dark corridor, off of which was the office. And the women’s rest room.
He was sitting behind the desk, exactly like he’d been when I first met him: the Daily News open on the desk, the Marlboro Light burning in the overflowing ashtray. He looked up at me and instinctively reached under the desk. “You’re not allowed back here. This is private.”
My hands were shaking. “I was invited.”
He looked at me, squinted, then tentatively asked, “Andy?”
I nodded, beaming. “I prefer Andrew. Or Drew.”
He relaxed his grip under the desk and folded his arms across his chest. That smile from the other night was missing as he closely examined my face, replaced with a quizzical, confused expression.
“I…uh…I guess I look a little different when I’m not wearing a dress, huh?” I babbled nervously as my smile flickered away.
And, for his part, he seemed nervous, too. “You look like a man,” he said finally.
“I don’t…uh…I never dressed in drag before. I let myself get talked into it.”
“You looked good,” he said, still without a smile. “A little like Demi Moore.”
“So you said. But I’m still not doing it again.”
We awkwardly looked across the small room at each other. He was as beautiful as I remembered, but much less approachable without the smile. And while I didn’t know what he thought about me, I felt that the lack of a smile said it all. Still, I had gone through the effort of running down to the Village on a Monday night, so I felt owed some kind of explanation.
“Why did you want me to come down?”
He shrugged. “I dunno.”
I didn’t say anything in response. I just looked at him with a steady yet unintimidating gaze. Finally, he said, “I wasn’t going to call. You sort of surprised me when you talked like a man as I was getting out of the cab.”
“I thought you knew.”
“Yeah.” A small piece of his smile finally slipped across his face. “I guess I should’ve, huh? But I’m new to all this.”
“Everybody here that night was male. They almost didn’t let me in because the bouncer thought I was a real woman. That’s why I thought—”
He held up a hand to stop me. “I didn’t make the rules, and I guess I didn’t know the rules. I just own the place; I’ve hired people to manage it and promote it. I mean, I don’t know all this gay stuff.”
Again, silence fell between us. I noticed his forehead was beaded with sweat, which was causing one of the ringlets in his curly black hair to slowly unravel over his brow. And, at that moment, as I stood there entranced by his uncurling curl and his nervous vulnerability, I was even more sorry he was heterosexual and unattainable.
“You know this place is gay, don’t you?” I finally asked, worried Barry Blackburn and his crowd had totally put one over on poor, naive Frank.
He laughed, and the smile again made a brief appearance. “It would be hard to miss that. Yeah, of course I know it. That was part of my business plan. But I thought girls—real girls…I mean…uh…straight girls—I thought they sometimes went to gay bars. You know, to dance and hang out without worrying that some asshole’s gonna hit on them.”
“Well, you should have a talk with Barry Blackburn. I think he’s afraid of women.”
“I guess so.”
Okay, that was out of the way. Now it was time to talk about me.
“So, if I surprised you—and I’m sorry about that, by the way—why did you call?”
He looked at the floor and swallowed hard a few times. When his eyes returned to me, there was a new sadness in them. But he quickly recovered. “I don’t know. I guess it’s because you were such a great-looking woman…”
Oh, God, Denise was right. All Frank wanted was for me to put on the wig and dress while he fucked me. I turned and started to leave.
“I felt this kind of, um, bond between us,” he said quickly, rushing to get the words out as I walked back into the corridor. “We seemed to connect on a deeper level. I mean, when we danced…”
I turned back and bitterly said, “I’m not what you want, Frank. I’m not a woman. I don’t dress like a woman and I don’t act like a woman and I’m not going to get fucked around by straight men like a woman. There are already too many gay men screwing around with my head. They don’t need company.”
My triumphant, defiant, scene-stealing speech over, I spun on my heel and started to march down the hall.
He caught me before I reached the women’s rest room.
We were back at the diner, drinking coffee and eating french fries covered in gravy. He apologized for giving me the wrong impression, so I apologized for making a scene, although I was fully prepared to make another one.
“What I meant to say,” he said, “is I felt like there was something between us as two people. Not just as a guy and a girl. But it took me until this afternoon to sort it out.”
“So, what’s that mean? Any way you look at it, we’re still two men, and that means we’ve got the same equipment. I really don’t get the impression that that’s what you’re interested in.”
He shrugged. “I don’t know what it means, and I don’t know how to work it out. There must be…I don’t know.”
I started to laugh.
“What?”
“This is perfect. I couldn’t have written it any better. I finally find the man of my dreams, and he’s straight. And you finally meet that special someone, and he’s a gay man. And short of a sex-change operation—and don’t even think of suggesting it—there’s nothing we can do about it.”
He leaned back in the booth and frowned. After a long pause he said, “I’ve got something to tell you. Something else. I have a fiancée.”
I barely looked up from my coffee. “Great. Another insurmountable complication.”
“I don’t love her.”
I didn’t respond. I just watched him as he put his elbows on the table and ran a hand through his hair, then across his face until it fell to rest in a position that shaded his eyes.
“I don’t love her,” he said again, but this time he was almost inaudible.
I told myself not to get drawn into Frank’s personal psychodrama but couldn’t help asking, “So, why are you marrying her?”
His hand didn’t move from its position, but he started slowly massaging his brow as he said, in a voice still just above a whisper, “Family stuff. It’s just something I have to do.”
“Like an arranged marriage? That’s kind of old-fashioned, isn’t it?”
“It’s not really like that,” he said, still massaging his brow. “It’s just…I have to do it.”
Of course.
I liked Frank, I really did. Maybe there were even the first flickers of love for him somewhere deep inside me. But the last person I wanted to get involved with was an emotionally damaged straight boy who didn’t know what he wanted, who he wanted, or why he wanted it. I tossed my napkin on the table.
“It’s been a real experience, Frank. But I’d better get home.”
His free hand darted across the table and wrapped itself around my wrist. “Don’t go.”
“Frank…”
He looked at me with plaintive eyes. I noticed they were misting over.