Everybody Loves You (12 page)

“You shouldn't tell about the tricks,” said Little Kiwi. “As one magician to another.”

“Oh, hell,” said Dennis Savage.

“If you
talk
about the secrets too much,” Little Kiwi observed, “they lose their secret qualities.”

“Hell, of
course
you can come.”

“You can know too much about magic, you know.”

“I doubt I could get through it without you. You
have
to come. I was just playing around.”

I question that.

“I just don't think you'll enjoy it, that's all. It's such a … a reversion into old business.”

“Oh, I'll enjoy it, my dear old Boffer,” I told him. “Old business is true business. Hidden objects must be retrieved from the Chamber of Disguise.”

“And I, La Dolce Pita the Magnificent, must demonstrate the truth of magic, assisted by Ferdinand.”

“The dog,” said Dennis Savage, with penetrating finality, “stays home.”

And Bauhaus growled.

*   *   *

This was not a simple matter of getting dressed, grabbing a cab, and showing up. Phone calls and letters passed among the Hamilton folk, as the party took shape and Mr. and Mrs. Cal Colson confirmed the date and old grads from Portland to Atlanta made their travel plans. Here was a Heavy Party. To top it off, Dennis Savage and I took Little Kiwi to Lord and Taylor for a new sports jacket on the afternoon of the do. Little Kiwi crinkled at the salesman while trying it on, and the salesman pretended not to notice; but he and two colleagues were buzzing like bees in a petunia patch as we left.

“What do you think they were thinking about us?” asked Dennis Savage after we got out of the store. “Those salesmen.”

“They thought we were some sort of gay ménage,” I answered. “What do you think people take us for, palling around like this?”

He said nothing.

“What do you think people will take us for,” I gently added, “at the Hamilton party? A law firm? An archaeological dig?”

“They'll know what we are,” he said, firming up his jawline. “They will know and they should know.”

“And what will they say? After we leave, of course, like those salesmen.”

“After we leave? Who cares what happens after we leave?”

At home, we separated in the elevator, but I went up to his place for dinner. He seemed remarkably calm, considering how close he was to bumping up against his dearest legends. How many of us, boys and girls, get to greet our own history? Now, it is true that half the party—the wives—would be strangers. But the other half—the Hamilton alumni—would be men who had known Dennis Savage intimately when he was dwelling behind the mirror, when he couldn't be seen. Now they would see him. He must have had highly mixed feelings about all this, but he wasn't showing us a thing: just a man in an apartment, a decent hand at dinner, a sharp dresser, a good friend, wise enough to know that no one, whatever his genetic advantages and luck, gets all that he wants out of life, and that we all pay a price for that which we do get. He knows this and I know this, and we can live with it. And that might very well explain why we get on so well.

“Why do I just have jackets?” Little Kiwi complained, coming into the living room ready to go. “Why can't I ever have a suit?”

“You look so nice like this,” said Dennis Savage, straightening Little Kiwi's tie. “What do you need a suit for?”

“For when I go on the stage, as La Dolce Pita the Magnificent.”

Bauhaus barked.

“Plus Ferdinand.”

“That's a little rich for the contemporary marquee,” I observed. “Why don't you take a trimmer stage name? Something like … The Boffer?”

Dennis Savage knifed me with a look.

“I guess we'll be hearing a lot of that tonight, won't we?” I continued. “There we are, making our entrance—and all those wild and crazy Hamiltonians will rush up and cry, ‘Say, it's The Boffer!' and ‘Hey, Boffer!' and ‘How're they hanging, Boffer?'”

Little Kiwi giggled. “The Boffer,” he said.

“Then comes the moment of moments. All is still. The crowd piously parts. And across the crowded room on this enchanted evening, you will see a … no, not a stranger, but a comrade, a vision, a ghost of your sweet youth of bracingly platonic rhapsody: Chad Jeffers, younger than springtime. He wafts toward you…”

“Crinkling,” said Little Kiwi.

“Crinkling all the way, yes. Then he leans over and murmurs into your ear, ‘Hey, there, my …
Boffer.
'”

Dennis Savage smiled. He would not be needled this night. “He never called me The Boffer. He called me something else.”

“What?”

He shrugged.

“Shall I guess? Groucho, perhaps? So fitting.”

“Daddy-o?” asked Little Kiwi.

“Attila the Nun? It's chic and it's true.”

“Everybody hush,” said Dennis Savage, “and let's go.”

“I guess we'll hear it soon enough, anyway,” I said.

“Doubtful,” he said, getting his coat. “It was a private nickname. He only used it when we were alone.”

“Listening to Erich Leinsdorf murder
Tosca.
”

Riding down in the elevator, Little Kiwi said, “When I go on the stage, I'm going to wear a three-piece suit.”

“Why do you always have some bizarre project going on?” Dennis Savage asked. “Don't you like your life?”

“How would
you
like to be your houseboy?”

“It's a responsible position,” Dennis Savage reasoned, his voice quiet, his mind elsewhere. “The free time…”

“It's woman's work! I should have a real job.”

Finally hearing Little Kiwi, and realizing what upheaval this complaint portended, Dennis Savage looked alarmed and turned to me—but this is a story for later. I put on my innocent face and whistled a happy tune as the elevator door opened, and we headed out for the party.

*   *   *

First of all, the Colsons had a terrific apartment, one of those room-after-room things on West Ninety-second Street; and the rooms were
big.
I know three people whose combined apartments would fit inside the Colsons' powder room. No doormen, true. But the expanse of sheer place that confronted us as we entered the apartment was as daunting as welcoming, at least to those of us who dwell in the dollhouse accommodations of the postwar high rise.

We scarcely had time to take this in before The Receiving Line was giving greeting. The Line was all women, and we weren't inside for more than three seconds before Little Kiwi had his trick deck out and was asking the girls to pick a card.

(“I frisked him before we left, I swear,” Dennis Savage whispered to me.

“He probably had it planted in his overcoat.”)

“I'm Mary Beth Christian,” an attractive, slim yet motherly woman was telling Little Kiwi.

“Linda Baker,” said another, more amply curved, somewhat severe of mien, just as attractive.

“Terry Finn,” said a third, a delightful post-tomboy deb with a halo of blond curls.

Little Kiwi was shaking hands with them. “I'm Virgil Brown,” he said. “But basically I'm known as The Little Boffer.”

Their smiles froze, but they took it in stride, as bourgeois maidens are taught to do, especially when Receiving. Then Dennis Savage and I grabbed their attention and thus we moved into the party, Little Kiwi trying one last “Pick a card” as I hustled him forward.

“Just keep moving, Little Boffer,” I told him.

We were in the center of a very fully done room—icy glass tables to the left of us, truculent couches to the right of us, and all about us vases of a very precise shade of antique green. This always means trouble. Naturally we had arrived somewhat late, as if prancing into a dance hall last and most awaited,
grandioso, chic deluxe,
and the rooms were spilling with Hamiltonians, strollers and couples and groups and whole coteries. And, pretty much as I had pictured it, a gang of males rushed upon Dennis Savage crying out, “It's The Boffer!”

He shuddered with a glad, stinging thrill as they surrounded him, shaking and clasping and pushing him in that way they have, that old-boy style. He nodded and reached for them, as if he were going home again even as he knew one cannot. They were crashing all over the place at the dead center of the party, he and his old boys, and their wives were coming up, drawn by the hoopla. Dennis Savage was encircled, and terrified, and content.

Or did I read it wrong? He was swimming smoothly in this sea of bright shadows—and I was watching carefully to see how much they liked him: they were wild. Little Kiwi was taking it in quizzically. This was a side of Dennis Savage he had never seen, opened to his gaze not by action but by reflection, in the excitement of the men roaring and pawing at him, in their attempt to share with him a relapse into the boisterous, bracing freedom of their youth.

Dennis Savage was calming them, and laughing, and nodding; they were strident, insistent. Then someone came up to him out of nowhere and said, “Hey,” so softly that I had to read his lips. But Dennis Savage heard him, and turned, and there was Chad Jeffers.

Yes, he was terribly handsome, and shockingly young looking, one of those do-or-die, take-no-prisoners preppies who somehow never lose that sense of having been rejected for the role of Prince because they are too nice, too real.

“There he is,” I told Little Kiwi.

Rather, I told the place where Little Kiwi had been. He had slipped away. Trying to keep an eye on Dennis Savage, I surveyed the room—ah, there he is, shuffling cards and effervescing at Linda Baker, who severely took a card, gave it back to him, and when he had reshuffled the deck and produced a card, severely shook her head. Wrong card. Well, all that's harmless enough. Dennis Savage was shaking Chad Jeffers's hand in a grip of death, and that can be harmful: because the grip must yield after the time passes and the boys separate to find themselves as men. You can keep your toys under your bed, perhaps, but you can't shake hands again, not with your enemy.

You may wonder at my choice of word. Well, you'll see what I mean presently.

You can imagine that I watched Dennis Savage's reunion with Chad Jeffers as a camera turns. I wanted to measure this data securely. But there was little to see. They were at ease with each other, focused on their conversation but, very clearly, free of those overtones of injured affections that long-lost friends sometimes give off when they speak. I imagined them tracking down old capers and catching up on recent curriculum vitae. I tried murmuring unlikely dialogue to the rhythm of their talk: “‘Remember the night we gave Doofus McWasp an apple-pie bed?' ‘Hey, and the time we road-tripped those two Smithies all the way to Canada and
really
ran out of gas? What a high!'”

Little Kiwi joined them. I continued to improvise as Dennis Savage introduced him: “‘This is my hot little fuck buddy, bet you wished you had one, right, Chad?'”

As Chad shook hands with Little Kiwi: “‘Can I borrow him, Boffer? It's perfectly safe, in the Hamilton way. I use three condoms, one on top another, each made of sheep entrails and individually packed in your choice of spermicidal creams, jams, jellies, pastes, and…'”

A dark-haired woman had pulled up next to me to listen. She was smiling. “You're not from Hamilton, are you?” she said, as a merry wife of Windsor might tell Khomeini, “You're not an old Etonian.”

“Hi, there,” I replied, feeling a blush make a jerk of me.

“Nor I,” she said. “Susan Drinker, outsider.”

“Bud Mordden, best friend,” I replied as we shook hands.

“I married into this pep rally. What's your excuse? Something unseemly, I hope.”

“Some people think so.”

“That's my husband,” she told me, pointing at a former stalwart lad now settling into the flabby grandee phase of the respectably accoutered straight. Family, career, and a house in one of the more ruthless suburbs of Boston. “Jensen Drinker,” Susan went on, “president for life of the singing group known to glory as the Six Hamiltones.” Jensen was speaking in a very confidential way to a small bevy of alumni. He was holding a pitch pipe and what looked like a college yearbook, and they had all changed into blue blazers. “I believe they are popularly known as the
Sex
Hamiltones. We can only guess why.”

Did she just wink at me?

“Let's really get down,” she sighed, sinking into a couch, indicating the place next to her with a toss of her head. “One thing you have to say for the University of Pennsylvania.
Their
alumni don't drag innocent wives away from their children, especially on the littlest one's birthday. Oh, she sounded very brave about it on the phone this afternoon, but she'll be weeping at dinner and her two brothers will bully her and make it worse.”

“Did you go to Penn?”

“Class of '75.”

“Egad,” I said. “Class of '69.” I held out my hand again, and as she took it, she said, “Buster, you just made the team. What do you say we kibosh the Hamiltones's act with a fast chorus of … What
is
the Penn song?”

“‘Drink a Highball at Nightfall.'”

“Sounds really barfy. Teach it to me.”

Three lines into it, the two of us giggling like freshmen cutting an orientation tour, Little Kiwi came up with his magical deck of cards and launched one of his tricks at Susan Drinker.

“Now
this,
” she averred, “is really cute. This makes the party. Did he go to Penn, too?”

“I went to the Lake-of-the-Woods region on a fishing trip,” said Little Kiwi, carefully shuffling his cards. “But I didn't like the food. I told my pop I wasn't going to fit in, but he made me go, anyway.” Somewhat tentatively, he pulled out a card to show Susan Drinker. “Was this your original card?”