I nodded. "That's it. And it has to stop, Julie, as much for your sake as for mine. We're habits for each other . . . for nearly two years now. Prospective husbands are all becoming somebody else's husbands, and you haven't noticed because you're always with me

She cut me off, almost fiercely. "That doesn't matter. I don't care about marriage."

"Well you should, Julie. You have to want something from life. Give it a chance, anyway.

"I don't think we'd be much good at 'tapering off;' at scheduling meetings of decreasing frequency, like liver pills. We both need some rediscovering time. We have mutual friends, mutual hangouts; even mutual books and records and sweaters! Our identities are all tangled up-neither of us had a present apart, and it's impossible for us to have a future together.

"You need time to learn to be Julie again, rather than half of 'Julie and Paul.' And, in order to give Marty and me a chance as . . ." I cast about for a word as a team, I need the same thing."

९९

Her smile was distinctly bitter this time. "Shall we have a 'property settlement,' then? On all those books and sweaters? And, speaking of our mutual, misled friends, what shall we tell them?"

That was unlike Julie, I thought. I forced a bland expression. "No settlement. We'd just be running back and forth with things all the time. Let's just leave things wherever they happen to be for now."

"As for the others-since when did either of us ever tell them anything? Let them wonder."

"Of course. Simple." Sarcasm was probably the intent, but she seemed not to have the will to put it in her voice. It was both hurt and uncomprehending. "This... this thing you have between you and Marty, Paul. Is it . . . love?"

"I don't know. There are probably as many definitions of love as there are people to define it . . . and none of them are true, but they all serve. Is it mutual attraction? Mutual need? Empathy? Passion? Just being comfortable together and sharing, perhaps? We've had a lot of that together, Julie. I guess that's a kind of love. And Marty and I have a lot of it, in a different way.

"But for me there's something else. Being 'gay'. . ." I hesitated.

She nodded impatiently. "I know what 'gay' means-I work in a hotel, re member? Go on."

"Well, it's that I feel more urgency to find something real. I haven't got a religion, or the kind of a morality that demands continence. And I don't have placid nature. There's nothing to keep me on the ground but a sort of 'esthetic sense' and it isn't strong enough.

a ..

"It's not that sex is more important than the other things, but I find it necessary. I go out to the gay bars because there's no place else I can lose that sense of being secretly different from everyone around me. And sometimes I go home . . . alone, after, but usually I don't.

"And when I don't it's an opiate that increases the illness, because in the morning the sense of 'alone-ness' comes back, only stronger, because I have to face the fact that I've spent the night with a stranger, not sharing a passion, but each finding his own, using the other, and knowing that the passion couldn't cancel out the mutual contempt."

Her face kept changing. Discomfort. Pity (to which I would have infinitely preferred even disgust). Resentment at being told. "I'm sorry," I whispered miserably.

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