It was just after six in the morning, and the VFW was not yet open, so Derek jammed his hands into the pockets of his coat and walked over to the Eagle’s Club. He ordered scrambled eggs and sausage patties, and sat at the bar drinking thin coffee. The door to the banquet hall was locked with a chain. Yellowing clippings of high school sports highlights hung, curling at the corners on the wood-paneled wall, below photographs of long-dead Eagle’s officers. A klatch of four old men, farmers, were at the far end of the bar in overalls and canvas jackets, listening to a WSMN broadcast run down the previous day’s closing corn and soybean futures.

“For the love of Pete, Terry,” one of the men, snarling, said to the man behind the bar, “turn that garbage off.”

The old men sipped their coffee and relayed what they had learned of El Niño. They worried over what the new administration would do to their subsidies. They chuckled at the difficulties of their relations in getting an icehouse out onto the lake. Bud McNamara’s hut had damn near fell through, and Bud’s brother along with it. Joe Olsen Jr. had not taken his snowmobile out on the lake all season, and Joe Sr. thought he was being a bit of a worrywart. Rodney Svien – who years ago had left the seminary to marry Eloise Hinsdale, who died 11 months later with his child in her belly – thought no, no, no, the young Olsen was wise to be careful.

Terry brought Derek his food and asked about Derek’s father and uncles.

“How’s Paul, your uncle? Used to call him Paulie, spell it P-O-L-L-Y.” Terry laughed, and topped off Derek’s cup. “He hated that, Paul. He’s in the Dakotas now?”

“Yeah. Remarried. A history professor.”

“Yeah?”

They talked about the Vikings’ playoff follies and their chances for next season. Derek had not paid attention to the team in years, but offered that their secondary needed some work, and Terry nodded in assent, sucking a toothpick. When Derek asked for a to-go cup, explaining that he had to hit the road, Terry brought him an eight-ounce Styrofoam cup. Derek chuckled, “How about two of those?”

Terry slapped Derek on the back as he left, pleased with the tip, and told him to let his father know that he would be there Sunday.

* * *

What little snow that had fallen had not stuck, and the fields, which in another winter would have been windswept and white, were boggy, endless and enervating to look at. Untilled corn stalks popped up from the muck like cattails; foxes, gaunt and mottled from the deprivation of their winter’s hibernation, prowled the margins of the fields foraging. Derek had always enjoyed the Minnesota winter – the white horizon, the off-white sky, the occasional isolated, somehow incongruous farmhouse, the leafless trees and the bitter wind – but he found this browning wetness suffocating. The three-hour drive to the airport, east through the fields on I-90 and north through the suburbs on I-35, seemed to take much longer.

Adrian’s plane was late, so Derek sat for a while at the gate reading an abandoned newspaper. He went to Caribou Coffee to get Adrian a latté. Standing at the register, he was asking the pierced and pouty Hmong who had served his drinks about her tattoos when he felt a hand on his wallet, and whirled to see Adrian quickly retract his hand. Adrian smiled and, his arms held wide, his thin wrists extending past the cuffs of his fur-lined nylon jacket, motioned for a hug. Derek handed him the latté.

“You wouldn’t believe how terrible the coffee was on that flight. What is this? Caribou?”

“It’s local.”

Adrian handed Derek one of his carry-on bags and took a long look at the barrista. He shook his head disapprovingly – he often accused Derek of going after low-hanging fruit – and thanked Derek for picking him up.

“Yeah, no problem. I don’t think you’d enjoy taking a cab to my place.”

“The lady sitting next to me was so fat,” Adrian sighed, and then quickly looked over his shoulder. He lowered his voice slightly. “Her watch looked like fucking tourniquet. And, Jesus, she had the worst accent.”

* * *

The same storm front which had delayed Adrian’s flight had begun to settle over Minneapolis. A slow, persistent sleet had all but stopped traffic, and a meteorologist on WCCO announced that the crosstown was closed due to a pile-up. Ice began to brace the branches of the trees ringing Lake Nokomis. The early afternoon sun shone anemically through low-hanging clouds. Small stuccoed homes, the ivies creeping up their facades gray and desiccated, looked abandoned in the quiet, their furiously spewing chimneys doing little to dispel the impression. Homeowners shoveled slush and snow from their front walks, and a handful of sweat-suit clad joggers ran the footpaths, their pant legs soaked, large puffs of warm air emitting from their facemasks in harried rhythms.

“Is this your neighborhood? It’s really nice.” Adrian had his phone to his ear, and was checking his messages, cocking his eyebrows or frowning in response.

“No, we’re a couple hours south… kind of close to the Iowa border. I figured you’d want to see some of Minneapolis.”

He said that he was sorry, that he was checking his voicemail and that his mother – she had left a message explaining how Adrian was to get from the airport to their villa – sounded half-retarded. He was reaching into his coat, trying to find something.

“Maybe she’s drunk already. Jesus, mom. What were you saying?”

“I don’t live around here,” Derek said, leaning forward and squinting through the windshield. He reached down and adjusted the defrost.

“Where are we going? Check out these sunglasses I picked up.”

“They’re a little, uh… let me see those.” Derek took Adrian’s sunglasses and put them on, continuing to squint through the windshield. He snuck a look at himself in the rearview mirror.

“They’re a little eurotrash.”

“You love them,” Adrian said. “You’re jealous. Where are we going?”

“And, uh, with your furry jacket?” Derek said. “You kind of look like, uh, like an Italian touring Germany.”

They both laughed.

“Adore gli italiani. Where are we going?”

* * *

A bolt of quicksilver anxiety rumbled from his stomach and outward. The Walker was closed for renovation, its windows boarded up and plastered with posters trumpeting the vision of the architects involved. He had hoped to tour the museum with Adrian – saying nothing, as if it was his second home – and let its Warhols and Closes and Johns validate his Midwestern upbringing as, if not exactly on a par with Adrian’s beloved Manhattan, vital and cultured and not for lack of society. He now had no idea what to do with his friend. He had not planned for the contemporarization of his home state’s contribution to modern art.

Adrian stood at the marquee reading a description of the renovation over the top of his sunglasses, his hood up, the flint of his lighter flicking ineffectively in the wind. He threw the lighter to the ground, and tapped the marquee.

“Herzog and de Meuron? This will be a cool building. You got a lighter?”

“Just the one in the car,” Derek said. “Sorry.”

“It says here they did the Tate. What now?”

Derek led him through the sculpture garden, trudging atop the collecting ice, and into the atrium to see Frank Gehry’s glass fish. Adrian was impressed, and Derek mentioned that the University’s museum was designed by Gehry, that he had seen it once, glimmering in the summer sun.

“Jesus. Glimmering? Are you serious? I must be rubbing off on you.” Adrian asked another visitor for their book of matches, and lit another cigarette. “Actually, I don’t think I’ve spoken the word ‘glimmering’ aloud once in my entire life.”

Adrian asked what they were going to do next and – being asked, in response, what he would like to do – suggested they go to a fag bar.

“Fag bar?”

In their sophomore year at Columbia Adrian had been asked to reconsider his pursuit of a psychology concentration after he in the middle of a lecture, still drunk from the previous night, asked a tenured professor if the impulse to classify and subclassify was anywhere in the DSM. He had added “watch this,” scrawled in pencil, to the marginalia of Derek’s notebook just a few seconds before raising his hand. A year later, after switching his major to sociology, he got written up in the Times for receiving funding to pursue a study of sociologists. “I hope to show that they are, on balance, ridiculous people,” he told the Times. Derek was generally amused by Adrian’s caprice, his ability to complicate simple things; but, in this case, Derek’s Presbyterian decorum – that made other friends of theirs say he always seemed angry, or ashamed – rejected the use of the word “fag” as reckless or, at the very least, unnecessary.

“Yeah. That flight took it out of me. And that woman! Her voice… she was awful.”

“Fag, though? Come on.”

“Oh, didn’t you hear?” Adrian asked, exhaling a cloud of smoke. “We’re taking that word back.”

“We’re?” Derek looked at Adrian and snorted. He looked over his friend’s shoulder at a massive sculpture of a lipstick red cherry balancing on the cup of a steel grey spoon. “You’re gay like Al Jolson was black.”

Adrian laughed as he took a drag from his cigarette, and began to cough. He looked at Derek over the top of his sunglasses and, affecting a throaty lisp, whispered, “Don’t you judge me.”

* * *

By the time they left the bar the December sun had set and the storm had blown over. The sidewalk was icy and dusted by a few inches of snow. Derek brushed and scraped the windshield while Adrian, far drunker than Derek, chattered excitedly, on and on, about the attorney who had offered to fellate him in the bathroom, about how quickly his offer devolved into a whine after being refused.

“How fucking pathetic!” he said, rifling through the glove box and removing from it a pack of matches. “I mean, can you believe that shit? You’re begging to suck some stranger’s dick in some disgusting fucking toilet stall, and rejection stings?”

“You can’t smoke in here,” Derek said. He drove defensively, his hands at ten and two, south down I-35 past the glowing suburban nightscapes of Burnsville, and Northfield, and Owatonna which radiated, thrumming with presumed life – shopping centers and tract homes and ice rinks – off the edge of the interstate and into the horizon.

Adrian propped himself against the door. As his voice sloped off into a mumble, just before he explained that he was going to try to get some sleep, that he was tired from the flight, he asked, “When do I get to meet the honorable Representative from Minnesota?”

Derek was concentrating on the road, on the semis steaming along slowly in the next lane, on the nervewracking looseness of the steering column, the green prisonpressed signs announcing I-90 in 15, 7, 3 miles, the hyperspace created by the headlights screaming through the falling snow…

Adrian was snoring softly by the time he replied, “His calendar says he’ll be in town all weekend.”

* * *

Derek woke up late and, after a shower, shuffled downstairs. His mother and Adrian were sitting in the breakfast nook, chatting affably over BLT’s and coffee. The willow tree across the driveway was caked in ice and the weight of the night’s snowfall, its burdened branches pulling away from tree’s core like the part of a child’s hair in a parish portrait.

His mother poured him a cup. “Would you like a sandwich, sweetheart?”

“Umm…” Derek rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand. “Yeah, that’d be great. Thanks, mom.”

“Cynthia, Derek never told me you had such a great little breakfast nook.” Adrian held his head at a slight tilt, and he grinned at Derek.

“Why the… Why would I ever tell you about our breakfast nook?” Derek sat down next to his mother. “And you’ll be calling her Mrs. Andreason.”

Cynthia chuckled, and leaned over to kiss her son on the cheek. “Excuse me, love, I’ll make you that sandwich.”

“She just told me I could call her mom,” Adrian said. “I was just calling her Cynthia so as not to alarm you.”

She laughed again as she stood up and moved past Derek, and put her hand on Adrian’s shoulder as she walked to the kitchen.

“Alright,” Derek said, “knock it off.”

“What?” Adrian had the Star-Tribune spread out before him, and he had taken a pen to about a quarter of the crossword.

“You know what,” Derek said. “Let me see that.”

They worked on it together, Derek rubbing the sleep from his eyes, Adrian reciting stories about whatever each clue, down or across, reminded him of. When she came back with the sandwich, Derek’s mother stood watching the young men close in on solving the puzzle. She offered up “palooka” as a seven-letter word for “punching bag,” and, as they penned it in, suggested to Derek that he go say hello to his father.

“Where is he?” Derek asked.

“He’s in the den,” she said, “watching the game with Caleb.”

* * *

The Congressman, in sharply pressed khakis and an embroidered maroon and gold sweatshirt, sat forward in his high-backed leather chair and reached out to shake Adrian’s hand.

“You’re Adrian? Mike Andreason. A pleasure.”

The University of Minnesota had just scored a shorthanded goal on Michigan and, before he could say hello, Caleb McAllister, a Michigan alumnus and the Congressman’s campaign manager and long-time political advisor, began to curse.

“God damn it!”

The Congressman chuckled and stood up to hug his son. He held him at the shoulders, arms outstretched.

“How have you been?”

“Fine, Dad, thanks,” Derek said. “How was your flight?”

“Superior talent, Caleb,” said the Congressman. “Superior talent.”

Derek and Adrian joined Caleb on the couch.

“Yeah?” Caleb asked. “How’d your Gophers do in football this year?”

“I could’ve sworn this was hockey,” Mike said, smirking.

“How’d the squash team do?” Adrian asked, smiling. Derek nudged him with his elbow.

“What, you really love hockey all of a sudden?” The remote control in Caleb’s hand stabbed the air, gesturing towards the deer’s head mounted above the fireplace. “Like you love hunting?”

The Congressman smoothed out the pleats in his khakis as he rounded the coffee table. His hand on the buck’s neck, as if to assure it, he explained that Derek had shot the buck when he was sixteen, and that he was proud of it. He smiled at Derek, and Adrian, and looked at Caleb. “And you know very well that I’ve always supported our state’s sportsmen,” he said.

The Congressman got each of them a beer and sat back down. The game had just returned from commercial, and both teams were at full strength. A Michigan wing had just been checked into the Minnesota box. Caleb told Adrian to call him Mac, and asked what brought him to Minnesota.

Adrian, caught off guard, looked up from his phone.

“Oh, umm… well, I’m meeting my family for Christmas,” Adrian said, “and I thought I’d take a weekend and stop to see Derek.”

“Yeah?” Caleb asked, watching the screen. “Where are you meeting them?”

The phone in Derek’s pocket buzzed, announcing a new message

“We have a house in Guam where we generally spend Christmas and New Year’s.”

“Yeah?” Caleb bobbed his eyebrows and nodded appraisingly.
Derek opened his phone. A text message, from Adrian, read U hunt? What the fuck?

“Yeah…” Adrian said. “It’s nice to be able to get out of the city.”

“Yeah, I’ll bet.” Caleb said, returning his full attention to the game. “Damn it! That’s hooking!”

He sat forward and shot an ugly look at the Congressman. He sat back and began spinning a coaster between his thumb and forefinger, glowering.

The Congressman took a sip from his beer, and told Adrian that he was happy to finally be able to meet him, that he was grateful for how well Adrian’s family had taken care of Derek.

“I don’t get up to New York often enough,” he said, “and it’s comforting to know he’s being looked after.”

Adrian clinked his bottle against Derek’s. He said that his parents loved having Derek around, and that they were big supporters of the Congressman’s. Everybody in New York, everybody important anyway, he said, was thrilled about how he forced the debate and vote by attaching the domestic partnership rider to the appropriations bill. Adrian said that he knew that the Congressman had taken a hit for the move but, no doubt, he’d be taken care of in New York for a long time. Nothing to worry about.

“Yeah, and San Francisco, too, no doubt,” Caleb said, smirking at the television, shaking his head slightly.

“Well, thank you very much, Adrian,” the Congressman said, looking at Caleb. He turned to smile at Adrian. “And, again, many thanks to your parents. I know how supportive they’ve been of our work.”

“I mean, it just doesn’t make any sense to me,” Adrian said. “Why the hell would anybody care if somebody else gets health insurance?”

Caleb tossed the coaster on the coffee table, and looked at Adrian.

“Well… Of course, ultimately, it’s an economic issue,” said the Congressman. “Unfortunately there’s a pretty influential school of thought that says that spending more than the minimum on employees does not make much sense. They, the workers, will work it out amongst themselves, these people argue.

“But,” he said, pausing to take a sip of his beer, “I think, there’s also something of people feeling as if they need to protect what’s theirs, their lifestyle, by denying it to others.” He paused, and looked for a moment at and Adrian and Derek, weighing his words. “There’s a sense, I think, that certain people have, that allowing those in alternative arrangements the same entitlements of those in traditional arrangements, church-sanctioned marriages for example, dilutes the importance, the validity, of those traditional arrangements.”

“So a few fags get health insurance, all of a sudden your marriage doesn’t mean anything?” Adrian erupted, rolling his eyes and pointing at the air in front of him with his bottle. “Your kids? Your life together? Come on… I can’t stand it. It’s just stunted, ignorant thinking.”

“Well,” the Congressman chuckled, and smiled warmly at Adrian and Derek, and looked back to the television, “I think that this is what people are talking about when we hear about the ‘culture war.’ Anyway… that’s politics. Sometimes it can be fun.”

The remote in Caleb’s hand stabbed the air again, and he sputtered angrily about the Wolverines getting called on highsticking when that punk Halvorson had been hooking all afternoon. He said that he could not watch that trash anymore, stood up, and rounded the couch.

“Anybody need a drink? Mike?”

They all said yes, and settled in to watch the game, and Caleb came back from the kitchen with a tray of vodkas with tonic and lime, and just as Derek was clicking ‘send’ on a message to Adrian which read don’t say fag, fag, his mother came in and asked Adrian if she could take him out to the barn to show him her horses. He said he’d be delighted.

Derek watched as they stomped across the icecrusted yard, Adrian gesturing animatedly, the hood of his coat tailing in the wind. They were halfway to the barn, and Cynthia was pointing to where her beefheart tomatoes grow in the summer, in the railroad tie planter’s box next to her plum and lemon trees, and Adrian’s gaze followed her pointing hand and it seemed that he had just said something to make her laugh, when Caleb pressed mute, and said, “I think it’d be a good idea if your friend didn’t come to the fundraiser tomorrow morning.”

It took Derek – lost in watching the scene in the window, straining through the bright winter morning to see the figures moving through it – a breathe or two to realize that he had heard what he had, that there was no sound in the room save the expectation of his response. A droplet of condensation collected at the base of his glass and fell, landing on the knuckle of his large toe.

“What? You’re kidding. Dad?”

The Congressman placed his drink on a coaster on the coffee table, and sighed.

“I’m sorry, Derek, but I think Caleb might be right on this.”

They knew, Caleb and the Congressman, that Adrian’s parents were influential boosters, that they were frequent and generous donors to Andreason’s own campaign efforts; and they knew how ugly it seemed, how calculating, to forbid the presence of a friend at such a routine, insignificant fundraiser, a pancake breakfast in the basement community room of the local Methodist church. They knew that Derek was entitled to be angry, and disappointed – alright, alright, not disappointed, angry – and they knew that Derek was right that the whole town would be there, that they would notice his absence. They agreed that his request that they secure for Adrian a summer internship, a good one, in a committee chair’s office, if not the Congressman’s own, was a fair compromise. They would work on that, immediately, no question. He had nothing to worry about: Derek could count on them.
“You know I don’t like it either, son. It’s just that… with everything, with the press, and…”

Derek watched through the window as his friend and his mother walked back towards the house. Her wrist slipped through the crook of Adrian’s elbow, she laughed, her wide smile and almond eyes – which an editorial board, in endorsing her husband, had once described as the loveliest in Cottonwood County – directed first at Adrian and then through the window, into the house where the three men sat, silent.

“A good one,” Derek said, as the doorknob turned.

“So that’s what they’re talking about,” Adrian said, removing his jacket and shoes in the foyer, “people, when they talk about horses.”

* * *

That afternoon they drove to Mankato. At the megaplex in the mall they saw a movie, a formula-heavy romantic comedy starring Hugh Grant. Adrian hated it, but he loved Hugh Grant. He wondered if he was related, at all, to Carey. He said they had the same sort of star appeal.

They went to the Applebee’s in the mall’s parking lot for a couple pitchers of beer and a plate of appetizers, and they talked to the waitress about the movie, about how she should never see it, and together they convinced her to meet them, after her shift, at Mulligan’s.

When she showed up with a man at least fifteen years her senior, Derek let the four scotches that Adrian had purchased for him do the thinking, and he told her in a roundabout way that she was the sort of pathetic local trash he one day, god willing, leave behind. His wits compromised, he considered the parallel he drew between her place of employment and her taste in men devastating, insightful, eloquent, comic. Adrian – after sitting Derek down in a corner booth, buying the couple a beer and shot, and apologizing for getting his friend, generally so benign, so drunk – agreed that, yeah, were he as drunk as Derek, he probably wouldn’t have been able to think of something so clever.

Derek insisted upon driving home, and Adrian insisted that he stop first at Denny’s. They smoked the better part of a pack of cigarettes, and sobered up on coffee and onion rings. After asking their waitress for it, Adrian reached for the check.

“You ready to go?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Derek said, staring out the window at the lamppost next to his car. It was snowing again.

Adrian looked up from his wallet, and squinted at Derek.

“You alright?”

Derek tore his gaze from the light outside and looked across the restaurant to see a heavy-set trucker scrape the last bit of chili from his bowl. Derek took a deep breath, and arched his eyebrows, and exhaled slowly through pursed lips. He looked at Adrian and nodded.

“Yeah.”

* * *

This, of course, was in Derek’s youth, before he could list successes of his own, before he could forgive himself for lying to panhandlers while loose change jangled, unneeded, in his pockets; and it was, of course, well before he realized that it must be admitted that mistakes repeated over time are, at some point, no longer mistakes but, rather, traits.