How's Your Romance?: Concluding the "Buddies" Cycle (12 page)

“It’s not as easy as—”

“You have a problem and you need to solve it. If you don’t, it will destroy you.”

“What if we can’t solve it, and why is the little dog staring at me with celery in his mouth?”

“If you can’t, you should part company, and the little dog is staring reproachfully because in the armchair you are safe from his shoelace rape.”

“Did you see what Jill did for Bobby last night?” said Cosgrove, coming out of the kitchen as he wiped his hands on a towel. He was referring to
NYPD Blue.
“What a babe, yet so loyal above all. She will do anything for a friend, even have sex with a nerd, which is what she did, though the nerd was kind of nice, actually.” Then he went back into the kitchen.

“And you think
I’m
crazy,” said Peter.

“Mind you, I’m not talking about compromise, because then neither of you will be happy. You’re going to have to talk it out honestly and calmly: which parts work, which parts don’t.”

Fleabiscuit bit down on his celery and started eating it. He’s the only canine I’ve known who likes crudités, but then Cosgrove did want a gay dog. When Fleabiscuit is cranky, Bette Midler’s “Do You Want To Dance?” soothes him, and he has been known to attend brunches with that did-everything-last-night hungover look so trendy in the 1970s.

“The relationship,” I continued, “must then emphasize the parts that work and utterly delete the parts that don’t. Or you’re going to have a big crash.”

Peter sadly watched Fleabiscuit crunching up the last of the celery. “I know you think this is about Lars Erich’s biting kiss that takes you out of day itself, or the way he towers over everyone. The physical, you think.” He shook his head. “It’s who he
is.
It’s the … person
inside
that build, and I can’t save myself from him, or negotiate a relationship as if it were a book contract. Oh, I can see you not liking what I’m—”

“I’m not anything, just talk!”

“Yes, in this crazy house with shoelaces and Jill and—”

“Paraphernalia!”
I cried. “Tell what it
is!
You’re not just fucking, you’re in
love!
That’s why it’s so impossible. Fucking’s always about
you
—what you want, how you come, why you feel. But love’s always about the
other
guy—how he affects you and what he does for you and what he’ll do to you. No, you’re right, this is not about skin. But if he weren’t in that skin,
none of this
would
ever
have
happened!
How do you explain that?”

“The dog went away.”

Silence.

“I have begged him, I have socked him, I have slamfucked him while screaming at him for his sins.”

Silence.

“He just laughs. He says, ‘We’re going to whether you’re happy or not, so let us amuse ourselves, my Peter junge.’”

“Hungry love,” I said.

Fleabiscuit erupted out of the kitchen with his little water dish in his mouth, heading for the bedroom, with Cosgrove right behind.

“What’s that about?” cried Peter, almost desperately.

“He’s irritated,” said Cosgrove, carrying the dog—dish and all—back to the kitchen, “because I gave him zwieback with the wrong flavor of jelly. He goes on strike.”

Having gained the kitchen, Cosgrove added, “Everyone should realize that I wash my hands after carrying the puppy.”

Down in the dumps, Peter muttered, “That’s good to know.”

The buzzer sounded; Cosgrove got it. “It’s my new friend Nesto.”

“Is he gay, by the bye?” I asked.

“I never asked. Latin boys have a powerful sense of privacy.”

Nesto turned out to be about twenty and was much too spiffily dressed for our ham-and-egging cohort.

“Perfect,” said Peter. “Enter a spice boy in his high-school graduation suit while my life is falling apart.” Jumping up, he clasped Nesto’s hand with “I’m Peter, and please don’t be shocked at all the real life that is about to explode before your—”

“Nesto!” cried Cosgrove, running out with Fleabiscuit, who lightly yipped and frolicked. Broadly grinning, the two boys hugged; when Cosgrove turned back to us, his right hand gesturing proudly at Nesto, it suddenly struck me that I know very, very little of Cosgrove’s relationships outside the family. It struck me as odd, in fact.

Then the buzzer sounded again.

“Uh-oh,” said Peter. “Twenty miles of bad road.”

“Come and see what I’m making!” said Cosgrove, taking Nesto into the kitchen.

Lars Erich came in like Richard III breaking into “the winter of our discontent.” “Peter,” he said, pointing. “So you downclose the phone on me, yet it is not finished. You will see that now, Liebling.”

“Gosh, you look terrific,” I said. “As if you were getting bigger every day.”

“I give you a private show later, ja? First, I kill Peter.”

“I’ll be taking drink orders,” said Cosgrove, coming out with Nesto and Fleabiscuit. Nesto had one of Cosgrove’s pretzels. “There’s red wine, sparkly water, vodka—”

“Yet who is this lovely chap?” said Lars Erich, moving up to Nesto. “A young businessfellow?”

Cosgrove introduced them as Lars Erich ran his hands over Nesto, feeling his contours under the coat. “Distinguished,” Lars Erich called him. Nesto just smiled.

Then Lars Erich turned to Peter, his eyes a goblin’s. But all he said was “I hear Sondheim, yes? The gay Mozart.”

“It’s Cole Porter,” Cosgrove replied.

“I thought I was hearing lines of great wisdom on the impossibilities of love, the rich problems, the trickery of the self. I will to hear some of the great Sondheim lines.” He smiled at Cosgrove. “Tell some!”

Cosgrove obliged with a mangled strain of
Sunday in the Park with George
—“The soldiers wiped their snot on us!”—before heading back to the kitchen. Lars Erich, just a bit thrown, lost his momentum, and Peter jumped in to seize control.

“In Sondheim,” said Peter, “love is two opposing forces, like football.” His hands mimed the urgent tango of the playing field, moving now toward this goal, now toward that one. “But love is not a game, a contest. Love must be an alliance.” He was almost pleading, as he turned to Nesto for the outsider’s disinterested affidavit. “Am I right?”

Nesto was about to reply when Lars Erich cut in with “It is not correct to want an alliance of men. That is not serious love, when hormones and instincts make an excitement. It is beautiful to fight. Fighting is sex.”

Still trying to figure out where Peter got such an arrestingly expert take on Sondheim’s theatre, I said, “But not in my apartment. Maybe not anywhere.”

“Ja, I apologize for that, at least,” said Lars Erich, circling the room, circling Peter. “It is such disgrace. Why must I do this? Then I look at Peter, and all I wish … When I see him, I can only … I want…”

“… to hurt him?” I asked.

After a long while of the two of them staring at each other, Lars Erich nodded.

“But why?”

Lars Erich said nothing.

“Oh, Lord,” Peter muttered, seeing it coming, and then, indeed, Lars Erich charged at Peter, going around me and pushing Peter down—I mean, onto the floor—and getting on him to steal ferocious kisses from his mouth while Peter struggled and shouted. Lars Erich slapped Peter a few times, and though I tried to pull Lars Erich off, he was just too big for me. He was lashing Peter in German, dense with slang, and so run together that I couldn’t follow it all. It was not, I think, abusive. If anything, Lars Erich was berating himself.

He wound down rather quickly, panting and still on top of Peter, now stroking his hair and licking his face. Peter had gone limp. Nesto was still sitting with the pretzel. Cosgrove, at the kitchen entry, was shaking his head, as was Fleabiscuit.

Then Lars Erich got up and shook hands with all of us very formally as if not all that much had happened, a little set-to rather than a riot. Nesto handed him the pretzel, and Lars Erich left with it.

“It’s the drugs, you know,” said Peter, from the floor. “He’s been stacking like crazy. I keep telling him, don’t I?, about the hazards…”

“Drugs?” I asked, mystified. I’m always mystified when gay men get into pharmacopoeia. If you aren’t clearheaded, you’ll miss all the cute guys.

“Aren’t you going to get up?” Cosgrove asked Peter.

“I don’t deserve to get up.”

“What drugs do you mean?” I asked.

He waited a moment. “Steroids, of course. For the gym thing.”

I was stunned.

“No. No, no, wait,” I finally got out. “That intensely busy mind, that quoter of Hölderlin … is on
steroids?
I thought they were for those dreary huge guys in the competitions.”

“Lars Erich is huge now,” said Peter, very, very sadly and still on the floor. “Haven’t you noticed?”

“But he trains guide dogs. He tells captivating stories about his little brother hiding a puppy’s toys so that … and then he comforts his brother, who cries and cries in Lars Erich’s redemptive embrace. Where … where would a middle-class boy like Lars Erich even get access to steroids?”

“From me.”

We all let that sink in for a bit.

“But …
why?
” I insisted. “You don’t need those drugs. Stonewall has always been filled with the big pumped-up guys who never—”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Peter, sadder than ever.

“Would you kindly get up from the floor?”

“You don’t realize how competitive it is now. In your day, it was big, and that was simple. Now it’s big and tight, all chiseled, and you
can’t get that
without the hard stuff. Please
hear
me, will you?”

He sat up.

“You
don’t
understand about Lars Erich, the way his head gets into your head. I know that it used to be just looks and fucking when
you
were young, but times have—”

“How dare you?” I said, but mildly. “You think we didn’t have feelings then?”

“You had poppers then. Isn’t that why I ruined your dinner party and sit so humiliated with all this bod on me but I can’t even defend myself? Your system was better, because I’m in love now…” He was raining helpless tears. “Want a look at love? No one fell in love in your day and got his whole insides, yes, quite ripped out of him. There was only pot then, and everyone would giggle on a high. Now you see me crying like a woman. Now, isn’t that the final bitch?”

Very worried, Cosgrove came up to him, trying to get Peter to stand.

“Why don’t I have someone like your friend here?” Peter asked. He reached for Cosgrove, and Cosgrove backed away, but I steadied Cosgrove with a hand on his shoulder.

“Let him,” I said. “I need the scene.”

“One of these easygoing kids,” Peter went on, holding Cosgrove’s hand and looking up at him, “who does what you want.”

“He’s as easygoing as
Finnegans Wake,
” I replied. “Besides, you don’t want a kid. You want the whole nine yards of man, that stinging clarity of a dream coming true. And now you know why they say Be careful what you wish for.”

That’s when Dennis Savage joined us. He took in the room—lingering just the slightest bit upon Nesto—and said, “So where’s Ernst Stavro Blowjob?”

“Nesto,” said Cosgrove, “this doesn’t always happen around here.” Released, Cosgrove went into the bedroom, followed by a mildly growling Fleabiscuit.

“Why is Peter on the floor?” asked Dennis Savage, sitting on the couch and urbanely miming the smoking of a cigarette. “No, I’ll guess. Lars Erich went ballistic on muscle-drugs and threw Peter down and I
hope
Cosgrove is not letting the dinner overcook.”

The little chef came in with the paper-bag mask, which he put on Peter, saying, “He has to, for making a mess in my dinner.”

“Who’s the head of this family,” I asked Dennis Savage, “you or Carlo?”

“Both, but he isn’t here, so me.”

“Okay.
You
tell: now what?”

“Peter has to wear the punishment hat for two minutes. Somebody introduce me to this splendid young— Fleabiscuit,
no!
” (For the dog was under Nesto’s chair, his teeth a half-inch from a shoelace.) “Then we eat. Over coffee and a sweet, we will discuss possible solutions and arrive at the most practical one. Peter will then solve his romantic problem and we can all get back into life.” Turning to Nesto, he extended a hand, saying, “By the way, I’m the incredibly rich and successful Dennis Savage.”

*   *   *

A
FTER THAT, IT’S PERHAPS
anticlimactic to return to J.’s Thursday dinners, but we still have the third kind of love to consider. J. was more changed than ever, quiet and self-absorbed but at least not moody and suspicious. He actually brought Cosgrove a house present, an antique Pez dispenser with the head of Dracula.

With the hot days already upon us, it was salad night: tomato surprise built around a chicken-curry-walnut-apple medley, coleslaw, and Cheese Selection Platter Deluxe served with Carr’s wheat-meal biscuits, a J. favorite. There was a time when he could go through two boxes of them, neat, leading Dennis Savage to crab in on that Why am I the only sane one here? theme. It’s a fond nostalgia of mine: to recall when we were all young and silly and had nothing to worry about.

The conversation that Thursday was desultory, feebly trotting down unfamiliar paths because all our basic subjects had become taboo or at least awkward. That’s when you know a relationship has shot its bolt: real friends never run out of things to say. J. and Cosgrove even tried discussing fashion trends, a bizarre expansion for two men whose notion of couture is Open a drawer and wear what you see, if possible with inappropriate socks.

Then J. said, “Has anyone wondered why I left Dennis Savage?”

Cosgrove replied, “Some are wondering.”

“Now it can be told. It was almost entirely because he made me have a day job, while you got to sleep late and goof around. I wanted to show him how people would prize me.”

“I sort of have a job,” Cosgrove said. “I do the chores for two apartments. Dennis Savage pays me forty dollars a week.”

“You don’t have to go out if it’s wet. You don’t have to take orders from crazy people.”