The Bard in Retail

And he wrote about his own sexuality.

In the store there was a man more beautiful than his wife.

The man flirted with me, then showed a wallet, inside was a picture with children.

In all the years quarreling with his parents over his career and even his sexuality, Reece never confirmed that he was gay. For many years he had girlfriends, one with whom he almost moved to Paris.

"I had a hard time integrating that into my life," he says.

A year ago, just after the poem was published in the New Yorker and just after the death of a close friend who had for years encouraged his writing, Reece fell in love with a man he met through mutual friends.

The fact of that relationship signals to him he has finally found a version of himself that he likes.

Writing the book was, if not an act of self-definition, then a record of his growing self-awareness. It has helped him understand something that was unknowable before.

"I needed all that stuff. I needed that mother. I needed that job. I needed all those girlfriends. I needed the breakdown.

"It made me the writer I turned out to be," he says.

It has not mended the rift with his family. He often uses the phrase "losing my family," as if they were all dead.

They are not. They live in Connecticut. He has letters from them almost weekly. They are not congratulatory.

He doesn't answer them.

Repeated efforts over the past several days to reach Reece's parents by telephone were unsuccessful. Although he is not aware of all the details of Spencer Reece's estrangement from his parents, George Reece, his uncle, says Reece's father was "real disappointed in Spencer that he wasn't using all his education."

"I think he's using it now," George Reece says. "He seems to be coming into his own."

Spencer's younger brother, who was adopted when Reece was 7, showed up at a reading in New York this spring. The brother's appearance seemed almost like an answer to a beseeching poem called "To My Brother," which ends with the line, "another year passes still no word from you."

But the reunion "didn't go so well," Reece said.

Too much damage to be undone so quickly perhaps. But Reece offered his brother his address and phone number.

Two months have passed, he said. "I haven't heard anything."

Reece has a dog again.

Butch, a chocolate Lab, belongs to his partner, Paul. Butch has a number of phobias, of new things and of noises, the result of being confined to a box when he was a puppy. He's still learning to connect sounds with what makes them.

On a recent Sunday morning, Reece took Butch for a long walk along Juno Beach, letting the dog off the leash to race up and down the strand.

You might say "The Clerk's Tale" has unleashed Reece in a way as well.

He will spend a couple of weeks in Vermont at the writers conference. Coincidentally, the Brooks Brothers is closing in July for renovations. If ever there were a time to make a break, leave behind the hashing and sorting and stacking of the retail life, this would seem to be it.

He's not likely to quit his day job. He'd like to find a way to cut back his hours to allow more time for writing. But the job grounds him. It's not a publicity gimmick. It got him through, and he knows so many, like his cousin and Sylvia Plath, who didn't.

"I like that I endured," he says, putting Butch back on the leash. "That's the message.''