How's Your Romance?: Concluding the "Buddies" Cycle (28 page)

“I know looks are all that matter,” he says. “But they don’t reflect personality, do they?”

“I wish you hadn’t put it that way. Some of my readers exasperate easily on the subject of looks.”

“Tell me what Ken sees.”

He was looking quite seriously at me, as if the question were coherent as asked. Well, maybe it
was.
“The fine black hair with the center parting and the floppy commas at the forehead?” I guessed. “The cobalt eyes. The light dust along the chest overlooking the hairless tummy. You even have beautiful ears.”

“Ken is more handsome.”

“Ken is beautiful. But you’re so sexy it’s scary.”

“Ken thinks I’m too complicated.”

“You are.”

“And Jim Streeter is easy?”

“You tell me.”

He leaned forward. “What have you heard?”

“Tom-Tom says he’s a little girl-friendy.”

Suddenly energized, Davey-Boy jumped up to pace and let off verbal steam. “Not a little,” he began. “Jim has a whole system for staying in cell reach, and who makes dinner or do they café. He has to know what you’ll be wearing tomorrow. ‘So we don’t
clash
’!”

Now he stopped short, looking right at me.

“And Ken loves it. He
says.
He wants to go steady, after all that sneaking around.”

“Have you ever thought that Ken might simply be teasing you?”

Davey-Boy pantomimed looking here and there about the room, his way of saying,
“Duh.”

“Well, then—”

“But he’s not a player,” said Davey-Boy. “He’s our Ken. I’m the one who games around—and I only do it to keep him online. It’s hard to get that boy to focus.”

A thought hit him.

“What was he like before?” he asked, sitting down again. “When you were kids.”

“I blush to say that we weren’t. I got to college before he was born, so we didn’t—”

“Give me something, at least.”

So I recalled the Christmas when my father, for unknown reasons, presented my brothers and me with recorders. They were oversize and made of a strong dark wood. Very impressive looking: but only Tony could play. Of course, the advantage of recorders is that they sound pretty much the same whether you have mastered the art or merrily pipe away in chaos. So we took our recorders to the big family party at Aunt Agnes and Uncle Mike’s, and we would burst into a room as I called out, “Yes, it’s the Christmas Fiddlers, playing their latest hit, ‘Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming.’” Then we’d tootle away for a bit, crash into the next room as I announced “Jingle Bell Rock,” and so on. Tony’s sense of musicianly professionalism got offended, however, so he dropped out. And Ken had been following us from room to room, greatly enjoying it, so when Tony quit, Ken asked if he could use Tony’s recorder.

“To play with the Christmas Fiddlers?” Davey-Boy asked.

“It’s called ‘sitting in.’ Ken was about five years old, I guess, very cute and rather dressed up. He may have been in a suit. The recorder concert was just a momentary goof, so we all gave up soon enough. But Ken kept coming up to me later on, looking so boyishly sharp in his duds, still carrying that gigantic recorder, begging for more stage time.”

Davey-Boy looked like one of the 9/11 Commission witnesses after Joe Biden finally stopped asking one of his thousand-year questions.

“Is that what you’re giving me?” Davey-Boy said, after a while. “What do we learn from it?”

“That somewhere in that strutting icon is a sweet little kid who wants to show off. So you—”

“Smother him with cell calls? Imprison him with dinner plans? That’s Jim’s way, you know. He’s total relationship, they say. Ken can’t want that.”

“Nobody wants to be controlled,” I said.

“I want to control him,” Davey-Boy told me. “Yes. Oh, yes, I will! Do you know what I want it to be?”

He paused, and I clearly saw him wondering if he should keep this nugget to himself. Go on, Davey-Boy, because this is my last volume in this line of work, and I want lots of content.

He did go on: “I want him lost and disoriented, in a cave someplace. Bones cracking under his footsteps. This must be where the ogre lives. And now he appears.”

“You’re the ogre.”

“Right, he appears, and he can’t distinguish between loving and snuffing. The ogre has had men every which way already, so now he can only love on the most ultimate level. He feasts to love.”

“You know, there is such a thing as being too alarming.”

“Is he a teaseboy?” Davey-Boy went on. “Shall I tenderly whip him for his crimes? I’ll put the blue cuffs on him, those Chelsea sex toys that come in merry colors, like ice cream. I’ll fall so lovingly for him for the very last time, and in the movie there will be scenes of us laughing on the beach, oblivious of vivisection and world hunger. We’ll be in contact by cell at twenty-minute intervals.”

Cosgrove and Fleabiscuit were standing in the doorway, trying to look sophisticated yet inconspicuous.

“They can come in,” Davey-Boy allowed.

So they came in. Fleabiscuit availed himself of a shoelace opportunity, and Cosgrove told Davey-Boy, “If you were four inches taller, you’d be God.”

“Thank you for this talk,” Davey-Boy said to me. “Tom-Tom is right about you, Ethan.”

“You don’t use my nickname,” I answered. “Why do I have to use yours? Can I call you ‘David’? Because you’re not a boy any more. You’re one of the most manly guys I’ve ever known, and that’s counting Jack Dempsey, who used to live in this building.”

Luftpause. Davey-Boy thinks it over. He finally says, “My name’s Isaiah,” rhyming it with “De Falla.” He tells me, “My family have been Pentecostals for four generations. I had to break with them to come here and turn into Davey-Boy.”

Joining Davey-Boy on the couch, Cosgrove felt his left biceps and asked, “Is it your birthday, by any chance?”

Davey-Boy was lost in thought, however, and did not reply. After a while, he uttered the term “girl-friendy” all by itself, in echo of Tom-Tom’s comment on Jim Streeter. “We’re having a dinner to all meet this guy,” Davey-Boy finally told me. “It’s at Sebastian’s, because he has the biggest apartment. Get the flags out and come armed. You’re invited.”

Davey-Boy said Cosgrove could come, too, but Cosgrove said that, instead, he would like to be shipwrecked on a desert island with Davey-Boy, Cosgrove’s portable CD player, and his twenty most beloved discs “for a period lasting no more than five weeks.”

Throwing on his coat, Davey-Boy nodded once at all of us and left. As if at his signal, we all began to do things. I organized the New Year’s music for a Sheri rehearsal. Fleabiscuit began to transfer the rubber ball, Shrek squeeze toy, plastic windup Mickey Mouse, and steak bone back to his den under the bed in the other room. Cosgrove decided to reexhibit the Christmas cards, moving some here and some there.

Then he said, “I’ve always liked your cousin, and Tom-Tom is very nice to me at all times. But that Davey-Boy is dark and crazy and strangely wonderful. Is that a type?”

“No, Davey-Boy’s his own genre. Before I go—what happened about your New Year’s gig?”

“My business manager told the guy he wanted the entire amount in advance in a bank check by a certain day and no more requests for substitutions and extras. So I guess that’s that.”

“You seem to have a very healthy outlook about it,” I said, retrieving my Sheri “Loveland” medley from the piano. It’s the
second
“Loveland,” and as “My Romance” ends I quote the main strain of the
first
“Loveland,” thrilling the Sondheim buffs.

“Mr. Smith said, ‘If you can’t win, don’t fight,’” Cosgrove quoted, creating a mini-display of the family photo cards. “I’m not really disappointed, because the next thing is just about to happen, whatever it may be. You know?”

“Yes—they call that ‘gay life.’”

*   *   *

I
N THE END
, C
OSGROVE
decided to give the New Year’s dinner for Dennis Savage, Peter Keene, Tom-Tom, and Red, with Carlo and Nesto serving and guesting. I went to Sebastian’s, where I met Jim Streeter and got to see what he and Ken were like together. Dennis Savage calls this “Who is the boy friend and what do they do?”

The boy friend was much as Tom-Tom had pictured, what the personal ads describe as “straight-appearing.” (But then, who isn’t nowadays, except straights?) Jim Streeter was certainly masculine as opposed to effeminate; his salient quality, however, seemed to be less an abundance of hetero than a lack of homo. It’s not that he was straight-appearing: he wasn’t
anything
-appearing. He functioned without giving clues. Perhaps that was his secret method.

He was certainly extremely handsome and in beautiful trim, though not Michelin-pumped in the Chelsea manner. I have since learned that his physique is termed “L.A. style”; it emphasizies abs over chest-fill and demands gaudy upper-arm separation between biceps and deltoid.

As for what he and Ken do, they were neither all over each other nor did they go the other way, into the cagey affinity of two men who shared the same lifeboat on some long-ago ocean disaster. More interesting by far was the behavior of the Kens. Tom-Tom sent me eye-faxes at every remark Jim Streeter made. Davey-Boy was cool and unobtrusive, but in the rococo Davey-Boy way: a congested cool, as unobtrusive as a Ming Dynasty mandarin whose eyelids flutter to signal the start of a holocaust. The rest of the party, loyal to Ken, were pleasant to Jim, and Jim was pleasant back.

At one point, Tom-Tom, in charge of some platter or other, passed behind me with the stage whisper of “Meet me in the kitchen.” But we had nothing to say that would color in the line drawing of unpredictable Ken outfoxing all our expectations. Jim seemed to me another of those emptily charismatic guys who let the rest of us see in them whatever we wish to, need to. They’re actors and we’re dramatists: we imagine them.

I said as much to Tom-Tom, who replied “It’s so profound” even as he was wondering whether to set the plastic container of whipped butter on the table comme ça or ferry the stuff into a serving dish. “How serious is this dinner?” he asked me.

“Butter-dish serious, I’d say,” I replied.

He thought it over, frowning at the sacrifices etiquette demands of us, then transferred the butter while casting the odd look beyond us at the dinner table.

“I feel sorry for Davey-Boy,” he said. “He doesn’t really want to boss Ken, you know. Even if he does bark at people. Could you hold that for me when I … Thanks. It’s a waste of butter, though, isn’t it? Because in the end we’ll just throw out whatever’s left. And here Davey-Boy has to sit and toast the happy couple.”

Picking a knife out of Sebastian’s cutlery drawer, Tom-Tom went on to “It isn’t even like Ken to shack up. He only tricks. You know—the call of the wild.”

I said, “It’s nice the way you and the guys hold the keys to one another’s lives. You know where everything is, from a butter knife to sex.”

“Oh, it’s easy knowing how your friends fuck. What’s hard to get is when they mess around with the ‘L’ word.”

“You’re smart, Tom-Tom,” I told him, and he rewarded me by flexing his right biceps for me to feel. “Bravo,” I cheered.

“Now, back to our show,” he said in a conspiratorial tone, as he led the way to the dinner.

Actually, there was precious little show out there till Wilkie asked Ken if he was free for video night on Saturday and Ken said yes. Because then Jim said no.

“No?” Ken asked him.

“Saturday’s our supper date with Edward and Crosby,” said Jim. “Remember? I said I’d get the flowers and you’d bring the wine. They’re serving red snapper, so be sure it’s white.”

The table froze. Tom-Tom silently mouthed “supper” at me, as if Edward and Crosby tended to respond with “Let them eat cake” when told that the working class has no bread. Morgan turned to Ellroy to say, “If you return the tuxedo by ten
A.M
., they don’t charge for the extra day.”

Jim started to answer that, but Ken cut in with an easy “White wine it is, Jim.”

Then the Kens looked at me—I mean, every one of them from Tom-Tom to Bradin—as if I had the next line.

Oh, yeah? “If everybody doesn’t immediately look somewhere else,” I threatened, “I’m going to recite Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales
in the original Middle English.”

They did look away. Then Anders announced the topic for the usual after-dinner roundtable: What Gay Life Most Desperately Needs. Ellroy led off, with a plea for a gym with a looks code. Bart spoke in favor of a ban on gay realtors at dinner parties, because, he said, some jackass then asks a question about The Market and the evening becomes overwhelmed by the most boring subject on earth, apartment prices. Then it was Jim Streeter’s turn.

“Well, isn’t the answer obvious?” he said. “What could we need more than gay marriage?”

Ken had gone to the belasco, so he missed this, along with succeeding entries by Anders and Sebastian anent, respectively, calamitous gaps in the Undergear catalog and the limited menu at E.J.’s Luncheonette. Now it was Davey-Boy’s turn.

He got up and did a thing with his shoulders. Hiked them, something. His smile would gladly murder you. And, he announced, what gay life most deeply needed was an end to the wish to imitate straights.

Such as trying to make their parents proud. Such as leading the kind of life that, say, Dick Cheney would call “useful.” Such as the stupidest idea of all:

Gay marriage.

The mild reactions that the company registered told me that this was an issue of no interest. However, Davey-Boy did not care what his cohort thought. He was speaking to Jim Streeter.

“Who
wants
gay marriage?” Davey-Boy intoned. “Real men wouldn’t, because only a woman wants to be married. Who else, boys of mine? Well, those stinking politicals want it, because they’re so stupid they won’t work for useful issues. Like integrating the military. No,” he insisted, drawing his right hand flat across the screen of view, a kind of real-life computer gesture. “No, they like gay marriage. Why, my boys? Because it’s insane, and gay politicals like insane things.

“Don’t they?” Davey-Boy added, hurling this at Jim Streeter, who simply looked back at him with a message undecipherable to the naked Chelsea eye, or mine.