I had all but given up hope when at last the heavy doors of the main building opened and Theo Severyn stepped into the Peace Garden. He, too, was alone.
“Hey, bitch.” His voice, soft despite the twenty-some feet between us, steamed in the cold.
“Hey, catamite.” I matched his hushed tone, though there was no one but the two of us in the garden.
The dollhouse-shaped Meetinghouse cast a shadow that fell across Theo’s face as he approached me. “What do you think?” he said lightly. “Can I be in the Invert Society now?”
“Is that why you did it?” Performing a parody of coquettishness—for my question was too serious to ask seriously—I said, “All for little old me?”
He came to a stop a few feet away from me. “Don’t tell Christopher.”
My heart was pounding. Mentally, I ran a quick experimental simulation. I visualized Theo walking up to me, placing his hands on my shoulders, leaning in, touching his lips to mine—no. Absolutely not. The mere thought caused my heart to slow in confused indifference. Kissing Theo would be like kissing the back of my own hand.
And yet, as I looked at him, I thought: I want. I was aflame, ablaze with want. What was it I wanted from him?
“Christopher tries to keep up,” said Theo. “But he doesn’t really get the whole Leopold and Loeb thing.”
“That’s ironic,” I said. “Since he’s the Leopold to your Loeb.”
“Well, we haven’t murdered a guy yet.” Theo smiled. “If you know what I mean.”
What did he mean? I couldn’t ask directly, couldn’t puncture the soap bubble of double entendre in which we were floating. This was flirting, I suppose, in the sense that it was an escalating and erotically charged exchange of verbal teasing that served as an indirect acknowledgment of an attraction that felt otherwise unspeakable. But it was a delicate balance we had to strike. A single false move—by which I mean a heterosexual move, on either of our parts—would have broken the spell. The flirtation was asymptotic, the attraction displaced: my object of desire was not Theo himself, but the abstract idea of Theo being gay. That was what I wanted. That was what was causing my heart to flutter in my chest with a mothlike fragility that it had heretofore exhibited only in response to the image of two dudes doing it—never, until now, in response to another living person.
“Also,” he added, “you think I don’t know what catamite means.” He stepped over a blackened snowbank, drawing closer to me. “But I do.”
“Oh?” My face felt hot. I wondered if he could tell. “Well, know thyself.”
“Bitch, please,” he said. “We both know you’re the catamite.”
I went mute for the next few seconds as I catalogued the various possible readings of that statement.
1. The schoolyard bluff: He didn’t know what catamite meant but was flinging the supposed insult back at me (rubber, glue, etc.) in hope that whatever it was, it would sting.
2. The “I know you are but what am I” gambit: He didn’t know specifically that a catamite was a boy kept for ass-fucking purposes in decadent Greco-Roman antiquity, but he had intuited the word’s homosexual connotations and was flinging the allegation back at me in hope that it would distract from his own homosexuality, which he had yet to confirm explicitly.
3. The anal association: He knew that a catamite was by definition the receptive partner in said ass-fucking and was flinging the implication back at me on the grounds that, questions of identity notwithstanding, this particular aspect of the word was an insult.
Cautiously, experimentally, I said, “You should look up catamite in the dictionary.”
“I told you,” said Theo. “I know what it means.”
I took a breath. “Girls can’t be catamites.”
He regarded me unblinkingly. “You’re not a girl,” he said. “You’re like this weird sad pervy gay guy in a girl’s body, cruising me.”
4. Identification in the wild: He saw me. He understood me. He knew me.