Late Victorians

By Miriam Heddy

 

 

The age-old description of homosexuality is of a sin against nature. Moralistic society has always judged emotion literally. The homosexual was sinful because he had no kosher place to stick it. In an attempt to drape the architecture of sodomy with art, homosexuals have lived for thousands of years against the expectations of nature. Barren as Shakers and, interestingly, as concerned with the small effect, homosexuals have made a covenant against nature. Homosexual survival lay in artifice, in plumage, in lampshades, sonnets, musical comedy, couture, syntax, religious ceremony, opera, lacquer, irony.

—Richard Rodriguez, "Late Victorians" from Days of Obligation (1992).

 

 

 

Charlie arrived at Larry's house to find the front door open wide, and Larry kneeling just inside and peering out at him, red curls damp with the sweat that was also beading his forehead and running down his cheek. Larry held out a hand as if to offer it to Charlie, but then took it back again before Charlie had a chance to grab it and instead swiped at his own forehead, leaving behind a streaky smudge of wood stain the color of blood.

 

"Charles! I was just thinking about—well, actually, I wasn't thinking about you, precisely, but nevertheless, I am absolutely delighted—"

 

"You're very red."

 

"Am I?" Larry glanced down at his undershirt, which was, actually, so white it must have been new. It was spotless. "I have to admit that I've been staring at this door long enough that everything looks a bit off to me."

 

Larry's undershirt was sleeveless, and his shoulders were lightly freckled and very pale. Charlie smiled because there was another red stain along the curve of Larry's ear, where he had probably tugged at it while thinking. Given how often Larry touched his own face, it was surprising Larry wasn't completely camouflaged into the door.

"Renovating again? I thought you were finished last month."

 

"Hmm, yes, much as I was finished the month before that, and before that, going back approximately two years and two color schemes now."

 

"Three," Charlie corrected.

 

"Three? In two years? My, that's...troubling."

 

"You tried that paper in the foyer last summer, with the—"

 

"Riiight. Anaglypta[i]. That—did you like that? Be honest, because—"

 

"I—"

 

"It wasn't, as it turns out, correct in a historical sense, but perhaps historical authenticity isn't as important as mood in this case."

 

"Mood?"

 

"Yes. How does the foyer make you feel?"

 

"I have no idea, Larry. You haven't invited me in yet."

"I—Oh. Yes. Do come in. Sorry about that. I suppose I'm a bit distracted at the moment."

 

And Charlie edged forward but Larry, still on the ground, was blocking his way, so he just leaned against the doorframe instead.

 

Larry sighed, glancing down at his hands. "I don't quite understand it, but I'm beginning to suspect that, like the universe, this house is expanding. Though of course it could simply be that I'm getting smaller." Another face-rub, this time with both hands, and a stripe was now staining each cheek. Charlie reached down and rubbed at the stains with his thumbs, smearing Larry's fingerprinted cheeks and making him look a bit less like some of the crime scene photos he'd seen recently. Larry frowned up at him and then rubbed at his cheeks with the back of his hand, not getting any more off, though he did manage to move it around so now he looked a bit like he was wearing rouge.

 

"I really should have you look at my furnace, Larry. And you should wash your face before you scare the neighbors."

 

"Hmm. Is it bad?"

 

"It's old and loud and it's keeping me awake at night."

 

"Now is that really necessary, I ask you?"

 

Charlie blanched. "The furnace. I was talking about the—you do know I'm talking about the furnace."

 

Larry sighed, a small grin playing at the corners of his mouth. "And you can continue to talk about it while I clean up, keeping in mind that I know nothing whatsoever about furnaces beyond their basic function, and probably very little about that. Something to do with heat, isn't it? My abilities are limited entirely to, well, apparently not even this, actually. Does this color even match what’s already there? The picture on the lid is really entirely deceiving, unless it dries darker, which I don't really think wood stain does. Paint does. Why is that? I should know. I think I've been inhaling this for too long, because I really—"

 

Charlie leaned down, grabbed his shoulders, and kissed him, mid-query, not caring about stain or furnaces or anything but suddenly overcome with the need to touch the man who, yes, was very loud at night, but generated quite a bit more heat than the furnace. "I like your face, and I have absolutely no interest in watching paint dry. And you know, I can't even remember why I came by to see you."

 

Larry gave him a sidelong glance that suggested he was quite a bit more aware of himself than he let on, and got up from his knees, careful to keep his hands away from his clothing. Charlie moved forward, assuming they were going inside, but Larry just braced his hands on the doorframe around him, pinning Charlie against it while glancing past him and out into the street, and only then did Charlie realize they were standing in plain view of anyone who walked by.

 

"We're, um…."

 

"Scaring the neighbors," Larry finished for him, and looked oddly pleased at the idea.

 

"Oh—oh—we should definitely go inside."

 

"Now that's precisely the color I was going for." Larry reached up with one hand and almost touched Charlie's cheeks, tracing the air around his face, and he felt his blush go hotter, down to his collar.

 

"Thanks," he said, and, almost as if Larry had dared him (which maybe he had), Charlie leaned in and kissed Larry again, putting his hands on Larry's hips and drawing him closer, aware all the time of the sounds of a car driving down the street, and someone's dog barking, and a sprinkler going off next door, but also aware of Larry's breathing getting faster, and the way that Larry smelled, the scent of sweat and his soapy antiperspirant, and the dizzying smell of the stain all around them. And then he was pushing Larry into the foyer, shutting the still-damp door behind them.

 

"Sex," Charlie said.

 

Larry murmured in agreement, letting himself be lowered to the floor, then raising his head up as he stripped off his undershirt. "I suppose that's a no on re-hanging the anaglypta then?"

 

Charlie laughed and pulled off his own clothing quickly, before Larry could ruin them. "Yes. No."

 

"Disappointing," Larry said, but then Larry's blunt-fingered, square hands were dragging and stuttering across the hairs of Charlie's belly and moving downward, the wood floor cool and smooth under him and all too familiar, considering there were three bedrooms they rarely managed to reach in time.

 

 

 

 

"Children are wormholes... Yeah, they're portals. Into the unreachable future and unattainable past. Now as things stand now they only exist in the theoretical realms."[ii]

 

"It would be foolhardy to attempt this fatal experiment in the hopes of glimpsing another Universe…when a realistic star collapses to form a black hole, it does not produce a wormhole."[iii]

 

"What is that?"

 

"A fireplace, um… what was it she called it? I picked it up at an antique store, probably for far too much, but the shopkeeper was absolutely charming, and somehow convinced me I needed this—thing. In any case, it's to prevent anyone from falling into the fireplace, I think. Or maybe it was to keep the fire from falling out. A barrier, of some sort, though now that I look at it, I don't think it's all too sturdy. Perhaps it's decorative after all. Or it will be, I suppose, if I ever finish refinishing it."

 

"Have you ever even lit a fire in there?"

 

Larry stared at the oddly shaped wood thing he was sanding and frowned. "I don't believe I ever have. But you can't be too careful. Children—"

 

"Tell me you're not thinking about children again."

 

"Theoretically, yes. Yes, I am. Why does that bother you so very much?"

 

"It doesn't—because you—what is it? What are you thinking?"

 

Larry was smiling, but not looking at him, one hand dragging the sandpaper over the turned wood, following with his bare hand, testing the smoothness, almost… fondling it. It was sort of oddly sexy, actually, the way that he moved his fingers so lightly over the still-rough grain, his eyes fluttering shut, then opening again.

 

"I'm not entirely sure I'm serious about children, Charles. But if I was…."

 

"That's what worries me. That 'if.' Because—"

 

"Consider it a toy theory, for now, if you like."

 

"Kids aren't toys, Larry. And they're not theories. They're—"

 

Larry stopped sanding abruptly, looking at him as if he expected Charlie to say something profound. But Charlie could only shrug.

 

"They're work. They're—I'd say ask my father, but really, please don't."

 

"I'm entirely sure Alan would say children are a joy, you in particular."

 

"Joy is not the word he usually uses, no."

Larry waved a hand in the air as if dismissing his entire argument, and then, both hands were in the air, moving around as if Larry was conducting a small orchestra as he spoke. "Don't you think about the future, Charles? This house—it's outlived every one of its owners, every last one, as you would expect. But did they expect it? And I—I have to wonder, sometimes, if my legacy will be nothing more than this—" Larry fingered the film of sawdust coating his hands "—that somebody else revises, removes, strips, obscures, erases. Is it hubris to want more than that, do you think?"

 

Larry's voice had gotten softer, almost as soft as the sound of the sandpaper, and Charlie got down on the floor, sitting in a pile of sawdust. He put his hand on Larry's arm, stilling it, or trying to. But Larry kept up the rhythmic drag of the sandpaper over the wood, taking Charlie's hand with it, so that they were sanding it together as Larry kept talking, purposefully not meeting Charlie's eyes now.

 

"I sometimes suspect that my interest in cosmology is merely another form of cowardice—a way of avoiding the inevitability of, well, inevitability. Focus on beginnings instead of endings, yes, and it all seems rather clever, but what do you have, finally?"

 

"Larry, your work is—it's fascinating."

 

Larry shook his head, looking at the floor, at the pile of sawdust there. "A carefully wrought series of equations and abstractions that depend on theoretical presence, theoretical absence, reading cause from effect in the most tenuous of fashions that few outside the field can even comprehend, and yes, it all amounts to a lifetime spent carefully re-constructing a past so distant and vast that we can only now see the afterglow. Is it any wonder people turn to God and call us fools?" Larry shook his head, letting some more sawdust sift through his fingers and onto the floor. "This house—this isn't—it's not a home, is it? It's mine, and I have settled in here, scattering my belongings in every room, but there's simply always going to be too much house and not enough of me, and you—"

 

"I can't, Larry—you know that I—"

 

"I understand completely. Yes, I do understand that. You've been very clear, I can't fault you for that. No… perfectly clear." Larry stopped sanding again, and put the sandpaper down beside him, running his free hand over the length of the piece and nodding.

Charlie took his other hand and held it, lacing their fingers together and wishing he was better at finding the right things to say to Larry when he got like this.

 

"You'd make a wonderful father, Charles." Larry patted his hand, as if he thought Charlie needed comforting.

 

"I—"

 

"Some woman somewhere is waiting for you, and you'll—you had a marvelous example in Alan, and I'm sure that you—"

 

"Larry, that's—you—"

 

"I really need to buy some wood. For the fireplace, because you're absolutely right. There's no point in having a fireplace and not lighting it."

 

And Charlie could only nod, recognizing that the conversation was over, because Larry had said what he needed to say, and had resumed his restless sanding, wearing away at the wood until it was smooth and bare and white, like bone.

 

 

 

"Deciding how best to stick it may be only an architectural problem or a question of physics or of engineering or of cabinetry."[iv]

 

 

The chalk dust was everywhere, covering the board and his hands and he groaned, pressing the eraser over the lines of equations, trying and failing to obliterate the mass of errors there. The eraser, already thick with chalk-dust, left faint traces on the board, overlapping his earlier attempts, and he felt almost as if he might squint and somehow see the answer that was taunting him, just out of reach, between the lines and hash-marks that now looked like another language—one he didn't recognize.

 

Clearly, he'd been at this too long.

 

"Knock knock."

 

The office door closed softly and there were footsteps, the squeak of wet sneakers on the floor.

 

"Who's there?" he asked, but didn't turn around as Larry's arms came up and around his waist. He leaned back against him and closed his eyes.

 

"Going well, I see?"

 

"Yes," Charlie agreed, eyes still squeezed shut. "I've solved every last problem, and there's no more work to do. I can retire now. You can too."

 

"Oh, excellent to hear. I was rather worried, when you didn't call, and then Amita stopped by and—"

 

"Hmm? Oh, dammit. I missed our meeting. Wait—no, that was tomorrow. Is it tomorrow?"

 

"No, I don't think so. I think today can only be today, by definition. Or by tautology. In any case—"

 

"Larry. Is. Today. Friday?"

"Today is Thursday, Charles. Were you supposed to be meeting her on Thursday or Friday? Because she didn't say you were late, but then again, she probably wouldn't have unless she'd already decided it was my fault for keeping you too busy with my petty concerns and incidental equations."

Charlie sighed, refusing to open his eyes and check his datebook. The numbers behind his eyelids were resolving into something, maybe an answer. 15, 16, 17… No, it just a calendar. He was meeting Amita tomorrow, at 10am, about pages 53-72. He sighed and opened his eyes, and the board had—

 

"A happy face?"

 

"My contribution, such as it is, to the problem of P versus NP. Soothing, isn't it?"

 

Charlie glared at him, but Larry's grin refused to give way in the face of his irritation.

 

"I'm losing my mind, because I think that almost makes as much sense as what I was coming up with."

"You're just hungry. Or maybe I am. One of us missed lunch. I'm entirely too wet, but I brought some coffee and whatever it was Amita bought at the cafeteria with the intent of feeding you, probably by hand—hmm. Cookies? Oh, they look homemade. Does she bake and add? You may just have to marry her after all."

"Can you bake, Larry? Because if you can't, you should realize that means you're down zero for two, in which case you may want to rethink your argument." Charlie reached into the damp bag and took a cookie, aware that, while one of Larry's hands was occupied with his coffee, the other had slipped down to idly stroke across the front of Charlie's jeans.

 

"Sadly, Charles, as I remember it, I failed home economics in a most spectacular way."

 

"Hmm. What happened?"

 

"Oh, well, I believe I sewed the apron upside-down and inside out, creating a fascinating mobius strip that, while aesthetically pleasing, wasn't at all useful unless you were planning to hang yourself. My potholder, on the other hand, was—well, I won't brag, but my mother claimed it was the best she'd ever seen."

 

"I was wrong. You're losing your mind. You do realize that."

 

"Thank goodness for tenure. Maybe no one will notice. Here, have a cookie."

 

Charlie exhaled as Larry's hand, which had been rubbing almost soothingly across the front of his pants, suddenly grabbed hold of him.

 

"Happy face, Charles. Because the definition of insanity is staring at the same problem over and over for two days and expecting the solution to magically—Oh."

 

Charlie nodded and picked up the chalk again, and it wasn’t the solution, exactly, but something Larry said about mobius strips was strangely right, and reminded him of, oddly enough, the punch-line to the knock-knock joke that Don used to tell when they were kids—the one that didn't really end but just kept going, cycling through, until you gave up. And that reminded him of the way that Don's strange pin numbers repeated at what had, at first, seemed to be the wrong intervals given his first, tentative predictions, which had led to yet another round of doubt on the part of Don, except that….

The hot coffee was strangely cold when he took another sip, and he turned around and was surprised to see Larry sitting behind the desk, his head pillowed on his folded arms, an issue of American Journal of Physics lying open, spine up. Charlie picked it up and saw Larry had been reading "Wormholes in spacetime and their use for interstellar travel: A tool for teaching general relativity"[v] and, in the margins, had written, "Charlie, call Amita." And next to Amita's name, "exotic matter? Definitely unstable."

Charlie sighed, looking back at the blackboard, where he was pretty sure he had the answer to Don's latest problem. One last, half-eaten cookie was left in the bag and he finished it off, gulping down the cold coffee and wondering how long he'd been working, and how long Larry had been thinking, and why it was easier to solve abstract problems and even Don's problems, but he couldn't for the life of him begin to solve for this.

 

Under ordinary circumstances, Larry would be the person he came to for help, but, watching the quiet rise and fall of Larry's breathing as he slept, Charlie was suddenly, painfully sure that Larry had told him everything he could—had done as much as he was able—and now Charlie was on his own, trying to find a way to rethread a mobius strip and finding himself instead always walking the same path and never really getting anywhere at all.

 

 

 

 

 

As we saw before there wasn't really a satisfactory picture for our matter particles in the string model. For instance what does a string with 3 ends look like? Is the membrane picture any better? Our spin 11⁄2 gravitino must correspond to a membrane with 1 edge. A simple circular disc fits this picture. (A Mobius strip - a tube with a half-twist - also fits this picture but this is a complication we shall ignore for now. It basically doubles the number of possible membranes.)[vi]

 

 

Adoption, surrogacy, Charlie had even briefly considered the possibility of Larry's choosing to marry, leaving him for this other desire. In every possible universe Charlie could theoretically propose that would end in a child, Charlie would inevitably find himself drawing a blank, because—a child. There was no mathematical way to make sense of that kind of addition within the parameters of his own life.

And there was the issue of his own selfishness—not to mention his inability to remember if he left the stove on, or missed a meeting. He—well, compared to Larry, he was positively organized. And considering just how much work it was to remember that there was someone else in the room with him, a child… No.

 

Wormholes were best left in the realm of the theoretical. Science or science fiction. Toy theories for boys—boys like Larry who never really grew up. Peter Pan adopting kids was one thing, but even he had Wendy to make sure they went to bed on time. No sane person would let either one of them near a child.

He was going to say yes. He knew he was. He knew it as soon as he leaned his bicycle against the side of Larry's house, as he was threading the lock through the tire and frame and thinking again about that mobius strip, about Larry's arms wrapped around him, about Larry's hands, smaller than his own, and capable and always, always touching something—as if Larry was looking for some way to anchor himself to the earth, as if gravity had long ago failed him and he was always reaching out, and when nothing could, he would fold himself up, hands clasped around his knees, knees held tight to his chest, protecting his heart.

"Yes," Charlie said, rehearsing it as he got to the door, knocking a few times and hoping Larry wouldn’t answer, because he hadn't yet been able to say it above a whisper, and certainly not with any conviction. Maybe Larry wouldn't notice.

 

"Yes," he tried again, and this time, the door opened.

 

"My, but you are agreeable tonight. I certainly should find a way to take advantage of that."

Larry grinned at him, letting him in, but Charlie looked at the open, red-stained door, noticing that, even in the dim light of the streetlamp, it did look like Larry had made a mistake with the color-matching. And then he looked back at Larry's hands, clean except for a smear of ink along his index finger where a pen must have slipped. And he wavered on the doorstep, even though Larry had put a hand on his elbow. Larry was wearing his Sunday clothes—jeans and one of his printed polo shirts that tried to look hip but somehow never did.

 

"Yes," he said again, trying to sound convincing, noticing that Larry was looking at him strangely.

 

He remembered his father telling him once about the day he was born, and about how he'd stood outside in the waiting room "because that was how it was done in those days," and how, when he first saw Charlie, he was sure there'd been a mistake. How he'd nearly told Mom that very same thing the first time, when Don was born, and how he somehow had figured on it getting easier, but that it wasn't until Charlie's bar mitzvah that he finally felt like a father—and until then he'd always suspected that someone would come by someday and take the kids away, saying, "Sorry—clerical error upstairs."

And Dad had chuckled, and Don had just smiled indulgently, but Charlie had nodded and gotten serious until Dad had turned to them both and said, "You two better get started or before you know it—poof—you'll be too old. Kids take a lot of energy, you know. Some, more than others."

 

Charlie looked at Larry now, and strangely enough, he felt like he was the one who was too old. Larry, for all that he talked about death and the unknown, was life, albeit life dressed in a very bad shirt. He put his hands on Larry's shoulders and looked at him, until Larry's smile faded and he began to look worried, lines etching their way onto his forehead, mirroring Charlie's own expression.

 

"Yes," Charlie said, and it was a little easier to say this time.

 

"Yes?"

 

"Yes." He nodded.

 

"Yes it is, then. You realize that I'm going to have to start coming up with some inappropriate questions before you use that word up and start in on its antonym. Lucky for us, I think I have a sexually-inspiring foyer here somewhere, if you'll just come inside. Would you like to polish the floors again in here? Because I'm pretty sure I put some clean sheets on the bed this morning, and we could try that just for novelty's sake. Oh, and did I show you the fireplace? I think you'll agree that it's very romantic. I had to hire someone to clean out the flue, which was apparently closed, and thank you, by the way, for suggesting I check before I tried it out, but now all systems are go and we can test out the fire-screen, though of course if it fails, I fully expect I'm owed a refund from the antique shop, or at the very least, an apology, though I'm pretty sure that if I stop by there again, I'll end up leaving with less money than I went in with. She really is a charmer, that one. And she has this pair of curtains that I think I, well, I suppose you probably don't care either way, but they're almost exactly the same color as your eyes, not to mention going nicely with the wallpaper. If I was a superstitious man, I'd say it was destiny, really."

Charlie stepped inside, shut the door, and leaned back against it, staring at the ceiling and liking the easy way Larry's hands moved over his chest, sliding under his jacket and pulling it off his shoulders. He let it fall to the floor as Larry started to unbutton his shirt.

 

"I have no idea how to do this, Larry."

 

"Charles, I assure you, you do. In fact, I doubt very much that anyone has a better idea than you do. Unless you were proposing we try something new?"

 

"Yes—new—but not—um."

 

"Um? We are talking about sex? No? We're not? What in the world are we—oh. New."

And there was an opportunity—a way out—but Charlie didn't take it, because he saw, sitting on the table by the door, a new book on restoring old houses, and a bag full of lamp parts, deconstructed and abstract pieces of tarnished brass and wire, and somewhere, out of all that, Larry was going to make light.

 

"I think we should think about children," Charlie managed, finally, and, though he couldn't have said what he expected to happen at his pronouncement, he was still startled when nothing did. Down the street, someone honked their car horn impatiently, and in the dining room, Larry's clock chimed on the half hour, as always, eleven minutes too early, but the world was the same. Larry was the same. Had he himself changed?

 

"So… new as in children? As in those people considerably smaller and smarter than you and I?"

"Having them," Charlie clarified, and Larry flinched, at which point Charlie realized he was still gripping Larry's shoulders, and had squeezed a little too hard. "Sorry." He let go, and Larry shrugged, looking curiously at Charlie.

 

"Are you serious? No—of course you're serious. You're really serious?"

 

"I'm serious," Charlie agreed. "I don't—I honestly don't know what you had in mind, or how important biology is—genetics—in terms of, um, progeny. Because I've looked into surrogacy, and it's still very much a grey area legally. And I'm not sure how I feel about it when there are so many kids who need—what?"

 

"Charles, you've obviously been giving this some thought."

 

"Yes, yes, I have."

 

"And it still scares the hell out of you."

Charlie nodded, barely able to breathe, actually, but managing to exhale anyway, which left him feeling suddenly deflated, as if he'd been carried all the way here on a single breath—a single thought. One word.

 

"And I absolutely admire you for it—don't doubt that for a minute. But this…gesture, I suppose is what it is. I appreciate the gesture, and I recognize you mean—well, I recognize the sincerity of the gesture as a gesture. Naïve, certainly, but meaningful nonetheless. I have to wonder, though, what brought this on? A crisis at work? No—you would've brought a pizza and woken me up in the middle of the night, not that I mind when you do, of course. But this being not too early or late for the more prosaic existential angst, I'd have to assume it's personal, then. Not Don, because I just talked to him when he called here looking for you, I might add, though I have no idea why he tried here before your office. In any case, he seemed very pleased about your progress with the dogs. At least I think he said dogs. Frogs? No, it was definitely dogs, though have you ever read that story about the jumping frogs? I found that someone had recently written an entire treatise on Twain's mathematics, and it was just fascinating. No—I suppose not at the moment. Regardless, Amita then?"

 

Charlie frowned.

 

"What in the world did she say to you to have you talking about children? She didn't offer her uterus, by any chance, because that would be—well—"

"Larry—this—" Charlie held up his middle finger. "This is a gesture. I'm talking about having your children, you—you—"

"Yes?"

 

Charlie inhaled again, wondering if he'd ever learn to breathe properly again. In and out, measured and even and he really was going to pass out if Larry kept looking at him like this was the first he'd ever heard of two men having a child—as if this was all Charlie's insane idea.

"You're making this very difficult."

 

Larry nodded, looking oddly sympathetic. "I wish I knew how to make it easy, Charles. But I don't suppose you really want me to."

 

Charlie laughed, noticing it sounded a little choked. "No, you wouldn't be you, and—"

 

"And this is hardly likely to be the most difficult moment in our journey if I take your assent at all seriously."

 

"I am serious," Charlie protested, and Larry moved into the living room, making him follow. Larry sat down heavily on the sofa, and Charlie was oddly glad to have made it in the door and past the foyer with most of his clothes on, and then suddenly wondered if this, too, was part of his future.

"You're really ready to have children? With me?" Larry slid further into the cushions, looking small and uncertain and Charlie again found it hard to breathe.

 

"Dad says nobody's ever ready for children. And honestly? Larry? I don't think anybody's ready to have children with you." He managed a small, weak smile, and Larry laughed.

 

"Now there's an honest fact. So… I was leaning towards adoption, since you asked."

 

"Adoption."

 

"Because, as you say, there are plenty of fertilized eggs wandering around without adding more DNA to the mix."

 

"We could—either of us could—have very smart children." Charlie said it even though it sounded very vain, because he knew Larry would understand his point. It had always faintly bothered him to know that people—especially women—sometimes looked at him as a pair of twisting strands of genetic material, a sound future investment, cold and calculating in ways that he could almost approve of, if only because of the sheer beauty of genes expressing themselves in a language he could understand, patterns and repetition and the occasional, unexpected surprise.

 

"With or without a direct contribution, I think that would be the case. You're a brilliant teacher, Charles."

 

"What if he or she doesn't like math?"

 

Larry gave him the blankest look, as if it had never before occurred to him. "I suppose we'd have to take it back."

"Larry—"

 

"Charles, I'm just so happy you're even considering this that I really don't know how to answer that question."

 

"It's not important."

 

"No—Charles, any questions you have about this are important."

 

"What if I forget to feed it?"

 

"They do cry, Charles. Or so I've heard. Some of them even learn to speak. We could probably make that a condition of the adoption, if you like."

 

"Oh."

 

And Larry looked at him and waited, patiently, as Charlie ran through the hundred questions he still had—the things he'd forbidden himself from verbalizing before this, for fear Larry would take it as encouragement.

 

"We'd have to live together," he said finally, and Larry sat back into the cushions, working his fingers into a small knot in his lap.

 

"I'll sell the house."

 

"You love this house."

 

Larry looked up from his hands and frowned, looking at the room, at the wood Charlie had watched him sand and stain, at the wallpaper Charlie had watched him hang, and at the floor Charlie had watched him refinish, and had helped him polish.

 

"It's a house, Charles. It's just… a house."

"But Dad—"

 

"Is desperate for grandchildren, Charles. And it's your house, is it not?"

 

"With my furnace that I still haven't figured out how to fix."

 

"Sometimes, you have to live with a little noise."

 

Charlie nodded, realizing that Larry was right, and that this was by no means a perfect equation. It was messy, unfocused, and incomplete, and he usually hated problems like that, until he started working on them, and they unfolded and made themselves known to him, a little at a time, and then he could and did spend years on them.

 

Children—a child, even just one—could keep him from solving P vs. NP. And it could keep him from sleep, and sex, and fame, and publishing, and teaching, and diminish his opportunities for working with Don, which he did in those few hours left when he wasn't sleeping. But it would mean more time with Larry, a man around whom he'd found himself organizing his life in small, subtle ways he'd only just started to quantify. And the results had surprised him.

 

For the first time in his life, he looked into Larry's eyes and saw another universe opening up, and it was dangerous and even though every instinct he had—and all manner of logic—screamed that it was impossible to go there, he realized that Larry was asking him—had been asking him all along—to suspend his disbelief and do the unthinkable.

 

He did sometimes think too much, and maybe that was a mistake. Sometimes, you had to take a quantum leap and hope the roof didn't cave in on top of you.

 

Larry patted the sofa beside him, and Charlie sat down, moving into Larry's arms, the familiarity of the gesture freeing.

 

"Show me your new fireplace, Larry."

 

He knew Larry's body, knew the geometry of it and the few positions in which they both could fit on the sofa without falling off, knew the pleasure to be had there, and the way that his back would hurt a little later and how Larry's would hurt a lot, and how Larry would casually suggest the bedroom and he decided that this time, this time he'd say yes, thinking that it was a small step towards waking up beside Larry and that tomorrow he was sure to think up more questions Larry couldn't answer.

"In the bedroom? A night of many firsts, Charles."

 

"You make me want to try new things," he admitted, taking Larry's hand and following him upstairs, finding his way in the dark with surprising ease.

 

 

The End.

 

 

Thanks to Kate, who let me make her sad and happy and who can tell the difference between Larry's run-ons and my own. And thanks to my two kids, who allowed me to see my way to other universes.

 

Feed the Muse.