"moved." Then he inches closer to the identification, at the same time creating some doubt as to what kind of relationship he is identifying:

Thus I tormented Jewish poetesses with their fashonable psychoses, and their devotion to little magazines. I doted on bright young men, sub-secretaries and vice-directors at the Museum of Modern Arts. My special target was artists who insisted on poverty in the Village because they weren't organized enough to hold down a clerk's job. And I got into a few fist-fights with painters male and female, because I held that the visual and plastic arts were defunct.

The last sentence is disarming. It seems to confirm the idea that these persons are not at all the sexual conquests referred to earlier but indeed the verbal circles he moved in. However, the summarizing comment which follows immediately upon this cataloguing re-invites the sexual interpretation: "Well, there was a kind of relief in surgical sex (with good-bye in the morning)."

This technique of advance and withdrawal in the homosexual treatment of the hero is strongly characteristic of Burns. David's previous relationship with Fred is left in great doubt. We are told by Fred, on the one hand, that David had never fully responded to him, yet David's past, including his navy life with Fred, is something he cannot reveal to Isobel. An air of sexuality hangs over the scene as David helps the drunken Fred back to the apartment, appropriately located in "Fruit Street Alley." As he stands aside to let Fred enter the room, he is reminded of his "first instances of sex." Fred's head strikes David's shoulder in passing-intentionally or not, we are asked to surmise. Inside. Fred reminds David of the "ole times" on Okinawa, when "we had somethin."

and hints that this former rapport could be reached again. David ignores the suggestion and helps Fred into the bedroom again Fred's head on David's shoulder-where Fred asks if David sleeps in pajamas now ("Ya didn't usedta"), begs him to sit on the bed and talk, and plaintively calls his pet name as David retires to the living room couch. David seems to be repudiating a past which may or may not have been overtly homosexual, but Burns has a way of making him seem always on the verge of not repudiating it.

The impression of his ambiguous past is re-enforced by frequent allusions to earlier affairs in which the sex of the partner is never clearly established. As the novel opens David has just gone back to Mickey's, a bar with three main rooms-one for male homosexuals, one for Lesbians, and one for mixed couples. "I'd long been tired of the baits that Mickey's offered,” he says, "but I stopped in all the same, perhaps to recapture the craziness that was in me when I got out of the navy." The nature of this former craziness is hinted at by Arturo, the bartender, who tells David, "O, it's really sexy here tonight! Lotsa the kids been askin forya." "Like whom?" asks David. "Ah," says Arturo, nudging him, "you know good and well enough... Ya always played it straight and I likedya for it." The implication seems to be that though David never let himself go ("I had a grip on myself even with liquor"), his former companions in the bar were homosexuals. It would be hard to account for Arturo's slyness otherwise. The word straight is of course the homosexual's term for the heterosexual, yet even this remark is capable of different interpretations: "Ya always played it straight."

David speaks, again ambiguously, of his first sexual experiences:

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