How's Your Romance?: Concluding the "Buddies" Cycle (16 page)

“Evan pays for it,” I said. “His money has no content. No myth. The
land
gives a guy content, makes him complete. Yes. So Evan found completion with Slim.”

“I always said he was a puffcake,” said Dennis Savage.

“A ‘puffcake’?” Cosgrove echoed, feeling the new word as a tempting little rebus.

“A scatterbrain.”

Fleabiscuit, who had been on a play date with the corgi in 5L, was now brought back to us. Apparently he had been up to some serious frolicking, for he scarcely got onto the couch next to Cosgrove before dwindling into deep nap.

“So who’s going?” I said.

Dennis Savage immediately signed on, but Carlo said he’d wait to hear it as dish and Cosgrove worried it for a bit. “Would there be legendary farm recipes for me to learn?” he wondered.

“I know about the food,” said Carlo. “Let’s tuck into macaroni and cheese olé.”

“What’s that?”

“Macaroni without the cheese, because it’s been another hard month. That’s all a farm is, I recall, eight hard ways from Sunday for the rest of your life. Unless you light out for a place where they like you.”

After Dennis Savage returned to the kitchen to finish with his freeze-boxes and take them upstairs to his place, Carlo said, “It’s fine seeing young Cosgrove getting along so well with Dennis Savage. Time was, he’d come in and Cosgrove’d spray him with the mustard squeezo thing.”

“Couldn’t that have been an accident?” said Cosgrove, blushing.

“Not twenty-three times. Bud, what do you make of this invitation from your buddy out of the blue like so? Think it means something?”

I was rummaging through some notes in preparation for the evening writing session, and it took me a bit to switch from one concentration to the other. “Means something … No. Or maybe. Evan’s a lifestyle snob, so perhaps he wants to show off the … purity, I guess … of the country. As opposed to us city sybarites with our nugatory little pastimes.”

“‘Nugatory’?” said Cosgrove.

“Useless.”

“‘Nugatory,’” he repeated, saving this one, too, for later.

Carlo absently put his arm around Cosgrove’s shoulder. “It’s nice to know friends from so far back,” he said.

“It’s fun revisiting my innocence, I guess. The trouble with Evan is, he’s so virtuous about his virtue. There’s something unnatural about it. It’s too aggressive to be genuine.”

“I’m bored with genuine,” said Cosgrove; and Carlo nodded. “What I like’s a good act,” Carlo said, “like some guy practices tightening his eyes down to slits, checks it in the mirror. Yeah, you’d date that guy. You recall Jim Krokis, pumped-up darkhair, big on the scene some years back?”

“One of Dennis Savage’s tricks,” I noted.

“Ever hear of Jim’s Latin-guy act?”

I shook my head.

“Well, Jim’s no Latin guy,
but.
If he says he is, you could believe it. ’Cause he’s dark and … something. And our Jim here falls in the B group, but he has such taste as would please him to go with the handsomest guys. So there’s cruising tension. But Jim is smart and artistic, you might say. And he goes out nights as a Latin guy who can barely speak English.”

“Why?” Cosgrove asked.

Carlo shrugged. “It’s hotter.”

“Why is it hotter?”

Carlo thought briefly; no explanation. “It just is,” he said. “So when Jim likes a guy, he turns into Tomás. Puts on the straight foreign guy’s dignity and shyness. See how well he thought it over? And he chooses his words to sound like they come from someplace gay guys haven’t been to yet. You know, like, ‘You is Ryan? You sure is nice. Ryan like Tomás?’ He lowers his voice as if the whole bar is listening to them on personal-issue walkie-talkies. He’s shy and Latin, see? Catholic, guilty. ‘You like mambo, Ryan? You like Tomás mambo you
por completo
for a secret?’”

I asked, “What if he was talking to someone who really was Hispanic?”

“Jim knew Spanish from school, so he’s ready. Says his accent’s from Canada.”

“Someone I know is Hispanic,” said Cosgrove. “But he doesn’t think he’s hotter just because.”

“It’s only hotter if you have to work for it. We don’t believe in the hot we were born to. And who knows if Jim’s score improved after all? Maybe some guys played along and laughed at him underneath. But he did say that fuck-talk was hotter his way. At that point of no return, mouth to mouth as he pumps away big-time? ‘Oh, Ryan, sure be brothers now with mambo, sí, Ryan? Sí, mambo? Sí, Tomás?’ He’s going on like that, and some of his partners would shoot just hearing it.”

“But why was that hot?” Cosgrove asked.

“Because he loved them so.”

After a silence, I said, laughing, “What does that
mean,
Carlo?”

He looked at me for a bit, then lightly brushed Cosgrove’s hair again. “Okay, chief,” he said. “You going down on the farm, or what?”

“I
shall
go,” Cosgrove replied, “though I fear that Evan is a nugatory puffcake.”

“Yeah, I figured you’d have something like that for us.”

*   *   *

D
ENNIS
S
AVAGE RENTED A
car, and I rode map, though Evan’s directions had less to do with towns and turnpikes than with “Go fifteen minutes after the red barn with the green door to an unmarked dirt road.”

“When can we have a rest stop?” Cosgrove asked.

“A rest stop?” said Dennis Savage. “We haven’t crossed Fifth Avenue yet.”

Well, it took forever, and once we had passed New Jersey and entered Pennsylvania I had to put up with teasing from Dennis Savage, who kept asking if various ghoulish creatures were relatives of mine.

“I’m not from this part of the state,” I said, “you quaint little … Wasn’t that our turn just now? At Bigelow’s Egg and Scrapple House?”

Dennis Savage slowed and made a U-turn, saying, “Do you suppose being hidden away like this is part of Evan’s identification? We have to seek him out like a genie in the forest.”

But we finally got there, pulling up a long drive to a big clearing behind the main house, where a bunch of guys were working on what appeared to be a stalled tractor. Animals were everywhere, including those chickens we liberals buy our eggs in support of, freely ranging all about us.

“It
is
a farm,” said Cosgrove in wonder, staring out the car window. “There may be a tire swing in the hay mow.”

One of the tractor guys detached himself to walk toward us with a tiny businesslike smile. He was in overalls and a flannel shirt, suitable for the October chill. The others paid us no heed.

“That’s Evan,” I said.

We got out, and I handled the intros.

“We’ve been waiting for you for a long time,” said Evan; but we weren’t all that late.

Then Slim came out of the farmhouse. I’m not going to describe him, boys and girls; you’ve all seen a Slim or two. He moved up behind Evan, put his left hand on Evan’s shoulder, and shook his right hand with ours, just like that. Look at us: the gay farmers. Love our land and we’ll love you.

“Slim’ll take you upstairs and then we can show you around,” said Evan.

We slipped in a rest stop and then did the tour. It was a farm, all right, with a few surprises. A rescued burro had a stall of his own in the barn with the horses and cows, and an old floor-model Victrola stood next to the stall.

“Put on a record and see,” Slim suggested.

Cosgrove slipped on a disc, wound up the machine, and set the needle down. Some old dance band started whacking away on Rodgers and Hart’s “My Man Is On the Make,” and the burro’s ears shot straight up.

“What’s his name?” Cosgrove asked.

“Bix,” said Evan, making one of those mock-resigned gestures at his partner: he insisted, so I humored him. The secret of staying together is not compromise but giving in.

“Could I pet him?” Cosgrove asked.

“I don’t want you in a pen with a donkey,” I said.

“What are you, a parent?”

“No, a crossing guard.”

Slim chuckled as he led us out of the barn and along various byways. At one point, he went off to oversee the repairs on the whatever it was in the driveway and Evan took over. It was Slim’s style simply to point out things; Evan extolled. Everything was wonderful on the land. It was drug-free, smoke-free, sin-free. More than once, Evan squeezed my arm and told me how happy he was to share with me the sights of his marvelous life.

“I need you to understand,” he said, pausing as if to make this moment as awkward and bewildering as possible.

Dennis Savage got me out of it by asking about crop rotation and other agricultural devotions, and we finally swung around back to the house and into a huge cyclone cellar sort of place, finished as a rec room with pool table, jukebox, and, way in the corner, a full-scale puppet theatre with antique homemade marionettes hanging on a display rack nearby. The characters were somewhat oddly chosen, presumably by one of Slim’s ancestors and for the production of a work of some personal relevance. There was a lumberjack. There was a guy in black with a turned-around collar who I assumed was a cleric, unless it was supposed to be David Belasco. And there was a fairy princess. Cosgove immediately grabbed the two males and started up an act.

“We were very poor when I grew up,” said the lumberjack. Both puppets then turned to look at Dennis Savage.

Thus cued, Dennis Savage asked, “How poor were you?”

“So poor the mice had to order out.”

Everyone laughed except Evan, who went on to tell of the rollicking yet intimate gatherings the basement routinely hosted.

“There is a holiness to friendships we maintain over the course of life,” said Evan.

Exasperated, I asked him, “Were you like this in high school?”

“Come quickly, everyone!” cried the fairy princess. “They just shot a dog in the street!”

Dennis Savage again played straight man. “Was the dog mad, Fairy Princess?”

“Well, he wasn’t very happy about it.”

After extracting Cosgrove from his comedy, we went to our rooms to dish and complain.

“Slim’s a picture, all right,” said Dennis Savage. “Even after all this time. But Evan’s such a … I think ‘stick-in-the-mud’ does nicely here.”

“Why don’t
we
have a puppet theatre?” asked Cosgrove while sorting through the CDs in his carrying case. “I could put on shows.”

“Why don’t you start a catering service for gays who give dinner parties but don’t want to cook and clean?” said Dennis Savage. He seemed confident of the notion, as if he’d been thinking it over for a while. “Carlo could bartend, and you could run the kitchen, cook the meal, and take home a check.”

It was such a good idea, after all of Cosgrove and J.’s crazy schemes to make money, that Cosgrove got engrossed in the concept and didn’t say anything at first.

A knock at the door, and Slim came in. He made the hostly gestures, and Cosgrove bubbled over with a consideration of the “lifechoice resources” of rural life. Or something like that. I kept thinking back to Evan’s tale of the night he and Slim met, of queens getting Slim stripped for an exhibition as if at one of Tiberius’ orgies in his notorious retirement on Capri, of how Evan saved him for a private exhibition and a lifetime of clean, manly devotion—so much more admirable than our sordid urban carnival. As Evan never tired of telling me.

“The main thing,” Cosgrove was saying, “is that Cosgrove may soon have his own cooking show on cable. Each week, I prepare a dinner for a gourmet guest, and then my co-host, Nesto, has sex with the guest. What do you think, Slim?”

Slim sat on the edge of one of the beds with an expectant look, and after two beats Dennis Savage accommodatingly spirited Cosgrove out of the room. I sat opposite Slim.

We were just two now, and Slim nodded. Then he began. “I’ve heard cuckoo things about New York cable television,” he said. “So they really have sex on it?”

“They show porn clips. Cosgrove’s cooking show is rather ahead of the curve.”

He nodded. “But there are many pleasures available in a place like New York. Right? They say that men can find quite what they want.”

“Have you ever seen New York?”

“I’d like to, but there’s always something that needs tending to around here. I wish I had someone to talk to about it. I heard there’s a place like a hotel where men walk down halls with just a towel over their shoulder, and they haven’t a care in the world as they go into a quiet bedroom for two.”

Pause.

“Is there such a place?” he asked. “In fact?”

Pause.

“I heard that one man can stand behind another, and slowly run his hands over the other man’s skin, feeling sure of each part before he moves on to the rest. You have your forearms and fingers to touch. The upper torso is next, isn’t it? You can take your time, they say. He won’t run away. He has a bottom like a peach, and when you part the globes to gaze upon the eternal ring, you sample the tightness with a slow, circulating tug. He says, ‘To fuck me?’ and you answer, ‘Why not?’ It’s easier if they take happiness pills.”

If I had a line here, I didn’t utter it.

“I also heard about a place where men sit around a large poker table on stools, completely stripped. One man is under the table, giving a blowjob to one of the players. The others have to guess who it is by how dim he gets in the card playing. Have you played cards that way?”

I just looked at him.

“Businessmen travel to New York for the purpose of ordering Brazilian cocktails which make them woozy and open to suggestion. And when a football team visits, it is likely that two of the teammates shower together, get all soaped up, then take it to a lie-down. The big guy does the honors. Then the trainer bursts in, and do they look embarrassed. They say they were just wrestling, to keep in shape.”

More pause.

“We don’t get a lot of news out here,” Slim then announced, as if he had been no more than discoursing on local peasant folkways rather than giving me his confession. And “It’s getting late,” he added. “The friends are coming over.”

“The friends?” I asked.

“The Enclave. Yeah, that’s … It’s how they like to see themselves. As if they had something special to protect in this part of the world.”