The Men from the Boys by William J. Mann

usual.
    â€œSo why’d you tell him we weren’t buying the place? Have we decided on that?” I ask.
    â€œJeff, I can’t come up with the down payment all by myself.”
    â€œI know that. I just didn’t think we had decided definitely.” I take out a silver metal bowl from the cabinet, the reflection of my face concave and distorted.
    â€œWe haven’t. Just let it go, okay?”
    â€œIt’s gone,” I pretend.
    Lloyd yawns.
    â€œWhat?” I ask, all eyebrows. “Didn’t you get any sleep?”
    He looks at me. “No,” he says deliberately, then turns around and heads into the bedroom.
    â€œHe’s in love with you,” I call after him in my best just-a-friendly-warning voice.
    â€œGood night, Jeff.” He closes the door.
    â€œJust a friendly warning,” I say, and crack five eggs into a bowl, not caring if half of the shells go in there with them.

Provincetown, June 1994
    â€œI’ll be at the breakwater,” I tell Javitz. “Have Lloyd meet me there.”
    I make my way through town from our house on the East End. It’s early morning, before nine. On Commercial Street only a few vendors have opened their doors. The Portuguese bakery is one of them, the wheaty aroma of fresh-baked loaves braiding with the thickness of hardening fudge from the candy store across the street. Few gay boys are out this early, only bleary-eyed sales clerks opening up the shutters on the T-shirt shops. The tanginess of the sea assaults them: they scrunch up their noses, unsure whether the smell is pleasant or foul. It is the odor of rotting seaweed, baby crabs and snails, the scent of a salty low tide.
    I cut between two shops and pad across the brown-sugar beach toward the pier. The surf approaches tentatively. Waves lap the shore, offering the only sound beyond the call of the gulls that cut wide swaths in the sharp blueness above me. The sun slants across the bay, thousands of twinkling lights whose brilliance is lost as quickly as they appear. A couple of white-rumped sandpipers run ahead of me on the sand. Washed up here and there are tangles of weed: long twisting green trails, like the discarded boas of an army of drag queens.
    There are days, like today, when I need the soul of Provincetown.
    Not the heart. The heart beats loudly every afternoon from four to six at tea dance, a bass backbeat that can be heard all the way down Commercial Street. But this morning, waking up alone, I wanted to find something else. So I’m heading here, to the very tip.
    I climb up onto the stones of the breakwater and find a suitable one, sitting down to face the rising sun. It’s gonna be a scawchah, as the locals say. The humidity is creeping back, in the haze off Long Point, in the stickiness of the wood along the pier. Here, on the breakwater, it’s cooler, with a breeze rolling in from the bay. A gull keeps circling in the blue above me, complaining perhaps that I have taken her spot. For a second I pretend I’m Tippi Hedren, about to get my forehead gashed. Then I close my eyes and doze a little, trying to forget about the trick who ditched me.
    Of course, I didn’t sleep last night except for fits. Once I woke up and wasn’t sure if it was my trick or my lover in bed next to me, but it ended up being neither. Eduardo ditched me, I remembered, forcing myself back to sleep.
    A couple of women pass me on their way out to Long Point. They’re holding hands. “Good morning,” they say, almost in unison. I smile back.
    The breakwater is a catwalk of cut granite stones connecting the town to Long Point. Massive slabs of granite, sparkling silver in the sun, the breakwater keeps the sandy dunes from dissolving into the sea. At high tide, the surface of the water on one side is textured with blue swells; on the other, it is smooth and satiny, like a dark turquoise mirror. The stones are scarred with the marks of whatever machines