Keith stared at himself in the mirror. He felt horribly tired - the way he's usually felt first thing in the morning, of late - tired, groggy - yet the face that stared back at him looked fresh and alert, youthful and smooth. He squared his shoulders and scanned the reflection of his torso, which again belied his own self-reckoning. He admitted to himself that he looked damned good for his age. Yet he felt unready to face the day?

The night before, Friday, he'd spent with Chris, seeing the new movie "Dummy" together. The evening had been memorable solely for one of those only-in-New-York experiences when one of the stars of the movie, Ileanna Douglas, had appeared at the front of the theater with her dog to beg audiences to spread good word of mouth. She spoke of it as a labor of love, yet the movie was surprisingly forgettable, despite Adrian Brody's pitch-perfect performance as an appealing loser with a passion for ventriloquism.

Walking home along Broadway after Chris had driven off back to New Jersey, an approaching storm had been thrusting pieces of trash high into the air, where they'd circled. The heads of the towers around Columbus Circle had been starting to disappear into a luminous mist. The evening had seemed as if something was about to happen. But Keith had just gone home, feeling the weekend stretching in front of him with nobody to fill it now that he'd used up his one good friend.

Early Saturday afternoon, and Keith was in Chelsea. He stopped off at Starbucks to get a coffee which would hopefully power him through his workout. The cheerful black girl who served him told him he had bird droppings on his shoulder. Keith thought she was joking until he reached for his shoulder and withdrew his hand with his fingers covered in brown muck. It just seemed to crystalize everything.

His workout was rather wretched. For the first time in a year, he was beginning to fear that he was again losing the battle against fatigue. And the goodlooking, robust, self-confident men he saw all around him; men who, in a better frame of mind, he'd have admired without a trace of envy, just made him feel sorry for himself. So in a burst of activity that left him feeling more optimistic, he signed up for some personal training sessions starting the next day. And he soon found himself sitting in a window seat at brunch, right on Eigth Avenue, enjoying his New York Times, looking out on the rain dampened street fair outside, feeling better than he'd felt all weekend. The waiter, a tall, slim, tanned young man with piercing blue eyes, short- cropped hair and a glamorously unshaven face, was nicely attentive, even remembering to bring him decaf instead of regular coffee.

The rain came on more heavily in the afternoon, and he sat in a cafe in Chelsea, reading Sense and Sensibility, making notes for a screenplay idea, trying to make up for his almost complete lack of creative activity since moving to New York. A tall, athletic black man in a blue t-shirt took the seat at the other end of the long table at which he sat. Keith glanced at him just long enough to signal his interest, then returned to his book. There was an hour of intermittently losing focus on Jane Austen, wondering if the guy was interested in him or not. After all, he was just sitting there for so long, staring out at the rain. Maybe he was as aware of Keith as Keith was of him, but equally uncertain how to make contact. After a further twenty minutes, the man left, and walked off down Eighth Avenue without looking back. So Keith returned to the more predictable mating dance in Jane Austen.

By six o'clock, Keith was waiting outside the Clearview West, sheltering underneath the overhang from the remaining sprinkles, thinking that he'd done well to keep the real fog of black heaviness away all day. His movie date, a new friend D, arrived late, and they took their seats in a surprisingly large theater to watch "The Magdalene Sisters." The first ten minutes, set at an Irish wedding party in a pub in 1964, were mesmerising; a priest sang a folk song with a decidedly unpriestlike passion. Without any dialogue, the scene played out; a young woman is raped upstairs by one of the wedding guests. She tells her mother, whose face hardens. The mother tells the father, who tells the priest, and accusing eyes settle on the young woman, instead of the man who raped her. Next morning, the priest arrives early to take her off to the convent where she's imprisoned, along with scores of other "hores and temptresses".

After the movie finished, Keith and D trooped out silently, shoulder-to-shoulder with the other filmgoers, feeling a familiar awkwardness that always seemed to follow watching a movie with someone else. After two hours of escape into someone else's world, it seems strangely difficult to return to your own, he thought.

They ate an unexciting dinner at a modish, expensive burger joint, and found a cavernous, mostly empty cafe/antique store, where they sat at the back to be well away from a couple of straight guys in the front patio playing backgrammon and smoking cigars. Keith's fears that they'd sit through an hour of desultory conversation were unfounded. Both men discovered a common identification in feeling, from very differing circumstances, somewhat set apart from others. In Keith's case, it was the combination of growing up very tall, knowing he was gay, and his natural sensitivity. In D's case it was not only being gay, but also being a black kid in a conservative, Catholic German city. D talked at length about his parents' strained and strange relationship. Keith volunteered that his own family life had been unremarkable for its regularity, which prompted D to wish that he'd had such a normal upbringing. When Keith found himself explaining that even a "normal" upbringing can leave you fucked up - that his Dad's mocking judgement of his artistic reachings as effeminate had strangled his spirit as a kid - he knew that his face was helplessly taking on a look of sadness - a sadness which he didn't really feel. (He just had one of those faces).

Sunday was spent in even more splendid isolation. His cell phone didn't ring all day long, and the only moments of sociability were at the gym, where he had his first training session with the new trainer, and at Starbucks when a strapping counter girl asked him how tall he was. Still, he pushed through the day without succumbing to the yawning depression that he felt ready to pounce if he let his guard down. He read his New York Times cover-to-cover, spent hours at Starbucks doing some more work with Jane Austen, and went to see his third art movie of the weekend, "Swimming Pool." It proved to be three movies in one: the first half seemed a deft, poetic character study of an Anita Brooknerish middle-aged mystery author; then it seemed to unexpectedly degenerate into a madcap mix of Agatha Christie and extremely ripe E.M. Forster, until the ending which just as surprisingly made the whole thing come together into something else entirely.

The movie made him feel good. When he returned home, it was almost ten o'clock; time to get to bed in preparation for a busy work-week. He'd gotten through the weekend.