How's Your Romance?: Concluding the "Buddies" Cycle (2 page)

J. duly arrived, as perfunctory as always in his greeting and conversation. He seemed like a relative, someone you see because you’re supposed to, not because you want to.

Is he
trying
to make it awkward? I thought, as he and Cosgrove ran through the latest indie movie hit, the way spring was being stalled by a cold front, and the supposed feud between Blur and Oasis. Distracted and aimlessly changing subjects, J. grew keen but once, when Cosgrove said he was looking forward to a Pines weekend and J. wanted to know who was inviting us out.

“Someone I know,” Cosgrove replied, as he fetched another of those little Perrier bottles for refills. “He has an excellent house on the ocean, and as he is quite the international gadabout he is often away and the place is empty for his friends’ use.”

“You never mentioned him before,” said J., with the tiniest suspicion of complaint.

“No?” said Cosgrove, attending to J.’s glass.

J. turned to me, hoping for information without having to ask for it: Have I a rival? Can I be replaced? There was a time, after all, when the only someone Cosgrove knew was J.

“Cosgrove’s become something of a socialite,” I said. “I expect to find a paparazzo or two hanging around outside the building any day now.”

“How’d you meet a rich guy?” J. asked Cosgrove.

“It was a bike accident in the Park. Oh, did you see my new GT Palomar? It has twenty-one speeds.”

“I saw it when I came in,” said J. flatly. That basket of fun.

“So we wouldn’t have to share my old Raleigh three-speed,” I said.

“It’s so glamorous at last,” said Cosgrove, crossing over to where the new bike leaned against the piano. “Though I’m never happy about leaving it alone with Bud’s junkmobile.” Cosgrove caressed the GT’s crossbar as Fleabiscuit came over and nuzzled the front wheel. “You know how territorial Raleighs are. Especially the three-speeds.”

This fanciful line of humor was, once on a time, J.’s stock-in-trade; now he simply ignored it.

“What bike accident?” he asked.

“Well, it’s because of all the speeds on the GT. I was crossing between the big fountain and the roller-skate place and I couldn’t decide whether third gear or eighteenth, so I wasn’t looking and I crashed into this guy in a beret. But he wasn’t hurt, and we got to talking, and he said I could use his Pines house sometime.”

“Just like that,” said J. sarcastically.

“No. During lunch.”

J. looked at me again. “Did this guy have sex with Cosgrove?”

“Did you?”

J. made an exasperated face. “What kind of household is this, when you do a bike accident and then have sex with the victim?”

“I didn’t have sex,” said Cosgrove quietly. “He was just being nice because he liked me.”

J. steamed over that in silence for a bit, then suddenly rose and apologetically put his arms around Cosgrove and held him. Breaking, J. said, “I’m just cranky because of my day job.”

“Why don’t we eat?” I suggested.

It was Potage Saint-Germain to start, which I must admit is Campbell’s split pea soup with crushed bacon and onion slivers on top; but it fools almost everyone.

Again, the conversation was fitful till I commented on how constantly gay life seems to fill with ever new friends. One drops some people along the way, true. But what was that dowdy piece of propaganda they used to print on the boxes of Girl Scout cookies my mother would order? Ah yes; and I quoted over the soup: “‘Make new friends and keep the old. One is silver and the other gold.’”

J. seized his moment. “
I
have a new friend, even if he’s no great millionaire with a Pines house and a beret.”

“Who could it be?” Cosgrove politely wondered.

“It’s my roommate, Vince. I didn’t believe we were going to be friends at first, because he’s so big and hairy, not to mention his whole right side is covered with body art and he smokes those disgusting cigars. But then he’s like this big dog crazy for attention. He’s always bringing the ladies over, as you might well guess, and I can tell by their breathing gasps and happy screams that they are glad to be with him. But they don’t come back, except for, like, Shona, who even says she doesn’t like him but just has to be fucked right and she can count on him. He complained to me about her but he dates her anyway. That’s how he says it—‘dating.’ He means just fucking, because he doesn’t take them out or anything. He tells me about these girls he meets and says, ‘I really want to date her.’ He doesn’t mean dinner and a movie. Just his dick and tattoos. He means well, though, I think. Vince.”

“What’s his last name?” Cosgrove asked.

“He’s Vince Choclo.”

“What kind of strange name is that?”

“Well, he
is
strange. Sometimes his mother calls, saying, ‘This is Mrs. Choclo,’ and all I want to tell is how he fucked a girl so completely last night that she drowned out
NYPD Blue.
I very almost said, ‘She was touched to the root, Mrs. Choclo.’”

Out came that torturously prepared rigatoni. J. failed to compliment the chef, though he scarfed up the pasta and was not shy about asking for seconds.

“Now this interesting kink,” J. went on. “Vince keeps a little wooden chest of Polaroids that he will always take of each of his dates, with their measurements penciled on the back. He measures them all up and down, including parts you didn’t expect, like their nipple size or even their honey box. That’s what he calls it. At night he likes to lie in bed nursing a bottle of beer and going over his Polaroids. He says their names out loud. You hear ‘Brenda’ ‘Candy.’ ‘Gina.’ It’s like humming. Sometimes he comes into my bedroom when I’m reading. He brings his chest of Polaroids to show me. Guess what he calls them?
‘Valentines’!
He picks them out and tells me what they were like. ‘Chicks,’ he says. He has many Polaroids of chicks. I told him he should have Polaroids of him and these chicks at the same time, especially when he’s fucking them and coming and his eyes go all crazy and his teeth would be seen. He said, ‘Who would take these pictures?’ And I told him I would.”

“I’m reading
Watership Down,
” said Cosgrove.

“What’s that about?” asked J.

“Rabbits.”

“How can a book be about rabbits?”

“Well, how can someone be Vince Choclo?”

“It happens. And when he comes in with his Polaroids, I manage to slide the bedcovers low, so he can see me in my skin, way way down. I know he is looking. He
sees
me, Cosgrove. So what are all his dates about? How come he’s sitting on my bed at night calling me ‘Sugar Boy’? Just how he walks around after a shower with his dick out tells that he wonders about me. I want to quit this day job and just keep house like you. I want the freedom of gay life, where a pretty boy gets his way. So I go out of the shower just as nude as Vince. He offered to towel me off once, but I said no. You don’t rush a guy like Vince. They get scared to know what they are. I’ll wait till he’s crazy about me—right now, he’s just curious. And guess what? I take money off his dresser and he doesn’t say anything.”

“Stealing is crummy,” I observed.

“It’s just little coins. Besides, I’m worth it. Don’t I bring joy into his life? He is fascinated to talk to me, I notice.”

“Does he know about us?” I asked.

“It is too soon for Vince to know about us.”

Cosgrove absorbed this, then said, “It’s apple-and-walnut salad for dessert.”

“Bring it on,” said J., expanding and patting his stomach like Falstaff. “In this mood I’m in now, I will love everything set before me.”

*   *   *

“H
E STEALS A GUY’S CHANGE
?” said Dennis Savage, when I told him a few minutes later, at his place. I always report in, partly to give Cosgrove privacy time with his former mentor and partly to learn if Dennis Savage could relate the present and somewhat reproachable J. to the boy who was once a pleasure to know.

“Did he ever steal from you?” I asked. “Maybe at the very beginning?”

He shook his head.

“Thing is,” I went on, “he actually seems manipulative now. Shrewdly calculating, even. He was so
impulsive
before. Can people so change their natures?”

“Is he hurt that I don’t want him back? Or does he perhaps enjoy his new freedom?”

“Can’t tell yet. How did he seem the night of What Happened Upstairs?”

“Like a defendant at one of Stalin’s show trials—totally innocent but resigned to being found guilty.”

“And how did you seem?”

“Like Stalin, I guess.”

“Obdurate?”

“No, just endless. Like God in the Old Testament. You know—too much destruction is never enough. Yet somehow I had thought that if you can slide past the third-month bad-habits-getting-on-your-nerves thing, and the year’s-end don’t-you-give-me-orders argument, and the second-year malaise, and the seventh-year cheating scandal—”

“With Cosgrove?”

“That wouldn’t be a scandal. No, with a sailor.”

Indeed, I was scandalized. “I didn’t know they still
had
sailors. I mean, in the Gulf War, yes, but not around here. Not in that gay thing of late-night pickups of uniformed trade.”

“Anyway, I figured if you can work past all that, you’re a cinch for long-run stats.”

“You had ten fine years. How long should it be, after all?”

“For life,” he said, simply, openly, mildly.

“Nobody gets that. Goethe didn’t get that. Ken Ryker won’t get that.”

Cosgrove came upstairs then, to return Dennis Savage’s garlic press and colander. A certain animosity on both sides usually keeps Cosgrove from venturing up here except on state visits, but this time he seemed in no hurry to leave.

“J. went on forever about his new roommate,” said Cosgrove, wandering around the room looking at things. “And all crazy stuff. Like the roommate beats off by fucking the bed.”

“Is this some cynosure?” Dennis Savage asked me.

“Some straight guy who would appear to have an angle on picking up women.”

“J. says it’s a total pussy house over there,” said Cosgrove, pausing at the bookshelf. “He’s writing porn stories now and sending them to magazines to earn extra money, and he says I should, too. But I guess I ought to read up some, to get smart first. What books do you recommend to smarten me?”

“Byron’s
Don Juan,
” said Dennis Savage. “It’s the smartest work of the smartest century. The nineteenth.”

“Of course, that’s my favorite century of all.”

“Well, then … you’ll enjoy this simple test. What nineteenth-century figure wrote stories, composed music, is the hero of an opera, and had Mozart’s middle name?”

“You?”

“Boys, boys,” I said as they moved into skirmishing positions.

“How long do
you
get?” Dennis Savage suddenly asked me. “You and our abradant little Cosgrove here?”

The silence that followed that one was so fine we could hear the roaches discussing their itineraries.

Then Cosgrove said, “If we were straights, we would never be in this room together, or returning a garlic press.”

“If we were straights,” Dennis Savage countered, “none of our lives would have happened, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’ Straight life is about your relatives—demanding mothers, clueless fathers, idiot uncles. Gay life is about your friends.”

He’s right, of course. Let me show you a very defining straight relationship, of the kind I term “Beauty and the Beast.” Some years ago, in the summer, research took me daily to the Lincoln Center Library, and I was timing my crossing of Columbus Circle to the lunchtime appearance of two men employed in construction on the Fordham University campus nearby. Rigorous union timekeeping meant they would materialize hungry at exactly 12:01, nosh somewhere, and then hang out at the war memorial to the
Maine
at the southwest entrance to Central Park at about 12:20, waiting till their break ended.

One guy was a study in nondescript: a face one forgot even while gazing at it. His buddy, shirtless in crispy-clean jeans and Timberland boots, was a looker: tall and total with one of those long-waisted, big-shouldered physiques that load on muscle easily. His face was no more than okay, but the unusual steel-gray hair and a tense mustache gave him extra presence to match the come-on build, and his bright eyes, looking everywhere but at no one, seemed to celebrate the knowledge that people were aware of him.

I sure was. Day after day, I’d take a perch close by and monitor their conversation while pretending to check over my notebook. And what I heard was the looker constantly belittling his friend. I distinguished three patterns. Pattern I was:

L
OOKER
: What a time last night with Deena.

S
IDEKICK
: She’s not so great.

L
OOKER
: Oh, yeah? So what dog did you fuck?

In Pattern 2, the sidekick would fight back:

L
OOKER
: Check out the classy redhead with a fine two-piece set.

S
IDEKICK
: Like maybe you got a chance.

Pattern 3 called up ontological considerations:

L
OOKER
: All you get is my leftovers.

It was a horribly unequal relationship, but men like this looker have the advantage. There’s an excitement about them, a vitality that comes of having all the first choices in life, so a lot of ego validation lies in sharing their company. For some people, it is the famous who wield this redemptive power. But whether the roomtilter is a movie star, or rich, or lovely to see, he must treat one with a sense of welcome or his strength becomes one’s punishment. Like your parents when you’re young and vulnerable, he has the authority to judge you as worthy or unworthy: and to make you believe it.

One day, I arrived at the meeting place (so to say) to find the pair going at each other near the newsstand. The looker was trying out a new style, going not only shirtless but beltless with the two top buttons of his jeans open, an unforgivably captivating touch. I studied the magazine covers while he hammered away at his partner, trying to borrow twenty bucks.

“I loaned you twenty last week,” the sidekick complained. “Didn’t see that one come back yet, did I?”