“I met your father the other day,” I said.

“Most people are impressed when they meet him,” Nevins said.

“He’s impressive,” I said.

“Hawk’s affection for him is sort of touching,” Nevins said. “Since, as you must know better than I, Hawk shows very little of anything, let alone affection.”

“You like him?” I said.

“He’s my father,” Nevins said. “I guess I love him. I’m not very comfortable with him.”

“Because?”

“Because he is from a different world. Machismo is the essence of his existence, and I am remote from that.”

“Is he disappointed in you?” I said.

Nevins looked startled.

“Why I… no… I don’t think he is.”

“I don’t think he is either,” I said.

“You talked about me?”

“Yes. He asked me if I thought you were queer.”

“And?”

“And I said I didn’t know. And he said he didn’t know either, but that it didn’t matter much one way or another. You were still his son.”

“I knew he wondered,” Nevins said. “Forty years old and unmarried.”

“I guess the time has come, I need to know,” I said.

“If I’m queer?”

“Yeah.”

“No,” Nevins said. “I’m not.”

“Might have saved you some grief if everyone knew that.”

“Might have,” Nevins said. “But I have always thought that it is entirely corrupt to judge people based on what they do with their genitals in private with a consenting adult.”

“I think that’s right,” I said. “Here’s an even worse question. Can you prove it?”

Nevins stopped with his cup half raised to his lips and stared at me a minute, then he put the cup down, and folded his hands and rested his chin on them and looked at me some more.

“Just how do we go about that?” he said. “Go down to the Pussy Cat Cinema, perhaps, see if I erect?”

“Maybe the testimony of satisfied females?” I said.

He nodded slowly, an odd half smile on his face.

“I don’t like this much better than you do, but everybody’s telling me nothing, and I need some kind of fact to wedge in with.”

“What is really, what, ironic, I guess, is that at least one member of the tenure committee knows perfectly well that I’m heterosexual.”

“Care to share the name?”

He didn’t say anything.

“Look,” I said. “It would have to be a female. How many are there on the tenure committee?”

“Four.”

“For crissake,” I said. “I’m a detective. You think given four names I can’t find out which one it was?”

“If I tell you, can you keep it to yourself?”

“I can keep it from anyone who doesn’t need to know it,” I said.

He still looked at me above his folded hands. The odd half smile faded. Finally he spoke with no expression at all.

“Lillian Temple,” he said.

“If that’s true,” I said, “Lillian Temple knowingly lied about you in the tenure meeting. She was the one who introduced the business about Prentice Lamont.”

Nevins nodded slowly, without taking his chin off his folded hands.

“Was this before she was Bass Maitland’s main squeeze?” I said.

“While,” Nevins said.

“Ah,” I said. “And you are too gentlemanly to kiss and tell.”

“That relationship is important to her. I don’t want to destroy it.”

“You’re getting lynched here,” I said, “and won’t say anything in your own defense because it would be dishonorable.”

Nevins shrugged.

“Honor requires difficulty,” Nevins said.

“Jesus Christ,” I said. “Your old man isn’t the only one for whom machismo is the essence of existence.”

Nevins widened his eyes at me as he sat there, and cocked his head slightly without lifting it.

“You think I’m motivated by considerations of machismo?”

“I hope so,” I said. “I hope you’re not crazy.”

An old fat black woman in white sneakers shuffled to our table, cleared the table debris, including the coffee cups we hadn’t finished, into the cart she was pushing, and shuffled on. Neither of us said anything. I wasn’t even sure she had seen us.

“Have you had other girlfriends,” I said. I wasn’t even investigating anymore. I was simply interested.

“Yes, and I’ve been reticent about them because they have been white.”

“Un huh.”

“And… I don’t know how to say this without sounding like a priggish jerk.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “You’re a professor.”

He smiled sort of automatically.

“Well, I am badly overeducated. I can only relate well to women who are also badly overeducated.”

“And most of those women are white.”

“Yes.”

We were quiet while the old fat black woman came back and wiped off our table with a damp cloth and moved on.

“I’d have thought interracial dating would not have caused problems in your circles.”

“I don’t know if it would have. I wasn’t brought up to believe that it wouldn’t. My mother was very careful about staying on our side of the line. I find it difficult to overcome my upbringing.”

“I’ve heard that could be hard,” I said. “So you kept your dating a private matter.”

“Yes.”

“And because you were single and forty it was assumed you were gay?”

“Single, forty, educated, bookish, unathletic – do you know I’ve never played a basketball game in my life?”

“A clear betrayal of your heritage,” I said.

“You know, the funny thing, I have no interest in sex with other men, but I am, in many ways, more at home in the gay community than the straight. I found the gay world readily accepting of a black man and a white woman. No one expected me to be Michael Jordan.”

“No one expects anyone to be Michael Jordan,” I said.

“You know what I mean.”

“Yes, I do. You have a large number of gay friends?”

“Yes. I’m more comfortable in the gay world than I am in the black world.”

I wasn’t sure that worlds divided themselves so neatly as Robinson suggested, but that wasn’t my issue. I nodded encouragingly.

“America expects black men to be macho,” he said.

Again, I wasn’t sure either of us was in a position to know what America expected, and, again, it wasn’t my issue. So I nodded some more.

“Of course,” and he smiled suddenly, “I am also relighting the family fight, you know, the refined mother and the father who trained fighters?”

That sounded a little closer to it and I liked him better for knowing it.

“Yes,” I said. “Being a straight man in a gay circumstance would be a nice way to do that, wouldn’t it.”

His eyes widened and he looked at me.

“Well,” he said, “you’re not…” He made a little oh-I-don’t-know hand wave.

I finished it for him.

“… as stupid as I look,” I said. “In fact I am. But I have a smart girlfriend.”

“I’m impressed,” Robinson said.

I went for the complete show-off.

“For a black man,” I said, “dating white women might be another way of dramatizing his ambivalence.”

“Your girlfriend must have had some therapy,” Robinson said.

“She’s a shrink,” I said.

“Oh,” Robinson said, “well, that’s not fair.”

“Of course not,” I said. “I don’t like to ask this, but may I speak to your current girlfriend?”

“Yes. Her name is Pamela Franklin. I’ll give you her address.”

He took a ballpoint pen and a small notebook from his inside pocket and wrote for a moment and tore the page out and handed it to me.

“Thank you. Do you know Amir Abdullah?”

“Yes.”

“Comment?”

“Amir is a fraud. He’s an intellectually dishonest, manipulative, exploitive charlatan.”

“Know anything bad about him?” I said.

Robinson started to protest, caught himself, looked at me a moment, and smiled without much humor.

“You’re joking.”

“Yes.”

“Perhaps you shouldn’t so much,” he said.

“Almost certainly,” I said. “Tell me more about Amir?”

“He has created himself in the image of a black revolutionary, without any vestige of a philosophical ground. I am not by nature a revolutionary or an activist, but I can respect people who genuinely are. Amir is not. He is a contrivance. He gets what he wants by accusing anyone who opposes him of being a racist or a homophobe.”