
Like People In History is one of my favorite novels. I first read it when I was 17 years old, and at that time it had a profound affect on me. I like to re-read it occasionally, sometimes small parts of it. The follow passage describes how Roger, the book’s protagonist, meets the love of his life, Matt. I think it’s a great passage from a great book.
…There, below me, not twenty feet away, in the poetry section, holding a book in one large outstretched hand, while he turned a page with the other was—I would have sworn it—the Archangel Ariel himself, his wings folded up, hidden away somewhere in a U.S. sailor’s eyebright middy and thirteen button “broad-fall” flap-front trousers.
In an unexpected dimensional shift, his eyes moved to the other page, tilting his head suddenly in another direction, and now I could see the single black curl falling across his Alcibiadean brow, the total roundness of of those large dark eyes, every tanned plane of that amazing head.
I felt a sudden burning in my breast and recalled St. Theresa of Avila had written of being struck in the heart by a blazing dart of Divine Love, and the paradox of enduring such Sweet Agony. So shocked, I had to lean against the walkway railing.
The sailor must have caught my sudden motion in his peripheral vision: he looked up suddenly, and dimensions shifted again. His direct gaze was so intense it was as though someone had suddenly pulled the blazing dart down through my torso and out of me again via my urethra.
My head spun, but I managed to get to the far wall, where I found a seat and dropped my head between my knees, glimpsing Daliesque visions of his individual facial features as they fled and cavorted and chased on another through a Palladian cathedral of pastel-hued clouds
…
I managed to stumble down the stairs to the main floor, hid myself under the edge of the balcony, where Alistair had returned to Faunce and the Goose, fooled around straightening a volume or two here and there among the gardening books and something new on bargello, and sort of wandered nearer the sailor, half circling him all the while, ready to flee at the slightest sign of disinterest.
From this close, he was taller than I’d expected. Six feet, almost six one. Big shoulders. Incredible deltoids, biceps, buttocks, and thighs outlined and simultaneously gripped by the tight cut of his sailor suit. I found myself thinking the term ‘animal grace’ had been coined just for him. He was still holding the book in his hands, reading it. I tried to make out the cover and thought it might be a recent anthology of poetry. He shifted his pose in place, and it was like continents gliding across the surface of the planet—and that Michelangelesque face!
Just as I was thinking I can’t possibly do this, he peeked over the top of the book at me. Almost inhumanly silver-eyes set in a bed of black lashes.
”Hi,” I said, held my breath, and moved to one side of him, adjusting various books on display that didn’t at all need adjusting.
He half smiled. Surprisingly small teeth. Was about to say something.
”You’re fine where you are,” I said, about to pass by. Understatement of the century.
He put down the book. It was the anthology.
”I should probably buy this,” he said in an even-toned baritone. “And not just stand here reading it all.” No accent at all. Certainly not from the West of South. Yet not from the Bay Area.
”No problem,” I said, trying to move away, yet magnetically held by his field of attraction. At that moment, I realized I would have said, “no problem” if he’d demanded to remain where he was and behead passing customers. Then, in a flash of unexpected poise, I added, regarding he book he’d been perusing, “It’s supposed to be a good sampling.”
”Is it?” he asked, so intensely naive and questioning I stopped about a tenth of my fidgeting.
”It’s supposed to be better than the Oxford Book of American Poetry. Of course this one has English poets too.”
”What about this Auden? He considered English or American?”
He held out the book, and I saw the lines “Lay your sleeping head, my love/Human on my faithless arm.”
I must have blushed, because he said, “What?” and pulled back the book and read the page. And half snorted a laugh. “That one’s pretty good. But I like this one better.” He showed me “Fish in the unruffled lakes.” “You?”
” ‘Doom is dark and deeper than any sea-dingle…’ ” I quoted the title from memory.
” ‘Upon what man it fall/In spring,’ ” he continued. “Yeah, I like that one too. You don’t think it’s strange?”
”I always thought that particular poem was pretty strange. For example, here,” nervously pointing, and now so close I felt sea-deep within his ambience, his smell like toasted wheat bread that’s not yet cooled, “in the second stanza, where he writes about deeming of going and home and kissing his wife under a sheet, then instead he wakes and sees ‘Bird-flock nameless to him; through the doorway voices/Of new men making another love’ …”
”Oh!” I suddenly said aloud. I’d for the first time realized what Auden must have meant with those phrases. “Oh, he must mean…” I stopped myself and began to blush. Gays, Auden must have meant, I thought but didn’t say. “New men making another love.” Opposed to a wife. What else could it mean?
”Mean what?” the sailor asked and read aloud. ” ‘…new men making another love.’ ”
He looked up, those remarkable huge, pale, silver-gray eyes so extravagantly set in dark, long, curled lashes, and seeing me red-faced, he too must have suddenly realized the words’ import, since he too began to color.
Which meant that against all expectations, all possibilities, all percentages, all fears of it not being so, the sailor must be gay too!
I couldn’t believe it. I almost levitated off the imported Albanian rose-red marble floor.
In that moment I felt us connect. It was as if a double-sided grappling hook and suddenly been flung and caught under each of our sternums, grasping tight into bone, biting deep into vital organs.







