THE CLIFF DANCERS

by Bob Waltrip

"I'm leaving now," Bill said, suitcase in hand.

He kissed Doug lightly on the cheek and left, closing the door softly behind him. Doug sat on the divan, smoking, his feet curled underneath him. Occasionally he made little sucking noises between his teeth, thinking. Eight in the morning. Go to work at nine. Bill is gone. Goddamn. Pay the rent, goddamn it to hell. I love him. Iron the clothes. He's gone. Make up the bed.

Doug was suddenly about to cry, and he bit into the cigarette, determined that he wasn't going to do that. He remembered one night shortly after he and Bill started living together. They were lying in their bed, exhausted from sex and loving each other so fiercely. Bill reached across Doug's chest toward the window and raised the shade. Light from the street poured in over them. Bill looked at him for a long moment of infinite sadness and said, "What clumsy dancers on the cliff we are.'

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That was all. But it was enough. Bill had an infinite capacity for poetry and romance. What he said fitted them perfectly. Clumsy dancers, indeed. Now the cliff had caved in. Bill was gone. Three simple words, but oh God how they filled his heart with terror and despair. Doug tried not to think about it. He got up and went about the apartment, putting it in order. He thought about his youth.

When he was much younger, Doug was more emotional. With a heavy stomach he would stand on a busy street corner, filled with an impotent rage at all the beauty he saw and could not have; breathing through clenched teeth at the men passing him-tall blond boys who pranced like farting stallions, small smooth Mexicans with liquid voices-legions and armies of firm buttocks and bulging genitalia passing him by with insolent disregard. Doug would want to scream out at them-to accost them in public. Had he been born a woman he

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