There she was, at 7:48 p.m., on the dot. Just like clockwork, every Wednesday evening for two months now. You could certainly count on Claire. She taught an 8:00 p.m. art class across the hall from Jesse’s exercise class, which supposedly started at 7:30, but the women who came to the exercise class were worse than a flock of sheep—and they’d all be angling to get in Jesse’s shorts until he settled them down. Nathan often barely had time to get them all checked in in time to make it across the hall for the art class with Claire.

Nathan didn’t know when he’d gotten in the habit to look up at 7:48 on the dot to catch a glimpse of Claire looking in the window of Jesse’s class before going on to her own. But she always was there, having bustled straight from her job as a real estate agent—and after the art class she’d usually go on to her evening stint in the hospital gift shop. Claire always seemed to be bouncing around from one thing to another. Nathan didn’t know where she got the energy from. In class once, when asked about being so energetic, she had laughed and said, “I’m afraid to stand still lest I discovered I died last year when I was twenty-eight.”

Nathan thought the woman was brilliant, as the line was guaranteed to get a laugh and she could pick and choose what part any given person was laughing about.

Well, one thing was sure, Nathan thought. As much as Claire bustled around, she sure didn’t need Jesse’s class. She appeared to be in great shape—for a woman of twenty-nine inside the body of a sixty-year old. Her striking resemblance to Susan Hayward, the dear-departed sultry movie actress, no doubt was cultivated by her, even though no one had told her that only sentimental and sensitive folks like Nathan watched Susan Hayward movies anymore. Not to mention that few in Claire’s targeted contemporary set even remembered who Susan Hayward was. The resemblance and connection to the movie screen was accentuated in Nathan’s connective memory when Claire’s fluffy red hair was framed in the window in the exercise room door.

A glimpse of Claire in that window always gave Nathan a little lift in emotions that he couldn’t quite figure out. It wasn’t what he was being groomed to be aroused by. Jesse was working on convincing Nathan that he preferred men, although Nathan hadn’t gone beyond his own right hand to prefer anything sexually yet, so the sensations Nathan got when he looked at Claire were a bit of a reversal on the program.

As for Jesse, he’d take anyone for a spin, female or male, who was under fifty and good looking and who he thought properly assessed the glory that was Jesse. “Any port in a storm” deserved the privilege of him, was Jesse’s mantra. Having picked Nathan out of a Broadway play dance line and making quick, if presumptuous assumptions, Jesse was close to selling the idea that the emotions of Nathan—young, cute, and naïve, not necessarily the sharpest knife in the drawer, but in a very nice, cuddly way, of course—were only lifted by other men. By Jesse, in particular, who hadn’t actually made any moves on Nathan—yet—but who had moved Nathan into his apartment. Here he let Nathan valet, cook, and wash for the future anticipation of Jesse using his magnificent beauty and precisely cut body to do some unspecified wonderful things with Nathan, which Jesse went to great odds to let Nathan know would be the ultimate blessing and experience of his life.

This living arrangement did have its up and downs. There were short periods when a young, giggly woman appeared in Jesse’s apartment for more than a night and took on some of the domestic chores Nathan normally performed. But as obviously awed the young women were that Jesse deigned to look their way when they first materialized in the life of the apartment, it wasn’t long until each became fried by the intensity of the sunlight that was known as Jesse and then it would be just the two of the young men again. On occasion, another young man, walking gingerly, would pop out of Jesse’s bedroom door in the morning. But said guy invariably always was gone—forever—after nothing more than a cup of coffee and a growl—or a whimper.

Maybe, Nathan thought, that little bump inside him when he saw Claire framed in the window of Jesse’s classroom door that made his throat constrict and, if he didn’t blush at thinking about it, gave rise to another little jolt between his belt buckle and his knees, stemmed from a little flash of jealousy. When Claire looked through that little window in the door at 7:48 p.m. on Wednesday evenings, she was looking past Nathan sitting at the reception desk and checking stragglers into Jesse’s class. Her eyes were glued on Jesse, looking oh-so godlike in his skimpy shorts and tight T-shirt, admiring himself and his blow-dried hair in the mirrors on three walls in the exercise classroom and in the eyes of the admiring women who he deigned to flirt with just enough less than they fawned over him so that everyone in the room knew who was the pretty one.

This particular Wednesday evening at 7:48 p.m. started off no differently from any of the seven that had preceded it in this semester of community night classes. Nathan sensed the mop of red, curly hair appear in the exercise room door window and looked up midstream of checking in Mrs. Lederstrum and listening to her praise for the eighth time how marvelously that Jesse hunk led the class. Seemingly motivated by the same awareness of Claire’s appearance in the window, Jesse puffed up his pecs and managed to gaze at himself and pose for mirrors on three different walls while patting Mrs. Jackson on the well-rounded rump. Rounding that out and showing that a hot flash is possible while melting, Claire looked into the room and past Nathan, and directly, worshipfully at Jesse.

At 7:49 and a half, without fail, Nathan was in the hallway between to the two classes, with Claire standing in the doorway to her class, greeting arriving students and, yet again, verifying that Nathan lived with Jesse and checking on this and that of the domestic likes and dislikes of that god.

It was only for a couple of minutes each night, but what Claire had managed to worm out of Nathan about Jesse’s private life just in the first half of the semester of classes had been quite impressive. Equally impressive was how she was able to do it without looking Nathan fully in the face but still with her eyes trained on the wall to the exercise class, now running at a high decibel rating, as if she could see the object of her desire with X-ray eyesight.

Not being remotely aware that his natural crush was on Claire rather than on the dangled promise of delights in the embrace of Jesse at some future date when enough grocery shopping and ironing had been done to satisfy what Jesse deserved in service, Nathan blindly only told Claire what would enhance the image of Jesse. Not that anything existed that would tarnish Jesse’s image, of course. He was the world’s perfect man. He could tell you that himself—and often did.

On this, the eighth night of the exercise and art classes, the persistent and clever grilling by Claire of Nathan about his housemate, Jesse, was confined to those two minutes between classes. However, somehow in a very private discussion at Nathan’s easel later in the art class, without Claire even looking at what Nathan was painting in response to a “paint the loveliest image you can think of assignment,” Clair had managed to move the extremely nice-looking but not fully brilliant young art student through an artful maze of Jesse topics. These moved from what darkness did to vibrant colors on canvas to the titillating “aha!” tidbit of knowledge that Jesse slept in the nude rather than worrying about what color of sleeping shorts to wear. In the process, Nathan had revealed that he also slept in the nude, but this somehow hadn’t registered on Claire’s interest scale.

Nathan was actually surprised that Claire was showing additional interest in Jesse on this eighth meeting night considering that even he had seen that Jesse had rebuffed Claire on the seventh evening.

On that evening, Jesse’s exercise class went longer than Clair’s art class went, and somehow Claire had managed to keep Nathan late so that when members of both classes had dispersed, it was just Claire and Nathan arriving in the hallway between the two classrooms at the same time as Jesse, still in shorts and T belabored by the well-cut muscles below, emerged from his classroom.

It became a natural opportunity for Nathan to be maneuvered to introduce Claire to Jesse and for Claire to manage to drop some reference to something she knew Jesse was interested in because she had wheedled the information out of Nathan several class nights previously.

She selected well, as that something had to do with the Olympic gymnastics trials Jesse had once been invited to. She knew he could be counted on now to boast on how close he came to making the team if it hadn’t been for the favoritism of a few coaches. Gymnasts were selected that these men had coached at lesser universities to the one Jesse had attended, excelling in everything from academics to athletics to having won the body beautiful contest at a college neighborhood bar after a homecoming football game.

Once she got Jesse going, she turned to Nathan during one of the golden boy’s pauses for breath in his monologue to ask, “Nathan, would you be good enough to take these art supplies to my car for me. It’s the white Mustang parked under the light at the far end of the lot.”

It took a few minutes for Nathan to jog out to the car and back. He returned only in time to hear the tail end of the conversation.

“I’m hardly dressed for the bar. And there aren’t any around here I’d be seen dead in,” Jesse was saying as Nathan entered the building.

“There’s always my place,” Claire said. “I don’t have to show up at the hospital gift shop this evening, and I have—”

“I rather think not,” Jesse had responded, looking down his aquiline nose at the deflated art teacher.

The conversation had ended pretty abruptly at that point, with Nathan, thinking at the back of his mind, without being aware why, that he wouldn’t have minded having that drink with Claire. She always made him laugh and feel a little warm inside. When Jesse drove Nathan home in Jesse’s Hummer H3 Alpha, Nathan mentioned how nice it would be to go for a drink with the art teacher, but all he got back was a tight-lipped reference to teachers in the night classes being able to see the résumés of the other teachers, including their date of birth.