Everybody Loves You (17 page)

“I don't think I ought to.”

“Why?”

“That's a good question.”

“Then why did you tell me before, on the beach?”

“That's an even better one.”

“Tell me a story, anyway.”

“Once upon a time,” I begin—for these are the easiest stories to invent and the most comfortable to tell, set hundreds of years ago among perfect strangers—“there was a little boy who lived all by himself in a great sand tower in the middle of a forest.”

“What was his name?” Toby asks.

“He had none. He had lived all alone as long as he could remember, so he had never needed a name. One day, a knight rode by on a beautiful black horse, and the knight was encased from head to foot in resplendent silver armor.”

“What was the horse's name?” Toby asks.

“Toby, you shouldn't interrupt the storyteller,” his mother gently chides, her doting look slipping from him to me and back.

“The knight's armor shone so brilliantly in the sunlight that the little boy, looking down from the window at the very top of his tower, could actually see himself. It was the first time he had ever done so, for there were no mirrors in his tower. None whatsoever. There was nothing to look into, no reflection—”

“Did he have Cinemax?” Toby asks, absently yawning.

“Hush. Now, the little boy was surprised to see the knight. But he was even more surprised to see himself. And from his window high above the forest he called down to the knight, ‘Who are you?'”

“Here you go, my friend,” says my brother, returning with refills of the drinks.

“But the knight thought the little boy was speaking to his own reflection, and so he said nothing. The little boy was consumed with wonder, for he suddenly realized that he must be lonely in his tower. He longed to go down and say hello to the knight and find out some things about the world. But there was no way down through the tower. Nor was there any way for the knight to climb up to him. The little boy felt very sad.”

Toby stretches out with his head in my lap.

“The knight was sad, too, for he had been wandering in the forest for many days, having lost his way. He feared he might wander forever, for this forest was so big that no one who strayed into it from outside ever found his way out. But there was nothing for the knight to do but move on, and he spurred his horse to pursue his journey. The little boy again cried out, ‘Who are you?' But this time the knight happened to be passing behind a great oak tree, which hid his armor from sight and thus cut off the boy's reflection. So the knight assumed he was being addressed this time, and he thought he should answer the question. He should tell the little boy who he is…”

Toby has fallen asleep.

“This tyke is all tuckered out,” I tell his parents. “He didn't even wait for dinner.”

“Did … did Ned read to you?” my sister-in-law asks. “When you were boys?”

“He didn't have to. I wasn't grouchy.”

“Did he?”

She is looking at him and he is looking at her.

“Well, my mother didn't, and my dad was away a lot…” Now they are looking at me. “I suppose somebody had to do the reading.”

She takes his hand. “
Did
he?”

“Please don't leak.”

“Don't … what?”

“When the little boy asked the knight who he was,” says my brother, “what did the knight answer?”

I look at him for a moment. “He answered, ‘I have the same name as you.”

My brother frowns. “Unusual repartee.”

Toby stirs in my arms.

“I have the same name,” I observe, “as all of you.”

My sister-in-law smiles. But my brother, puzzled once too often this day, looks at me as if he does not know who I am.

Beach Blanket Mah-Jongg

Dennis savage finally broke down and bought a VCR, and Little Kiwi was in heaven with a new toy. As winter dwindled into the coolly clever, touchy, mercurial season that we New Yorkers call spring, Little Kiwi began assembling what he touted as “this superscope collection of classic cinema.” However, the titles he collected ran to the likes of
Abbott and Costello in the Foreign Legion, The Nutty Professor,
and eight versions of
Heidi.
At that, Little Kiwi somehow never mastered the fine art of taping by timer. On a number of occasions, he herded Dennis Savage, Carlo, and me into the living room for, in his words, “the local world premiere screening” of some hapless old movie, only to unveil, to his flushed befuddlement,
Strike it Rich!
or
Modern Farmer
reruns—even, most useless of all among the likes of us,
Sermonette.

Carlo didn't mind; he thinks anything a sexy man does is sexy. I was wry about it; you have to be wry at just about everything Little Kiwi does. But Dennis Savage, who has become as much Little Kiwi's father as his lover, would get up and patiently go over VCR mechanics again, which made me twice as wry because Dennis Savage knows less about machines than Little Kiwi does.

“Instead of giggling and fooling,” Dennis Savage told Carlo and me, “why don't you help him get his movie collection together?”

“Make up a list,” I advised Little Kiwi. “Put down all the films you'd like to tape and hunt them down. Structure your project.”

“A list!” Little Kiwi thrilled; he always finds the glamour in the mundane. He immediately got a pad and pencil to start his list, and the rest of us fed him suggestions.

“The Broadway Melody,”
I offered.

“The Grapes of Wrath,”
Dennis Savage added.

“The Boys in the Sand,”
Carlo recalled.

“And
Tigers in Connecticut!
” said Little Kiwi.

The company was baffled. Even Bauhaus, Little Kiwi's incompetent dog, appeared bemused.

“That one where Katharine Hepburn has a tiger and she loves Cary Grant,” Little Kiwi explained. “So then she wrecks his dinosaur.”

“Bringing Up Baby,”
said Dennis Savage.

“And it isn't tigers,” I added, “it's leopards.”

“That one goes
right
on my list!” Little Kiwi cried. “This is a pad of classics, you know.” Enthused by a thought, he told Carlo, “And guess what else!”

Carlo just looked at him, his thoughts unreportable even to an all-male readership.

Little Kiwi turned to me. “How about
Cabaret Lady
?”

“What's that?” I asked. “A Lotte Lenya musical?”

“No, Hildegard Dietrich.”

“Blonde Venus,”
said Dennis Savage.

“And it's Marlene—”

“Oh, this is a swank list, my boys,” said Little Kiwi.

*   *   *

Little Kiwi got so caught up in the provisioning of his library of classics that from time to time he would venture downstairs and knock on my door, eager to have someone come up and admire his latest acquisition. It was still spring, those two or three days that New Yorkers get between the chill and the boil. Dennis Savage wouldn't be free from schoolteaching till late June, and I was handy and agreeable and only two floors of apartment building away. Actually, it was fun watching Little Kiwi show off his technical dexterity. When he tried to fast-forward, the sound would mute; when he pressed the mute button, the tape would rewind; when he summoned rewind, the television would go off.

One day, as I sat at my desk wondering if I should take an eighth work break without having done any work, I realized that Little Kiwi hadn't been dropping in lately. Who's he been showing his tapes to? I thought. About three days later, I found out: I heard a knock, opened the door, and laid eyes on an unknown teenager, younger and shorter and fairer than Little Kiwi.

“Virgil,” he said, “wants you to come up and see our show.”

Startled, I stared.

“I'm Cosgrove,” he explained.

He led the way up to Dennis Savage's, and after a while I began to feel like the head of a day-care center. Apparently Little Kiwi and Cosgrove had put together an entire mixed-bill program: main features, coming attractions, cartoon, newsreel, and second feature. There were still kinks in the system—the coming attractions bit was simply network hype for
Dallas
and the “newsreel” was a slice of the evening news, mostly of commercials. At least the cartoon was a Mickey Mouse, though Bauhaus got frightened and had to be locked in the bedroom.

“This is just like a Saturday kiddy matinee,” Little Kiwi was raving. “Isn't it?”

I said, “It's very nostalgic.”

Cosgrove was looking at me as if wondering if they even had movies when I was a kiddy, much less Saturday matinees, and I was looking at him as if ready to haul out his blanket and woolly panda for nap hour, when Dennis Savage staggered in from another day of improving the minds of the American young.

“Those cretins,” he muttered.

“Which?” I asked. “These or yours?”

“Oh, they're all mine,” he sighed. “Hello, Cosgrove.”

“Hello.”

Dennis Savage shot me a look of amusement, which I shot right back, and Carlo dropped in, so Little Kiwi went into the kitchen to make everyone grilled cheese and tomato sandwiches, Cosgrove assisting. Every so often, Little Kiwi's voice would float into the living room, with “Slice them real crunchy now, Cosgrove” or a “Cosgrove, let's serve half-sour pickles as a side order today.”

“Sounds like Little Kiwi's found an even littler Kiwi,” I said.

“One of the neighborhood kids,” said Dennis Savage, unpacking his valise. “He dropped out of school and his parents more or less threw him out. Or so they tell me.” He was shifting papers about, showing us the official kit of his hard work. He seemed distracted. “One of those gay stories, I guess.”

“Are those book reports and Latin tests?” Carlo asked Dennis Savage. “You would surely have flunked me if you were my teacher, wouldn't you? You would have stood me in the corner.”

A rare half-smile elegiacally unfolded the line of Dennis Savage's mouth. Usually, he's either chuckling or grouching. Especially grouching.

“Go easy on me,” said Dennis Savage. “It's been a heavy day.”

“Now I'd be pounding the erasers,” Carlo went on. “Sharpening the chalk sticks. I'd always be in dutch.”

Cascades of giggles from the kitchen.

“If this were 1955,” Dennis Savage opined, “that kid would have to straighten out with a wife and a job and make a whole new generation miserable. But Stonewall City has places for boys who are always in trouble.”

“Yeah,” I said. “He gets to adopt a buddy and revel in a VCR.”

Dennis Savage nodded, sorted his papers, shrugged. “They're quite inseparable. The kid does everything but sleep here.”

Carlo shifted position and I cleared my throat. We traded glances. Then we grinned at Dennis Savage. As the Germans say,
Luftpause.

“What's with you two?” asked Dennis Savage. “Are you totally zonked out from a hard day of loafing and goofing off?”

“He doesn't get it,” Carlo told me.

“Give him time,” I said. “He's totally zonked out from a hard day of reading and writing and 'rithmetic.”

“Taught to the tune,” Carlo agreed dreamily, “of a—”

“Give me time for what?”

Carlo and I performed a mock innocent-guilty whistle.

“All right, you jokers. What's the game?”

“‘The kid does everything but sleep here,'” Carlo said. “It sounds so truly innocent.”

“Two dear little play pals,” I chimed in, “with their VCR and their alphabet blocks.”

Finally catching up to us, Dennis Savage expostulated with the strenuous resistance of the sighted blind. “You think those two kids are … You dare to suggest that Little Kiwi would cheat on me with some … some—”

“Some beautiful blond kid?” I said. “Why not?”

“Terrific! Just terrific! You see a perfectly innocent little friendship and all you can do is … ravage it with Circuit innuendo. Dishqueens of the world, unite!”

Carlo and I bowed to each other like mandarins.

“It's not funny!”

“Jesus, can't you take a joke?”

Dennis Savage was calming down. “It's not fit comic material,” he huffed. “You should tread gently in the sacred wood.”

At which Carlo and I laughed so hard we had to hold our stomachs; and Cosgrove, helping Little Kiwi serve the food, eyed us with bewilderment. Little Kiwi, inured to such exhibits, ignored us, and we quieted down, but then Cosgrove tucked his napkin into his shirt collar like a five-year-old, and Carlo and I had to look away to keep our faces straight.

*   *   *

Summer beckoned to us from the Island of Fire, but Little Kiwi moped at the notion of having to abandon his beloved VCR. Finally Dennis Savage agreed to drag the equipment out for the season, and Little Kiwi was in heaven again.

Cosgrove was still around—more than ever, if possible. It was not clear where he went and what he did when he was elsewhere, but he, too, was certainly in heaven when he was in the company of our gang, the typical bourgeois youngster who has evaded a reproving family for a troop of males who accept him as he is. This is called Why Boys Leave Home.

Cosgrove's attachment to Little Kiwi was virtually absolute, and Little Kiwi liked it that way. Once Little Kiwi had hung back in the shadow of Dennis Savage; suddenly Little Kiwi had a shadow of his own, to instruct in the ways of the great world. “Cosgrove, do you think that's a good tie for the eighties?” he would say; and Cosgrove would immediately lose the tie. Or “Cosgrove, your grilled cheese isn't quite as
grilled
as it should be”; and Cosgrove would beg to put the sandwich back on the fire.

Cosgrove even functioned as Little Kiwi's secretary. One evening just before Memorial Day we were sitting around at Dennis Savage's as Little Kiwi updated his list of classic films. He paced the room like a tycoon giving heavy meeting while Cosgrove, with the pad, watched him like a hungry puppy.