Buddies (17 page)

“Didn’t they ever … say
anything
about this?” Dennis Savage asked. “It seems a somewhat brusque way of dropping a lover.”

Ron was quiet. So were we; we could hear his breathing.

“Well,” he said finally. “It really isn’t the way things work out there.”

“You keep saying that,” I put in. “And there is something to it, I understand. But is this a story about a place or about people? My guess is every story is about people, even if the way they think and talk and act and, I don’t know, maybe even make love … even if all that typifies the place they’re in.”

Ron nodded, but he said nothing.

“I mean,” I went on, feeling crummy for pursuing Ron’s feelings—but hell, if I’m going to write this story I have to
know
it—“what next passed between Tom and Elton?”

After a bit, Ron said, “Well, you’re right. They did … refer to it once. At Elton’s. Tom had taken up visiting there every so often because it was so clear that it was over that he didn’t feel any more left out there than he would in the center of town. So he went over, and Elton and he were talking about Tom’s college plans. He was going to be the first person in his family to do more than high school, so that was big news. And Elton was asking him about his major and so on, and after a while it ran down, and Tom knew it was time to leave but he just kept sitting there. You know how that feels. And Elton sensed that somehow, and he looked at his brother for a real long time, looked right at him. And Tom looked back. He was thinking about their two years together, and knowing what they were, and not asking for more, not even once more … just telling Elton how much … how important it was. How happy he had been. And Elton sensed that somehow, all that, and he … he nodded. Real solemn. As if to say he understood. And then they both got up at the same moment, and went to the door, but when they got there and Elton had the door open he suddenly closed it again. They were going to shake hands just then, you know. But Elton took Tom in his arms and he held him real tight. And he said, ‘You’re such a pretty kid.’ He said that. And they stood there and held each other, and I swear it was as if … as if … I don’t know. I don’t know what it was at all now.” A tear rolled down his cheek. “But he was so … damn … wonderful to me. So wonderful.” Another tear. “We never fought. We never quarreled in our entire lives. About anything, never. And he came to all my track meets. Do brothers do that? All the time, I mean? I felt so safe with him. Jesus, I … I
don’t care
who knows anymore. I
don’t!
And let me tell you something—after him, all those gorgeous New York attitude hunks who think they’re God’s present are just pieces of ham to me! Pieces of fucking ham!”

“Canned ham!” said Dennis Savage, thinking to keep it light.

“Rotted canned ham,” I put in.

Carlo, one of New York’s most incurable gorgeous attitude hunks, made no-no fingers at us.

“He did
what?
” said Little Kiwi, finally.

“Oh hell,” said Ron, wiping his eyes. “Isn’t anyone hungry?”

*   *   *

He was shuffling lettuce and eggs when I came into the kitchen. “I thought omelettes and salad and this Italian bread,” he told me.

“Terrific.”

“You beat the eggs, okay?”

As I did, he said, “I was never going to tell anyone that. Not ever.”

“Where’d you get the name Tom?”

“Oh, he
was
my best friend. Tom Coley. He died in Vietnam.”

He set me to washing greens and cutting radishes.

“Are the others shocked?” he asked, quietly.

“Just Little Kiwi, and he’s extremely unsophisticated, remember. He didn’t even know about lesbians till last week.”

“Know what about them?”

“That there were any. Where is Elton now?”

He stopped, thought, patted my arm, said, “Stay here,” and went to his room to get a photograph of Elton taken at the last Thanksgiving party. “Dayton, Ohio,” Ron explained. “He’s the superintendent of a mattress factory. It’s a good job in those parts. That’s his wife Carrie, that’s Elton Jr.—they call him Tony—and that’s Mary.”

This Elton did not align with the one I had imagined pulling Ron into his lap and leading him to bed. He was half bald, working on a paunch, and sported an entirely dismal beard. Nice family, though.

Then Ron produced another photo, a dog-eared black-and-white of two boys in swimsuits at the edge of a lake, and I gasped. Ron, I could have guessed, would have been a spectacular teenager. But Elton, perhaps fifteen then, his arm around Ron’s shoulder, was about the nicest-looking thing you ever hoped to be related to, or slip into bed with: and, as Ron points out, sometimes you get both.

“Now that you’ve heard my story,” said Ron, “are you ready to admit that you and your brothers … you know?”

“Now that I’ve heard your story, I wish I could. But the truth is, all we did was sleep.”

He shrugged. “You may be better off that way. At least you came out with no expectations. I had a tender, handsome man take me through the hard parts of late adolescence, so I missed a lot of pointless anxiety. But where was I supposed to go next? I’ve been looking for another brother ever since.” He buttered the omelette pan. Typical Pines: we have every kitchen apparatus known to man, including an artichoke guillotine, yet we’re always out of clean towels. I think Bauhaus eats them.

I had one last question. “I can believe that an essentially straight man might pillow with an available male for two years out of adolescent horniness. But why would he then turn around—just as he’s about to reform, so to say—and call you a pretty kid? Rather new-wave lingo for a midwestern straight. It seems sadistic, somehow.”

Collecting the cutlery, Ron said, “Or generous. Maybe he was telling me what I needed to hear. As long as you’re throwing someone over, why not let him think he means a great deal to you?”

“Surely you did. You don’t sleep in someone’s arms for two years without meaning something to him.”

“Well, that’s true.” He was folding napkins. “A few years ago, at Christmas, Elton and I were joking around—shouting and punching each other, you know? Kid stuff. And Carrie asked us if we had always been this rowdy. And he said, ‘No, when we were teenagers we were very serious around each other.’ He said, ‘Sometimes it was as if we were the only two people in the world.’”

“And you rent your garment and screamed that yours was a love that would never die.”

He smiled, heaping dinner onto trays. “I kind of laughed and nodded and we went on to the next thing. Let’s face it, gays have to do a lot of acting around the rest of the population.”

They had the Monopoly stuff all set up when we brought the food in, and Carlo said, “There should be a Monopoly where you play for men instead of properties.”

“There is,” I reminded him. “It’s called the gay world.”

And, as the rain battered on, we got down to the really serious business of life: putting hotels on Boardwalk and Park Place and waiting for Dennis Savage to come around and land on them and go bankrupt.

The Preppie and the Clone

An east side romance.

Carlo decided that he wanted a preppie lawyer and no one could talk him out of it.

“It’s not for you,” we told him.

“Their vested suits,” he would reply.

“You’ll be bored, Carlo.”

“Their luncheon clubs and business talk,” he would go on. “Their fox trots, tennis rackets.”

“What would you speak about?”

“They went to Harvard University! Look, I’m tired of hunks and stars. I want something different this time. Maybe someone over forty. I like them…” He grew blissful.

“Ripened,” Dennis Savage offered.

“Practiced,” Carlo corrected. “And they’re nicer when they’re older.”

“Grateful,” Dennis Savage observed.

“No. They just have the time to be generous.”

I grinned at Dennis Savage’s lack of expertise. But then his taste favors bashful youth, and we habitually take our reading of romance from our own narrative, neglecting all other data.

It was the Friday after Christmas, a television afternoon at Dennis Savage’s: one of those amusingly wastrel days New Yorkers sometimes schedule before plunging back into the grid of themes and ambitions and opinions that stretches across every social intersection of the town. Dennis Savage was free of his teaching duties, I was taking the afternoon off, Carlo was as usual living on unemployment, and Little Kiwi, on temporary enforced leave from the mailroom of BBDO because he had bitten a coworker for calling him “a derogatory epithet meaning an aficionado of oral gay sex” (as Little Kiwi put it, after working it out on a piece of paper), had been packed off to the grocery with his fey Godzilla of a dog, Bauhaus. We other three had settled down to cruise the soaps for skin. Strangely, instead of suburban bedrooms and health clubs, all we could find were political intrigues in exotic places, with heroines in tattered gowns crying, “No, Mark! Don’t leave me here in the jungle, alone with the Ishtar Ruby!”

“Whatever happened to love?” I asked. “I thought soaps were about romance.”

Dennis Savage scoffed. “Soap opera is about the illusion of romance. The characters fall out of love as fast as they fall in.”

“Falling out of love is easy to do,” said Carlo. “It can happen overnight.”

We stared at him.

“You should go into it,” he explained gently, “without expectations.”

“You say this, after wishing for a lawyer?”

“I need a new adventure. I’m so truly bored with having a hot time and trading Circuit buzz terms. I want … I want someone I can
electrify.
That’s what I want! Hot men are neat, but they already know everything, don’t they?” His eyes lit with a wild surmise. “I surely believe I want a virgin!”

“Back to the sixties,” Dennis Savage breathed. “Remember when no one knew how to do
anything?
”

“A lawyer with a terrace,” Carlo went on, dreamily, “and a bulging briefcase.”

“He’ll be dull, Carlo,” I warned.

“He won’t, because we’ll fall in love. Don’t you know that everyone is good in bed when he’s in love?”

A key clicked in the front door and Little Kiwi marched in with the groceries, the mail, and dire Bauhaus. “You’re watching
soap operas?
”

“The best people watch soaps nowadays,” I told him.

“The best people,” he answered, “are otherwise engaged.”

Carlo winked at him, and, suddenly shy, Little Kiwi turned away and threw his raincoat onto Bauhaus to watch it go. In the kitchen, sorting out his haul, he called out, “They didn’t have Froot Loops, Snug, so I got Count Chocula.”

“Snug?” Carlo echoed.

“Froot Loops?”
I cried.

Dennis Savage blushed. “Little Kiwi, I believe it’s time for your nap.”

“Dennis Savage eats Froot Loops!” I exulted.

“Well,
you
eat zwieback and milk!”

“So I do …
Snug.
”

In the ensuing silence, we heard Little Kiwi slotting things into cupboards and watched his raincoat crawl evilly around the living room.

“What’s new,
Snug?
” I asked.

“I could really enjoy tearing your head off.”

“Little Kiwi should go first,” Carlo told him. “He blew the secret.”

Little Kiwi joined us, happy as a hatter. “He wouldn’t hurt me,” he announced. “He likes me a lot.” He ruffled Dennis Savage’s hair. “I guess I shouldn’t have called you Snug, though,” he added in a whisper.

“How long has it been now?” asked Carlo, looking at them thoughtfully.

“Four years,” I said. “And they still sleep face to face, hot breath steaming their cheeks.”

“Has anyone ever told you,” Dennis Savage asked me, “that you are a vicious rotten oik who is completely fagola?”

Little Kiwi was taking in the television; a woman in a nun’s habit was shouting, “Lars! Please, Lars! Don’t rush off in search of The Golden Cone of Calcutta!”

“Soap opera is dumb,” said Little Kiwi, picking up his raincoat. Bauhaus continued to slither around the floor, his eyes closed, growling.

“The conversations are funny,” Carlo admitted.

“No class consciousness,” I put in.

“It’s not realistic,” Little Kiwi insisted. “Out of nowhere, two people meet and kiss and shack up, and a few episodes later they’re slapping each other. People aren’t like that.”

“Sometimes they are,” said Carlo. “Like if they get to know each other too well.”

“How could you know someone too well?” Little Kiwi asked. “That’s what love is for.” He came over to Carlo. “Isn’t it, Carlo?”

Carlo smiled at him. “Sure it is,” he said.

*   *   *

Carlo was so serious about finding a lawyer that he harangued me about throwing a lawyer party so he could examine them and make a correct selection. Ridiculous. Everyone thinks I know suitgays because I live on the east side. On the contrary, you know whom you know and where you live has nothing to do with the case. Anyway, the only lawyer of my acquaintance is my cousin Ellis, who is straight, married, and the father of two splendid children. There didn’t seem much point in setting him up with Carlo.

“Ellis?” Carlo said at a planning session in my apartment. “That sounds right. Where did he go to school?”

“Dartmouth.”

“That’s what I want! Fill a room with those and—”

“I know!” said Dennis Savage. “Hugh Whitkin!”

“Hugh!” Carlo sighed. “The names they have!”

“We were at Hamilton together, and he went on to Harvard Law. He knows a hundred preppie lawyers.”

“Would he give Carlo a party?”

“Maybe I should skip the party and take Hugh Whitkin.”

“Uh-oh!” Dennis Savage and I said in chorus.

“Is that a no?”

“Carlo, didn’t you say you wanted a virgin?”

“Has Hugh been around?”

“Somewhat,” Dennis Savage admitted. “When they discovered the Stone Age paintings in that cave in Spain, his phone number was on the wall.”

“Is he cute?”

“Abnormally handsome,” I said. “Nice shape. No muscles. Straight golden-blond hair…”

“I
love
Hugh Whitkin!”