Almost Like Being in Love (43 page)

In 1965, Liza Minnelli starred in this Broadway show where she played a gullible kid named Flora Meszaros. By the end of the first act, she’d stumbled headfirst into everything she’d ever wanted, so she sang about it 'duh( in a song called “A Quiet Thing.”

I won the election by six thousand votes, but Eeyore wasn’t the only cartoon I wound up portraying. True to his word, Noah took candid snapshots of Craig-as-Barney, Craig-as-Tinky Winky, and Craig-as-Gepetto, then hid the negatives at the bottom of his toy chest. They’ve since been scanned onto a 30-gigabyte hard drive along with the e-mail addresses of every tabloid in the Western Hemisphere. If I ever consider legislation that doesn’t meet with his approval, my career is over.

Clayton and I managed to struggle through another half-year before we decided to quit while we were ahead. '“Honey, why don’t we try it solo for a little while and see if the urge to kill goes away?”( But even after he moved out, we’d find ourselves at the movies together on Sundays, on the telephone at 2:00 in the morning, and routinely in conference with one another on the daily crises that always seemed to be threatening our lives. And since I hadn’t yet bothered to learn the difference between a garlic press and an ignition cap, he’d still come over three nights a week to make us dinner. '“Ma,” he’d bark at my mother over the phone, “would you please tell him he’s got to eat?”( It was an unusual way to split up—but when four months had passed without so much as a scowl from either one of us, we knew we’d made the right call. Besides, Charleen had already nailed it: Clayton and I are a lifelong team, period. End of discussion.

“Oh, shit,” I groaned, flipping off the AM station that had just quoted my How Many Republicans Does It Take to Screw in a Lightbulb speech. “What was I
thinking
? Clay, couldn’t you just kick me in the ass for old time’s sake?”

“Not a chance,” he retorted, grinning maliciously. “When you’re sitting in the cheap seats for a change, it’s fun to watch.” This particular conversation took place in the Bronco on our way to Jody’s wedding. A last-minute switch in the lineup had found Clayton and Noah splitting the best man spot two ways instead of three, only because Charleen had asked me to be her maid of honor. '“But in a tux,” I reminded her ominously. “Let’s not give the Moral Majority any more ammo than they think they already have.”( The minister didn’t bother to protest. He merely assumed we were all from California and left it at that.

I couldn’t have survived the year without Travis. Sometimes he called just to yank my chain and sometimes he called for real—but he always managed to remind me that he was in my corner, no matter what.

‚Hello?‛

‚Craig, if you had to be stuck on an island with either Brady Anderson or
Ryne Sandberg, who would you pick?‛

‚You mean naked?‛

‚Absolutely.‛

‚Troy Aikman.‛

‚That’s what I thought. Me too. Talk to you tomorrow.‛

We learned how to take turns leaning on each other again. When he was seven paragraphs away from finishing his first book, he found himself face-to-face with a bad case of flop sweat. '“Craigy, what if they hate it?”( So for two hours I convinced him that as long as he was still the only boy in the world who could wake up a whole village with his heart, what difference did seven paragraphs make? (P.S. He polished them off while we were on the phone.) On the flip side, he was the one I called when I found out that Clayton and Brian had fallen for each other faster than a collapsing dam that had just been hit with a SCUD

missile.

“If I’m so fucking happy for them, why am I crying?” I sobbed.

“Because when you love somebody, you do it down to your toes,” he reminded me gently. “That’s what makes you Craig.” And he wouldn’t hang up until I’d fallen asleep.

So after we’d spent close to $3,000 on airfare, hopping from coast to coast on one phony pretext after another '“I was thinking about checking out the Auto Show in L.A. on Saturday.” “I’m coming to New York on Tuesday for Kiss Me, Kate.”(, we allowed the rest to happen all by itself. Kiss Me, Kate led to a carriage ride through Central Park, then a trip to Colony Records, then a couple of Italian ices on the stoop of our old brownstone, and finally a brief stop by the fast food joint that was once known as Beefsteak Charlie’s. Fodor’s would have called it the Travis-Craig Walking Tour of Manhattan, with a single conspicuous addition: according to Smerk, every one of the hundred thousand restaurants in the greater New York metropolitan area was mysteriously booked for dinner (on a Wednesday?(, so we’d have to make alternate arrangements —which, by sheer coincidence, Travis had taken care of from California three weeks earlier.

“
That
was convenient,” I mused, as we headed down the ramp into Grand Central Station.

“Wasn’t it?”

History was rewritten on that warm spring evening in May—exactly twenty-one years after he’d toppled off a ladder and into my life—when we found ourselves standing beneath the green-and-white awning of the elegant Tappan Hill in Tarrytown, a mere eight blocks from our gazebo.

So we had two choices: we could either keep our 7:00 P.M. reservations in the glamorous Hudson Room or we could lock hands and return to Brigadoon instead. Not exactly a tough call.

“
Hey, look! The park! Let’s go reminisce!‛

That’s where I discovered, for the second time in my life, that he really can wake a village with his heart.

TO: [email protected]

FROM: [email protected]

Did you finish the Matthew Shepard bill yet?

TO: [email protected]

FROM: [email protected]

Since your last e-mail five minutes ago? Or in a larger cosmic sense?

TO: [email protected]

FROM: [email protected]

I can’t help it. I miss you.

TO: [email protected]

FROM: [email protected]

I’m only in the
den
!

We celebrated our two-and-a-half-year anniversary the day we decided I should run for Congress. (Actually, Smerk had the idea first, but I don’t plan on admitting as much until we’re at least a hundred and ten.) It was Christmas Eve in the West Village, “light flurries” had given way to a Rudolph-requiring snowstorm right outside our bay windows, Vic Damone was crooning “Winter Wonderland” over our sound system, and we were curled up together in front of our fireplace.

Even Norman Rockwell would have approved.

“Hey, Trav?” I murmured, chin-in-the-necking him while I played with his hair. “What do you call it when there’s a smile in your stomach that starts when you wake up in the morning and doesn’t go away until you’re asleep?” Travis sighed audibly in my arms before glancing up from my chest in wonder.

“You mean you have one of those too?”

Flora was right. It’s a quiet thing.

FROM THE JOURNAL OF

Travis Puckett

Knows all the lyrics to Flora, The Red Menace (optional) It was bound to happen sooner or later.

About the Author

STEVE KLUGER shook hands with Lucille Ball when he was twelve. He’s since lived an additional thirty-nine years, but nothing much registered after that.

A baby boomer whose entire existence was shaped by the lyrics to Abbey Road, Workingman’s Dead, and Annie Get Your Gun, Kluger has forged a somewhat singular path as a civil rights advocate, campaigning for a “Save Fenway Park” initiative 'which qualifies as a civil right if you’re a Red Sox fan(, counseling gay teenagers, donating his free time to Lambda Legal Defense, and—on behalf of Japanese American internment redress—lobbying the Department of the Interior to restore the baseball diamond at the Manzanar National Historic Site. He plans to run for public office himself, provided he can be persuaded not to propose Carol Channing’s birthday as a federal holiday.

Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

ALSO BY STEVE KLUGER

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ALMOST LIKE BEING IN LOVE. Copyright © 2004 by Steve Kluger. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

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