Everybody Loves You (14 page)

“It was a good party,” I began. “Wasn't it?”

“The best of its kind, I'd say.”

“Though I was getting awfully tired of all those blue eyes. Chad Jeffers figured it out, didn't he?”

“He was bound to. The men who liked you the most when you were innocent have the most to lose when you grow smart.”

“Don't be wise so late at night,” I told him.

“I thought I was afraid of what he would think of me when he found out. When I first heard of this reunion, that's … what I feared. His opinion of me. Just as I was afraid of their opinion way back when I pretended I was one of them. When I did what they did.”

He crossed over to the stereo, carefully picked up the playing arm, and switched off the turntable. No Gieseking. Something important to say.

“As soon as I walked in,” he said, “I realized that their opinion couldn't possibly matter anymore. Oh, I … yes … I liked hearing them go through the old routines. That Boffer stuff. I always liked that. Sure I did. And the Hamiltones, too. And those absurd old songs that used to matter so much to me, God knows why. But in the end this is nothing. There's no
here
in it. I'm not like them,” he said, looking right at me. “I never could be, whatever I thought once. And if I'd gone on trying to be like them, I would have wrecked myself.” Right at me, still, this, because he knows that I understand him and that this aperçu matters greatly to the likes of us. “Those straights can go back to that time because that
was
their time. That … that Arcadia of self-righteous adolescence. Gays can't go back. Everything in gay moves forward, do you realize that? It's getting out of school so you can reach the city and find your people. Working for political rights, looking for love, hoping for a cure.” He touched wood: my desk. “Am I right?”

I nodded. “‘And point me toward tomorrow.'”

“Tomorrow—when I was to have had dinner with Chad Jeffers,” said Dennis Savage. He sighed. “Well. Something tells me that has been indefinitely canceled. By gentlemen's agreement.”

“What would that have been like?, I wonder.”

“It would have been an awkward fit, trying to keep his bourgeois order in kilter with my subversive surmises.”

“So you admit you want to take over the world.”

“I admit I'm trying to claim my place in it.” He got his coat. “It
was
a good party, you know. It just wasn't the right party for us.”

“The Boffer passes judgment.”

“Can you make it into bed by yourself, you backbench tosspot, or am I going to find you sprawled on the floor in the morning?”

“Just for that, I hope Chad Jeffers shows up to claim his dinner tomorrow.”

*   *   *

It was I who showed up for dinner, because Dennis Savage is not only a reliable cook but a generous one, even to drop-ins from the sixth floor in their stay-at-home rags. His apartment was in its full swell of life when I arrived: Little Kiwi, in his bath-towel cape, was running through his magic act to the strains of “Roses From the South”; Bauhaus, his snout caught in the paper packaging material from the
Chorus Line
CD, was scrounging around near the bathroom; and the master was in the kitchen, happily preparing his celebrated (not to say infamous; to which he would snap back, “Then why do you have to
say
it?”) Stuffed Chicken with Wild Rice and Mushrooms.

“I hope I don't look as bad as I feel,” I told him, parking myself in the kitchen doorway.

He gave me a quick once-over and grinned. “You'll live.”

“You always look most content when you're making food, do you know that? Maybe you should have been a chef instead of a schoolteacher.”

“I'll admit that I really blew it on career choice,” he mused, stirring the mushrooms. “But I believe I did everything else right.”

“Well, you certainly know how to run an apartment. This one comes complete with dinner and a show.”

“Was that the buzzer?”

“Sometimes, when I'm sitting in my hobbit cave downstairs, surrounded by books and records and gloating in the stillness, I wonder why I never have to give a guest refreshment or keep him entertained.”

“Everyone's afraid of your apartment,” he said. “People have been killed there.”

Little Kiwi joined us, bearing the Mysterious Talking Dice. “Watch this, now.”

“Little Kiwi,” said Dennis Savage, “did I just hear the buzzer?”

“Yep. Now, watch closely, as La Dolce Pita confers with the Mysterious—”

“Well, who was it?”

“Chad Jeffers. He's coming up.”

The doorbell rang.

“Oh,
shit,
” Dennis Savage observed in a kind of murmured shout. “Look at this place! Look at … everyone. This is like a…”

“A homosexual be-in,” I said.

“What do we do?” asked Little Kiwi, missing the implications but enjoying the excitement.

Dennis Savage took the mushrooms off the fire, wiped his hands, strode through the living room, and opened the door.

It was Chad Jeffers, all right, a blatant contrast to the scene in his neat suit and splendid chesterfield. He and Dennis Savage stood in the doorway for a long moment.

“Can I come in?” Chad Jeffers said.

“Sure,” said Little Kiwi, coming up. “You're just in time for the Mysterious Talking Dice.”

Chad Jeffers stepped in and took in the room, its things and people and Bauhaus, still poking about in his
Chorus Line
logo muzzle.

I shut the stereo off.

Chad Jeffers turned to Dennis Savage. “I guess I'm supposed to say that this isn't going to be easy, or something like that. But it's going to be very easy. I should have done this a long time ago.”

Dennis Savage was still holding the door open, his body rigid but his face a blank.

Chad Jeffers nodded at the door. “Maybe you'd better close that,” he said. Dennis Savage looked at him as if thinking it over, shut the door, and slowly turned back to Chad Jeffers.

“You get used to certain things,” said Chad Jeffers. “You expect a way of living from other people and from yourself. It feels right. So when other people don't agree with you, you think they're wrong. You just do. If they're strangers, they're just stupid or crazy. But if they're people you're close to, you resent them. It's complicated. I feel it better than I understand it. My brother Brian—you met him that time you spent Thanksgiving at my folks'. My older brother. I guess … you remember him. Because … anyway, we were very close when we were growing up. Those old-fashioned kid things like camping trips and … we did all that together. And he … well, he told me a lot of things. When I got into trouble at school, you know, or how to get around, like, with the girls, making those right moves. See, we had that. We sort of grew apart after college. Living in different parts of the world, and other things. Things that have nothing to do with … with like the fact that he's gay. But the gay part is … hard. You must
really
hate hearing that, I know.”

His voice was grinding a bit, as if he was trying to show us how rough it feels—not only to hear it but to have to say it.

“But it's the truth. It's not what people expect, and when you give them this instead, it's very hard to take. You try to like work around it, see if you can keep all the rest of it together. You say, Okay, the gay stuff can be a secret. And I know that some of you … I mean, some of your people … they play it that way, don't they? But Brian is a very football-player kind of guy. He doesn't believe in secrets. That's the way he is, and, I'll tell you, I've always looked up to that. I knew that whatever shit anybody was handing out, anywhere—our father, or at school,
anywhere
 … I could always count on Brian to clear it up for me.

“So of course he had to clear this gay thing up for me, too. That's Brian, see? He insisted that we talk about it, and that … that is the hard part. He said I ought to understand it, and look, I don't
want
to understand it. Why can't I just accept it? Brian says that with just anybody on the street I can accept it, but with my brother I have to understand it.”

He looked around at all of us.

“Well, let me tell you, it made a lot of trouble between us, and it got mixed up with everything else there can be in your family, all those feelings that you want to accept without understanding them. I always get afraid that if I understand one thing, I'm going to get mixed up in all of it. That's why I say it's complicated. No one wants to confront all that … feeling in there. Nobody else has to, why should you? Like which kid got the better deal. It's not good to go into that, not good for anyone. My whole family knows that I was the favorite child—”

“Me, too,” said Little Kiwi.

“—but that doesn't mean that Brian and I should sit down with our parents and talk it over, does it? It's not what people expect. It's just not what they expect. And Brian's always pounding at me about his lifestyle, which is none of my business. And other people do it, too—suddenly this … this event is happening to the rest of us. I can accept it, I know I can. And you're probably saying, Big deal, who cares what he can accept? I'm just telling you this, so you'll know. You'll know that one thing drags in another. All hard things. Because … because like how come the guy who took me on fishing trips and showed me how to smooth it out on dates and stand up to authority assholes and … yes, and play opera records for me and coach me for my chemistry exams which if I couldn't pass them I was going to get the ax from college … How come those guys can get so … different from me? I don't know what side I'm supposed to be on anymore. I told you saying this is easy. I've wanted to say it for years. But the feelings behind it are hard. It's not what I want, to have to know so much. And that's why I said…” Pausing, he gave a little shrug. “… Well, whatever it was I said last night. I apologize to all of you. I just didn't expect to have to relate to all those feelings at that party. I just wanted to go back to … to … before everything got complicated.”

There he halted, staring at Dennis Savage for the longest freeze-frame I've ever seen.

Then he said, “Can we shake hands?”

And they did, and Chad Jeffers shook hands with us, too, and Little Kiwi liked it so much he shook hands twice, and it turned out that Chad Jeffers had come to dinner after all, so that's what happened. We had a fine time. Little Kiwi enlivened dessert by putting on his complete magic show, and a few of the tricks almost worked. Chad Jeffers hoped to encourage the budding performer by asking for revelatory explanations, but La Dolce Pita only smiled—for, as he himself has said, if you talk about the secrets, they lose their secret qualities.

I believe this was the true reunion party, most literally a reunion, a rejoining of splintered interests. And I believe that Dennis Savage and Chad Jeffers felt their bond more keenly this night than ever they had in their rash, free youth at college, because they knew better now what their bond was made of. You can grow up and move on and forget almost everyone you knew, but the truest friends are those who teach us something that matters greatly, even something with hard feelings in it: and those friends stay essential to us for life, not only part of our past but of our future as well. Our teachers are always with us.

So I was not surprised to detect a trace of moisture in Dennis Savage's eyes when Chad Jeffers got on his overcoat and said good-bye. He gave Dennis Savage a whack on the shoulder and told him to take good care, and when he was halfway through the door he stopped and turned back and nodded.

Then he crinkled and said, “So long, Denny.”

Away he went: and Dennis Savage's college days were over.

“Is that the name?” asked Little Kiwi once the door closed. “That only Chad Jeffers called you?”

“Did you really help him with his chemistry?” I put in. “You who don't even know how much lime to cut into a Perrier?”

Dennis Savage sighed heavily. “He's out the door but two seconds and the fun begins. This is where you mock my most intimate and beautiful memories, isn't it? Humiliate my quaint paeans to boyhood. Expose secrets that I never entirely understood in the first place. Loot my pathetic treasury of recollections. Right? Am I right? Fine. Go right ahead. Won't you please be my guest?”

“Oh,” I said. “Not this time, Denny.”

I Read My Nephew Stories

Okay, what am I doing on a beach in Massachusetts?

Simple: my brother Ned ran away from home when he was fifteen.

I bet you didn't know I had a brother who ran away from home—also an aunt who committed suicide, a great-uncle who went to prison, and a cousin who dropped out and moved to India. I'm still trying to get the rights to our saga back from the O'Neill estate.

Anyway, Ned not only ran away from home but never came back, which had my younger brothers and me agog, but which my other older brother Jim called A Very Outstanding Event. Jim and Ned stayed in contact, and I would receive periodic, laconic reports. Now Ned was doing bits at Cinecittà, now he was a reporter for the Paris
Herald Tribune.
Presenting the news was Ned's forte, it seemed, for he stayed with it. He even did it on television.

Better, he came home to do it on American television. Better …
Huh.
It seemed unnaturally forgiving, like Samuel Beckett coming home to Dublin, licking his lips at the sight of the Martello Tower, and crying out, “Champion!” Jim and I met Ned for lunch one day at Clarke's; Ned was up for a transfer from New Orleans to New York. So many distances, voyages, in some people's lives. You notice this particularly if, like me, you stay in one place for entire epochs, enthusiastically resisting all opportunities to travel, even just to Brooklyn for dinner.