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should go up there?”
    By “up there,” she means the writers conference in Vermont where she was his student, where he’s teaching right now. I should just tell her that I’m out of my league, that, though I’m twenty-three, the mechanics of heterosexual romance are as comprehensible to me as the compounds that make up sodium chloride. I’d know more about building the Golden Gate Bridge than I would about men and women and the games they play regarding sex.
    Her face shines. She keeps looking at me hopefully, expectantly, as if I might pull the answer from deep within myself, if only I listened.
    But she’s weeping now. The weeping isn’t merely about Famous Writer and her wish to be with him, to be him. Or the hell of competition. No, her tears seem to be about the hell of wanting, which finds its way underneath your eyelids and fingernails and has no cure. I don’t know why I don’t get up from the sofa and put my arms around her. I don’t know why I sit with my hands practically folded on my lap, hoping she’ll shake herself out of it and start talking about J. D. Salinger again. She is on the left side of the room. I am on the right. We might as well be on different sides of the country, yet I could be the one to change all that. I could cross that charged space. I could close it up with my body, and the crying, the awful crying, would stop for the night.
    I should just say it. I should stop keeping that starved landscape inside myself a secret. Men are on my mind all the time, not that I ever do anything about it. Certainly that must be evident in how I move and talk and walk through a room. And it’s not as if she’d be anything but all right with it. Her student John came out to her in her office one day, after an exasperating class discussion when it was assumed that men wanted one thing, and women wanted the opposite, and that was the problem from the get-go. Well, I’m not any of those people , John said, and Denise loved him all the more for his stubbornness, his red hair, his stark, charismatic ferocity. In fact, she brings up John all the time. But to say that I’m a John would be to say that I’m not the person she thought I was. The person she holds in high esteem. The person she thinks of as a promising writer. The person she thinks of as handsome, though I don’t know what the hell she means. I’d just be one thing, a gay thing, the person who creeps into the adult bookstore on Route 73, slips quarter after quarter into a slot (all the quarters he saves for this purpose), and dreams into the images of a forbidden world he both desperately wants to be a part of and is desperately afraid of. A world that couldn’t feel farther from the pine trees and strip malls and new subdivisions along Route 73.
    There must be a good reason I keep my grandeur to myself, but I don’t know it yet. It is a little like a secret animal, with oily rank whiskers, I don’t want Denise to know about.
    Can Denise already see I’ll be with another Famous Writer in eleven years? Can she already see how happy I’ll be, in a life she’ll only be a guest in? The menagerie of animals, M and I reading our first drafts to each other, roses outside, the fireplace burning …
    Maybe it hurts to sense that coming. She’s already beginning to spell out an equation: Paul is the lucky one. Paul gets everything I don’t get.
    “Should I go up there?” she says once more, the road map of Vermont unfolded across her lap.
    I look at the length of that route, up the spine along the Hudson, across mountains, down steep grades, roads that turn and twist through villages. I think of her worn-out Buick, the car that struggles up the slope of the Ben Franklin Bridge. “Yes,” I say. “Yes.” Even if I guess that’s not what she wants to hear from me right now.
    2010 |  Darlene Etienne is pulled from the rubble in Port-au-Prince after fifteen days. It’s hard to picture it: fifteen days under the rubble of your