A writer and a sexually ambiguous man walk into a bar with an uncomfortable air of silence about them. Well, I guess it’s not so much a bar as it is a café. And they aren’t really uncomfortable with each other.

     This joke isn’t very funny. Let me try again.

     A novelist of moderate literary credit and a nervous man who wears a well trimmed beard because he doesn’t want to see his father in window reflections walk past a café only to decide that the coffee is worth the price and enter. Quiet instrumentals play over the speakers. They hold a pessimistic conversation on love and life and language and any other topic prevalent to the conversation beginning with the letter L; that was today’s letter. This was one of their games. There were countless others.

     The writer hasn’t given up on love, not in the least, but puts on the veneer of bleak despondency for the public to fit a self-appointed stereotype among the tragically brilliant. The man on the other side of the table is obsessed with the writer’s “works”; the collections of stanzas and paragraphs were never called stories or tales or narratives or even literature, but “works”. The man thought it was cute how serious the writer was about it all.

     The man is the writer’s student; a protégé of sorts. Unofficially, the writer says. Unofficially, spoken with that charming lilt. Unofficially, it’s the closest thing to a commitment that could be offered. Unofficially, the man doesn’t mind.

     They are done talking and get up to leave for the writer’s place. The man is sweating and his eyes are darting and he’s shaking a little when the writer takes his hand and leads him up the steps to the apartment complex. They exit the elevator on the 5^th floor. Room 503, across the hall from a maintenance closet. It is a small studio space. There is a bed in the corner and the writer is already undressing.

     The man remembers his first love. The boy beside him is shirtless, pale, visibly hesitant. They undress each other quickly. It is noon, early July, but with the shades pulled and the dark green walls, clockless, time has no reason to get itself involved. The boy is naked on the bed and the man, who is only a boy as well, walks slowly past the bathroom door, the armoire, the night stand, and behind this expectant ivory figure on hands and knees. There is cold lube and slow penetration and blood. They are Schrödinger’s cats in this drywall box of bed sheets and heavy breathing; if nobody enters and nobody leaves, nothing will change. Everything will stay awkward and inexperienced and clumsy and perfect and nobody will ever know the difference. Of course, this isn’t possible. The boy leaves 20 minutes later, a kiss goodbye, leaving the man, who is still a boy, tired and stripped of his innocence in the doorway.

     The man is still in pants and socks. The writer is down to skin. She has smaller breasts than he had guessed. There is very little curve at all in her slight stature. This brings comfort to the man; it is more familiar. But he is about to be naked in front of a woman. This is a terrifying reality.

     Gender is not a dichotomy, he had read somewhere. He repeats it to a group of close friends, publicly, enthusiastically, very loudly. Now those words grind into him like a hangover. Gender is not a dichotomy and he is standing partially dressed in this quiet room and the writer, this small naked woman expecting something from him, is just another body to fuck. Just another body. A body is just a body, no matter who it belongs to, right? Any body, anybody’s body, will do. The word body doesn’t even register anymore. The lights are out and she is spread on the comforter and a red neon sign up the street is illuminating her pale hair with a gory scarlet shine through the window; a flicker of street lamps and a subtle movement of thighs and the scratch of a zipper and the man is beside her, touching, cupping, tongue against neck against lips against breath. She has softer skin than he had guessed. There is no hair anywhere on her body. This brings no comfort at all; it is not familiar. There is a brief hesitation, the exhalation before the cliff diver descends, a moan, a grunt, and he is now playing the role of a heterosexual man in this heterosexual situation that is as foreign to him as any language he has never spoken.

     He does everything right but the act itself is not. She’s wet and bent and clawing at the bed and he’s just going through the motions and getting embarrassed and starting to go limp and now nobody is enjoying themselves and he just stops.

     Humid silence.

          Jamison.

          Yeah.

          It’s okay.

          Not really. No.

          …Oh.

     He sits up and starts to put his pants back on. She rolls onto her side. Concern, mild sympathy, her face is twisted into a question mark but he doesn’t really care; he is only concerned with lacing the belt through the buckle and pulling on his boots and getting to the door and he is out in the hallway and she is still in bed, sobbing quietly into open palms.

     This joke just isn’t very funny.

     When the man gets home, he shaves off his beard and stares into the mirror and his father stares back. Instead of the usual shattering comments such as I hope you’re not calling because you got the aids or I’d like to introduce you to my daughter, Jamison or You’re dead to me, he is being congratulated. Well done son, the reflection says, I’m proud of you for not living by another man’s standards. Good for you for realizing it’s just not for you. A man can’t know what he likes until he knows what he doesn’t like. But this isn’t really his father and he is just talking to himself in a dark bathroom at 11:30 in the evening with his soapy razor in the sink and a bottle on the toilet seat, cheap wine, still corked. He pours two glasses: one for himself and one for all the women he will never again have to leave disappointed, tangled in bed sheets and self doubt. He needs a man, an ass, a body with chest hair and strong hands and a caramel-dipped voice and gender is a dichotomy again.