Mating Read Online Free

given by some Canadian volunteers. He was physically stellar. He wasn’t Canadian, he was British but had lived for long stretches in Canada and America and was very homogenized. His chestnut hair was long and in actual ringlets. It was a hot night. CUSO is very hairshirt, so naturally the air-conditioning was unplugged and we were all outside under the thorn trees fanning ourselveswith scraps of cardboard. Canadians thought it was funny that Reagan was likely to be elected president. We stopped playing Jimmy Cliff records and started a desultory game of proposing the people Reagan was no doubt going to name to his cabinet, all Hollywood stars, naturally. It was puerile. I didn’t distinguish myself. John Wayne was going to be Secretary of Defense and Boris Karloff was going to be White House Science Adviser. I had to explain when I said Lloyd Bridges for Secretary of the Navy. Apparently I was the only one present low-level enough to have spent time watching the stupid television series in which Lloyd Bridges went around underwater. Giles was so thick he proposed Jean Gabin for Director of the FBI. The consensus being that nominees had to be American citizens, Gabin was rejected. Another cinéphile then counterproposed Basil Rathbone, in honor of his long experience as Sherlock Holmes. Giles insisted that Basil Rathbone was British. We were unanimous against him. Basil Rathbone had been naturalized. It was typical that nothing would move Giles on this point. His obstinacy brought the game to an end, but in an unconscious tribute to his physical beauty, we all immediately forgave him. He was a beauty. He was self-consciously leonine. He was wearing a sheer batiste shirt that let his golden chest hair show interestingly through. The kneesocks he wore with his safari shorts were doubled down just where his blocky calves were thickest, for emphasis. He let me admire the camera he had with him at all times. Later in our relationship when I asked him how old he was his reply was
Under forty.
He was what he was. His beauty made him unusually goodnatured. You could revile him and be sure he wouldn’t mind for long because when all was said and done he was still going to be the beautiful six foot plus guy you or somebody else wanted. This was not vanity. It was reality.
    He was a professional photographer. The last I heard, he was unknown, although I still think he was very very good. He was someone totally permeated by his vocation. He related to the world compositionally. I was already inclined against the visual arts as a hunting ground for mates, but Giles clinched it. Two women I knew married to painters were supremely unhappy in an identical way. Men whose raison d’être is to wring images out of everything around them range from mute to gaga when they stop doing art, such as at breakfast, lunch, dinner, and bedtime. Giles’s stance was to be always alert to the parade of images that constituted the world, because one of them might be classic, like the Frenchman weeping when the German army marched into Paris. The trick was to never stop taking pictures, which is what he did. He wasworking on several contracts simultaneously. One was for documentation for the UN, one was for the firm in South Africa that supplied Botswana’s picture postcards, and one was for an unbelievably crude men’s magazine put out in Malta. And then he was always adding to his personal portfolio, which I promised to someday review for possible classics.
    I intrigued him enough that he followed up to get my suggestions about picturesque spots near Gabs, mostly in the hills along the back road from Kanye to Moshupa. It was a little greener there. Goats kept it parklike in the small villages. He was grateful and started offering me tiny fees, which I refused, which seemed to overwhelm him somehow: I became sexual to him. Suddenly he wanted to turn our picnics into something a little different. I had been bringing chicken sandwiches and milk stout