As I walked around the city, I only grew more convinced of how the landscape had changed and continued to change. Everywhere there was scaffolding under buildings, there were construction sites, plots of land being cleared out, new buildings going up, buildings I had remembered once being there, now gone, leaving an empty space or with a new completely different building in its place.

It felt very wrong to believe what my sister said, that nothing new really happens in the city, that one restaurant closes and another one opens, that's all. It felt like everything had changed. People changed, city blocks changed, buildings changed. Not to mention, 9/11 happened -- though who could have ever foreseen this -- and they were saying that this changed everything. They said that it changed things that now people were kinder, gentler. People in New York were politer, they felt a common bond, they hung American flags from their windows -- like in small towns around America, Slews of storefronts I remembered from before were now replaced by Starbucks Coffee shops.

I counted three of them in the five block radius between the subway station and Adrian's house, where we would meet. The fourth was right next door to his building, where there once had been a mom and pop type diner that seemed to have been there since the 50's and where I remember we'd occasionally go for greasy french fries at 2 in the morning. I wasn't entirely sure if I wanted to see Adrian. It felt like penance. I went in for a coffee, I had some time to kill and their coffee tasted so good after my diet in Uzbekistan of bitter and acidic Nescafe. The coffee worked on me like a drug. When I drank it, I could even start to feel my head spin, my gestures get speedy, my eyes darting around me stopping momentarily on all of the city activity happening outside, like the dog lifting up a hind leg, a jogger breezing past, a cell phone on a table near me ringing loudly, a pair of eyes meeting mine -- they were Adrian's. He was being led by the leash of that strong dog that had stopped to relieve itself by a tree. I didn't remember him having a dog. This was new. But the dog looked old. Adrian looked up from the dog held out a finger to me and mouthed out "one minute," and pointed up.

I've been accused of breaking Adrian's heart, and it's likely that I actually did, because I felt guilty about it. We were dating for a few months when I had told him that I wanted to cool things down immediately after we'd taken a short vacation together to the coast. By the time we'd boarded the train to leave, I knew that I was probably in love with someone else, but I refused to admit it aloud. I would even call the other guy from pay phones in restaurants, on street corners, anywhere and any moment I could steal away from him, even if just to leave a message on his answering machine. I left Adrian shortly after, to explore the new prospects with the other guy, who turned out to be seriously considering becoming a monk. Not being a Catholic myself, and not knowing many Catholics, there was no way I could have been aware of the red flags. However, just having had this experience, of meeting this guy, I came to realize that there was something attractive to me about the monastic life and I could attribute to having had some influence on me to take an overseas posting in Tashkent and to for once confront being alone and on my own. These were things I told no one, about an indiscretion I told no one about, and feelings that I had no one to share with. Certainly not Adrian. And I felt that he must hate me or should hate me, must think that I'm a bad person for having left him, for no reason that he knew about.

A few moments later, Adrian returned, came into the shop from the street without the dog. He looked much the same as I had always remembered him, lean, with his hairline receding, and always with a bit of a tan, which I looked at when he embraced me and over his shoulder I saw his dark arm against my pale one. In the desert, I covered up and wore layers of sunblock, whereas he in the city would embrace the sun, weekending on the Long Island Sound at Fire Island, the beach where the well-off New York City gays relaxed on summer weekends, drank, drugged, danced, hooked up, had dinner parties, and I am told, sometimes made business deals. The few times I had been out there, I remembered enjoying the decadence, but not without tremendous feelings that I was enjoying a guilty pleasure and perplexed that grown men could live what was like a second adolescence. That was back then. I wondered how I would feel now, having lived among the Uzbeks with their conservative outlook on life, that I worried might be rubbing off on me. "Did you just get back from Fire Island?" I asked thinking that the answer would somewhat differentiate myself from Adrian and what kind of life I might have had, had I never left here.

"I stopped doing that," he said. "I decided to buy a summer home on the Sound, but somewhere quiet." I didn't expect that and was surprised to find myself a bit envious of my friends' acquisition of real estate, while I owned nothing, had nothing save a cabinet of foreign goods stowed away for rainy days in an apartment in Tashkent. "Congratulations," I said.

He could detect my muted tone, perhaps intention. I hoped not. "What's the matter?" he asked.

"Nothing," I said. "Just things change, I guess," I added inconsequentially. "I'm always getting used to things changing these days. After being away, I'm always thinking that I'm the one whose changed, not realizing that everything else is changing too."

"Yeah, things have changed, since you left to..." He paused. "Where is it again?" He reverted to this jackass tone that he had, acting as though it were so hard to pronounce, and the word, a question in itself, "Uzbekistan?" He pointed south along Eighth Avenue. "No more twin towers. And lots of things around here."

It was strange, Adrian repeated what I said, as though what I said was wrong, and then said pretty much the exact same thing, but with some nuance. I wondered if I was hypersensitive, but I felt that I detected a note of hostility in this, as I felt in almost all of our conversations, some kind of tension bordering on hostility. Perhaps it was just his latent hate for me. I thought, if he hated me, then I think I hate him back. These days I was finding myself hating just about everyone. Perhaps it would be best to cut the conversation short, make an excuse to move on, as though I had someplace to be, as though I had hundreds of errands to run before getting on my plane back to Tashkent. Truth was that I was killing time until then. We were silent for a moment, perhaps he was thinking about the twin towers, perhaps he was thinking that I was thinking about the same, whereas I was thinking about whether it was such a good idea for me to spend time with him or anyone here for that matter.

"Are you in any danger in Uzbekistan," he asked with some warmth returning to his voice, "isn't it close to Afghanistan?"

"I don't know," I said. "I don't feel unsafe. I feel as safe as I feel right now, right here." I could have gone into an intensive discussion about the geography of Afghanistan, about where the fighting was happening, which was mostly in the South, and that the Uzbekistan bordered the Western-friendly Northern stronghold and supported its Northern Alliance that battled the Taliban. Whereas September 10th was an ordinary day for most Americans, for us living in Uzbekistan, it was a day of alarm and tragedy since the Northern Alliance General, Ahmed Shah Massoud, was assasinated that day, and we wondered if something was going to change. But my very localized impression of those days, whereas common to us in Tashkent, would likely have seemed out of place or incomprehensible here. This was the time for me to keep silent.

"What's safe these days, after all who could have predicted this?" I told him about how frightening it must have been to be here and how I remembered that in Tashkent at that time I was wondering if I would have a home to return to in New York after the attacks, if one day it would be gone and then I'd just be stuck in Tashkent, for lack of anyplace else to go. I would probably just kill myself if that were the case. I remembered watching for days afterwards on CNN's panic inducing coverage of the potential of attacks on the US using crop dusters, that made me crazy. I remembered talking to friends in New York who said that maybe it was time to move out of New York, but where to go? We all loved this place so much and it was a part of me.

"So why leave," he asked.

"I don't know." Sometimes you leave something you love either because you love it too much or your fear of losing it outweighs your love, I explained. Or maybe because you need to see more just to confirm to yourself your love. Unlike a person, I made clear, unless my intentions were misunderstood, a city was something you could always return to. You were allowed to have an open relationship with a city since it doesn't go away. Though there was some time after 9-11 that I feared that it could.

As we walked down Eighth Avenue and talked, we found our path blocked by a dog that ran behind me, his leash catching on to my leg, so that he could sniff the rear end of another dog. Chelsea's men and their dogs. There were lots of them here.

"So when will you come back?"

"When I'm ready, I suppose." I said, while the dog's owner apologized to me. "Say, since when did you get a dog?"

"It's not mine, it's my boyfriend's."

"Aha, a boyfriend." I said with some interest. "Who is he?"

"Well, just someone I've been seeing for a while."

"Is it serious?"

"I don't know. Hard to tell around here." Then he looked at me, letting me step ahead of him slightly so as to better scrutinize me. "Is it OK to be gay there?"

"No," I said. "Actually, there are laws against it. It's called besalbasik. " I repeated the word because I liked how strange it sounded, through I'm sure it made no sense to him.

"That sucks. And you like this place?"

"Well, sex isn't everything," I said throwing out this unbelievable platitude. I had sort of accepted my situation there and accepted it in stride as the price of having other kinds of happiness and peace of mind. I didn't particularly like the hiding my sexuality part. But, I didn't feel that I had to do anything particular out of the ordinary to pass. On the other hand, I was doing the kinds of things that straight men did, like having sex with a woman. It just seemed to be very much a part of the expatriate lifestyle in Tashkent, especially when you saw these older expatriates, who had been in Tashkent for years. They had local girlfriends who they gave keys to their homes, or even had them move in. The men, usually middle age, sometimes older, had sacrificed their marriages, relationships with their children, for what you'd occasionally hear called "the best sex of their lives," if you got into barstool philosophizing with them. I'd heard these stories more than once, and being confident in my sexuality, my homosexuality, would figure that this living, breathing, drinking cautionary tale was wasted on me. But lo and behold, the same thing could have been happening to me, and it wasn't too late to nip it in the bud. I wondered, what kind of reason could I give Yulia for breaking up? I couldn't exactly say that it was because I was gay. That would be social suicide. Perhaps I could just tell her that I didn't love her, didn't see our relationship going anywhere. I didn't even really see us as friends. I worried that this could be messy. I thought about the KGB uncle she had mentioned a few times.

New York's sunny sky turned an ominous silver, a large cloud now hovered above lower Manhattan, and a breeze came off the Hudson. It looked like we would have one of those summer rains and we started to feel raindrops and soon, my shirt was wet and clinging like a loose second skin. "Let's go in," I said moving to the entrance of a random Eighth Avenue restaurant.

Adrian followed along and we took seats by the window. The place was air-conditioned and I felt a chill. Adrian excused himself to go to the bathroom, and I asked him if I could order him a drink; he said he wasn't drinking. A waiter quickly came to the table, where I sat alone and took my order. I ordered a shot of vodka which earned me a curious look -- this was city that generally drank cocktails.

The waiter brought the vodka over to the table quickly and I took a little sip, appreciating how much smoother the vodka was here than in Uzbekistan. Here it was smooth and not bitter. It quickly made my face feel warm, and seemed to slow down the speediness of the coffee. Adrian came back from the bathroom and watched incredulously as I sipped, then shot, the rest down.

"Impressive," he said. "Something you picked up there."

"I suppose," I said. He never saw me drink since I hadn't drunk much before I left New York. Though I would go out with friends to bars, I rarely touched my drinks and was always the sober one seeing to it that everyone else got home safely. I never suspected that I might be the one of all our friends who would be drinking alone.

"You've changed a bit, I've noticed," he said with a somewhat playful tone. I was wondering where he was going with this.

"Well, when in Rome," I said. "They drink a lot there. One of the many contradictions of the place. It's a Muslim country, but with lots of fun drinking...and fornicating."

"Fornicating, but just not for the gays," he added.

"Well, there are laws against it. But that doesn't mean it doesn't happen at all." I was starting to feel giddy. "You make laws to regulate things that get too out of control."

"So you're saying that there are a lot of gays there swinging off the chandeliers?"

"I'm saying that there are some."

"Are you among them?" He asked coyly. "Among the practicing?"

"Well, it's complicated," I said.

"Is there someone special?" I knew that it would inevitably come to this. He'd already been talking to Jonathan, and there was no way that Jonathan hadn't told him. But I would pretend that I didn't know that he already know this.

"Well, there is someone special," I said, and continued to deliberately keep my language gender neutral. "I mean, this person is not-so-special, but yes, I happen to be seeing someone."

"Would that not-so-special someone happen to be female?"

I feigned complete surprise, "and where would you have heard such a nasty rumor about me?"

"So it's true! I thought that Jonathan was just fucking with my head." He paused to take a sip of his water. "You know, I always suspected that you might be straight! I was never sure about you." He was all excited and chatty. I wanted to hold back my laughter, but that was hard as the vodka had begun to fully take effect. "I knew you were straight."

My cell phone rang. I picked up amidst the laughter. It was Henrietta. "What's up? What are you doing?"

"Drinking."

"As usual."

"With an ex-," I said nodding to Adrian, as though I was offerring a compliment. "But he thinks I'm straight."

"Put him on the phone." I handed the phone to Adrian. I could hear her voice slightly, something to the effect of "he's about as straight as ....and I missed the end of the sentence as it set Adrian laughing. "Don't be fooled by that ho that he's hanging out with. Ask him if he's dumped her yet?"

"Have you dumped her yet?" Adrian asked.

I took the phone back from him, "I will. What are you doing?"

"Ali's driving me crazy," she said. "I should get off. When do you get back?"

"Soon."

"I gotta go!"

"Who is that?" Adrian asked.

Labels: Adrian

  ¶ 11:05 AM