Everybody Loves You (30 page)

Dennis Savage was patiently floating along with Virgil's lecture, putting in his oar at the odd moment. I sometimes think that he gets along so well with Virgil because he doesn't have to work as hard with him as with our more intellectual friends. Like Carlo, Virgil needn't be constantly entertained or amazed; he brings his own theatre with him. I was scribbling away in the aisle seat as the merry partners plotted their sightseeing campaigns, and so the time passed, broken by the dinner break, the movie show (
The Untouchables
), and the continued flattery of the Scots steward. We had taken a late-night flight, and long before the film was over, most of the passengers were asleep, some stretching across three seats, empty in the calm of off-season. I can't sleep on planes, but Dennis Savage made some fitful stabs at a doze, and Virgil, depleted by excitement, went out like Samuel Pepys's candle. I had put my notebook down to do some thinking, and the steward, passing, paused to look upon us and smile.

I smiled back.

“Can I gaet ye anythin', ser?” he asked.

“Another of those little bottles of white wine,” I replied, “would do me nicely.”

“Wus it the dry German ur the French?” he said, admiring Virgil.

“The German.”

“Yur brother is fast asleep, I sae,” the steward noted, his voice lowered. “It's a peaceful picture.”

“Wait till he hits London. It'll be about as peaceful as the Blitz.”

“I'd be glad to know him then,” said the steward, and I half expected him to slip me his phone number to give to Virgil. But he went off to the galley, and Dennis Savage, his eyes still closed, snorted.

“Do you believe that?” I whispered.

“‘Your brother,' huh? Your lover. Your project. Your hustler … What do they call hustlers in England?”

“Rent-boys.”

“Your rent-boy.” He opened his eyes and looked over at Virgil, deep in dreams. Looked, I dare say, for quite some time. As the steward came down the aisle with my wine, Dennis Savage closed his eyes again, murmuring, “Tell him it only works in bright red corduroy pants.”

*   *   *

Upon arrival we took a cab to the hotel and moved in. I conquer jet lag with extra infusions of Shaklee Vita-Lea multiples and an iron will. Besides, I had the rest of my theatre tickets to buy. But Dennis Savage proposed a nap.

“I'm tired,” he told us. “I'm done in. I'm dead or dying.”

“How can you be tired?” Virgil asked. “London is outside.”

“How can I be tired? How about an eight-hour plane trip, not to mention getting out to the airport and hanging around waiting for our flight?”

“But all you did was sit there. You didn't do pushups in the aisle or anything.”

Dennis Savage was already pulling down the bedclothes.

“Well,
I'm
going to see London,” said Virgil; and away we went. We walked down prim little Gower Street to the Shaftesbury Theatre, where I had to pick up the
Follies
tickets I had ordered by phone. Here the southwestern tip of Bloomsbury opens up on a more metropolitan London. Here, suddenly, were men in business suits, scorning overcoats despite the nippy weather, and the unique black taxicabs and the red double-decker buses. The streets grew broader, the buildings soared, the town began to clatter, dashing and seemly as it is. And Virgil stood stock-still and took it all in.

“Are you going to be okay?” I asked him. “You won't get lost, will you?”

“Are you kidding?” he said, brandishing his nineteen maps at me.

I might have said something about … well, I don't know. When are you coming back? Will we see you for dinner? But he is a man now and needs no looking after. Just as I was about to enter the Shaftesbury Theatre, I turned back—oh, just in case, you know—and saw Virgil authoritatively pointing a passerby off toward Oxford Street. Apparently the man had asked him for directions to somewhere.

Apparently Virgil, now, could give them.

Well, I proceeded from the
Follies
box office to the Cambridge Theatre (for Lulu in
Peter Pan
), just reopening in a new coat of white paint after three years in the dark. The Cambridge is my favorite London theatre because the unsuspecting can never find it. Most London playhouses are named for where they are: the Piccadilly, the Aldwych, the Strand, the Savoy, the Haymarket. The Cambridge is named for where it isn't: Cambridge Circus. The Palace, where
Les Misérables
is playing, is in Cambridge Circus. The Cambridge itself is two blocks away in Seven Dials, a crossroads of seven streets. This reminds us that things are not invariably sensible or fair. We need to be reminded, especially as we near our forties.

I went on gathering tickets into the late afternoon. This is always a choice time for me, as my trip takes on its shape and color. This tour took in the World War II musical
Girlfriends,
the drag artiste Dame Edna Everage in her one-man show,
Back With a Vengeance!, King Lear
and
Antony and Cleopatra
at the National Theatre, the new Simon Gray play
Melon,
with Alan Bates. Thus a world opens up in a week—history, parody, wit, poetry. Of course, just being in London opens up a New Yorker's perspective—somewhat, I think, as age enlightens youth. One cannot help but learn here, in the very shadow of the history of Western democratic civilization; and the intelligence and politeness of the people is quite a lesson after the lawless rages of New York. London does not teem with madmen on a spree, with desperadoes hungry for an order of mugging to go, with crowds of the homeless, tossed into the gutter as if they were literally human garbage. Nor does London challenge you with bizarre, unprovoked assaults from waiters, bank clerks, and such, as New York insistently does.

All this is London. But there is something more, and very important: the people you run into are not only courteous and sensible but
pleasant.
Dealing with them even in the most impersonal and formal capacity gives one a lift, adds a sweet breeze to a warm day. Shocked, a New Yorker finds himself easing up his defensive postures and enjoying his encounters with strangers.

It's a high. It's like dropping ten years from your age or lucking into a dynamite apartment. The difference between New York and London is like the difference between being alone and being in love.

My ticket buying kept me so busy that I didn't have time to go back to the hotel. I had dinner out, took in
Peter Pan
with a house full of children, and, just beginning to fade from fatigue, went home and crashed. So I didn't catch up with Dennis Savage and Virgil till the next morning. Our typically English hotel offered the typical bed and breakfast, and when I entered the dining room I found Virgil conversing with a middle-aged Australian couple. He was telling them all about England in a wildly counterfeit English accent, something like David Frost trying to talk with Piccadilly Circus in his mouth. On the table close to Virgil stood a little metal copy of the red London Transport bus, the first of what was to prove a caravan's worth of souvenirs.

I joined this improbable trio, saying as little as possible: who wants to crab an act as fetching as Virgil's? Certainly the Australian couple were enjoying his company. The man sat on the quiet side, with a touch of wry, but his wife avidly pumped Virgil for sightseeing tips, and she virtually had to tear herself away from the table when her husband rose to go.

“I say,” Virgil observed in his voice of a thousand monocles as they left, “a rather posh couple, any-road, don't you think?”

“So what did you do yesterday?” I asked, working on my typically English runny eggs and raw bacon.

“Oh, I saw everything!” he cried, losing the accent. “I was on the tops of buses and I went into Westminster Abbey and across the river on some bridges! Guess what I found! Refrigerator magnets of London street signs! I got you one that says Covent Garden, because of opera.”

“Was Dennis Savage in on any of this?”

“That old fogy. He was still sleeping when I got back, so I went to a pub for a pint of the best and some—”

“You went to a pub? By yourself?”

“Sure, my dear chap, old bean. I found some really nice people, too. They have neat names here, you know … Simon, Rupert. And Gillian, of course. She's Rupert's bird. Topping sort. I wish we had food like that at home, like this stew you get inside a pie. Only they don't give you any napkins. Rupert and Gillian are going to invite us to tea.”

“Wait a minute. You just walked into a pub and … I can recall when you were afraid to go into a bar. Suddenly you're having tea with Rupert and Gillian?
How?
I want how.”

“Well, Gillian said how cute my little bus was, especially in a pub just like that, and then she thought I might be American, so I—”

“She
thought
you
might be
—”

“Well, I gave them a little of the old-boy pi-jaw, don't you know.”

“Listen, you—”

“All the comforts of home,” said Dennis Savage, sitting down. “Everybody's fighting.” He noticed the bus with a silent groan but pressed on. “What's in store for us today, skipper?” he asked Virgil.

“Knightsbridge, Harrod's, the Royal Albert Hall, and the Albert Memorial in the morning,” Virgil told him, pulling out a map as Hannibal might have shown his elephants their route to Rome. “Lunch. Then—”

“Are you along with us on this?” Dennis Savage asked me.

“No, I've got a matinee at the National, and the traditional Checking Out of the Record Stores.”

“There's a Tower Records,” Virgil informed me, “in Piccadilly Circus.”

“So I've noticed.”

“If Bud doesn't have to go,” Dennis Savage asked Virgil, “why do I?” But he paled at Virgil's look of bewildered disappointment. “I'm joking, of course.”

“We'd better get started,” said Virgil, grabbing his bus. “This is going to be a crowded day.”

“Don't forget we've got
Kiss Me, Kate
tonight,” I said.

“At the historic Old Vic,” Virgil rejoined.

“If I live that long,” Dennis Savage put in.

That last little exchange might be our trip in miniature, with our boy centering on the theatres, Virgil on tourism, and Dennis Savage on sheer survival. And I have an illustration to fix this paradigm in its visual truth, from that same afternoon, when I was walking back across Waterloo Bridge after my National
Antony and Cleopatra.
I had reached the traffic light at the Strand end of the bridge, and a man approaching me on the walkway called out, “Some bloke's tryin' to twig ya, mate.” He pointed at a bus. I turned just in time to see Virgil waving at me in a grin of innocent devilry in a window of the upper deck, Dennis Savage asleep next to him, his head a-loll against the glass.

*   *   *

“You aren't traveling hard enough,” I told Dennis Savage later in my hotel room. “You're sleeping your way through London.”

“I don't even know why I came.”

“Perhaps to shake up the settled routine of your existence with a little adventure.”

“This is too much adventure. He's had me in and out of every attraction between William the Conqueror's bedpan and Virginia Woolf's outhouse.” Sitting on the edge of my bed, he threw himself back to stare at the ceiling. “What am I supposed to be getting out of all this? St. Paul's was so thronged with tourists it was more like a D'Agostino's than a church. And Poet's Corner—what a thrill. A bunch of tombs and plaques. He was falling all over himself and he doesn't know who half the people were.”

“Why do you keep calling him He? Is it too much for you to ante up with his name?”

Slowly he pulled himself back up. “What is this,” he asked, “the Face the Music Hour? Whose side are you on?”

“Ours.”

“Oh, you very clever, feeling man. With a best friend like you, who needs mid-life crisis?”

“Is
that
what this is?”

“I'm tired,” he said. “I'm old. I've lost my looks. I made crucial mistakes. I'm not content. I didn't get to do what I wanted to do.”

“What did you want to do?”

He looked at me for a bit. “Carlo's had a nice life,” he observed. “Wouldn't you say?”

I didn't say.

“True, he has reduced all human existence to one essential act,” Dennis Savage admitted. “But within that limited compass, he did hit all the points, didn't he? Or even Big Steve. It's a simple way of life, I grant you—he doesn't go to brunches, or the theatre, or London. He goes to the gym. But he gets up when he likes, and he works when he likes, and he dresses as he likes. And when he walks down the street in summertime, lovely boys tremble with a terrible joy at the sight of him. Even now, and how old is he? Forty-five? And while we're on the subject—stop me if I advance overmuch upon our intimacy—why aren't
you
miserable by now, like most of us?”

“Maybe I did what I wanted to do.”

He gave me a shrug.

“What, no riposte?” I said. “You must really be down.”

“I really am.”

He got up.

“I really, really am.”

“Maybe a change in wardrobe would cheer you up. What do you look good in?”

“Winter.”

“Has it occurred to you that you'll only make things worse by going around in this … the stupor of doom? Why don't you fight back?”

“What is there to fight? What's there?”

“Inside you, I mean.”

“No.” He shook his head. “It's inside him. It isn't happening to me. It's happening to him. So let it happen.”

“You don't want to try outwitting it? Forestalling it?”

“Oh, please,” he said as he passed through the doorway. “You are what you are.”