Some Men Are Lookers: A Continuation of the "Buddies" Cycle (35 page)

I schemed. I scenarioed. I what if?ed. A bolder soul would have been able to flourish a more imposing report than I can, for nothing occurred between Zuleto and me. Oh, sure, I should have staged one of those . . . you know: Alone together in my bedroom, my family at the beach, we talk of girls, we get excited. Then the famous One Thing Led To Another.

Except one day, when I did in fact skip the beach, I happened to look out of my window to catch Zuleto and some girl in the garden. (I had given him a blanket permission.) I couldn’t hear them, but there was no mistaking her practiced look of alarm as he tried to lock her eyes with his, dared a caress, another, held his finger to his mouth only to touch her mouth with it in turn, presto, prestissimo, pulling out his smile that reads “I’m too marvelous to be guilty,” leaning forward to whisper, his fingers reaching for her
sides, cheek, breasts. I’m watching, the hidden me. Yes, as his eyes turn on to full, and he’ll take her this way, because his looks move to yes, and, thus captivated, because now she’s so yes, that girl took that boy in with the longing of Juliet for keen Romeo.

There it is. My hopes amounted to no more than a pathetic hunger: And I gave them up.

Zuleto and I stayed friends, though on a less elated level. In fact, I believe I maintained a very healthy relationship with him—as many gay men have to, where one is Barkis and the other isn’t willin’. Sex is everything; but on the other hand it isn’t. Fourteen months after we hit Italy, we returned home—again, without a word of explanation—this time to a new start in the New York suburbs. Zuleto and I exchanged letters every once in a long while. He even telephoned—when he got engaged, when his wife became pregnant, when she died in childbirth. And, most recently, when his son, Candio, began seeing a girl Zuleto did not approve of and refused to break it off.

“Co se fa?” he moaned. What do I do now? “With all our fighting, the whole sestiere will learn of our shame. Guai, un scandolo de piazza!” It’ll be a public scandal!

“But what’s wrong with the girl?” I kept saying. “Xela bela?” Is she pretty, at least?

He sighed. “Amico mio, is it not enough that I say she is unworthy? You want her papers to look over?”

“But what’s the problem?”

He sighed again. “La xe una tedesca.” She’s German. “A guide for the hotels. You know. In this palazzo died famous English poet Robert Browning. In that palazzo my beloved German soldiers tortured Venetian patriots. Ma, bene! I love Italians! I date Italians. I kill Italians.
Now
you see? This trash that my boy picks out, of all Venice, to be loving?”

“Maybe it’s only an episode.”

“They want to marry,” he said, as doleful as a broken old church bell. “He tells me this.”

We had a rule, in these calls, that at some point or other the
one who had been phoned would offer to call the other back after both had hung up, to equalize the bill. But Zuleto was so unhappy that he couldn’t tear himself away from his text, basically that of every father about every son:
He won’t take orders!

Well, he shouldn’t. And gay men and women, I proudly note, are the pioneers in the case. We weren’t put on earth to placate the furies of the father. His disapproval is his problem.

So I wasn’t much help. But Zuleto thought this the ideal opportunity for me to revisit the home of my youth and meanwhile “talk reason” into Candio, who respected all American ideas.

For a moment, I was tempted. I mean: Venice again! But wait.

“Zuleto, there’s no ‘American idea’ about whom your son chooses to date. What could I possibly say about it?”

“Ma, amico, no gastu el don de parlantina?” Don’t you have the silver tongue? “Talk him into circles till he doesn’t know what he wants.”

I couldn’t believe it—I had actually reached the age of the domineering parent. And here was one such inviting me to become his confederate in manipulation.

No way. I put Zuleto off, to his quite formally delivered disappointment. But it’s hard to concentrate on someone else’s domestic troubles when your own family is exploding.

I mean,
Gakk!
That dinner with Cash and Virgil, the one so coolly hot, so suavely trashy, Ledermeister doing Noël Coward; and the other in the uniform of his new life, rape-me-quick mesh pants topped by no shirt, a colorful tie, and a black leather vest. (This despite the Arctic weather that day; what dedication.) All right, I enjoy a hot look on a kid. But not when it’s your nephew, or whoever he was. Then getting grilled by Carlo and Cosgrove, enduring Dennis Savage’s fastidious ignoring of the event, and having to field questions from our many bewildered friends. How did Goethe put it? “Life’s a bitch and then your boy friend splits.”

Listen to this bit of whimsy from the front: Entranced with an electric pasta-maker I saw on an infomercial, I tried Bloomingdale’s,
found the very model “as seen on TV,” and brought it home, to Cosgrove’s immense delight. Like all Americans, he loves gadgets, and suddenly we were swimming in vermicelli, macaroni, tagliatelle, angel hair, fettuccine, linguini, penne, manicotti, pappardelle, rotini, shells, and so on. With my help, the little chef devised his very own dish, Rigatoni à la Cosgrove, in which the pasta is stirred up with sautéed shrimp, mushrooms, red pepper, peas, onion, raisins, and cashews. Top with, as we put it chez nous, “a little fresh grated.” But Cosgrove insisted on adding a “secret ingrediment” to it all: “which we would never tell anyone,” he explained, “so it’s always our magic thing.” The secret, after some trial, turned out to be Pickapeppa Sauce, which bites tartly on the tongue and lends a handsome dark color to the plate.

We were so proud of ourselves that I invited our own master of the kitchen, Dennis Savage, to sample and judge. Billy elected to pass, which was fine with Dennis Savage. “I must say, I prefer the less overwhelming kind of romance,” he blithely explained as we headed downstairs. “These really so
devouring
affairs, where everyone’s always on top of everyone else. No privacy, no independence. It’s
a fascism
of love.” He shook his head like an animal lover at a bullfight.

I said nothing.

“See, what holds Billy and me together is, he gives me sex and I give him money. We don’t try to flourish on pretenses.”

As I unlocked my door, he looked me dead in the eye, daring me to haggle. I kept my counsel.

As we entered, I could hear the roar of the pasta machine, and I led Dennis Savage to the kitchen, where Cosgrove was, as he sometimes does, keeping house in jockey shorts. He shot a house-proud smile at Dennis Savage. But the latter suddenly recalled a childhood rhyme, and chanted,

I see London,
I see France,
I see Cosgrove’s underpants.

For a moment, Cosgrove stood frozen in outrage, his eyes on overload. Then he grabbed the usual bread knife and went after Dennis Savage, who ran into and locked himself within the bedroom.

“Get him off me!” Dennis Savage called out, as Cosgrove banged on the door and cried, “
I will chop you into messes!”

I took the knife from Cosgrove, and order was restored in a grudging sort of way. We ate mostly in silence, so I put on every intelligent person’s favorite opera, Verdi’s
Don Carlos
in the original French version with all the extra music, so we could pretend there was some good reason why we weren’t talking.

“Can we have the cordon bleu report on the house special?” I finally asked Dennis Savage.

“Indescribable” was all he would give.

“Maybe we should go to a movie.”

“We’ve got one right here,” he replied, looking at Cosgrove, “and its title is
Deadly Friend.”

“And I,” said Cosgrove, “look forward to seeing you in
Last Ride on the Elevator from Hell
. In the title role.”

“Boys, boys,” I said.

Silence.

“This would never have happened,” was my view of it, “if Virgil were still here.”

“Piffle,” said Dennis Savage, forking a shrimp around in the sauce. “What do you use for flavoring, may I ask?”

“That’s the secret ingrediment,” Cosgrove informed him.

“And it is . . . ?”

“Secret.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake!”

It occurred to me just then that I could use a vacation. Not just time off but a trip away from here. Like maybe to Europe. Like maybe to Venice. Zuleto and his problems were looking more attractive by the minute.

Good old British Airways had an off-season book-six-weeks-in-advance hotel-and-airfare tie-in at bargain prices. I figured six days
in London doing theatre and opera and six days in Venice would fortify me for the playing out of “this Virgil stuff.”

There was one snag: Cosgrove wanted to come, too. Look, I know he’s sensitive and greatly given to self-doubt and helpless furies, but I needed a getaway, solo. I argued with him for a while, guiltily noting his increasingly deflated air. Then a brainstorm: He didn’t have a passport and probably couldn’t get one in six weeks. Probably? Certainly.

“But I do have one,” he said quietly.

“How . . . You’ve never been abroad.”

He was already hunting around in my old toy box, where he keeps his stash. As my heart sank, he brought out the familiar blue booklet. I opened it and discovered a photograph of Cosgrove at some absurdly early age.

“Where on earth did this come from?”

“This guy took me to Bermuda. To this fancy hotel with scuba diving and caviar dinners.”

“You weren’t even legal then.”

“Yeah, that guy liked cream of chicken. On the floor under you, pulling on your legs, and he looks up as he slurps. It’s real cute.”

“What else don’t I know about you?” I asked.

“He drank me dry, because that’s what he likes, over and over. The people in charge of me were so freaked when I got back! The man? He got into a coughing fit, flopping all around till the woman was worried. So I said, ‘Fatty get a heart attack.’ ”

That’s how Cosgrove refers to his former parents: “the people in charge of me.”

“So that’s why I have a passport. Now can I come?”

Cosgrove’s hair lies flat on his skull without a parting, but it curls out slightly at the forehead. People have been known to reach out and smooth him down there, and he bears it stoically.

“I don’t think I should be left out of everything,” he went on. “I’m not so great at the various social techniques but I always treat you with respect, don’t I?”

One can at times be very aware of his skin, which is startlingly white, especially at winter’s end. I have been careful not to let him learn what I love about him, but he knows, he knows.

“Can I whisper to you?” he asked.

I nodded. He carefully put his hands on the sides of my torso just below the shoulders, leaning forward to lick my ear with “I know that Cosgrove would find luscious new ways to make your day complete.”

“Fatty get a heart attack,” I predicted.

“I would really be nice to you,” he continued, still whispering. “I would be Cosgrove the Unknown.”

“You’ve been holding back on me.”

“Just till now.
Please?”

Cosgrove turned out to be the ideal travel companion. He didn’t want to shop, feast, or inspect the indicated shrines. All he did was explore. He was especially eager to discover what he called “secret routes,” clocking himself ever more speedily in foot trips from, say, Oxford Circus to our hotel in the Strand, or from the Tower of London to St. Paul’s.

“There is a secret route to almost everywhere,” he told me in the hotel dining room at our second London breakfast, while comparing his travel times on a chart he had devised. “Finding that route is the mission in life.”

“You know,” I said, “my brothers and I used to hold secretroute races in Venice. We’d start at this bench in the Public Gardens way to the east in Castello. The first one to get to the railroad station won.”

“What did he win?”

“He won self-esteem. He won true delight in his resourcefulness in discovering new and vital passages through the maze. No dead ends of the kind we so often find ourselves in. No bridges to nowhere. No walking endlessly about within sight of the bell tower we somehow cannot reach. The winner’s choices were pure and he gloried in them.”

He regarded me with interest. “Say more,” he urged.

“The oldest of us, Ned, had taken advantage of the move to Venice to elude the hard law of my evil mother and vanish forever. So there was Jim, my other older brother. He favored an at first direct route from the bench to St. Mark’s, except that was clogged with tourists most of the year—and, in winter, the whole Piazza was usually underwater because of the floods. Anyway, there he’d cut north along the Merceria, even more clogged, till he crossed the Grand Canal at the Rialto and then abandoned himself in the contortions of Santa Croce, the most twisted sestiere in all Venice. He was in quest of the perfect route, but he never found it.”

Cosgrove spooned up the last of the marmalade from one of those little individual jars they give you, blotted his lips with a napkin, and smiled in that way he has when he really likes what he’s hearing.

“Who else was in this?”

“Just my younger brothers, Andrew and Tony. They used to straggle in hours late, till they hit upon the expedient of taking the vaporetto, which would have worked if they’d once tried the express instead of the local.”