I was talking with Henny after work one day, as the summer days grew milder and one could still stay outside in the daylight and she did not want to go directly home, after instructions from Ali that she was to come directly home from work, since he knew she was probably hanging out with me. Even her mother in law had pleaded with her over the phone, “please just stop spending so much time with the homosexual,” Henny told me, which kind of made me feel bad and I suppose it registered on my face, because at that point she quickly asked if we could change the subject and if the topic could be about anything except her home life.

What else was there to say? It was a quiet summer, I was slowly preparing myself for her leaving and for my life to get even quieter. The country was sleepy. The city was getting spruced up for the September first independence day celebrations and they were taking out some of the trolleybus lanes and expanding the streets. When you turned on CNN it was only talk about a possible war in Iraq. Neighboring Afghanistan and Uzbekistan’s small moment in the public eye had quickly become eclipsed by this.

And there was little in the local news. Nightclubs now closed after 12:00, except for the ones owned by the president’s daughters and the Che Guevara, which was protected by one of the big mob bosses. Billiards were now banned. The president’s older daughter had moved back to town since she now found herself on an Interpol list because she took her children back to Uzbekistan from her estranged husband in New Jersey without showing up to the custody hearing, and had since opened up a pop-music radio station, a fashion magazine, a nightclub, and a beauty salon, and probably many other things. And behind every story there were plenty of fantastic theories and rumours, which we’d talked all through so that there was little left of them to talk about. They were what they were, incomprehensible, immaterial, trivial.

“So tell me about you,” she said.

So I decided to tell her, to speak out loud about the thing that I had mulled over so many times in my head, this summer. I told her about Jason. I said that I thought that I might be in love with him. But I knew I could never have him. He wasn’t interested in me. And yet, he calls me all the time to spend time together. I even thought of telling him how I felt.

Henny said that I should do it. “Tell him how you feel,” she said, just like that. “What’s the worst that could happen?”

“Everything,” I said. “Everything will suddenly be awkward, since he probably doesn’t feel the same way at all. And he’ll probably stop calling me and that will be the end of it. I’ll never see him again.”

I decided I wouldn’t say anything.

Labels: Thinking Out Loud

  ¶ 7:50 AM 1 Comments

  So, I liked Jason, I'd grown to admit to myself. More than just like, perhaps a crush. Evan after listening patiently through his stories of hand-holding with his boxer friend, loaning money to him, carefully masking my feelings and an urge to tell him, why do you look there, when everything you really want is right here?

And I suffered through hearing about his heartaches and mistakes, sometimes living through them with him, like the time he'd picked up some rough and sexy guy off a construction lot near a swimming pool we had just left. The guy looked like the kind of guys that Uzbeks called a "horib," a hick, a bumpkin, and could barely string together an intelligible sentence in Russian. Not that Jason could notice this with his bad Russian. But as always, I served as the interpreter, the mediator, the fixer, brokering their meeting, on the street. Guys always liked to look at Jason, because he was big and tall, and Jason prompted me to approach the gawking shirtless young man, baring his muscled physique, and ask him to sit with us for a drink at one of the makeshift cafes on the street, at which there was little to talk about except prompt him to come home with us, to Jason's house.

I thought it was a bad idea, i whispered to English to Jason in front of the guy. "I think this guy is not safe," I said, thinking that perhaps he might be a bit crazy. But I could not deny his raw attractiveness. Regardless, we took him in a taxi to Jason's where I sat sentinel in the living room, watching the football game while they had sex in the bedroom, occasionally rapping on the door and reminding Jason that we were going to be late for the farewell party at the house of the U.S. Embassy's Deputy Chief of Mission because I needed to go home and change my clothes. At one point Jason walked out wrapped in the fitted sheet off his bed, hurrying to the bathroom and in horror, whispering to me that the guy had shit in his bed, and he had to strip the bed and shower himself off, furiously tossing the sheet into a washing machine in the kitchen on the way, and into a shower. The boy came out with a wild look in his eye after him demanding money.

I only tolerated this in the name of unrequited feelings, just to be near him and expect nothing more, watching him go through mistake after mistake that summer as the days grew shorter, the swimming pools began to close for the season, the sun gentler, and the desert streets of the city grew ever so slightly more populous as the residents of Tashkent returned from their summer holidays.  ¶ 5:03 AM 0 Comments

  Our Saturdays that summer, after sweating through the work week, were what we would call our “pool crawls” around the city. Too hot to be anywhere where we couldn’t take off some of our clothes, too bored to sit in the air conditioned comforts of our homes, or the hotel lounges and cafes where foreigners sat, we would spend our Saturdays driving around in his air-conditioned land rover, checking out different swimming pools around the city.

We would go to different hotels, sports centers, public pools, private pools, high end pools, low end pools, man made beaches by the filthy river that ran through the city, public fountains where people stripped down to their underwear and splashed about to relieve themselves from the oppressive heat, casting aside their Uzbek sense of propriety which kept them covered up, and frequently bathing in their underwear. And at once, I had seen more male flesh than I had in my entire experience in Tashkent.

While we’d speak in English admiring what we might see around us, without any fear that anyone would understand, Jason would tell me about the flirtation that he’d been carrying on with a professional boxer from Uzbekistan’s national boxing team, who had met at his gym and I would listen on enjoying vicariously his little adventure with a twinge of jealousy and some confusion.

Jason spoke some very broken Russian. And he said that he had found himself a nice boxer, who didn’t speak any English. I never quite understood what kept those relationships together, when two people didn’t speak the same language. Fantastic sex, I assumed. So I asked Jason, a bit indiscreetly about said fantastic sex and whether it made up for the fact that they couldn’t really communicate given the language barrier. But, much to my surprise, Jason told me, the flirtation was chaste – it had absolutely no sexual component to it, for the simple reason that the boxer was not gay. What fueled Jason’s pursuit was the mere possibility of sex, the hope that one day his boxer would break down and capitulate to his wishes and desires.

“So what do you do,” I asked.

“He lets me hold his hand while I drive the car,” Jason said. I suddenly wondered why I had been jealous all of those summer Saturdays. Jason was getting about as much action as I was in Tashkent. But, at the very least, he had something to fix his desires onto, which was better than me, in a perpetual state of dissatisfaction and boredom, and resigned to such a state.

Not only had he touched and held the boxer’s hand. He had been to his house, that is, his parents’ house, for dinner. He even slept over at their home, as the customary Uzbek hospitality generally requires not letting you out of the house even after being force-fed into something of a food coma, after the endless cups of tea and conversation prolonged to long after the conversation has been exhausted. He slept in the same room as the boxer. But only slept.

"Does he even know that you're gay?” I asked Jason. “Or that you're interested in him?"

Apparently he did, Jason said. Though I wondered how well Jason’s Russian language skills were capable of communicating that. Perhaps; the Russian word for gay, is the same as in English.

"And he's OK with that?" I asked and Jason nodded, though I couldn’t really believe him.

Homosexuality was not taken lightly here, and the Uzbeks were accommodating to a limit, and I think that this was the limit. But perhaps foreigners here were given a separate set of standards, in the same way that the rich here were, as they could, after all, buy their own rules and laws. And perhaps for his boxer friend, having a foreign friend was something like a prestige item, like a pair of designer jeans or an imported car. It certainly was something here to parade around. I think I would have hated to be in that position, the paraded foreign friend. But Jason seemed okay with it all, he didn’t seem to care that he longed for things he could probably never have.

"He has no problem with your holding his hand?" I asked him unconvinced.

"I told him that I hold hands with my friends when I drive my car."  ¶ 7:44 PM 0 Comments

  Living overseas, upon meeting other expatriates who I would become acquainted with, I would often find myself questioning whether or not the person was someone I would ordinarily befriend had we met back home, in the U.S.. Here, I would wonder whether a friendship emerged purely by circumstance: two people who happen to find themselves in a faraway place, where they had little in common with most of the locals – and a bond developed purely of this very low common denominator of shared nationality, some basic common cultural reference, the inevitable fact of being located here, where we might feel a desperation to connect amidst what sometimes could be an exceptional sense of isolation and loneliness.

I sometimes wondered if it was desperation of that kind that brought me to hanging out with Jason. Besides both being Americans, we were gay. We discovered after talking over brunch one day that he had spent a summer in New York when he was a graduate student, and would frequent the Boy Bar, a fixture of St. Mark’s Place in the 80’s that I barely had the guts to visit when I was 19, but did once and was nervous the whole time for being caught there, which was completely neurotic. We were both surviving in this place – like survival buddies, trying to make our way here, like all the other expatriates, but a little bit different. And I suppose we became like another one of those odd sets of mismatched friends you saw out here, drawn together by small commonalities, loneliness, common language, alcohol. With Jason, private thoughts I never spoke aloud, we could say to one another; it almost felt like we were the only ones we could tell it to, when we rode around in his car, walked in the streets, talking about things like about men we fancied, about sex that we missed back home, about desire. And then there are the things that gay men could only say to each other. Things that in no way, I could even tell Henrietta. I remembered a drunken conversation with Henrietta and a guy named Phil, who had left a few years earlier about the time I had first arrived in Uzbekistan. The topic was – the most outrageous sexual thing we had done. Henrietta said that she had once dated two men at the same time.

“You mean, you had sex with both of them at the same time – like a Henrietta sandwich,” I asked.

“No,” she said in horror, “I was seeing one guy, and seeing another guy behind his back.”

“Two-timing,” I said, to clarify. “Are you serious?” Phil and I looked at each other in mock horror. Phil, like all men, had two-timed, and there had been a time in New York in which I suppose I had two-timed, possibly three-timed, possibly more. I’d had a feeling that in this company with Henrietta and Phil I was going to come off as far more libertine than either of them, and I couldn’t even think of what was the most outrageous sexual thing that I had done. In New York, I had experimented with everything, well at least almost everything. Phil then shared that he had put his fist up a woman’s vagina. This floored me when I heard it, even sickened me somewhat, left both me and Henrietta speechless. He had outdone me. He said that the woman had already given birth to two children, I suppose, making the case that him putting a fist there wasn’t such a big deal. And, I noticed that he had small, delicate hands. Western men who lived in Uzbekistan had much more exciting sex lives than they possibly would have been able to have at home, as a rule; and for Western women, quite the opposite, as a rule. And for gay men, Jason and I were just figuring it out for ourselves – and that was pretty much what we had between us.

I suppose I’d been told numerous times that one never really understands what goes on between two people. It was the kind of wisdom passed on to me by my mother, at a time in her life when she was making peace with her own divorce and could speak about it somewhat rationally and it seemed to be one of those things that sounded true enough to be taken at face value; one shouldn’t judge people for their bad relationships or for pairings that one might have thought didn’t quite make sense. Still, clinging to mother’s wisdom prevented me from delving in too deeply into that puzzling question as to what it ever was that brought Henrietta together with her husband, how a strong, intelligent, attractive American woman could live in harmony with an Uzbek man raised within Uzbek traditions, “tied to his mother’s apron strings” as the Uzbek saying goes. He was of no extraordinary intelligence or achievement, or looks, and he occasionally made offensive jokes. Like the time we had all gone to the Korean restaurant and he made the joke about all the meat on the menu actually being dog meat. The righteous Americans cringed politely, saying nothing and Henrietta blushed and stared down into her menu as if she hadn’t heard anything. The dissolution of that relationship only seemed inevitable. Others bemused by the odd couple, spoke behind their back and I stayed silent. Perhaps I wasn’t being a good enough friend to Henrietta, the kind of true friend who can tell you that your breath stinks. I just knew that they would eventually split, that it was the natural order, the way things would resolve themselves, much in the same way that I would probably leave this place.

Labels: most outrageous sexual thing

  ¶ 8:46 PM 4 Comments

  I sat down beside him and looked back to see that Stas had disappeared. He was no longer sitting on the side, not in the water. Jason didn't turn his gaze away for a moment from the well-built guy, who didn't seem to notice him.

I lay down on the tiled stair behind Jason continuing to stare at the Russian guy, looking up at the glass ceiling above and closed my eyes.

It was sort of pathetic, I thought. Why bother with that, why waste the time, when that can only lead nowhere? But Jason seemed completely content, even though he was completely invisible to his unattainable object of desire. Our invisibility here was such a stark contrast with the Sheraton Hotel restaurant, where the overbearing attention and typical Uzbek hospitality was cloying. Neither was particularly comfortable. Both were the extremes of living in Uzbekistan.

I liked this place because it felt like life was going on in front of us. Little family dramas, crying children, scolding mothers, fathers teaching their sons to swim, boys and girls having youthful summer romances. It all seemed so innocent, perhaps much the way things were here during the Soviet times -- much in the way the babushkas who ran the place, had wanted to preserve those better days. Back in the Soviet times, these babushkas, with their senses of propriety, ran the show. I had been told that back then they would swab your body with a piece of cotton to determine if you were clean enough to enter the swimming pool. Probably back then, there wasn't any sediment at the bottom of the pool.

Jason and I probably struck the babushkas as unwanted, alien presences; they could probably detect something in our faces -- our cynicism, our less than innocent desires -- that gave them reason for a double take. Especially with Jason and his staring.

We were misfits in this environment. We were older than the younger generations, younger than the older generations. The people around our age, our generation, had left Tashkent, where there was no future for them. They were already in Russia or elsewhere in the world. Looking at this swath of humanity, this little oasis of Russian-ness in front of us, I thought of how it would probably not exist in a few more years. These people would leave too. Yulia would be gone, too, perhaps having married some foreigner, if not one who passed through town, like me, then perhaps one of the ones she made fun of, who used the services of her online dating business.

I heard a splash in the water beside me -- and opened my eyes. It was Jason jumping in the water. At least from where I was, it seemed very intentional the way he "accidentally" brushed against the guy he'd been watching, who still took no notice of him.

A part of me wondered why he went for that and not me.On the other hand, I thought it was fun to have a gay friend to hang out with. As the wing man for someone like this, clearly always on the make, perhaps I could troll for guys for myself, since I didn't feel like I could do that kind of thing on my own. He had the guts, the predatory instinct. I was too cautious, too shy, too much of a quiet observer.

But, I thought. I could be a useful sidekick for him. I had the language skills. I could translate for him. I could be pretty indispensable for him. We could make a good team.

Doug got out of the pool, dried himself off, and motioned his head towards the showers.

"Let's do this again next week," I suggested. I told him that I knew lots of other pools around here that I'd like to check out.

"Deal," he said. "This was fun."  ¶ 10:07 AM 1 Comments

  We drove along the wide boulevard from the hotel, past the Tata hotel, past city hall. There were no cars, no pedestrians on the sidewalks. We drove past the box-shaped art museum, turned right on a dirt side street that left a cloud of dust behind us, and slowed as we pulled up to the swimming pool building, where some young Russian children stood holding their towels. One loutish teenage boy rolled up his towel into a rat’s tail, which he whipped towards a young blonde girl in tight short shorts and a halter top, who let out a little squeal as a lash just missed her.

Jason parked his range rover on the side of the building, and activity seemed to stop as he turned off the ignition, children gawking at this rarely seen and monumental marvel of technology, keeping a respectful distance as Jason and I disembarked and walked into the building.

The pool had a particularly Soviet way of doing things. First you went to the cashier, where you bought your entry ticket, which was a small brown piece of paper of such unsubstantiability that it almost felt like it would zip out of my hand if touched by the slightest breeze, like the fan on the cashier’s desk, which she had greedily pointed only at her.

The cashier, as always, was a matronly Russian woman, with a head of heavily bleached hair piled precisely atop her head in the shape of something like a protective helmet that didn’t move despite the fan blowing. Her face, harsh as though drained of warmth or blood and had a stony cold expression, as though the only thing that could escape it were orders shouted at unruly children or an arbitrary and flat refusal to sell you a ticket, simply because she could, this being the only power in the world that she wielded.

She looked at Jason and me disapprovingly, with a look I imagined that rued the end of the cold war, and the better days Tashkent once saw that preceded it. But she sold us a ticket, which we brought to a desk not even two meters away, where another such Russian matron, sitting behind a fan, took our tickets, examined them and their fine print through her spectacles, and allowed us to pass through a turnstile, looking suspiciously up at us through her spectacles. She said that only the indoor pool was open today. It was a “sanitary” day for the outdoor pool, whatever that meant.

We carried on down a corridor with a soundproof window looking into the indoor pool, which looked mobbed and boisterous, full of splashing, and with children running around and mothers running after them, people jumping into the water and others climbing out. Everyone inside the greenhouse-like swimming pool looked Russian; there didn’t seem to be any Uzbeks. Uzbeks would swim in public fountains or in the shallow Anhor River. In there, it was like another country, or like a little Russian hothouse in Uzbekistan.

Down a hall, we walked into a locker room full of wooden lockers, attended by two more of these Russian matrons. Around them, boys, men, stripped down to their bathing suits, the women unmoved with that look on their faces like they'd seen it all before; much in contrast to Jason, who looked around him with some interest. I no longer worried about taking him here – which was sort of like slumming it in comparison to the Sheraton Hotel swimming pool – he seemed quite content.

"Lady," a twenty-something Russian boy limply called out at one of the attendants, "open my locker." And the woman came with a master key she produced from an apron pocket to open up the locker door. Stowing away your belongings here operated on something of an honor code, and I was slightly concerned about stashing away my passport and documents in lockers that could essentially be unlocked by anyone who wanted.

Jason and I changed next to each other. I turned my back to him, to the attendants, and quickly stripped down, slid up my bathing suit and resisted looking over at Jason, who took his time changing, folding his jeans neatly, and standing for a moment naked and looking down at his toned frame. I sat on the bench and stared at the floor. When I sensed that he finished, I looked up and called for the attendant in the same way the young man had. "Lady," I called, and she seemed to cringe at my accent, which was clearly American; she probably already could detect the American-ness by the bathing suit – I didn’t wear the skin tight Speedos worn by all men here, regardless of age, shape or size. Jason and I wore modest American swim trunks that betrayed little of the shape or contour of the bottom in the front or back.

We next walked to another small room with a line of shower stalls, where we showered next to a hunky guy who quickly doused himself with water before stealing off through the exit to the pool. One of the ladies shouted over at him for not showering long enough. He came back and stood under the water, smiling mischievously at us.

We finished showering and walked through the exit into the pool area, which sounded just as noisy as it had looked when we looked through the window in the hallway at the entrance. The air inside was thick and dense. On the side there was an elevation where Jason and I lay down our towels. He sat down and said he'd sit and watch for a bit, while I said I would go into the water and try to swim laps around the children floating around in inner tubes, teens in water fights, and young men and women doggy paddling in the water and flirting, their bodies close and barely visible under the greenish water.

The water was ice cold. I jumped in and tried to warm myself swimming some laps, but found myself freezing, trying to warm myself up by swimming faster. I swam deep under the water, near the floor where all was silent. The surface of the floor was covered with a film of some kind of sandy sediment. Someone had swum here earlier and drew a happy face in the sand with their finger.

After a few laps, I was exhausted. I climbed out shivering and on a nearby bench saw a familiar face looking at me. It took me a few minutes to recall the face -- Stas the monk. I hadn't recognized him in this context, so different from the contexts in which I'd seen him before, and it had been quite some time since I saw him last -- Valentine’s Day this year, or a year back bearing the gift of a portrait of Jesus. He hadn’t called; I had changed my phone number several times since. And he had long stopped turning up at my doorstep. He sat sheepishly with his arms huddled around his knees, in just a bathing suit and gold cross, about as naked as I would ever see him, I thought, since he was such a helplessly complicated case.

I said hello and he spoke to me in his abysmal English, a little standoffish. "You here with friend?" he asked, and I had no idea what meaning he attached to the term friend. For a grown man of my age, he was like a child with his linguistic skills.

"Yes," I answered. He had probably seen me come in earlier with Jason.

"Everything OK?" I asked shallowly preparing to take my leave, and he nodded and seemed awkward and uncomfortable, as though he had just been caught doing something wrong -- perhaps looking at men's bodies, just as Jason was probably doing at this moment on the other side of the pool, but shamelessly.

Perhaps this scene brought back memories of the beach in Poland when he had oral sex that one time – the incident that he had told me about over and over, which had marked his fall from grace, and which so tormented him. The pool had this summer romance feel about it, like a beach in a 1950’s movie.

"I'll see you around," I said and walked away to the other side where Jason sat. He was watching a well built young man playing with a pretty bikini clad girl, threatening to push her into the icy water.

"Who was that you were talking to," he asked, surprising me, as he barely seemed to notice that I approached.

"Ah, nobody, just a neighbor," I said, taking my towel and drying myself off.  ¶ 1:37 PM 1 Comments

  I tried to say something, but my mouth had gone completely dry.

"Come in," he said and I climbed up into the car, which was nice and cool in stark contrast with the chilla heat. Once inside, I felt the sweat drip from my face, down my back, and turning cold, giving me a shudder. In the mirror, I could see my flushed face. Jason looked over at me and laughed. "It's 45 degrees out there. What are you doing out on the street?"

"Trying to get a taxi." I croaked. He handed me a bottle of water.

"Not very successfully." He chuckled and started driving. I opened the water which I chugged, water spilling down the side of my face. He decelerated. "Where can I take you?"

I thought about it for a moment. "Any hotel. With a swimming pool."

"I was on my way to the Sheraton," he said. "Get some breakfast, read the newspaper, maybe take a dip. Go together?"

"Sure," I said, and he sped off, definitely breaking some speed limit, but that didn't really matter, I suppose, when you had red diplomatic license plates.

He had just asked me to go out with him, I thought. I had completely forgot how just moments earlier I was feeling lonely with no idea what to do with myself, fearing leaving the apartment, desperate for some human contact, feeling like the last person alive in this city.

But we were silent throughout the short ride. I looked out the window at the empty streets, past the central department store, with no signs of life in front of it. Not even the outdoor booksellers were set up. No one in front of the opera house -- its fountains in the plaza in front of it shut off. Not even a uniformed officer in front of the KGB headquarters.

I tried to steal a glance at Jason, whose eyes were focused on the road. I thought about the previous night, how we hadn't really been properly introduced; that probably Alyssa had wanted to fix us up.

We got to the hotel parking lot which had no cars, and got out of the car in silence. The heat was oppressive. Even in the few steps to the door of lobby, which seemed deserted quiet. No one had seen us enter. Not even the doorman, who sat on the sofa with other uniformed hotel staff enjoying a laugh, but quickly stiffening and stopping all laughter as they saw us enter, swiftly assuming their places, at the door, by the elevator, at the concierge desk, as we walked to the dining hall.

The dining hall seemed to anticipate our presence. Though the tables were all empty of people, a huge buffet with elegant trays piled on with food was laid out, fresh-faced waiters appeared from the corners. A chef, recognizable by a typical chef's hat lit up heaters under the serving trays. We walked over to take seats by the window, which looked out to an empty swimming pool, followed by what seemed to be an army of waiters, who buzzed aruond us, offerring us coffee, tea, removing the cloth napkins from our plates and handing them to us to put in our laps, offerring to push in our seats, then hovering above us as we sat opposite each other, for the first time looking at each other face to face, smiling, since all we wanted to do was to get food from the buffet tables. I quickly registered that he had lovely slightly tanned skin, grey eyes, and lots of gray in his dark hair before we quickly stood up.

Leaving behind the waiters, we went to the buffet, where I piled onto my plate fresh fruits, scrambled eggs, small broccoli rabe, spinach, challots, tomatoes, wedges of three different cheeses -- brie, havarti, cheddar . I took a second plate for rolls, muffins, little cakes, cookies. It wasn't until I saw his small portions of fried eggs and bacon with a side of several slices of pineapple, that I grew self conscious of how big my portions were. I didn't need to watch my weight, I was in great shape, had a nervous energy that seemed to burn off the calories and besides, it wasn't every day that I had such nice foods spread out in front of me. He was older, seemed to have that propensity towards getting fat, had to watch his diet.

We met back at the table and he cast a bemused glance at my plates full of food. We chatted a bit.

He'd lived overseas only for one year before this. He lived in Minsk, in Belarus on his previous assignment before being transferred to Tashkent. "Shitty countries," he referred to these posts. I wondered what had prompted him to leave the US. Had he left a bad job, a bad career path? Left a bad relationship. These were the things our families and friends back home assume about us to explain our exoduses. Why did they never think that perhaps we were following someone or something, a spirit of adventure, seeking our fortunes on the road, seeking knowledge, seeking something inside ourselves. They were never particularly creative with their explanations -- which were always about escape, perhaps reflecting more about their own entrapping situations. Often when I met expatriates here, they told me what drew them here. But Jason didn't. And I found my journalistic faculties escape me and some unfamiliar politeness take over. I justdidn't feel right about asking.

Instead, he told me about his law practice in DC. And before that, he had done graduate work in New York lived in the, East Village, remembered the Boy Bar on St. Marks. This bit of information would have probably placed him at least at 10 years my senior, since I remembered that place as already having been closed by the time I was a college student; it also answered any questions that might have remained, as to whether or not he was gay. But I hadn't such a question, though we had not explicitly spoken about it. Of course Alyssa had been trying to fix us up. Though I got a sense that he was likely after something younger, exotic, local, as part of his overseas adventure.

He had something of a wandering eye, which he cast on the tall, young waiter who came to refill our coffee. Jason beamed at him focussing hard on pouring the coffee, I thought it made him feel self-conscious, awkward. He was lovely, with swarthy skin, thick lips, olive colored, almond shaped eyes, and jet black hair; he looked up and smiled back. I wondered if Jason's newness here had him mistake the good service or the facination by young Uzbeks with foreigners to mean something more than just that. Or, perhaps he was just predatory. He could probably get away with it here. He was tall. He was good looking. He was foreign.

The waiter stepped away, standing behind the buffet tables. Jason would look back at him. His interest allayed any sense I might have had that there were any sparks between him and me. At best, I figured, we'd be like buddies. I needed a good buddy around here.I turned at looked at the waiter, then turned back to Jason. "He's really cute," I said, wondering if he sensed that I might have liked him, and hoping that he didn't.

"Yeah, he keeps looking over this way. I wonder what that's all about," he mused. The waiter had an innocent boyish look about him. That, of course, could be deceptive, though.And Jason clearly had less innocent things on his mind. The waiter then disappeared.

Jason quickly drank his coffee. He raised his mug indicating to the waiters standing in all corners of the hall, watching us, that he wanted a refill. From the kitchen, a young woman emerged with a coffeepot. She refilled our mugs and asked in stilted English if we were happy with our meal.

We talked about going swimming. "Should we swim here?" he asked.

"Why not?" I asked.

"Well, there's no one here. It's kind of boring. I kind of miss the summer in Minsk, where all the young guys would gather outside the city at this makeshift beach. There was always lots of interesting things to look at," he said somewhat lasciviously.

"Not likely you're going to have anything as exciting as that here in Tashkent. These hotel pools are too expensive for most local guys. It will only be expatriates. And have you seen our expatriate men?" I said. "They're a nice bunch, but not a whole lot to look at."

I offered to take him to one of the local swimming pools. The Mitrofanova pool was not far away. It wasn't the cleanest swimming pool, but had an interesting mix of local people. We agreed we'd go to Mitrofanova. He finished his coffee and raised his mug again. The young woman started walking back with the coffee pot, and Jason whispered with disappointment, "her again."  ¶ 10:22 PM 1 Comments