He has no socks, and his little toe is sticking through a hole in his left shoe. He is thin and small, with a long Jewish nose. But he is pretty. His hair and eyebrows and lashes are unendurably black. The lashes are long and curled, and his eyes are a deep, unique hazel.

The road takes one last bumpy turn, then the river stretches before us, wide and grand. The water is rather grey, but not dirty-rushing into a thousand corners along the shore upstream, supporting bass and crappie and carp (and, somewhere, naked Indian boys) late in a summer's day-a perfect Mansfieldian sex symbol.

Startled by the sound of my approaching car, five white cranes leave the surface of a little cove and rise lumberously into the air, their whiteness contrasted against the sharp purple mountains behind them. The setting sun is turning red, and its light shines from behind the mountains onto the wet wings of the cranes as they fly downstream, arguing and calling to each other.

For a long time Adrian watches the birds dispassionately. Then he slowly raises an imaginary rifle and kills them one by one. Ka-pow! Pow, pow, pow. "Let's go swimming," I say.

We get out of the car and walk to the edge of the water. Adrian removes his shoes and sticks one foot in.

"S'not too cold," he says, beginning to remove his clothes. I watch him undress, my fingers trembling at buttons. My stomach twists into a knot as he removes his shorts, standing with his naked back to me-unconsciously revealing his young beauty. Dark hair on the nape of his neck, thin brown shoulders, slender waist, and supple, subtle, buttocks fill me with such a pain that I clasp my hand against my heart. He is torturing me merely by existing.

I finish undressing, then walk to him and put my hand on that sweet part of his back where waist ends and buttock begins. His skin is warm and firm. "Is that all you ever think about," he says, lightly, with his back still

turned.

A hotness comes to my face. I jerk my hand away and put it behind my back. This is the first time he has said something like this. In the past he has always tolerated my attentions with a laughing half-disinterest.

He dives into the water and swims toward a sand bar protruding from the middle of the river, his little derriere seeming to flaunt its beauty. I stand at the edge of the river, naked and ridiculous-twenty-eight years old, rather ugly, horribly alone a despoiler of youth.

Pain, passion, agony, frustration, and hopelessness are all flooding through me. This is the beginning of the end of my love for Adrian. Adrian the Youth. Adrian the heterosexual boy. In another few weeks he will have passed that era of youth wherein he was taught all the subtle nuances of sexual gratification.

I taught him sex, letting him know that the sex we had together was not important. I told him that he enjoyed me, but when he became an adult he would love and marry a woman. Married to a woman, he would be able to find a perfect union that was impossible in a homosexual world. I taught him that he must not enter my world.

I would have taught him more. I would have taught him how to love poetry-how reading Robert Frost could make a man want to curl up with a

one