He draped the scarf over the highback wooden chair as he buttoned up his coat. He told the scarf to be patient. He would not be long in buttoning up his coat.  
He thought of phoning Ade and cancelling, but he couldn’t disappoint him. 
If it were any other day, if it were anyone else other than Ade, he would have stayed at home. He would not have cared about the weather. He would have ordered sushi from Sakura. He would have masturbated himself into oblivion and then cursed himself that he had not rationed enough horniness for an evening hookup. Who was he kidding? If he wanted a sound spanking, that usually meant leaving the apartment and taking the N into Manhattan and trudging through the puddles and slush and ringing strange bells.  
Even the promise of sex no longer motivated him to engage with the world as it once had. He had abandoned his morning calisthenics months ago and chubbiness had returned. He went unshowered for whole weekends, his thick red hair unkempt. No one inspired him anymore. He didn’t care, anyway. He had yet to find a man who could deliver bum smacks—as hard, as swift, as intense—as Ade could. His hand could make Trace as hot as a grunting radiator. They had not played together for months and, if Trace had his way, they never would again. He did miss Ade’s stern voice, his own splutterings, the breathless kisses of their milky finales. 
As he pulled it from the chair and wrapped it loose around his neck, Trace apologized to the scarf for having not given it more to do that winter. He could not bear to tell the scarf that it might no longer be winter. The scarf had only seen one winter. And it had been a winter whose blizzards had melted quickly. He wanted to tell the scarf not to worry. Colder days were ahead. 
The scarf remained mute. No answer. No ‘It’s okay.’ It was hard to guess exactly what the scarf might be thinking. 
He had never worried until today what the scarf would do all spring and summer once he stowed it away. In its practical plastic tub, the scarf, along with the other scarves, and gloves and tuques, would become a bed for his spare light bulbs. Would the scarf recoil, its colorful threads touching curved glass and not skin? Did the scarf feel repulsed, doing nothing? Did it have a sense of its purpose? Did it know its mission was unfulfilled? That it was supposed to be providing warmth instead of hibernating in a tub? Who knows? Maybe it had never wanted to be a scarf. 
He had bought the tub at the bed-and-bath store that day when Ade, still able to walk unassisted, had yanked him up to Steinway to go shopping. 
Ade had goaded him to stop living in a half-empty apartment, dusty swaths of space between his bed in one room and his computer desk in another. Create a home, for god’s sake!  
Ade had come over one night to drop off a borrowed book and found that one of his sculptures he had given to Trace had been ill-treated. 
“That’s what you do with my creation? You place it on the floor?” 
“I’m sorry.” 
“Look, it has a ding in it.” 
“Where?” Trace squatted. “I didn’t do that!” 
 What Trace had tried to pass off as Zen, Ade exposed as indifference to self-care. Jeremy left five years ago! Move on with your life!  
Trace had had to start over after that break-up. “You’re a cold, fucking bitch,” Jeremy had said by way of ending an argument, and the next day, each time Trace turned around with a plea for him to stay, another piece of furniture, another framed poster, another clock had disappeared. Jeremy had left behind only one thing, a bottle of painkillers for his foot that he had never used, and Trace would open the medicine cabinet and stare at it, wondering if the pills were enough to anesthetize his grief once and for all. 
The apartment had remained as bare as a tomb, as New York apartments of the young do, but the difference was he was not out eating dinners at neighborhood restaurants nor gallavanting at clubs. Trace spent most of his time there, with absence and anger, his quiet roommates who always washed their cereal bowls and kept their music low.  
During their shopping trip, under Ade’s watchful gaze, Trace bought a tidy couch and coffee table, DIY shelving, some dressers, and soon got into the spirit of inventing his future. He imagined careful appointments around the apartment. A set of Hiroshige’s “14 Famous Views of Edo” that he found in the bargain section of the bookstore would look great on the wall leading into the kitchen. Candles on wrought-iron spires would complement the black-oak furniture in the living room. He bought pillows, in purples and reds, which he would pile onto his bed.  
He did not let on to Ade that he might not be fully on board. But he realized the trick that could be played. If it looked like he cared about himself, others might care about him. 
 
After a long, three-block walk, overheated by a sun that seemed to follow him like a spaceship’s tractor beam, he pressed the buzzer he had first pressed five years ago, and Ade answered through the speaker with his usual gruff  line: “I don’t want any!” 
Trace leaned in with a smile that no one could see: “I wasn’t offering any.” 
He grasped the doorknob in anticipation. The buzzer that released the lock bleated loud and harsh, but to his ears it was as lovely and soft as “Open sesame.” 
Ade had managed to dress himself—in all black, his favorite uniform obeying no hour of the day nor season—without the help of the home health aide, who had now left for the day, dismissed to find some other quiet place to gossip on her phone.  
“It’s cold?” Ade asked, looking up from the coupons he had spread across the surface of the tray that extended from his computer desk. Soon, as soon as he left for the nursing home, they would be worth nothing. 
Trace slipped off the scarf and bundled it with his coat on the chair. He could leave the scarf behind, but then he worried that it probably would feel orphaned. It wouldn’t understand that he was coming back. “No. I guessed wrong.” 
“I don’t want to go if it’s cold.” 
“Yes, yes. We’d go if there was a blizzard out.”  
Trace kissed his cheek. Ade had titled his head in anticipation.  
“Yes,” Ade agreed. “You’re right.” 
“You look very handsome.” Ade always waited, impatiently, for one of Trace’s compliments. They were only courtesies, he guessed, as cheap as diner mints in a wicker basket near the register, but he still liked to suck the peppermint flavor off of their surfaces.  
Trace stopped at the shelves, as he always did, to look at Ade’s sculptures, the ones not in storage, small twisty rough-hewn stone things that had been tortured, like bonsai, into beauty. Ade had worked for years but he had never made much headway. He had never had his day in the sun. No gallery representation. No solo shows of any repute. Trace had wondered why he had kept at it, long after he had realized he had failed. 
Ade looked at the blank monitor to check if he had turned his computer off. 
It was only 10:30 a.m. but Trace thought they should eat lunch before they left. “What kind of soup—?” 
Trace looked in the cupboard, muscle memory from his volunteer days. Soup can after soup can. All low sodium. He thought of his grandmother sitting down to her daily Shabbats and Seders. He almost cried. 
“I’d rather have corned beef from that deli on 5th Avenue.” 
“It’s so expensive—that deli. It’s become a tourist trap.” 
“I have coupons.”  
“Won’t going up those stairs be too much bother?”  
“I can manage.” 
“I did make reservations at that Nigerian restaurant in Hell’s Kitchen.” 
Ade chuckled at the nostalgia Trace thought he harbored. “Igbo or Yoruba?” 
“Oh, I didn’t ask!” 
“I’m just teasing you.” 
“You’re impossible.”  
Trace touched one of the sculptures, where the smooth stone bled into the rough. 
“I want my corned beef. You said it was my day. Didn’t you say it was a day just for me?”  
He pressed RETURN on his keyboard to see if his computer was still on. 
“Yes. You can have as many days as you want,” Trace lied. 
“No. I can’t. Once I step foot in that nursing home, that’s it. It’s all about what they want, not what you want. They say it’s all about your schedule, but it’s really all about their schedule.” 
Ade thought he would be able to stave off the nursing home for another ten years, when he would be eighty, but his legs had deteriorated more rapidly than expected. His social worker had thought it would be too taxing on the home health aides if he stayed in his apartment. Yes, it would be a tragedy if they missed one of their TV judges having to help him bathe. He wanted so badly to say fuck off to his social worker but he had no husband, no savings, not even enough for an electric wheelchair, no pension, no private insurance. Perhaps his son had been right to disparage his life choices, starting with an exorbitant loan for art school it had taken him thirty years to pay back. 
“I have the whole trip to your nursing home mapped out on my app,” Trace said, showing him the face of his phone. “It takes one hour and forty-eight minutes on the N. Shorter if I switch to the Q mid-trip.” 
“I don’t expect you to visit me at the nursing home.” Ade had been disappointed that nothing closer had been available, that he would be jettisoned to a far edge of Brooklyn he had never even visited. 
“Or it will take me forty-five minutes if I hire a car.” 
“Too expensive.” 
“Don’t be silly. I’ll visit.” 
“Remember when that art show about queer desire was at the Brooklyn Museum? We kept saying we’d go and we never did?” 
“That was to see some exhibit. This is to see you.” 
Ade let him have his fantasy. He knew this was the end. Trace might visit, but to do what? Stare at the ocean? Crack wise about the nurses? Watch CNN on a giant screen TV like they were grounded at the airport? Make dreamcatchers in the friggin’ arts and crafts room? 
Trace tempered his idea: “I know we might not see each other very often, but why do you have to be so—final? You’re impossible.” 
“It helps nothing to pretend otherwise.” 
Ade had grown up in a different generation, so he accepted that some relationships ended. He would mourn, of course, and miss Trace, but he could move on. He didn’t hold stock in this new world that promised the hope of endless connectivity. People fell apart. 
Ade picked out a couple of coupons and stashed them in his shirt pocket. “It’s a trick. They pile you into the nursing home as if it’s a lifeboat. But they don’t tell you the lifeboat is the one that’s sinking. It’s a deathboat.” 
Trace laughed. “Will you stop being so dramatic?” What he thought was: Please, never stop being so dramatic. “We can still talk about moving in together.” 
Ade looked at the monitor again, and wiggled the mouse. Sometimes the computer only pretended to be asleep. 
“That’s an insane thought, even for you.” Ade at one time had daydreamed about taking care of Trace, not the other way around. 
Trace ignored Ade’s attempt at humor or derision, he couldn’t tell which. “I have the room. I’m on the first floor.”  
“You take me in, but my own son does not?” He had not heard from his son since he told him he was set to go to a nursing home.  
“You hate Long Island!” 
“I hate disrespect even more.” 
“He loves you.” 
“What difference does that make?” Ade let his anger deflate as he glanced up and saw that Trace was trying, and trying very hard, not to cry. “Besides, I wouldn’t want to interrupt your sex life.” 
How simple, thought Trace, to be saved by a laugh. “Ha! I haven’t had sex in weeks.” 
“Tragic! Try six months.” Trace bristled at his calcuation, the unintended mirror held up to the one who decided to end things. Ade pressed on. “What about those spanking parties you’re so fond of?” 
“Stopped for now. And I’m thinking of calling a moratorium on all hook-ups. All sex. The last time I hooked up—younger guy, right? He walks in the door. No talk. No one can even say hello anymore. Just a lusty grunt: hey.”  
Ade rose and began slipping on his spring coat, one arm at a time, so Trace hurried on with his story as he helped him. “So we have sex. The sex is…sex. And we’re finishing up. I’m lying on my back. My eyes closed. He is straddling me and jacking me. I’m into it. I’m enjoying it. But I open my eyes and the guy is looking at the slideshow on my monitor. He’s jacking me like it’s a chore.” 
Ade chortled. “I’ve handled your manhood. It is a chore.” 
“Ha! Sorry it’s so laborious for you.” Trace faltered in his laughter, the misspoken present tense, remembering why they had stopped their fun. When Trace was mourning his grandmother’s death, sobbing randomly, Ade had halted mid-spank when Trace had blurted through tears plumper than his erection: Help me, he implored. Ade had asked him if he was okay. Embarrassed, Trace told him to forget it, fled, and never laid himself across his lap again. To his mind, Ade had betrayed the rules they had set up. There was always a beginning, a middle, and an end. Admonishment, a roasting, coddling. A solid and dependable plot. The true source of his tears was no business of Ade’s. 
Ade smiled. “What were the slideshow pictures of?” 
“That’s not the point—” Trace now regretted telling this story, realizing it had been spoken from the mouth of a friend but heard by a lover’s ears. “The arty ones my mother took at that beach in Rio.” 
Ade hummed. “All those men—so humpy in their skimpy trunks.” 
Humpy. It was one of Ade’s favorite words when describing the beauty of men.  
Funny how one word in the right mouth could send one into an apoplexy of desire, thought Trace. He had kept safe in his heart certain words or phrases from the men he had loved. Not only the words but how they had been said, the timbre, the context. Even Jeremy’s You’re impossible. He had woven them into his speech. Of course, no one knew their histories except him. No one knew he was calling them up like spirits when he spoke them. 
But he didn’t want to adopt Ade’s word. Not just yet. They had one day left together. 
“I know the point,” Ade said, not wanting Trace to think he had forgotten his story. “But that was one man out of how many…?” 
“Yes, okay, but there’s a general sense of no-talk, just-sex,” Trace bemoaned. “It just seemed like when I met guys at Phoenix there was more of a sense of a connection.” 
“So go back to Phoenix.” 
“That’s changed too. Everyone is looking at their phones now.” 
“You don’t have a sense of connection online?” 
“No, not really.” 
“Then meet for a bubble tea first.”  
Trace was pleased, and unsurprised, that Ade had remembered he liked bubble tea. He had only mentioned it once. 
“The only ones who want to meet first are the ones who want the option to reject you.” 
“Or the option to make a connection. You can’t have it both ways. Search for what you’re after somewhere else then. Start your own spanking party. Don’t wait on anyone else to host your desires. Are you listening to me?” 
“Always.” 
“No, you’re not. You’re as bad as my son.” 
Trace disapproved of the comparison but did not challenge it. “I just don’t want to let the cold, lonely streets of New York into my heart.” 
“I don’t know how to avoid that with strangers. Or with friends. Or family. The heart has its cracks where the wind gets through. It’s an ill-made door. We’re all cold.” 
“But I’m super-cold. I’m a ‘cold, fucking bitch,’ remember?” 
“Then you should say that up-front.” 
“Oh yes. A fine way to start a romance. ‘Hi, I’m cold as fuck.’” 
Abruptly, before Ade could respond, Trace shifted to a leaving-the-house checklist—subway pass? stove off? iron off? 
He did not want today to be anything but mundane. He would resist all epiphanies. He would learn nothing. He was determined that today not become a “memory,” but slip into the stream of their ongoing friendship. He wanted today to be nothing special, and, so, special. 
Ade checked to make sure his computer was off one last time. 
 
His door locked, Ade tackled the one flight of stairs to street level. Each step was a jumble of clankings and breathing as Ade maneuvered his forearm crutches. Trace loped a bit ahead of him. 
 The downstairs neighbor came home. She paused, adjusting her thick-rimmed glasses. “I’m going to miss you, Ade.” 
Ade did not answer her, unaware that the news of his departure had made the rounds. 
“If there is anything I can do. Collect your mail or—” 
“Thank you,” Trace answered, much more softly than she was shouting. She looked at him and smiled, before she disappeared into the darkness beneath the stairs. 
The kid from upstairs came home. He bounded up to the first step and then stopped short, seeing his way was blocked. He huffed.  
Trace refused to leave his post. He was not assisting Ade in any physical way. He was there to catch Ade if he stumbled, he supposed. Otherwise, he imagined his energy afforded Ade a force field of protection. 
Ade hated this attention. Everyone who wanted to help, even Trace, seemed only to be around minutes out of the day. Their concern was dwarfed by the hours he had to go it alone when there was not a meal to make or meds to swallow. He read mostly, books he bought for fifty cents or a dollar from the Greek woman who parked her cart under the N. Sometimes he fiddled around on-line, taking virtual tours of museums in countries he would never visit. Mostly things remained undone. Query letters to galleries remained unwritten. Clothes remained unfolded. Dishes unwashed. Relationships unmended. 
The kid backtracked into the vestibule and argued with his mother over the intercom. When he said “the old man,” Trace wanted to scream him into nothingness. 
Ade motioned for Trace to descend ahead of him with a little grumble and a flick of his let-handed crutch. “You’re cramping me. I need the whole stairs.” 
Franco, his neighbor from across the way, intruded next. The dark-haired man carried a cardboard tray laden with two tall coffees and a bag that smelled like toasted bagels. 
Trace smiled to himself. Ade had once called Franco humpy. 
“Ade, you’re getting out!” He flexed his lightly whiskered grin as if it were his bicep. 
“We’re going to see his favorite painting,” Trace replied, leaning against the wall, hands behind his back. 
Ade grimaced. It sounded silly when Trace put it like that. Sentimental. Childish. Ade thought of the trip as practical, something that needed to be done, like choosing a burial plot. He had hated that whole fuss. He simply needed a chunk of earth. What did he care about the prospect? If his son and his daughter-in-law and his grandchildren had a bench to sit on and a pretty view? 
“It’s my day. I get to do whatever I want and everyone has to do what I say,” Ade announced, glancing at Trace, as he steadied one foot on a step. 
“It’s your birthday?” Franco asked, befuddled. 
“The exact opposite.” 
Franco looked to Trace, who refused to explain or apologize or anything. 
“I’m sorry about your coffee. I know it’s getting cold while I am taking my sweet time.” 
Ade smiled at Franco. He loved to flirt with him, this man whose chest was meant to be, his bosomy pecs encased in a tight black T-shirt. In his younger days, and really not so long ago, Ade could have gone toe to toe with Franco. 
“It’s all right. I’ll let Marissa know we are out here,” Franco said, texting his girlfriend with his free hand. She almost immediately opened the door and stepped to the top of the stairs and perched there. 
“We’re having a picnic in the hallway?” she asked. 
“Yes, a picnic brunch,” Franco agreed, as he halved what he carried, removing his crumple-foiled bagel from the bag and his coffee from the tray and setting them down on the bottom step.  
“Ade, could you pass Marissa her bagel and coffee?” he asked, extending the tray. 
“You’re a smart, beautiful man, Franc-o daddy-O,” said Ade, in response to this sweetheart gesture. He freed his right hand from his crutch and extended it to the proffered tray. 
“Yes, he is,” Marissa agreed, though Ade could only hear, not see, her smile. “But hands off. He’s mine.” 
“But can you handle him, my dear?” 
“Oh, I can handle him. Don’t you worry about me, Ade.” 
Franco grinned, blushing.  
Franco, Marissa and Trace all watched Ade grasp the laden coffee tray. More than one of them worried about the imbalanced weight of it. But Ade’s hand did not tremble. In a slow gesture, his arm traced a wide arc, as if he were ushering someone into a secret garden beyond a wooden door, or a sparkling ballroom of swooning music, or a high-vaulted cave of torch-lit treasures. Each of them who watched Ade wanted so badly to step forward into the world he guarded. 
 
At Ditmars, one block up, they paused in front of Atomic Wings as Ade rested. Trace grew restless around so many people on their way to somewhere. 
“We can still hire a car.” 
“No, I’m fine. I just need a moment.” 
“At least let’s take a car to the elevator at Queensborough.” 
Ade lurched away toward the stairs. These stairs were wider than his apartment building’s, but the flow of passengers made them more crowded and the lanes tighter. 
Trace stood behind Ade and watched him ascend. Ade’s body rocked back and forth as he hobbled upward as if there was a jerky metronome within him that was counting out his rhythm. 
A girl, perhaps six, stopped beside him and pried his hand off of its grip and started to pull him up the stairs. 
Ade stopped and sighed, looking askance at her with merriment in his eyes. 
“Aren’t you the helpful one!” he said, pretending she was helping him. 
She smiled. Her mother goaded her to leave him alone. 
“No, no, it’s good to see someone who is so kind and helpful.” 
“She is kind and helpful,” the mother answered, but it sounded more like a directive than a compliment. 
“Where are you off to today?” Ade asked the girl. 
“The planetarium to look at stars.” 
“Ah, when I was a little boy we could actually see the stars in the sky.” 
“You could?” 
“Yes, Queens was not so bright.” 
“The live streams will be on today.” The planetarium syphoned images from an array of satellites. 
“Looking at stars gives you absolutely nothing, except perspective.” 
Her mother shot him a queer look, unsure if he was going to start down some strange path of discourse. She seemed ready to cover her daughter’s ears. 
“Where are you going?” the girl queried. 
“We are going to see my favorite painting one last time. Christina’s World.” 
“Is she dying?” she asked.  
“No, no. Christina lives forever.” 
 
Ade leaned his body against Trace when they were nestled in their seats on the gleaming subway car, clean and empty in the sweep of sun. 
“Did you think I would spill the coffee?” 
“Actually, I was pretty confident you would not.”  
With his left hand, Ade squeezed Trace’s right thigh and watched his fingers tense in their grip, pinching him softly like so much clay. He feared a death that immobilized him. He imagined his deathbed as one where, if he could not speak, he would at least have full range of his gestures—to point, to caress someone’s cheek, to look away. If he were immobilized, he could perform these same gestures in his mind, but that wouldn’t be the same. That would be a death before death. He was not ready to leave the land of gestures. 
Trace drifted in the feeling of Ade’s hand on his thigh as he watched him rest his crutches against the shiny metal railing and in a way they disappeared. Trace wondered if the N line was not simply his set of crutches, just of a different kind, but one he refused to use.  
“Are you going to apply to that position I emailed you about?” 
Trace shook his head. “It’s not for me.” 
“What about that newsletter I forwarded to you, about the speed-dating group at the Center? When will you find your daddy-O?” Ade teased. 
“Will you stop?” Trace hated that he struggled at both love and work. A success in one might have occluded a failure in the other, and fended off others’ attempts to help him. 
“No, I will not stop.” 
“You’re impossible. I wanted you to fix me up with your friend’s son, there. The one who just moved back from Florida.” 
“He wasn’t for you. You need someone who is going to challenge you. Get you out of your head. Make you come alive again. Some man who can rock your world.” 
Trace was reminded that Ade truly cared for him because the truth, from his lips, never hurt.  
“Someone strong. Like Franco.” 
“Ugh, I do not go for muscle-heads.” 
“It’s just a metaphor—his muscular strength. The figurative precedes the literal. We sculpt ourselves and then wait for someone to breathe life into us, even if we have to do it ourselves. We make a promise of what might be. Franco always had his physique but only became strong recently, when he met Marissa.” 
“And who will I become?” 
“I’m not sure. Have you made a promise to yourself of what might be?” 
“No.” Trace paused, eager to reject Ade’s query. He had no clue of what might be. “So what did you promise to yourself?” 
Ade ignored his challenge, how close it skated to impertinence. “You need someone who will get you out of that damned apartment.” 
“You get me out of my damned apartment.” 
“Stop evading.” Ade fished for something in a pocket in the lining his coat. 
“What do you need?” 
Ade shook his head.  
“I forgot the coupons.” 
“Check your shirt pocket. You know, it’s my treat. It’s your day.” 
Ade found and fingered the coupons, ruffling them with his thumb. The train finally moved forward to its next stop. The short buildings of Astoria, shadows engraved into their facades, rolled past like silhouettes projected from a magic lantern on a wall. “Trace, I lost the only man I ever loved. No, that’s not true. I’ve loved other men. The only man I ever wanted to love. That’s who I lost. Because I didn’t pursue him. That was my problem. Too many men pursued me. I’m not boasting. I just never learned how to go after what I wanted. Who I wanted. I never cast myself as the hero.” The doors zipped open. A throng of passengers boarded, but their jostling presence did not dispel Trace and Ade’s intimacy.  
“Simon?” Trace instantly regretted saying his name aloud. 
“Yes, Simon. Like you, I was too cold. Closed off. I thought he would come to me, just fall into my lap. But he never did.” 
Trace looked elsewhere but the cascade of tears fell everywhere, down every happy face. He had wanted Jeremy, that relationship, and, when it was over, he wanted nothing else. He no longer understood how the world worked. 
“I was serious when I suggested you tell the man you want that you are cold, Trace.”  
Trace looked at Ade, trying to understand his bizarre advice. “Tell him you are cold from the start. How else will he know that you need warming up?” 
Trace looked back to Ade, to bear witness to his affection. 
A teenaged boy, clinging to the rail over his head with one hand, hovered and swayed above them like a rescue helicopter over a burning building.  
He surreptitiously snapped a picture of them, face to face. He had been able to post the photo to his Wall and tag them with one word, “love,” by the time the train descended into the tunnel under the East River. When Trace and Ade exited the 57th Street station, they had, unbeknownst to them, a bouquet of hearts bestowed upon them by seven strangers. 
 
Inside the modern-art museum, Trace swept right by the bank of wheelchairs. He knew Ade would refuse to be pushed around. Literally or figuratively. Trace laughed to himself. 
As Ade perched on one of the cushioned circular benches and watched, from across the hanger-wide, cloud-tall lobby, the ravenous crowd in the adjoining gift shop, all of the visitors preying on keepsakes, something by which to remember their day, before they left the museum for good, Trace snaked through the roped line. He gladly paid the price of admission. He did not press for the senior discount. He would pay triple if need be.  
They did not check their coats, though Trace pulled his scarf off of his neck and carried it bunched in his hand. They set off without a tri-fold map. Ade knew the museum like the back of his hand. Third floor—that was their objective. 
A few people paused and watched him cross the vast, shadowy floor. With his long, black coat, unbuttoned and swaying behind him, and his crutches flung out before him like bird legs in an even uneven gait, Ade appeared like a desperate, dying crow moving across the floor. Trace walked behind him distractedly, the world’s slowest bride. 
Some onlookers, at first, held their breath, reverentially, as if they were watching a performance artist. Some even consulted their one-sheets to check for the title of this piece. Fingers played on the abaci in their mind, trying to figure out its meaning—old age, the dashing man now withered, his younger, somber companion, the contrast in gaits, life, death. 
Trace convinced Ade to take an elevator. The escalators were too slender and delicate. 
Everyone was super-polite and Trace was very pleased. A rare feeling. The brightness of the third floor, with its tall windows and maze-like white walls, reminded him of the jonquils he had laid on his grandmother’s high-gloss mahogany coffin. At the last minute, at the flower shop, he had remembered—you give people their favorite flower, not your own. 
“It’s not here.” Ade stopped, his crutches planted. 
“What do you mean, it’s not here.” 
“This was her spot.” He nodded to the Rothko that now hung on the wall. 
“Might they have put it in storage? Loaned it out?” 
“I think it’s left the building once since 1948.” 
Trace had never seen Ade this baffled and perturbed. “Let me find out. Let me find out for you.” 
He left Ade and walked over to a guard. “Christina’s World?” 
“Fourth floor,” he said. 
In the meantime, Ade had waylaid a family to look at their brochure and came at him with the same news. 
“Fourth floor!” they sang together.  
One floor up, they were at first greeted by a wall on which Entering Christina’s World was printed in massive, chubby block letters above paragraphs of explanatory text. Ade closed his eyes, resting, as Trace read. The painting, a simple farm scene in Maine, had been considered old-fashioned at the time it was created. Indeed, at first glance, Andrew Wyeth’s painting seems like a simple work—a young woman sprawled on the wild, unkempt part of the grass in a worn pink dress, gazing up toward a graying house and barn pinned to the horizon. She seems paused in her movement toward what appears to be home, but is home a haven or a site of distress? All tones are muted and her face is turned away from the viewer, and so we do not know the emotions she might be feeling. Thus, they might be every emotion. Critics, for the most part, had dismissed the painting. The action paintings of Jackson Pollock, with their frenetic energy of flung paint and chaotic fever dreams, enraptured the post-WWII imagination. But some perhaps sensed that Christina’s World, too, was an action painting, for Wyeth had chosen as his subject his neighbor, who, suffering from an undiagnosed disorder that robbed her legs of mobility, preferred to drag herself along the ground outside of her home instead of using a wheelchair. It was if she herself were akin to Pollock’s dashes of paint, looping back and forth across a canvas of dried grass. This homespun, rural “action” would never be noted unless one took the time to trace it. Some action is slower but no less engaged or beautiful. 
Ade and Trace were directed by a linear arrowing of words down a corridor and around a corner to a dark, boxy room. Light along the far wall indicated where the painting must be. They moved with the crowd but were met with an obstructed view—a pale pinkish block (the color mimicked Christina’s dress, Ade noted) that looked like it could house a small European car had been suspended, about three feet off the ground, in front of the painting, whose top you could see if you peeped over the surface. Some visitors went up along the sides of the block but reported back that one could not see the painting. 
Trace guffawed, concerned that Ade’s wish had been ruined by the installation. “What kind of fuckery is this?”  
Ade almost cursed, ready to pivot away, but he stopped. He turned to Trace. “Help me sit.” 
“What’s wrong? What’s wrong?” 
“Nothing. Just—” He eased himself down to the floor. 
Trace cradled his crutches loosely in his arm and stepped back as Ade began dragging himself across the floor, under the box, toward the painting. 
A guard stepped up alongside Trace, who looked at her, ready to defend Ade, but she only smiled and said, “He’s the first one to figure it out.” 
Trace beamed as he watched Ade’s long legs disappear. Of course! How could one truly enter Christina’s world by standing? Was empathy at all possible on two good legs? How could you appreciate her struggle if you kept yourself outside of the space of the struggle? 
 
“I’ve never noticed that ladder before, leaning against the side of the house,” Trace said, once they emerged from the hollowed interior of the box, domed like an apse, having been directed by a guard stationed by the painting through a doorway to a room beyond. Only children, at first, had followed them on hands and knees to gaze at the painting. Before they had departed, adults had followed too. “She is ascending, right? The tone of her dress is the same as the sky above the horizon.” 
“Hmmm,” Ade murmured, pretending, not very well, that he had never noticed that. “Did you note the shadow on her back? It’s in the shape of a cross.” 
“Oh, yes—” 
“Finally,” Ade interrupted something Trace was about to say. 
“Finally what?” 
“I am her now,” Ade said simply as they walked past other paintings to the exit. 
Trace reached for Ade’s hand and clasped it, lightly, the fingers on the grip. 
“She was always my hero. I could seek her out and she would let me know that everything was going to be okay. That the world was always limited and limitless at the same time. Now I am her. Or someone like her. But literally, not figuratively. Climbing toward life, sloping up to death. What is death but the final clench of the earth? I hope that when I die, there are things to still figure out. That some mysteries will accompany me to the final one. That I can clench the earth and pull myself toward life.” 
Trace squeezed the back of his hand for he had thought the exact opposite until this very moment. “I’m so unclear about so many things.” 
Ade turned sharp. His voice was harsh and pointed, echoing. “But you’re perfectly clear about some things and yet you refuse to act. You know exactly what you need to do but you do not do it.” 
A visitor moved away from them in protest. Real life was encroaching on the art. 
“I don’t know what I need.” Trace tried to lower the volume of the conversation. 
Ade obliged, softened. “Needs are not mysteries. Don’t pretend they are. You know what you need. Your heart knows, our hearts know, ill-made or not.” 
Trace had let go of his hand by now and was adjusting his coat. He hated himself for ruining the magic, the afterglow, but he had to do it. He was a cold, fucking bitch. 
He folded the flattened ends of the scarf over each other across his breast, like a rude guest at a party who wanted to announce that the hosts should curtail their goodbye at the door because he was leaving. Can’t you see? I’m all buttoned up. Let me go. 
Trace didn’t like to think so, but a small part of him was heartened by the fact that Ade would no longer be a witness to his life. Ade would live out on Manhattan Beach, on the southern coast of Brooklyn. No one would bother him now. No one would scrutinize him. He could stay in his apartment for days, for weeks, if he wanted. He and the scarf could wait for winter.  
 
The corned beef sandwich lay in tatters on his plate. Ade had not so much as eaten it as disassembled it. 
“You didn’t care for it?” Trace had made sure to finish every bite of his $20 egg salad sandwich. 
“It’s not the same as I remember. Dry. The pickles are the same.” He munched and munched. “So if you are not going to look for a new job or a new love, why not go back to volunteering?” 
“I can’t even improve my own life and I’m going to improve someone else’s?” 
“You did mine.” 
Trace shrugged. “I volunteered because I didn’t know what else to do, not out of any sense of community.” He flicked a steak fry on his plate, turned it over like a log. 
“I won’t miss your apathy,” Ade said without any sort of jest in his voice. “What’s holding you back?” 
Trace dismissed the insult because he savored the question, sour as it was. 
“I don’t know.” He closed his eyes. “I just want the world to go away. And be still. I’m done expecting anything good to happen.” 
“That’s death. You don’t want that. You want to be in the middle of life.” 
“It’s hard.” 
“Fuck, yes. Life is hard. It would have been so easy to give up on my art but I never did. After all that humiliation, all that rejection, I could have given up. I could have pretended that I didn’t want to sculpt. But I did. I did want that,” he raged. “I don’t want you to visit me.” 
“What? Why? I think about you every day.” 
“You can’t improve my life. You said so yourself.” 
“I admire you. How much I would give to be your son. For real. Not just when we roleplay.” 
“You are my son.”  
Trace lifted his head, straightened his back.  
“Then stay with me. Let me take care of you.” 
No one said anything after that. It was enough for them to see the fantasy inscribed upon the air, and then fade. 
 
 
 
Outside in the early evening a bitter wind was smashing plates on the dark windows of all the buildings. 
“May I have your scarf, Trace?” 
“Of course. Cold?” 
“Yes,” Ade said. “I need warming up.” 
Trace smiled at his gesture. “Do you?” 
“Yes.” 
He pulled the scarf from around his neck and wrapped it around Ade’s. His hands smoothed down the wrinkles in the scarf. He reassured the scarf. You are going on a new adventure. You will be safe with this man. He knows how to love. “It looks better on you. Keep it.”  
Neither of them could think what else to do in this, their last trip to the city. Home did not seem like an option but rather the absence of option. 
Winter had returned.  
Ade pulled Trace close into an intimate huddle. Trace laid his head against his chest.  
“Listen to me,” Ade whispered in his ear. “If you do think of me every day, then every fucking time you think of me, do something. Go and seek difference. Go and seek peace. Go and seek pleasure. Go and seek your man. Your men. Be in the middle of life. If you’re rejected, you’re rejected. If you feel foolish, feel foolish. But seek those moments when you commune. Connect. Share your energy. Create. Create life!” 
Trace hugged him tighter. For the first time since his grandmother had died, Vermont seemed very far away. He sobbed, as if they were parting right then and there. They were parting right then and there. Yes, there would be a quick visit some other day, one last Greek take-out, one last rented Jason Statham blockbuster. There would be packing day and moving day. But Trace knew he might never travel out to the nursing home, not because he didn’t want to see Ade but because he feared he would never be able to bring him news of what he wanted to hear. 
“Thank you for giving me my day,” Ade said, his finger touching Trace’s cheek to wake him.  
“Ade, I want to live.” 
“You will.”