can do it. I’m just getting him back.

  He ended with a scalding insult to his rival’s breeding, homeland, and defecatory practices, which, in its country vulgarity, I actually found shocking here in the city—at any rate worrisome:

  His rival just happened to have been—most visibly—of the same ethnic origins as the inhabitants of the neighborhood in which our festival was to take place.

  When we reached the crowded streets with their colorful revelers, the grills set out on the corners with their spitted lambs, the drunken singers, the arguing parents, the racing children, the colored hangings roped below the windows, he stayed very close to me. The neighborhood (to him) was full of foreigners; and foreigners were what, at home, he’d been taught most to fear.

  Once we reached our wagons, for the first minutes he simply stood by the back corner, blinking and staring a lot. Of course there was still more setting up to do, and I turned to lend a hand. Minutes later, I looked up to see him suddenly let go of the wheel whose rim he stood clutching and throw himself into our preparations as if he were one of our troop, now asking some groom, now one of the propmen, what he could carry here or there, what he might fetch, what he might hold, and even the Leading Lady if there was anything he might go bring her—with a blown kiss she sent him running off after something or other, which, in only a little longer than one might have assumed, he returned with.

  I admit I was somewhat wary of all this, but the others seemed to take to him, and soon they were sending him there and here, with this load or that.

  His labors clearly left him braver. Now, as the day wore on, he would actually go off by himself for a while, and an hour later I would see him, from the platform, as I played my gongs and cymbals, threading through the crowd, munching on this or that bit of carnival fare, given him by whom or pilfered from where, I would not presume to guess.

  Eating, watching, grinning, he would wink at me.

  And, indeed, I would grin down at him—and go on playing.

  That night when the flares burned low and it was time to dismantle the platform and take down the lamps and lanterns, again he threw himself in with our work. Once I saw him nearly slip with a plank of wood balanced on his shoulder. A little later, I saw him unsteady with a load of masks in his arms. Somehow in the course of the evening he had managed to get satisfactorily drunk—but then, in such conviviality where strangers offer you drink practically at every corner, that was not surprising. And it certainly had not dampened his energy.

  He stayed with me that night in my wagon, the two little dancers with whom I then shared it having found some sailors after the performance who wanted to take them to see their ship on the waterfront by the moon. (They didn’t get back till two days later and received quite a dressing down from the Director.) We had rather drunken sex in the littered dark. One or the other of us, I suspect, fell asleep in the midst of it.

  Once, in the wagon, he woke up, somewhat disoriented, and made me lead him, unsteadily, outside into the surprising moonlight. He kept on repeating, still drunk, that he’d heard something. Then, with his head down, his feet wide, and his hand against the crumbling daub of some dilapidated wall, he began to urinate—in amazing quantities, with astonishing force—wetting his feet, my feet, splattering his knees, soaking his own hands, making almost as much of a mess of himself as if he had never left the bed.

  The next morning he was up, however, standing out in the quiet morning, only a little squint-eyed.

  We saw the wagons off, on their way back to the market. Then we walked together, the long way, toward the bridge. Halfway across I told him:

  I must cut you loose here. It’s been fun. And I don’t have too much of a headache.

  I do. He grinned at me, his young beard, unbrushed that morning, looking as grizzled below his rough cheeks as one of his elderly client’s. I’m going down under the bridge and sleep for a while in the shade, he told me. (I was planning to crawl right into bed as soon as I reached the wagons back in the market square.) Hey, how about letting me hold a couple of coins? Oh, I don’t mean for last night. I wouldn’t charge you for that. That’s free. But just for all the work I did? For you, and everybody?

  What could I say?

  —We get together soon? he called after me, as I left him, standing there with the iron in his hand. The bridge was quiet that morning, and I had the momentary feeling that his voice, with its all too expected proposition, echoed not only from end to end but throughout the entire city.

  —Yes, of course!

  I believe I also called back some tentative time for meeting him the next day (—I’ll see you at about…), an appointment that one or the other of us didn’t keep.

  Of course.

  And whose party was it a week later? No, not yours that time—because I recall distinctly I rehearsed with that marvelous, messy woman who composed the wonderful music that made me, finally, decide to give up tootling to become a serious mimic. And we never performed together in your gardens. Yes, that’s right. It was for your friend, the baronine. You were present at that elegant afternoon affair? Well, that’s certainly possible.

  At any rate, it was probably that same evening, when I was returning from Neveryóna to the market, over the bridge:

  —Hello! How you doing?

  A few more beers. A few more coins. Another room. In another inn, which another boy had told me was somewhat cheaper. And as I sat at the edge of his bed over the next few days, our conversations ranged back over pretty much the same topics as they had the last time.

  The son.

  The wife.

  The farm…

  —I was married, I decided to tell him one evening. Once. For al most eight years, actually. Before I became a mummer. Or, at least be fore I permanently joined the troop. I had two sons and a daughter. Ah, what a good father I was! I’ve never worked harder at any role in my life. Well, that’s finished with now, and though it may be my finest performance, I wouldn’t give a minute more to it, that I tell you.

  He laughed with me; but he was curious:

  What about your fooling around? Did you do it back then? With men, I mean?

  Certainly. Probably a good deal more than I do now. After all, I was young. About your age, actually. At least when I married her.

  Did she know? I mean about you and…men?

  Of course!

  You told her?

  Well before we were married. What sane man would ally himself with a woman and not let her know something about him as important as that?

  How did she feel about it?

  At first it rather excited her. (From the way he grinned, I knew that even with his seven women he’d already learned that anomalous truth about the complex engine of sexual interaction.) After the children came, I suspect the topic began to bore her.

  Did the kids know?

  Toward the unnecessarily ugly end, the two who were old enough must have suspected. A lot of things were yelled that had nothing to do with anything save how deeply they could wound. You know, my wife was quite talented herself. Still lives out in Yenla’h. At least I think she does; it’s not on our summer itinerary. Oh, she could make anything: houses, pots, stage sets. Also, she was rather an adventurous, if moody, woman. But I was fond of her; and most of the time I treated her as such. With me, that involves a certain amount of honesty. I suspect it does with most.

  Then why aren’t you together?

  The most difficult part to understand for him, I think, was that the reasons for our separation (Oh, final happiness!) were simply those that split any pair who each finds that the company and habits of the other reduces her or him to a sniveling, furious, pitiable, and paralyzed beast no longer capable of acting like anyone’s notion of a reasonable man or woman as the gods first formed and crafted us.

  —How many women have you been to bed with? he asked.

  And before I could answer, he began to tell me a clearly preposterous story about a sexual triumph he’d had with a beautiful woman he’d slipped off with for a while that night at the carnival. He hadn’t told me before, you see, for fear I might be jealous. But he hadn’t drunk that much, yet. So of course once he’d gotten her down in a pile of leaves behind some old shack away from the merry-makers, he’d come too fast and—In the middle of his tale, however, it was as if he suddenly remembered we too had entered into a certain arena of honesty, and he halted. Well, actually, he said, he’d seen a woman in passing, older than he, ordinary enough in other respects, but with a certain…Well, she was just against a wall and eating from a netted sack of fruit at one of the crowded corners. Standing across the busy way from her, he’d considered going up and trying to talk, hoping possibly to bring her to the wagon, where he’d intended to ask me to let them fuck while I stood guard outside!

  That’s why he’d come back and worked so hard.

  He had left her and returned to look at her several times. She’d apparently stood there quite a while, as though she were waiting for something. (—Almost as though she were listening for something, I believe is what he said with a moment of poetry to his pensive look that now and again would illuminate his most work-a-day accountings.) But still he had not been able to bring himself to speak. Eventually, on the fifth or sixth time he returned, she was gone—alone or off with someone else, he did not know.

  —Like the fool I am, he told me, shaking his head, I couldn’t say anything.

  For both of us, then, the answer was still seven.

  I don’t remember which of us asked the next obvious question: Well, how many men have you slept with? (Oh, it must have been me!) We sat on his bed in the tiny room with the bare walls and sloping thatch, trying to figure. Twenty-five? Fifty? (Did I throw such absurdly low numbers out only to tease?) Well, he’d come to Kolhari with half a dozen from his childhood play on the farm, and he’d seen a hundred go by months ago: he remembered passing the twenty-five mark in his first week on the bridge.

  Laughing, we agreed that for both of us it was certainly high in the hundreds. I was forty. He was not yet twenty. I wonder why I felt obliged to tease:

  Well, then, you’re just like me. Obviously you like men’s bodies better than you like women’s. I certainly do! Always have. Always will.

  No! he protested. I like women’s bodies far more than I like men’s. Men’s bodies? That’s only a kind of play. I don’t take them seriously. I only go with them when women aren’t around. And I want to get paid for it when I do.

  Well! and I had to laugh. I thought such things once myself, though I never really felt them. When I sleep with a woman, it’s only thinking about a man that allows me to enjoy myself. Which thinking I did very well, thank you, twice a week for eight years. Of course, too often when one does go to bed with a man, one has to think of another man. Really, it does go on. What do you think about when you sleep with a woman? Or a man—me—for that matter?

  Nothing, he said a little wonderingly.

  To be sure, I said. He doesn’t think of anything.

  Well, sometimes, he admitted at last, a man and a woman doing it together…but while you were married, you still did it with men?

  Who do you think I was thinking about that let me enjoy my wife? My young friend, I say it, and I mean it: I like men’s bodies for the inspiration, stimulation, and relief of lust far more than I like women’s. And going through the proper nuptial rituals with a woman, as your village prescribes them, will not change that if that is, indeed, your case. Also (and here I frowned askance at him with one lowered brow), for two who feel so differently, don’t think it’s odd that what we’ve done is so much the same?