Chapter 2 Summary

The narrator describes how, while on Christmas vacation during his last year of boarding school, he spent more and more time hanging out at a bookstore run by a masculine Southern gay man named Tex and his more effeminate assistant, Morris. The relationship between Tex and Morris, as the narrator portrays it, is occasionally tense, with Tex having to remind the occasionally flamboyant Morris that he runs a respectable business. The narrator, meanwhile, watches them both and wonders whether he is destined to be the sort of homosexual they are.

At one point, Tex complains to the narrator about his financial situation, referring to himself as the narrator's "mother." He reveals that he is involved with a married man whose wife is aware of the relationship, and exploits Tex's need for secrecy in order to get money from him. Further conversation between Tex...