Everybody Loves You (22 page)

“I don't want to be shocked any more tonight.”

“Well, now we truly see that some secrets are too much even for the secret man himself. But there's one thing for you to know about now, and that's what this Cosgrove here wants out of sex.”

“Then you can tell me what you want out of it.”

“That's
just
the kind of fucking thing you always have to do, huh?” he shouted, grabbing the front of my sweatshirt. “When do we hear about
your
secrets, you son of a bitch?” He pushed me back so hard I lost my balance and fell off the bench. “How about I pound you pretty good now, and you can figure out what that means, huh?” he growled.

“Didn't you get enough of that already,” I said, getting up, “with Cosgrove?”

With a coarse shout, he jumped up and shoved me against the deck railing, looming over me as he forced my head back. His breathing sounded like an avalanche. I tried to ease him off me, but he wouldn't yield. Carlo has a violent streak, I know, but he only gets into fights when he has been attacked.

Physically, I mean.

We were locked there for quite some time, not moving, silent, just looking at each other, as his hostility—not his anger—died away. Finally he let go of me, stepped back, nodded his head once, twice, put his hand on my back, gently pressed me over to the bench, and sat me down. He sat next to me, looking away, back toward the house. I was shaking, I have to report, but that strange nameless feeling slipped alongside us, both of us, and put an arm around my shoulder.

“I'll feel like heck about this tomorrow,” he said. “But right now I'm not going to apologize. You have been a good friend and all, and I shouldn't have done that. Except you … you truly have to stop doing this.”

Now he looked at me.

“Yes, you have to. You go around and watch everyone and you know too much and it gets on everyone's nerves. Because no one gets to watch you. You don't want anyone knowing about you. So you and me, we're very much alike in that, see? Very much alike.”

He was silent for a while.

Then he said, “You remember when I was hustling for Dave Direnzi, way back a time there? You and Dennis Savage got all on my case how I was taking a chance with doom and like that, but my unemployment ran out and I needed the money. And most of the guys I did the calls with, they didn't want much from me. Anyway, you gave me some advice, at least, just in case. Remember?”

I didn't do anything in response. I wasn't remembering; I was looking forward.

“This was it: If the door opens, and there's two of them, get careful. If there's three of them, get worried. And if there's three of them and they're grinning, run like hell. You remember that?”

I remembered.

“Okay, I went to this one gig, and just as the door opens this flashpop goes off right in my face and there's this old guy with a camera. And behind him is this huge black muscle dude, not a stitch on his build. And in the corner there I see a young guy in a sailor suit. And everyone's grinning.”

He laughed quietly.

“So what did I do, huh?”

He laughed again, a warm rolling sound.

“I ran like hell.”

That feeling put an arm around my shoulder again, and now so did Carlo.

“I'm ready to apologize for what happened before,” he said—but just then Cosgrove came out of the house, holding a blanket around himself. He stood on the porch, watching us, then approached.

“He calls me Mr. Smith,” said Carlo.

Without a word, Cosgrove folded himself into Carlo's lap and Carlo held him.

“This young boy is one of the ones who wants to be taken care of. Maybe it's time for me to try some of that. I've been playing around for so long. Now I'm forty, and maybe I should get serious about this. Sometimes when we're all together, I believe I am thinking of something. Something real important. I'm never sure what it's about.”

So Carlo feels it, too.

“Maybe this is what it's about, here.” Carlo stroked Cosgrove's hair and the two of them turned to me.

“See, it's us watching you now,” said Carlo.

In the pool lights their eyes blazed like the fierce embers of a fire that won't go out no matter what you do to it. They had become, Carlo turning from boy to man, Cosgrove from orphan to son. One day it's love; and so the story ends.

“He's not afraid,” said Carlo.

Cosgrove took one of Carlo's hands and opened it up.

“He has nothing to be afraid about,” said Carlo.

Cosgrove placed his little hand inside Carlo's great paw and folded it around his own.

“He's not the one around here who's afraid of me,” said Carlo, pulling the boy close so the two of them could tremble together and feel that keen, brash moment at the start of love when the heart speeds.

I left them then.

Because of course Carlo is right: Cosgrove isn't the one around here who's afraid of him.

I am.

The Dinner Party

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a gay man in possession of a fortune must be in want of an oceanfront house in The Pines. And I
told
Colin: east of the co-ops is the chic quartier. But no. No, he found what he wanted so far west that when we're still, we can hear people coughing in Hoboken. But we are seldom still this weekend, for the usual Pines reasons—a lot of guests, a lot of dropping in, a big dinner planned, and there has been another death. Greg was diagnosed, went right home, and decided to choose in a no-choice situation. Heroin overdose.

Are you with me so far?

Greg's family hadn't known he was gay, I was told—but isn't this just another of those euphemistic concepts designed to protect straights from seeing the world too well? A markedly unwise and unobservant family might honestly mistake your sexuality even into your late teens. But Greg was twenty-nine or thirty and uncloseted. He never spoke of his life to his parents or siblings, apparently—but surely by this time they must have Known. They just didn't Speak of It.

This left them with little to say at the funeral, when they met the people of Greg's life. Straight sons are survived by a wife and kids, not by a porn star, an opera impresario, an ad man, and an airline pilot.

Guillermo, Luke, Stephen, and Cliff.

They had all (or mostly) been boyfriends—Stephen and Greg, Cliff and Guillermo, Guillermo and Luke. Eventually the five of them passed into a second honeymoon of casually devoted friendship, a state unique to gay—penetration without sex, you might say, penetration of the feelings. They were always together, dancing, planning a surprise party, dining at the Tiffany Coffee Shop after the gym, breezing into The Pines atop a ferry—Stephen and Cliff waving, Luke grinning, Guillermo solemnly charismatic, Greg drumming restlessly on the boat's wooden ribbing. It was not my circle, particularly, but I went to college with Luke and was an old Eagle buddy of Cliff's. A fellow traveler, they called this, back when the subversives were political rather than sexual.

In a dream, my fourth-grade class, at a carnival, beckons me to come along, flourishing cotton candy and Pokerino prizes. I hang back; someone behind me needs help. I turn: and everyone I have known for the last fifteen years is lying in a heap of corpses. We are all children in this dream.

A porn star and an opera impresario, you say? An ad man and an airline pilot? And Greg himself was a professional sweetheart, a “houseboy.” It's a questionable coterie, no? What is a striped-tie-and-vest ad exec doing in the company of a man whose work clothes are chest hair? What did the opera maven and the pilot talk about? Ah, but was not this very sophistication of identities one of Stonewall's revolutions? Have we not made the received bourgeois discretions of status and culture irrelevant? Sex outranks status. Friendship purifies culture.

And these men were good at what they did. Greg took his liaisons so seriously that he held his employers' hands as they strolled the boardwalk. He wasn't, he felt, hired for ecstasy, but for affection. Guillermo may have been the best-known porno-thespian of the late 1970s, strenuously pacific, opulently brooding, known to the many under a Colt code name I daren't reveal because he'd get mad and brood at me. Luke rose to dominate the American opera scene, most adept at casting. Once I challenged him to cite ideal casts for the three most obscure operas I could think of, Casella's
La Donna Serpente,
Delibes's
Jean de Nivelle,
and Auber's
Gustave III.
Luke not only did it, he cast
Gustav
entirely with artists of the Prague National Theatre, for a
bonne bouche
of expertise. Then I hit him with a fourth challenge, describing an unperformable grand opera by D'Indy that doesn't exist.

Luke knew it didn't. His eyes narrowed as he leaned in, the scent of the kill strong in the room. “No one living can sing those roles,” he said, “so I'll cast from the Golden Age.” Out came Melba, Ponselle, Nourrit, the de Reszkes—a night, in all, of some twenty stars. I was about to crow, “You left out the Page”—those old grand operas always sport a trouser part for a page—when he said, “I'll have to cut the Page's scene. Even Marietta Alboni couldn't get through that.”

Because they were a circle, a set quintet, I gave them nicknames. Guillermo was El Macho Muchacho. Greg was The Boy. Stephen was Eyes—his were green, and a man once told him, “I'd love to take a dip in your eyes.” Luke was Il Divo. I could never reckon one for Cliff, but he came up with one for me: The Human Typewriter, because he knew the source material for some of my stories and was amused that I plunked things and people in from anywhere. He said everything I see and hear goes right to the typesetter.

It's time he went, anyway. I've been saving him up, because I'm a little apprehensive of him, of his slashing moral clarity, I guess, or the questioning fervor of his conversation—brunch with Cliff is as exhausting as the Royal Shakespeare
Nicholas Nickleby.
Or perhaps it's just the way he slams out when he doesn't like what he hears.

Cliff was not only good but downright radiant at what he did—flight, friendship, education. He flew planes, befriended gay men, and educated the ones he loved. He was a gay success story, a Washington Stater who came east and made the scene in all its appetite, intellect, style. His thrift-shop special, screw-you attire was a fashion defeating Fashion. His rash wisdom was mission irresistible. The first time he and I talked at length, I told him I didn't like the word “homophobe” because the stem had been incorrectly applied in the word's invention. “Homo,” from
homos,
denotes “same.” A homophobe hates what he is. Thus, a homophobic lawyer would hate not gays but lawyers.

Cliff and I were sitting, this particular night, on a couch at a party, his thigh pressing mine, his arm around my shoulder. He had this way of … what? Militantly relating.

“You will use this word,” he told me, “because it's our word. So we defy them, see?”

“Them?” I asked.

“Breeders.”

He's the only man I've known who used the word consistently.

“Writers are useful,” he said. “Publicizing the lingo, doing it along.”

“I don't want to be useful,” I said, “except to myself.”

Wryly pensive, he replied, “In revolutionary times, everyone contributes. Everyone inside.”

“Inside what?”

He smiled, but his eyes were blazing. “Give your hand here, ace,” he said.

“Why?”

He took it, clapping it between his two, and he laughed, watching me, as he pulled it around into a stalwart shake.

“I want to be your friend,” he said. “Inside the ghetto.”

This was 1976, the age of High Attitude, and I had never met anyone who behaved like this. Under the abrasive gambado, Cliff was ruminative, intellectual, a historicist. Others said, first thing, “How are you?” Cliff said, “What have you done this year?” He would look at you as if reading the caption under your likeness in some chronicle. “One day,” he constantly predicted, “they'll write about all this.”

He saw
long.
He lived as if inhabiting an era, a locale, an ideology. A little smoother, gentler, he would have been a star; he acted as if a man with energy and dedications shouldn't be handsome, as if perceptions made hot unnecessary.

It was shocking, then, to wander down a hallway at the Everard baths and realize that the Swedish lifeguard who just stalked past you had, three brunches ago, discussed
The Soft Machine, Intolerance,
and antihumanist tendencies on the
New York Times'
editorial page. It was Cliff, of course. His head was so intense that he looked different silent and undressed. He was better than handsome or sexy: he was exciting. I accepted his not saying hello; one didn't observe punctilio in a bathhouse. But then Cliff sidled up behind me, to point out an absorbing hunk often seen in the Eagle but never elsewhere.

“Off his turf,” Cliff murmured. “Uncertain, disconnected. What mores obtain here? Is he supposed to have sex? Is he not supposed to have sex?”

Indeed, the Eagle avatar did look confused.

And Cliff, who is simply not afraid of anything, called out, “Hey, buddy!” And he said, “This is where,” and the Eagle guy went into Cliff's room and Cliff had him shouting for joy, and a small crowd pulled up to know more about this, and the Eagle guy came out literally staggering, goofy with pleasure. Then Cliff stood in his doorway and said, “Big cock, slow fuck, deep intention.” He laughed at the way everyone stared at him. “It's slick,” he said, I swear to you.

So he was a star, in the end. But primarily he was a comrade, tending his relationships, heartening his mates with his copious, impatient affections, holding them when they ached and congratulating them when they prospered, lending them money and giving them holiday dinners and musing fondly on their capers. He kept them warm. One flaw: he was not always gentle enough; but he could only be gentle with the wounded. He complimented his friends by treating them like soldiers, barking when they broke formation. “Solidarity,” he would urge, even before there was a Poland.