Fellow Travelers

by Thomas Mallon

nearly a month since their first hours in his own bed on Capitol Hill, he and Fuller had yet to take a walk together or share a meal. Hawkins had once shown up, unannounced, at the room above the hardware store, bearing a quart of milk (a joke) and a candy bar. They had eaten the candy bar in bed, but that hardly ranked with going out to a restaurant or making supper together. Were he and Hawkins having an “affair”? Actually, Tim couldn’t see that the word, with its implications of brevity and furtiveness, did the situation justice. Devoid of any previous romantic experience, he had lived these three weeks as an eternity of happiness. This wasn’t, he told himself, even technically like Back Street, since Hawkins, thank God, had not turned out to be married. That possibility, the ne plus ultra of Tim’s imaginings about the worldly and perverse, had been lifted from his mind the first night he had walked into Fuller’s almost comically authentic bachelor apartment on the fifth floor of 2124 I. Reentering the pale brick building tonight, Tim decided to take the stairs instead of the elevator to number 5B, partly to experience a pleasant envy of the career girls and med students who got to live in such proximity to Hawkins—but mostly to kill a last minute of time, enough to put him past ten-thirty on his graduation wristwatch. “It’s open,” said Hawkins, above the clatter of kitchen cleanup.