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which to set it. Then I stood back for I don’t know how

long, trying to see what was there. You’d think that a wall without art would look merely blank, but what you get instead is a checkerboard of lighter shapes against a darker background—the part of the wall you haven’t seen rising up from what you’ve always seen. Look long enough, and the

lighter sections seem to acquire a dimension; you can imagine crawling through them to somewhere else.

Thinking about her as much as I’ve been doing, I

shouldn’t be surprised that she should invade my dreams.

Just last night, she was jogging around the Central Park

Reservoir. I suddenly remembered that I had something

to tell her, a phone message of some kind, and I started to run after her. This being a dream, I wasn’t my usual short-winded self, but she still outpaced me with no trouble, so I decided to wait until she circled back around. At once, she changed direction, and no matter where I stationed myself, she was always on the far side of the reservoir, gliding away, and whatever I was planning to tell her was already seeping out of me in pearls of sweat.

I woke expecting the usual descent of melancholy but

found myself, on the contrary, seized with action. Wouldn’t it be grand to take the dog to the park? It’s just a couple of blocks, for Chrissakes, and you can’t find a better time than April, and Ptolly always gets such an atavistic bounce in his step when he sees a whole forest rising before him.

It’s a drier park than I’m used to. The drought, I guess,

has stopped the fountains, and the lake is as low as I’ve seen

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LOUIS BAYARD


it, but saints be praised, there are still rowboats, scarred with graffiti, trucking across the algal water. I once pre-ferred the stillness of the Conservatory Garden, but today I rather like the mob that gathers here of a Friday morning.

The mimes building their usual fruitless walls and the jog—

gers in their high-cut nylon shorts and the power walkers

in striped knee-high athletic socks, swinging their hips in perfect, ludicrous rhythm. A little boy in overalls pushing a Tonka truck straight into the nearest obstruction and a steel-drum band and a Mister Softee truck and a cat resting like a tsarina in a bicycle basket.

Ptolly slumbers by my ankle. Noon furrows over us and,

from the swirl of figures, one grabs my eye. A girl, sixteen maybe, on roller skates. She has a cut-off T-shirt that reads cool chick, and she’s spinning in contemplative circles to the music that’s being fed to her through her boom box,

which rests on her shoulder like a newborn calf. She smiles, mostly to herself, and then, with the same secret air, makes room for another figure. Willowy and purposeful and queerly languorous as she strolls toward me. The oversized

sunglasses are nowhere to be seen; the Secret Service, neither. She has nowhere else to be.

“I had the funniest dream about you,” I say as she takes

the patch of bench next to mine and curls her hand around

my arm.

“I know,” she says.





ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Jackie & Me is, without apology, a fictional work and an exercise in alternative history. My affection for Lem Billings compels me to add that he was never, to my knowledge, arrested for solicitation; this was merely a typical experience for many thousands of gay men of his generation. Any reader looking for a definitive nonfictional take on his life should consult David Pitts’s Jack and Lem.

My research was greatly aided by Abby Yochelson, Maureen

Shea, Mark Allen, and the mother-daughter team of Robin

Clarke and Alden O’Brien. I am grateful to David Walter,

whose Princeton Alumni Weekly article, “Best Friend,” first introduced me to Lem Billings, and to the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library for preserving Lem’s senior thesis on

Tintoretto.

Thanks to Dan Conaway, and thanks to my Algonquin

team, prominently Michael McKenzie and my ever-abiding

editor Betsy Gleick. And thanks to Don.