How's Your Romance?: Concluding the "Buddies" Cycle (11 page)

“Let me go,” said Peter, actually rather blandly.

“One sees what comes of defiance,” Lars Erich told him; and Peter started to struggle.

“‘Klaatu barada nikto,’” said Cosgrove, coming over to them.

“Peter must calm down befirst.”

“Let me go!”

“Let him go, damn you!”
I shouted, and a startled Lars Erich released Peter so abruptly that Peter staggered before steadying himself at the breakfast bar.

“Wie Sie befehlen,” Lars Erich told me, ever so courteously: As you command.

“This is conduct unsuitable to gay life,” I said.

“It is not pleasing, his defiance,” Lars Erich replied. “I warned him from the start how it is with me. I am in charge of him, and he loves me like that.”

“I hate you like that,” said Peter.

“‘Ach, nun wird mir immer bänger! Welche Miene! welche Blicke!’” said Lars Erich, quoting mockingly at Peter: Now it’s getting really scary! What a face! What evil eyes!

Peter just looked at him.

“Ja, smart Americans,” Lars Erich whispered. “What is this poetic highlight?”

“Goethe,” I said. “
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.
And you’re the sorcerer, right? Peter’s learning fast and hard.”

“Peter teaches also,” said Lars Erich, taking hold of him again, but nicely now. Peter did not resist; he had the look of a prisoner in love with the headsman. “Peter teaches me that I feel now as I have never before so felt. It is a cure for all woes.”

“You guys have a problem, and you better resolve it,” I said.

“No, it’s true,” said Peter as Lars Erich started to … well, deep-dish him. “No, Lars … yes, but stop … okay…”

“Lars Erich Blücher,” said Cosgrove, “are you respecting the tone of the house?”

Eventually, Lars Erich took a time-out to say, “In the next life, when I become a cute little shorty, I will respect the tone of the house. In this life, I am in control, and all learn from me.” Performing one of those penetrating looks at his lover, Lars Erich asked, “It is good like this? Nice, this taste? You will give me all your American kisses, ja?”

“Ja,” said Peter, ready for the block.

*   *   *

Y
OU HAVE TO HAVE
a best friend who knows all your secrets anyway and thus might as well be confided in. You need enjoyable friends, and you also need sexy friends. But what if they are combined into one figure, coming after you like your favorite nightmare?

I don’t mean Lars Erich; I mean J., stalking the ever more enchanted Vince Choclo.

“Now he took Polaroids of me,” J. told us one Thursday night. “And he got down my measurements, with his fingers playing along my skin, taking a little extra for himself. He even measured my mouth, and when he said, ‘You got the lips of a pretty chick,’ I knew I had him. He’s so helplessly in need of someone who likes him, he don’t care who.”

“He ‘don’t’?” Cosgrove echoed, with consternation.

J. shrugged. “He talks funny and it’s catching.”

The dinner was spinach-and-potato soup, scallops over wild rice, salad, and tiramisù.

“Here are the pictures,” said J., spreading them upon the table as Cosgrove and I leaned over to see. “Those are my mesh sexpants. I told you about them. Vince likes to see how he looks in them.”

“Sexpants?” said Cosgrove.

“Here’s a few of the babes Vince dates,” said J. “I snuck them out of Vince’s box because he lets me get away with anything. That’s the secret of how to love me, you know.”

“‘Serena,’” I read off the back of one snapshot. “‘Jonquil,’” said another. Hot tamales, looking merrily wanton for Vince’s memory box.

“And here’s Red Backhaus,” J. went on, pushing some more Polaroids at us.

“Gosh” was Cosgrove’s report.

Unlike the amiably natural Vince, Red was Built for Contest. He had one of those uncanny physiques that is at once pumped and pulled tight. It was not a modest shot: the pants were open to the knees to display Red’s manly pride. Yet the hero took no joy of it; his empty face seemed about to blush. One feature in particular set him apart—a close haircut of brown, blond, and red, the kind of visual that aroused commentary in a medieval village.

“I want Red in my porn stories,” said Cosgrove. “I see him as a pie man going to the fair.”

“He’s more like Simple Simon,” said J. as he gathered up his photographs. “Vince is pretty clueless, but Red is so dumb that people laugh at what he says. Then he cries right in front of you. He’s short, too, and he’s always saying what a problem that is with the chicks. He’s the night manager of a gym near Prospect Park, so he can talk to the chicks in his job capacity. But when they put him down, he stays on alone after closing and uses up all the machines to work off his frustrations.”

“How does he treat you?”

“I just ignore him.”

“J., you should be nice to him,” said Cosgrove, who only now gave up Red’s photo. “When a guy feels unliked and someone is kind—”

“No, because I finally had zero hour with Vince, which I entirely came to talk about tonight. Is there more salad?”

Cosgrove took J.’s plate to the kitchen.

“How come the food here is so good?” J. asked.

“Cosgrove and Dennis Savage have decided to share an interest in cooking. Dennis Savage has been taking Cosgrove stage by stage through some of his dishes, and Cosgrove has been picking up secrets of the trade. Unexploited spices. The temperature of sauces. The application of sweetmeats.”

“How come they suddenly like each other?” J. asked, a bit suspiciously.

“Beats me.”

Six seconds, then: “How is he?”

“He’s fine.”

J. nodded. “It won’t be as interesting to know Vince, because he doesn’t have these amazing friends or go to
A Chorus Line
or a snazzy Oscar party where you vote for who will win and someone gets a prize. But it will be good for me not to have to be Little Boy Blue doing a party turn. This time I’ll be more in charge. And it has its exciting side, to live with someone you hardly know and see their strange secrets come out all the time.”

Cosgrove brought in J.’s salad refill and a pepper mill. Standing at J.’s left, Cosgrove asked, “Pepper, sir?,” and J. nodded. Looking down at his plate after Cosgrove finished, J. went on, “I know I’ll miss out on all the lively doings here,” as Cosgrove went back to the kitchen. “I’m making the best of it, but probably I shouldn’t have done what I did to Dennis Savage.… I thought having adventures was what we’re all supposed to do.”

He choked and looked up at last, his face hot with tears, and I called out, “Cosgrove, come quickly,” and Cosgrove came,
*
salad and all, and went right to J. and pulled him up to hold him close, stroking J.’s hair and rubbing his neck as if this happened all the time; and then kissing him, and I mean deep-dish, with the racy pull that marks the connoisseur.

J. at length recovered himself and sat as Cosgrove pulled his own chair close for support. I was trying to imagine what their lovemaking was like—if indeed they ever did get it on—when J. quietly said, “I do still love you. I’m just in a different place now.”

“What is that place?” I asked.

Ignoring me, J. went on, “This new part of the story started when Red got a crush on a girl in his gym. A real babe who flirts away at everyone. She asked Red for help with some machine, and she sucked on one of his nipples through his T-shirt right in front of the whole place. Red told Vince, and Vince said, What if he and Red fucked her together? Listen to how he says it: ‘I sure do like a triple.’ And his eyes do that thing.”

“Time,” I said. “Place. Costume.”

“It was before bedtime, in the kitchen, where Vince was cleaning up his usual mess.”

Conceiving a desire for J.’s salad, which he was toying with but not eating, I tried to pull it over. But J. pulled it right back. “I was in my mesh shorts and going along real innocent. I even changed my voice a little, to be all moist and young. I said, How come Vince hasn’t taken me on a triple? I would really like to see him daddy-fucking the chicks.

“Well, he was real interested in that. He said, ‘Why would you?’

“I said, ‘Because you’re so big a man.’ I said, ‘I believe that if you kissed a chick and I kissed her, I would taste of you on her kissful lips.’ No, that’s
my
salad”—because I’d made another grab for it.

“I’ll fix you an encore,” Cosgrove told me.

“I want his,” I said.

Retaining his salad, J. continued his tale: “Vince was finished in the kitchen, so I followed him into his room, where he started to undress for bed. ‘I want to do a triple with you, Vince.’ He says, ‘Okay.’ ‘No, really,’ and I took hold of his sides. I made myself as open as can be to him, saying he’s my favorite daddy-fucker of them all, but what if he would daddy-fuck me and then tell Red? How could I hold my head high then?

“Now he’s completely nude, and toweling off as always, even if he doesn’t shower first. Everything’s a little nutty about him. But he heard his cue well enough. He says, ‘I would never tell Red, I swear. That would be our secret.’

“He had his hands on me by then, when I— Why do you keep taking my salad?”

“You’re not eating it.”

“That’s not the point.”

“I want you back in the family,” I said. “I don’t want you in a different place. I understand Vince’s appeal, those slow, silent containers upon whom one projects all his needs. Nevertheless—”

“He is my savior, because he heard my plea. He pulled me onto his bed to sit in front of him and he took off my shorts. I said, ‘Vince! Vince!,’ and he kept saying, ‘We won’t tell Red.’ He was all over me with hands and I still pretended that I didn’t know what it would be, so I begged him, ‘Don’t daddy-fuck me, Vince!,’ with my hands all on his neck and arms and that stupid shaggy hair which now I sort of don’t mind, so of course he will fuck me. He says, ‘You’ll sure go over easy now.’ He says, ‘You’ll like it like this, J. boy. You’re a piece of J. cake for me to feast on.’”

“He said those words?” Cosgrove asked. “It’s like a play.”

“And guess who wrote it,” I put in.

“I admit I arranged it,” said J., finally passing me his salad. “But I didn’t see anyone holding a gun to his head. And he was even feeding
me
lines, like ‘It’s okay for a fine young boy to struggle when he’s got to be daddy-fucked.’ So I knew he wanted me to fight him, and he was so hot when I did that his eyes went all sky-like. I whipped out from under him and backed away with ‘You wouldn’t fuck me against my will, would you, Vince?’ And he came and got me so gentle and loving, saying, ‘That’s the best pussy of all.’”

*   *   *

T
HAT’S BUDDY LOVE
. H
UNGRY
love is frustrating; buddy love is efficient, and there is never enough of it, though it is possible that most of the lifelong gay partnerships are built on buddy love.

On the other hand, if you want a lively story, you’ll go with hungry love: so of course we have Peter and Lars Erich coming for dinner, which by now is like saying the Phantom of the Opera wants to check out your chandelier.

“Have I Julia Child for a roommate?” I asked Dennis Savage in our kitchen, as he and Cosgrove worked on the dinner: crudités vinaigrées, five-alarm chicken stew, garlic French bread, and silver cake.

“No, mince the green peppers unevenly,” Dennis Savage advised Cosgrove, with a friendly hand on his shoulder and a warning eye for my attention only, “and the red peppers quite coarsely, with jutting edges…” Miming “Have to talk” to me, he took me into the living room.

On the couch, he told me, “Don’t let this get around, but that chat-room stuff is not only addictive but evilly effective. There’s so much of it. Men, men, every last Jack of them your type, and they’re all, like, how smart and funny you are, and when do we meet. Well, you know I got around the photo thing, and my profile is a bald lie—”

“‘Thirty-four and rich’?”

“Thirty-three, in fact. Oh”—after a glance at his watch—“it’s my time to chat with that boy in Hartford. He sent his picture, of course—slim, with shoulders. You know I love that look.”

He got up. “Remind Cosgrove that the couscous has to be firm, and I’ll be back soon for dinner.”

He left and I went into the kitchen, tailed by a suspicious Fleabiscuit.

“I invited an extra friend,” said Cosgrove, chopping away at whatever. “He is Nesto, and very Latin, so please be nice.”

“Where’s he from?”

“Tower Records, downtown. You always end up meeting guys there, but he was especially friendly, in these cute overalls with no top. I had to follow him downstairs into World Music just to get a look, and we started talking. He was fascinated that I have no day job, because he’s out of work and his family is putting all this pressure on. He wants to learn about cooking from me, because a friend of his has a good job as sous-chef in a jazzy restaurant. He doesn’t say a lot, but he’s good ka. Could you please start the music? It’s the
Capitol Sings
series, with perhaps Cole Porter first, ideally at a volume setting of, say, five and a half.”

Musing on the irony of being directed by my, uh, employee, I set up the music just before Peter arrived, early, with a look of purpose in his eyes.

“A see-through embroidered shirt and Spandex bike shorts,” I said, assessing him. “Doesn’t that theatre of yours ever close?”

He dropped heavily into the armchair. “We just had a fight on the phone.”

“Gee, what a shock.”

Fleabiscuit, cheated of Peter’s shoelaces, came out from under the couch, growling, and went into the kitchen.

“It started,” Peter began, “when—”

“Oh, I have been here before,” said I from my desk chair. “With Bill and Jake, it was Bill wanted to kiss in the street and Jake wouldn’t even hold hands in secret passageways.”

Fleabiscuit trotted out of the kitchen with a stalk of celery in his mouth, the bitty one from deep inside the bunch. He settled on the floor with it and stared at Peter.

“With you and Lars Erich, it’s you’re too wild but he’s even wilder. Brinkmanship as lifestyle.”

“I’m not that wild.”

“Are you kidding? Chi Chi LaRue dreads to be seen with you in public. Donnie Russo’s mother told him not to play with you. Joan Crawford is afraid you’ll die and come to hell. Why must I be a seer in this country of the blind, constantly explaining life to the people who actually live it?”