How's Your Romance?: Concluding the "Buddies" Cycle (9 page)

Most of the audience was out lobbying and smoking, and the few people around us either missed it or were but half-intrigued. So our two friends enjoyed privacy as Lars Erich continued talking, his voice trickling into a whisper and Peter too stunned to do anything. Then Lars Erich released him, immediately turned to find us, nodded, and said, “He is all right, you see that, so I will get for myself a drink of water,” and went up the aisle.

The three of us looked at Peter.

Peter shrugged.

Moving closer, I asked, “Are you okay?”

Feeling the angry red blotch on his cheek, Peter said, “It’s nothing. Sheer rhetoric. Playacting. It’s the … well, the craftsmanship of love. That, and … the, yes, troublesome topics that just
may
gang up on one in the first—”

“What topics?” Dennis Savage asked as he and Cosgrove joined us.

“Same old thing, really. Bareback sex as opposed to Should one use condoms when tricking outside the—”

“Peter!”
cried Dennis Savage, genuinely appalled. “You don’t discuss the use of condoms—you
use condoms!
”

“Yes, old chap, I know that. At least, I learned it, under your … tender … guidance.
No,
” he forcefully went on, for Dennis Savage was starting up again. “No, it’s
not
that simple, because if two fellows have been going bareback already, what’s the point in their now denying themselves the all-night delight of—”

“Don’t say any more of that,” Dennis Savage put in. “I really like you, so make your own choices. Just don’t tell me about it.”

As Dennis Savage went back to his seat, Peter said, “Everything’s a moral question in your family. It’s so
judgmental.
”

“Peter,” said Cosgrove, “would you like to hear my new
Titanic
song?”

“‘Judgmental’ has become an attack word in this culture,” said I. “As if all behavior were equal. A culture without judgments is amoral.”

People were streaming back to their seats for the second act, Cosgrove sang his ditty, Peter declared it the best thing in the score, and we settled in. Lars Erich didn’t join us till three minutes after the curtain went up, though as he was on the aisle it created no disturbance.

No,
that
he saved for dinner after, in one of those showplace East Side apartments that every East Sider but me has, with two bathrooms, dream kitchen, and dazzle views. Our hosts, a straight couple, were also German, apparently friends of Lars Erich’s parents, and there was a spread of Western Civilization among their other guests. Dinner was served buffet-style, centering on a gigantic lasagna that smelled so good that Cosgrove ducked around everyone to avoid the handshaking, grabbed a plate, filled it, and ran to a couch to feed. (He was quickly joined by a Turkish guy—at any rate, a guy wearing one of those hats shaped like a huge thimble with a bookmark at the top—who talked and talked while Cosgrove silently dined.)

Doing my writerly job, I collected some raw dialogue from various guests, then got Lars Erich aside. “Who’s gay at this party?” I asked.

“Oh, it is this usual European
assemblée
where no one says, I am gay, I am not gay. It depends on who is there and how I am feeling. One can make bisexual choices.”

“Do you ever make bisexual choices?” I asked.

“Not so much, it is true. Not maybe ever. But it is always possible, no? Oh, there is Peter making conversation with that tedious French professor who quotes Chateaubriand. I rescue him.”

Off he went, as Cosgrove pulled up to comment acidly on how poorly J.’s beloved A
Chorus Line
compared with
Titanic.
“
A Chorus Line
was fun and moving, okay. But how small and tidy, when this show tonight is the Great Floating City of Nevermore.”

Neatening his hair with my trusty X-Men pocket comb, I said, “You don’t have to disdain J.’s favorite show to ease him out of your life, you know. If he’s going, he’s going.”

“But why is he going?”

“I think he got exhausted with all the performing he had to do—being cute and unpredictable and conceiving outlandish projects and making sure everyone found him seraphic. It’s just a guess, but I believe he would like nothing more than a little place of his own and no one to come calling. A nice long vacation by himself.”

“Look,” said Dennis Savage, suddenly there and indicating Lars Erich and Peter, earnestly conversing in a corner with their hands on each other’s shoulders. They could have been models, in one of the “cutting edge” poses that fashion favors today, Peter in an ultra-light gray suit over a white turtleneck and Lars Erich in that too-sexy-to-live outfit of his.

“Breathtaking,” I said.

“Supreme,” Dennis Savage agreed.

“Barky,” said Cosgrove. “Something’s funny about that Lars Erich.”

“Wrong,” said Dennis Savage. “
Fifty
things are funny about—”

“He’s on something,” said Cosgrove. “He’s
doing.
”

There was a pause.

“Like when he jumps from one subject to the next,” Cosgrove continued. “Not changing the subject—losing it. He goes fast, then he’s slow.”

Another pause.

“You don’t notice that?” he concluded. “Someone comb my hair some more.”

Dennis Savage did the honors as I pursued this line of inquiry. “Are his eyes dilated or something?”

“It’s not that kind of high. Not in his head. It’s deeper. Oh! Look innocent, he’s coming!”

Dennis Savage and I looked innocent; Cosgrove slipped on his novelty-store eyeglasses with the bulbous nose.

“I appeal to you,” Lars Erich began. “Peter says it is so sad for so many gay teenagers, they kill themselves from fear of homophobia. Their parents, friends, the folk. I say it is so loathsome to throw away the one life, our only time on earth, when we could make so much of it. Sixteen, seventeen … dead. Why? Because Mutti won’t like me?
You
have respect for this? Bud?”

“I don’t, in fact.”

“Why?”

“Because the culture is loaded with liberated gay images. Sitcoms are virtually made of homophilia. It wasn’t like that when I was growing up, yet I had no problem with it. If I can, they can.”

“Oh, is it that easy?” Dennis Savage asked.

“It isn’t easy at all,” said Peter, coming up. “Think of all the propaganda you get from everyone around you.”

“But you weren’t put on earth to please their idea of what you should be,” I said. “This is the part I never get—why does anyone care what some jackass thinks?”

“You hear?” Lars Erich asked—told—Peter.

“I only—”

“It is
disgusting
to sympathize with suicides of such a young age! Not finally ill, in pain, without hope. Yes, for these, of course—but youths, just undertaking their life and work, and they will
believe
homophobia? They say, I must be worthless if Mutti says so?”

“Mutti,” I offered, in my usual soothing style, “is a stupid bitch.”

“Yes!”
Lars Erich shot back. “Now I, a German, tell you for instance of Jewish people in Deutschland, when the Nazis are in power. Did the Jewish people think they must be unallowable because the Nazis say so? No—they think the Nazis are unallowable. And so I must feel that anyone who does this, who lets the bigot persuade him to hate himself, must be
disgusting
and
deserves
to
die.
”

“Lars Erich,” Peter began.

“I
say this!
” His eyes blazing.
“Disgusting!”
Turning to Cosgrove, he said, “You, the boy who loves mischief. We have a name for you, it is Till Eulenspiegel. You did not let parents force you to go a suicide, ja?”

“Perhaps his emotional constitution is stronger than—”

“That is bullshit
excuses!
” Lars Erich muttered, really angry now. “Where you say the ones who didn’t surrender didn’t have to, they were born stronger. We were
all
born the
same!
And so the sensible ones overrise!” To me, he added, “You have this word?” Before I could supply an English equivalent, he said, “I could gladly murder about this surrender to bigotry.”

He was so fierce that we just stood there, till Dennis Savage said, “I almost killed myself. Or … I considered it. Really, I was that afraid. Don’t be angry at the victims; be amazed at the persuasiveness of these particular bigots. Like, why do Jews simply resist anti-Semitism while some gays virtually embrace homophobia?”

Polite to us, Lars Erich shot visual bullets through Peter as the conversation continued. We got out of there soon enough and hailed our separate cabs, Peter holding his hand to his cheek as if he’d been slapped again. We Fifty-third Streeters held conference on the ride home.

“You see?” said Cosgrove.

“He’s right,” Dennis Savage agreed. “The way Lars Erich leaps from nodding at us to whacking at Peter. It’s like the stupendous carvings of his physique, so demonstrative. Hysterical, even.”

“Amazing guy,” I said. “His insights are stunning. Ten minutes with him and you see the entire world more clearly. I haven’t met many people like that.”

“When do I get a secret
Titanic
tape?” Cosgrove asked. “I know we’ll get one, I just want to know how long.”

“Soon.”

“It better be,” he said, kind of nuzzling his body deeper between Dennis Savage and me till we were nearly a ménage à trois. Dennis Savage didn’t mind; later, he asked if he could be the one to present Cosgrove with the
Titanic
cassette, which a friend got for me from the underground. Dennis Savage wrapped it in his special Mondrian paper (from the Museum store again; it’s only four blocks away), and Cosgrove was immediately suspicious.

“Could this be a letter bomb from some fiend?” he wondered when I pointed him to it.

“Dennis Savage left it for you.”

“My point exactly.”

“It’s
Titanic,
from early in previews, complete with the dropped numbers and the audible groans of the audience when a new scene is to begin and the lights come up on another technical failure.”

Stunned with excitement—I mean, frozen yet grabby—Cosgrove gave himself over to wonder as he gazed upon the tape. Then: “What does Dennis Savage have to do with it?”

“He wants peace between you two.”

“Ha,” Cosgrove observed, moving to the stereo with the present, whose wrapping was shredded in a moment. “He wants sex between us.”

“He’s already had sex between you.”

Slowly he turned.

“I happened to come upon you two in the act, all that long ago at the beach,” I explained.

“That was a hologram,” he pleaded. “It was all done with strings.”

“It was you and he fucking. I don’t mind, because you were desperate to get off the streets and he was so hot for a seductive tyke in a Speedo—who had, if I know anything, worked himself up at just the right moment—that he lost all sense of proportion. People have a right to slide here and there. Love is not a bank account. I’ll never mention it again, but I want something in return.”

“Never,” he said, impatient at the
PLAY
button;
Titanic
must sail forth. “What?”

“Tell me if you and J. have ever—”

“That again?”

“This is the final volume, and my readers have to know. No, don’t turn to the machine. Turn to me.”

After a while, he did. He said, “I’ll tell at the last story.”

*   *   *

O
UR
T
HURSDAY NIGHT DINNER
with J. really had become a chore, though at least he did continue to entertain with the ongoing saga of Vince Choclo.

“Two nights ago it happened,” he was saying, digging into Cosgrove’s Mushroom Soup Surprise as heedlessly as if it were Campbell’s. All right, it is Campbell’s—but Campbell’s with the classy alchemy of red wine, cooked spinach, thyme, and melted jujubes.

“No, it won’t be long now” was J.’s prediction.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “A straight guy is going to turn gay
and
be your boy friend just because you want a keeper?”

“There are no straight guys,” J. observed, “when a cute boy such as me is there.”

This was churlish of me to say, but: “For all your genetic gifts and uncanny ability to maintain fitness through the years with no apparent effort, you are not a boy any more. You and Vince are coevals.”

“‘Boy’ is just a word. It means that he’s a big ol’ hold-you guy and I’m a little sugarcake.”

“What happened two nights ago, J.?” Cosgrove asked.

“Well, you know, I generally go nude when Vince takes his night shower, and I show off when he comes out. He’s really looking, too. Or, like, I model the new black mesh shorts I got. I asked him, ‘Will the chicks go for it?’”

“But what did he make of that dinner with us?” I said. “Doesn’t he know we’re all gay?”

“He doesn’t know anything. He never
notices,
the way we do. A couple of times I watched movies on TV with him, and he can’t follow the story. And those girls he’s always talking about don’t appreciate him, but he doesn’t get it. This one called Shona, when she comes over she mocks his attire and says why can’t he have a snappy haircut like me. She deep-dished me right in front of him, too.”

“Want to translate that term?” I said.

“Heavy kissing. And when they went into Vince’s room, she said, ‘Can’t the cute one come along?’ But then I heard her sighing out all these lovey things. I have told Vince not to see her if she’s so cruel, but he just smiles and says, ‘She’s really stacked.’ Did you notice how nice it is when he smiles?”

“I liked him,” said Cosgrove, gathering the soup plates. “I think he is sad but secretly doesn’t know it.”

“Well, now he is completely going around naked like me. I said he should try on my mesh shorts, and when he did I complimented him on what a big total guy he is. And like a joke I said he could daddy-fuck me anytime, and suddenly right there his cock started to unpack and he had to duck into his room. So I was on to something.”

From the kitchen, Cosgrove said, “I thought you were always dissing him.”