2

      In all the years Kate had known Elliot – over ten now – he’d always managed to cheer her up when she was sad and support her in her successes. Now, as they walked down the corridor to his classroom, she glanced at him affectionately. The stretched-out orange T-shirt, the ugly green over-shirt decorated with mustard, the slight love handles and the wrinkled chinos didn’t make him look like much but he had a keen mind and was a loving and generous friend. She felt a swell of gratitude toward him. As always, he had cheered her up and helped her make the break from school. Kate was proud of the work she did with the kids. She had learned a lot from them, too. For one thing, the school catered to the children of the rich and successful but Kate saw that money, privilege, and education brought as much misery as had her own deprived childhood. She had lost her resentment of those with money and she was grateful for that. She had not picked her calling for the money it earned; in fact, she regarded her work as a kind of vocation. It was one thing she never made light of, and she often found it hard to leave it behind at the end of the day. But tonight she had to, to help Bina prepare for her big night, and then, later, to introduce Michael to Elliot and his partner Brice at dinner.

      She waited just inside Elliot’s classroom as he chucked the offending lunch sack in a bin and started messing about in his untidy desk.

      ‘You know, it’s very hard not to keep thinking about Brian. He’s so adorable, and has had a really difficult time. And I think the disappointment when his magic doesn’t work, which of course it won’t, could cause real problems later.’ Kate sighed. ‘Boys are just so much more fragile than girls.’

      ‘Tell me about it.’ Elliot sighed deeply too. ‘I’m still getting over the time Phyllis Bellusico told me I smelled.’

      ‘Did you?’ Kate asked, ready to be either his straight man or his audience. She was used to Elliot’s shticks. Since college they had been amusing one another with dark humor from their childhoods.

      ‘Well, yes,’ Elliot admitted reluctantly, ‘but I smelled good. I should have. I’d dumped an entire bottle of my mother’s White Shoulders into my underpants.’

      ‘Pee-yuw.’ Kate imitated any one of her lower school ‘clients’. ‘Maybe Brian has a point. I’d have to agree with Phyllis,’ she said. ‘And this happened …?’

      ‘… In third grade, but with a little more therapy and Brice’s love and support I expect to get over it in the next decade.’

      Kate loved it when Elliot got going. She had to laugh.

      Elliot had been tormented by kids in school. After a moment he said, ‘I have to go to Dean & Deluca to get rice for our dinner tonight. Brice is making his world-famous risotto. You can tell Michael it’s your recipe. The way to a man’s heart …’

      Kate looked up with a suspicious glance. ‘Yeah, and please be on your best behavior. Elliot,’ she began, ‘can’t you just …’

      ‘No,’ Elliot retorted, ‘I can’t just anything.’ He walked over to her and gave her a quick hug. ‘I don’t want to discourage or criticize you. I just want to make sure you know what you’re doing.’

      ‘Oh, God, Elliot! Who knows what they’re doing when they try to find a soul mate?’

      ‘Well, you have a point there. But I don’t want you to be hurt again, Kate.’ He paused. Kate knew where he was going and she didn’t want him to. Her last entanglement had ended so badly that she didn’t know how she would have gotten through it without Elliot. She had invested a lot of time and emotion in Steven Kaplan, all of it worse than wasted. It had left her more suspicious and distrusting of men than she liked to admit. One of the good things about Michael was that she could trust him completely. He might not have Steven’s banter and easy charm but he had substance and achievement and sincerity. At least she thought so.

      ‘That’s why you’re meeting Michael.’

      ‘Ever since Steven, I get to meet your new boyfriends. I’d like you to just find the right one and make him an old boyfriend.’

      ‘He’s thirty-four. Old enough?’

      Elliot rolled his eyes. ‘I worry about you.’ Kate looked directly at Elliot. ‘This one is different. He’s got his doctorate in anthropology and he’s very promising.’

      ‘Promising what? You always think they’re different and you always think they’re promising, until they bore you and then …’

      ‘Oh, stop,’ Kate interrupted. ‘I know: I won’t pick losers on account of my father and I won’t pick winners on account of my father. Yadda, yadda, yadda.’

      ‘Don’t leave out your fear of commitment, yadda.’ ‘I’ll have you committed if you bring that up one more time. How come for thirty-one years you’re allowed to be a gay bachelor – in both respects of the phrase – and then one day you hook up with Brice. Bingo! But since then I’m neurotic for not doing the same.’

      ‘Hey, I don’t want you to hook up with Brice,’ Elliot mock-protested. ‘We’re both strictly monogamous.’

      ‘I can’t tell you how relieved I am to hear that,’ Kate retorted. ‘But don’t project your fears onto me. It isn’t easy to find a kind-hearted, dependable, intelligent, sensual single man in Manhattan.’

      ‘Tell me about it!’ Elliot exclaimed. ‘I had to try almost every guy on the island before I met Brice.’

      ‘Try not to be bitter, Elliot. I try so hard not to be.’ She reached up and wiped off a remaining bit of banana from his mouth with her thumb, then gave him a little peck on the lips. ‘Do you really have to be gay?’ It wasn’t the first time she had asked him that. Ever since their college years – when the two of them became instant friends during a calculus class that bored him and that Kate had barely managed to pass – Kate had depended on Elliot to be her friend, sometimes her brother, more often her sister, and occasionally even her father. Elliot was family. Still, like family, he could be a pain in the ass. Then she smiled. Elliot was everything to her, except her lover. And sometimes she thought that’s what made her love him the most. Elliot was safe. Unlike the other men in her life, Elliot would always be there.

      ‘What makes you think I’m gay?’ Elliot asked with wide-eyed innocence. ‘Is that your professional opinion, Doctor, or just a guess? Is it my spectator pumps?’

      In fact, Elliot was not a flamboyant homosexual. He didn’t look or act like what Kate’s old Brooklyn crowd might have called ‘a fag’ and, like most of the young gay men in New York, he didn’t go in for the high-maintenance GQ look. Elliot looked and acted like a grade school math teacher – no, what he looked like, she thought affectionately, was a classic nerd: the only thing missing was the broken glasses held together