The Men from the Boys by William J. Mann Page A

broke them from the earth, then lifted them and relinquished them into place. Scars that prove man is stronger than stone, more enduring. No cement holds these rocks together, no glue. Just their sheer weight keeps them in place.
    Some people use the breakers merely as a bridge to get out to the beaches on Long Point, where the sand is finer and the cruising less heavy than at Herring Cove. I, however, use them as a test of my stamina: from stone to stone I leap, always landing on my feet and never in the cracks between. Then, satisfied that I can still do it, I lie on a flat rock in the sun, like a seal, belly side up.
    That’s how I am now, waiting for Lloyd. He should be here soon. He promised he’d leave Boston by eight, so he’d be here by ten. So why am I thinking about Eduardo? Why does it bother me so much that he’s gone?
    I shouldn’t be surprised. It’s the same old script. “You loved Raphael,” Javitz said last summer, and he was right. Many times I have fallen in love in the course of one sun-blistering afternoon. It lasted until barely the following day, when the rains came and washed away the humidity from the cracking clay of the Cape. Raphael was a sweet cocoa-skinned boy who spoke in the mellifluous tones of French Canada and who became transfixed by my tongue. “Give it to me,” he implored, and I thrust it into his mouth, into his ear, into his armpit. Then I’d laugh: laugh at his eager passion, and roll off of him and make him ask again.
    â€œJeff,” Javitz said a day later, holding the phone out to me, “it’s Raphael.”
    But now I did not take his call, for the crush of love inside my rib cage had eased. I told Javitz to tell him I’d left. Gone back to Boston. And Javitz, of course, lied for me.
    Yet only a few days later, I yearned for Raphael as if I were Heathcliff and he Catherine, brooding about the house in a cloud of gray. Even now, the pinch of a Quebecois accent still pains me. I do not try to contact him. Such would not make the pain go away, only worsen it. For within a day of seeing him again, I’d send him home, and the ride would start anew.
    But when Lloyd’s here I don’t have the desire, don’t have that burning in my belly to lace up my boots and struggle into my tank top at eleven o’clock at night. When Lloyd’s here, I have no urge to sweat on the dance floor, no ardor to see who will shoot the farthest in a cum contest.
    Instead, we rent videos: Bette Davis or Tennessee Williams or The Creature from the Black Lagoon. We order in pizza and bake brownies, the fragrance of chocolate wafting out the windows. “Lloyd must be here,” Javitz says, returning from dinner with Ernie, widening his nostrils to savor the aroma. Sometimes he will stumble over Lloyd and me asleep on the floor, bundled together in the breathing position, while Ava Gardner swings her hips at Richard Burton above us on the screen.
    I once whispered to Javitz: “How much passion should be left after six years?”
    â€œDefine ‘passion,’ ” is all he said in response.
    But I couldn’t. I just sat there, staring into that netherworld that exists between the time Lloyd leaves Provincetown for Boston and the time I pull on my tank top and stride out into the dark.
    Javitz tried to reassure me. “Don’t worry about passion,” he said. “It has a way of showing up in the unlikeliest of places.”
    Like the time I threw my grandmother’s ceramic German shepherd across the room, the one she’d given me the year she died, watching it shatter into a dozen pieces and Mr. Tompkins scurry into the other room. In my other hand was a notice that my car insurance was due. “How am I supposed to pay for this?” I screamed, sending the bill across the room after the dog. “What, do they think money just falls from the sky?”
    I’d just left my job so I could write