My trust grows, even as I keep a low profile

The magazine where I work recently moved to new offices. We now occupy one enormous open space where we all are in plain view of each other. We know when someone is engaged in a troubling or pleasant phone call simply by the expression on their face. I see my colleagues' spouses and significant others when they visit and I often wonder if I, too, will be able to walk past their cubicles with a new friend of mine and have it known who he is in my life without it having to be said.

I have met someone who I thought I could love, but who has proven to be alternately elusive and available, and now, just friendly. With the few colleagues with whom I share any personal information, I always refer to him as a "person." I remain gender neutral not because I am not yet out of the closet (that door was opened the moment I got to college) but because I still feel the need to be discreet around the office.

The era of the "Man in the Gray Flannel Suit" in which a gay man has to hide his sexuality is long past, especially in my industry -- publishing -- but I still prefer to wear a gray suit rather than jeans and an open collar.

Most of my colleagues go along with my choice to keep a low profile. Because we are all friendly in the office, my colleagues are interested in the few personal details of my life that do come out. Following my cues, they also refer to the "person," asking if the "person" is being kind or dismissive.

Often most work colleagues occupy a status somewhere between acquaintances and friends -- "acquafriends" -- a former colleague called them. Since I spend most of my days with these people, I want them to know some things about my life but not all; they can be helpful and comforting when things don't go well in personal matters.

My colleagues know I'm gay, but I still prefer they not reference it -- unlike my friends and family members. The other day, though, after hearing me say aloud to myself that I wanted to book a suite at the Heartbreak Hotel, a young female editor came to my desk, ostensibly to borrow my electric pencil sharpener, but as the motor grinded, said, "Since you like him so much, why don't you just tell him?"

Even though she had heard the Heartbreak Hotel routine for weeks, it was the first time she mentioned his gender. I decided not to be coy. "I might do that," I replied.

"But, remember, sometimes, people like him just aren't available," she added, blowing on the sharpened red tip. And with that one trenchant remark, she provided me with a new phrase that comforts me during this period of uncertainty. Indeed, this person will likely never be available in the way I wish, and I need to accept that.

One of the ironies I wanted to be able to confide to her, but didn't, is that he is not yet out -- at work or elsewhere . He is European and works as a professor at a good university. Despite my consoling that he has nothing to worry about should his department chair, fellow instructors, or students find out he's gay, he insists the news could derail him from his tenure track.

When I suggested he come to my office after work one day to show him the view from our 32nd floor and meet my colleagues, he said, "But how would I be introduced?"

"As a friend of mine," I say, and his brow suddenly unfurrowed.

"And what would I say when they ask what I do and where I work?"

"You'd tell them what you do and where you work."

I know one of my appeals to him is that I make my living as a magazine editor and writer, for he teaches literature and knows the American literary canon as well as anyone I have ever met. On a Monday morning, when asked the standard question by colleagues, "What did you do over the weekend," I was able to say that I spent a cinematically evocative Saturday leading my new friend (a/k/a, the "person") on a literary walking tour of Greenwich Village. I paid particular attention to the residences and locales of gay writers and artists -- Hart Crane, Willa Cather, Walt Whitman, Tennessee Williams, Howard Moss -- hoping that their collective creative spirits might channel him to pay romantic attention to me.

But I probably won't be leading him to the walls of windows in my new building. We could have taken in the distant views to the campus where he works, as I reveled all the while in the image of my coworkers looking over their low cubicle walls, knowing his status in my life.

I've discovered that one salve available to me now for getting over loving someone who doesn't love me back is not to retreat to a room at the Heartbreak Hotel or some such metaphorical state of mind, but rather to the cubicles in the office, filled every workday with my colleagues. I may not always find fulfillment every day in my job, but I do in the company of my colleagues.

These are people I may not see outside the office or exchange gifts with at holidays, but I have come to trust that they recognize some important truths of my life, even if I don't tell them everything.