37

An old coworker of Rachel’s named Alex visited Paris with his friend Caroline and crashed in our living room. Saturday night, Alex wanted to hit a famous gay bar he’d heard about in the Marais, but Rachel and Caroline were too tired from sightseeing to go out, so Alex and I went by ourselves—Alex to cruise guys and me to drink. Inside, the bar was full of hundreds of men. In fact, there were gay Parisians. Techno pumped the room to nearly popping. Alex pointed out the bar’s main attraction, a shower booth installed above the liquor bottles where a beefy guy, lathered up, was playing with his penis. Semierect, it was the length of my forearm.

Alex bought us Coronas. “Pretty butch scene, don’t you think?” he said. Some polished chests were revealed, but mostly it was bobo guys in office clothes or Lacoste shirts, a number of them with sweaters draped around their shoulders like any guy in Paris.

“The thing is,” Alex said, “I was walking around today and I swear, in Paris you can’t tell who’s gay and who’s straight.”

“Your radar’s messed up?” I said.

Alex laughed. “It’s like they’re homophobic and extremely gay at the same time. Seriously, either every man in Paris is gay or no one is.”

It sounded right to me: straight Parisians tended to dress like gay Americans. But then what did gay Parisians dress like?

It came to me: Italians.

On Sunday, after Alex and Caroline had left for the airport, I finished writing my novel. I reread the last chapter and knew it was done. Rachel finished the whole thing by the following weekend and said I’d figured it out, it worked, it breathed the oxygen of its own little world.