Everybody Loves You (18 page)

“A nifty video collection,” said Carlo, “should have lots of horror movies.”

“Razor Fingers With Main Street!”
cried Cosgrove.

“Knife Man,”
Little Kiwi corrected,
“on Main Street.”

“A Nightmare on Elm Street 2,”
said Dennis Savage.

Cosgrove noted it down.

“And what about that one where the guy goes downtown,” said Little Kiwi, “and then everybody does things to him?”

“Yes!” said Cosgrove.
“The Statue Boy in Soho!”

“No, Cosgrove,” said Little Kiwi.
“Soho Nights.”

Carlo and I looked questioningly at Dennis Savage.

“After Hours,”
said Dennis Savage, patiently.

I chuckled.

“While you're at it,” said Dennis Savage, “why don't you get my favorite—”

“The Breakfast Lunch!”
cried Little Kiwi, jumping up.

“No,
Don't Play the Music
!” said Cosgrove, bounding around him.

Carlo and I looked at Dennis Savage. “My favorite is
Love Me Tonight.
And that's
The Breakfast Club
and
Can't Stop
—”

“How do you know what they mean?” asked Carlo.

Dennis Savage shrugged. “I've been watching television and going to the movies with them. I know what they've seen.”

“Is
Love Me Tonight
your favorite?” I asked. “You have good taste.”

“I always go for the good things,” he said. “Don't you know that by now?”

“Cosgrove,” said Little Kiwi, “maybe I should alphabetize our list.”

“Oh, could I do that?” Cosgrove threw a look of such opulent need at Little Kiwi that Carlo and I furtively nodded at each other, as if swopping answers on an SAT exam. I'm positive Dennis Savage saw us. But he made no remark.

*   *   *

“Do you think it
is
a joke?” I asked Carlo. “About Little Kiwi and Cosgrove? I mean, isn't it—”

“They are truly close now,” said Carlo, looking it over in his mind. He likes to pretend he misses everything but who's hot, yet he's as observant as a writer. He doesn't see things; but he sees people like nobody's business. “When two sexy little boys are close, well…”

“Well?”

He nodded. “Don't they fuck?”

“Who would be top man in that combination? Aren't they both natural catchers?”

I had decided to paint my kitchen; I think it very restful. Carlo, who had found himself hungry and came over to see about some lunch, ate a red delicious apple and watched.

“Everyone's a natural catcher with someone who's a pitcher,” said Carlo. “But two catchers always figure out who's the most natural catcher, and the other guy gets to do the pitching.”

“Actually, they could go to bed without fucking, couldn't they? Princeton rub, and so on. Would that count as adultery?”

“Well, I truly think Little Kiwi is fucking that Little Cosgrove.”

Shocked, I stopped painting.

“Just like so?” I said. “You describe the infidelity of the era as if it were the tricking of a pair of exchange students in the NYU student union.”

“Somebody's got to cheat sometime,” he said. “Otherwise, you'd have nothing but people who love each other.”

“Somewhere in Stonewall,” I said, “I got the idea that
that
was the idea.”

He tossed the apple core into the garbage. “Fruit is a good dessert,” he said. “Instead of jello.”

“What do you think Dennis Savage would say if he knew Little Kiwi was cheating on him with Cosgrove?”

Carlo looked at me as if I had asked him what a condom is. “How could he not know?”

I put down my brush.

“Just a minute there,” I said. “Are you telling me that you believe that Little Kiwi is doing the sidestep with Cosgrove
and
that Dennis Savage accepts it?”

He looked at me for a bit. “So what do you believe?”

“I believe Dennis Savage and Little Kiwi are as attached to each other today as they were when they met nine years ago.”

“In their feelings, yes, I truly know that. But in bed, too, all this time? Is that what you believe? And with Dennis Savage away all day, and those two alone up there, watching the videos and getting very serious about making little bowls of tuna salad just right. You don't believe there comes a moment in there when those two little boy bodies suddenly can't concentrate on anything but the sound of the other one's breathing, like that, and then the next thing, which is they take turns slowfucking each other?”

“Little Kiwi isn't a little boy anymore. He's twenty-seven.”

“Even better,” said Carlo. “He'll know how.”

I left the kitchen, shaking my head. “I just can't feature Little Kiwi suddenly turning into a couch artist after having been so reticent all these years. He still blushes when someone cruises him too blatantly on the street.”

Carlo was staring at the lipstick office tower that replaced the brownstones that used to command the corner of Fifty-fourth and Third. “Look at all those people in there,” he said. “Office workers. Do you think they wish they were like us? When they see us fooling around while they're working?”

“Carlo, what would you do if you were Dennis Savage and you knew that Little Kiwi was sidelining with Cosgrove?”

He smiled. “I'd let him get it out of his system. A boy that nice deserves a chance to prove that he can be top, too. Everybody needs a Cosgrove sometime.”

“What does a Cosgrove need?”

“He's a beautiful young dude, isn't he? The squirmy kind. If he was my type, I'd surely gobble him up. Anyway, you know how young kids are. They hang around waiting for someone to show them how, don't they?”

“Well, I'm just amazed,” I said. “I'm fabulously amazed.”

“Young kids need a lot of attention. They really need to be hugged and spanked and screwed pretty nearly every day. I wouldn't have the energy. Maybe that's why I like big guys. They sort of take care of themselves.” He settled into my desk chair. “Let them do the spanking and such. A really big guy is so good at that, somehow. So very truly good at that sort of thing, you know.”

“I've been your friend for some fifteen years now,” I told him. “And you still shock me.”

“A really big nice guy,” he said. “To hold me when I'm sleeping.”

*   *   *

I let Dennis Savage and his Dingdong School get themselves settled in at The Pines before I came out for my visit. If Dennis Savage has had a chance to miss me a little, he doesn't get grouchy as easily as he does in town. Besides, I was running a deadline.

So it was late June before I got out there, and I felt full of the devil, as I always do when I touch base with the only part of the world that is so gay that, for once, straights are the neighborhood problem. For a joke, I left my bag where the boardwalk gave onto Dennis Savage's house and sleeked inside to materialize as if by magic. One of my Pines routines.

No one was in sight, though it was near cocktail time; yet I thought I heard an odd sound somewhere about, as if someone were calling for help from very far away. Following the sound to the doorway of the guest room where I usually stay, I saw Cosgrove on his back, his legs dangling over Dennis Savage's shoulders, the pair of them gone from the world in the dangerous clarity of Buddy Position Number One.

Silently I backed away, left the house, and took my bag back to the harbor. I let a few ferries dock, traded a pot or two of dish with comrades, and finally heaved myself back into gear and returned, whistling, coughing, and stamping the last few feet like the country dolt in an antique melodrama.

Dennis Savage was occupied in the kitchen area. Overhead, I heard the shower going.

“Well, well, well,” he said.

“Well enough,” I told him.

“Deep as a well.”

“Oh, was it?”

“I thought meat loaf and those roast potatoes you love that no one can make as good as your mother.”

“I have to admit,” says I, setting down my bag, “she is unrivaled in her specialties. Everyone should have a few, don't you think? Specialties, I mean.”

The shower was turned off.

“How's the city coming along?” he asked.

“Well, it's still there.” I fixed myself a drink. “So are you, I see.”

He laughed.

“You usually say, ‘What's that supposed to mean?'”

“I'm feeling frivolous today,” he replied, washing vegetables and briskly drying them. “I'm running on mellow.”

Nothing from me.

“What, no banter on that? No saucy sortie?”

“I haven't seen you this jolly in quite some time. What's your secret, old pal?”

He was about to answer, but stopped as Cosgrove came along the second-floor walkway wearing a bathrobe so oversize that it looked as if the Ringling Brothers had sold him last year's tent.

“Hey, big shot,” I said to Dennis Savage.

He was watching Cosgrove come down the stairs; and Cosgrove was subdued.

“What's your secret, big shot? I want to be jolly, too.”

“Did Virgil come on the ferryboat with you?” Cosgrove asked me.

“He isn't here, then, is he?”

“He had a job interview,” said Dennis Savage. “To be a receptionist at a women's magazine. Apparently they have a policy of hiring—”

Halfway along the stairs, Cosgrove lost his footing and slammed down to the floor on his ass; and I was so tense I laughed.

“I'm sorry,” I said, racing over to him. “I'm terribly sorry, Cosgrove.”

“I'm okay,” he said, just sitting there.

“Anyway, Little Kiwi didn't come out with me. I didn't even—”

“His interview,” said Dennis Savage, “was for four-thirty, so he probably—”

Cosgrove burst into tears.

“Oh, Jesus,” said Dennis Savage.

“No, I'm okay,” Cosgrove repeated as I picked him up and held him. Carlo's cure. “I just got hurt a little on my bum-bum.”

At which I could not restrain another shock of giddy laughter even as I patted his back.

“Where did you get that bathrobe?” I asked him, to stir the place up a bit, steer past the trouble.

“It's mine,” said Dennis Savage.

“You're not this big, are you?”

“Who says I'm not?”

“Okay, okay,” I told him. “Don't flash your eyes at me.”

Footsteps on the walk heralded Little Kiwi's arrival, and Bauhaus, who would probably have dozed through the Battle of Stalingrad, suddenly decided to seem useful and barked once from the porch.

“Hey, I think I just got a new position,” said Little Kiwi. “And Cosgrove,” he added, opening his bag, “look at what I brought out for us for Sunday night: that superclassic gangster flick with James Cagney and Jean Harlow—”

“Machine Guns and Mothers!”
Cosgrove exulted.

“The Roaring Twenties?”
Dennis Savage guessed.

“The Mean Old Slums!”
Cosgrove decided.

“No, Cosgrove—”

“The Public Enemy,”
I said quietly, gazing at Dennis Savage.

*   *   *

I don't know why I felt so scandalized—even betrayed—by finding Dennis Savage and Cosgrove together. I should have been prepared for it by Carlo's theory, which runs, roughly, “Gay men are always going to think of something hot to do, then they'll go do it.” Anyway, surely it's Dennis Savage's relationship to worry about, not mine.

However, I've grown terribly used to this coterie we have, used to playing uncle to Little Kiwi and big little brother to Carlo and whatever I am to Dennis Savage, for which no word has yet been coined. I just don't want anything shaking up the procedures here.

Things calmed down considerably by dinnertime. Dennis Savage does make a first-rate meat loaf (one of his few accomplishments) and the mustard dill sauce that accompanies it is to die. Now that my folks have moved to California, it's thoughtful of Dennis Savage to complement the entrée with my mother's celebrated roast potatoes, an arcane delicacy of Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. (He came out for a summer day of R & R when my parents were still living on Long Island, in 1972, and was so taken with the potatoes that he asked for the recipe. Mother shared it, but reluctantly, and she retaliated by calling him “David Savage” for the rest of the evening. It made him sound like a Broadway chorus boy.) Wafted on a wave of vodka, I forgave everybody, and doted upon the “kids,” merrily lapping up the meat loaf, potatoes, and broccoli as kids do, utterly unconcerned with the relish and gusto of the gourmand. Good food is not delight; good food is to eat. They even raced off before dessert—raspberry sherbet topped with fresh blueberries and drenched in Grand Marnier—to prepare for the evening's entertainment. Little Kiwi and Cosgrove don't just show a movie: they
present
it, like the proprietors of a jazz-age picture palace.

Dennis Savage and I, in sweaters, took our coffee onto the porch and gazed at the ocean.

“How did you know?” he asked me, after a while.

“I saw what you did. I sneaked in to surprise you and…”

“You got surprised.”

“It's none of my business,” I said. “I have no right to an opinion,” I said. “I'm a little threatened and that makes me judgmental, so I'm sorry,” I said.

“It just happened,” he told me. “You should know that. One time,” he said. “One slip, that's all. There is no affair. No … ongoing calculation. I lost control and I feel terrible about it, but that … incredible little boy came up from the beach in those little swimming togs of his and he … I just … I went for him. Do you know how many, many moments it's been now, having that little darling around and not being allowed to make myself at home? I can't have him, I can't ask him to leave, and I can't loan him out, can I? He's always there. He's going to be near me, right here like this. Go hale me up for rape. Any jury would let me off.”