Everybody Loves You (19 page)

“Was it really rape?”

“You know it wasn't.”

“What are you going to tell Little Kiwi?”

He said nothing.

“Yes, good,” I said. “One of those old-fashioned relationships. Just like our parents.”

He said nothing.

“Maybe it's for the best,” I observed. “Why ask for trouble? Forget it. Time will pass. Things happen, this and many other things. Little Kiwi counts his offenses, too, God knows. Then one day you and Cosgrove will be together again with no one else around and
pow.
”

He said nothing.

“Just to satisfy my innocent writer's curiosity, would you be willing to tell me how it was? Because you always go for the good things, I know.”

He said nothing.

“
That
good, huh?”

He turned to me, tears running down his cheeks.

“Oh, Christ,” I said, my hand on his shoulder. “What the hell is going on around here? Where is everybody going?”

“Okay, it's all set up!” cried Little Kiwi, bouncing in with Cosgrove at his heels, as Dennis Savage furtively wiped his eyes.

“Friday night at our free movie show!” Cosgrove added.

“Guess what we've got for our surprise feature!”

“Gentlemen Prefer Blondes?”
I asked.
“Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? My Little Chickadee? Love From a Stranger? Nothing Sacred?”

“Strange Interlude,”
Dennis Savage pleaded.
“An Innocent Affair.”

“Oh, no,” I corrected.
“Greed. Golden Boy. A Fool There Was.”

“Charade,”
Dennis Savage insisted.

“Idiot's Delight,”
I went on.

“The Night of the Hunter,”
he said reproachfully. He meant me.
“The Informer.”

Little Kiwi and Cosgrove were staring at us like chipmunks who come home from a day of frolic to find all their acorns have been stolen.

“Or your favorite,” I noted, sure of my climax.
“Love Me Tonight.”

“No,” said Little Kiwi, bewildered. “It's
The Awful Truth.
”

“Ah,” I said. “
My
favorite.”

“Curtain,” said Dennis Savage. “
Please.
Okay?”

The Right Boy for Cosgrove

“Look, I'm telling you,” Dennis Savage is telling me, “Cosgrove has simply got to be farmed out. I'm sorry, but someone's got to take him out of here. I can't have this … this apprentice sweetheart underfoot all the time.”

Not to mention on the end of your cock, I thought; but I said nothing, for Dennis Savage's moment of weakness was to be our secret, his and mine. No one must know of his adultery—better, no one must know of adultery, no matter whose or why, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Not even Carlo, who would forgive Hitler an act of sensual self-enhancement if his partner was hot enough. Not even Little Kiwi—especially not Little Kiwi—the victim of the adultery but also the person responsible for it, as the one who brought the young man known as Cosgrove into our circle.

In the event, Little Kiwi agreed that Cosgrove ought to find a place of his own. “He's been living in our socks, almost,” Little Kiwi observed.

“He likes it here,” said Carlo, biting into a Granny Smith apple, his latest food discovery. (He likes to sample the stuff in your fridge, and sometimes it changes his life. One dinnertime Dennis Savage and Little Kiwi came out, amid a great deal of hushings and fa la, with a chocolate soufflé for dessert; but Carlo said, “Can I have one of those tart green apples that Bud buys?” and Dennis Savage was ready for the straitjacket.) “That cute little Cosgrove,” Carlo concluded, “has a hateful family and no other home but this.”

“That's just it,” said Dennis Savage. “We have to get him one. He needs a place to move to. His parents have virtually thrown him out. He doesn't have a job. But he's marketable, let's face it. All we have to do is find him a good home.”

There was a pause as we faced it. I felt Dennis Savage looking at me, then Little Kiwi looking along, and at length Carlo joined them. All three were grinning. A home for Cosgrove.

“Nothing doing, you bum Samaritans,” I cried. “What is this, the Fresh Air Fund?”

“He could be very agreeable, running your errands,” said Dennis Savage.

“I'm not taking your refuse.”

“He loves your Victrola,” Little Kiwi urged.

“That's his problem.”

“He's a beautiful little honeystuff,” said Carlo, and we other three looked away in bemusement, the usual condition when you pal around with Carlo. “One solid paddling every morning, and he'd—”

“I don't want a roommate,” I said, with intense conviction.

“All right,” said Dennis Savage, “all right,” waving a soothing hand. “All right, but he's got to go. He has to … find someone to live with.” He shrugged. “My nuclear family is big enough as it is.”

He was looking out the window, but his feelings swept the room, and for the tiniest moment something very crucial and abstract became almost intelligible; I couldn't grasp what the something was. It moved so quickly that you'd have missed it if you blinked.

Little Kiwi missed it. “Just when I taught Cosgrove,” he sighed, “how to make Baked Beans à la
Whorehouse.
”

I guffawed and Carlo chuckled.

“It's a gourmet delight,” Little Kiwi told us, somewhat hotly, “whether you're laughing or not.”

“Oh,” I said, “I'm definitely laughing.”

“What goes in that?” asked Carlo, trying to look serious.

Still at the window, Dennis Savage turned back to us. “He opens a can of B & M beans and puts raisins in them.”

“And minced onions,” Little Kiwi added. “That's what puts the crunch in Baked Beans à la
Whorehouse.
”

“Why à la
Whorehouse
?” I asked.

“He named it for the night we met,” said Dennis Savage. “At
The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.
The show.”

“Boy, that was a long time ago,” said Little Kiwi.

Dennis Savage nodded. “Nine years.”

“Cosgrove,” I noted, “was only eight then. A child.”

Again I sensed an unnamed feeling doing a riff on itself. Something in the room with us.

“Why don't you give one of those Pines dating dinners?” Carlo asked. “We'll bring over all the eligible bachelors and set Cosgrove up.”

“How are you going to explain that to Cosgrove?” I countered. “You might scare him into—”

“We don't tell Cosgrove,” said Dennis Savage. “We just give the dinner.”

“Then how will he know he's supposed to charm everyone? Put his better foot forward?”

Carlo smiled. “Do you really think a kid that sweet has to do something to make guys wild for him?”

“You aren't wild for him, I notice.”

“Little kids aren't my type. You know that.”

*   *   *

“Kids aren't his type,” I said to Dennis Savage later, when we were alone.

“Well, they aren't. He likes to get on top of dark, shaggy monsters. What do you like to get on top of?”

“I had a feeling we'd get to me sooner or later.”

“Well, it
is
rather notable that this perfectly cute little … honeystuff—”

“You get so urbane when you quote Carlo.”

“The Voltaire of the Circuit,” he dryly notes. “So this kid becomes available and our Cocktail Dandy, who maintains no other berth that I know of, refuses to—”

“Why don't you let me be the judge of what is honeystuff and what isn't?”

“You listen to me,” he begins, getting into his Uncle Know-it-All frame of mind. “He's a very strange character. Okay. But somewhere in there is a nice kid who got strange because of what his family did to him. He's not smart. He's wild and he's young and he hasn't been around much. But he's waiting to fall very loyally in love with the first man who's willing to be kind to him. And he'll … be kind to you in return. Couldn't you use some of that, now?”

Keep talking, my friend. Let's do a little scene here.

“I've seen his sort before,” he goes on. “They just want to fit in somehow. If they're actors, they fall in love with their director. If they're writers, they fall in love with their editor.”

“I never did.”

He puts his hand across my mouth. “And if they're houseboys, they fall in love with their host. Remember that old man and that incredible hunk at the Pines ferryslip?”

I sometimes think that Dennis Savage and I are coasting on dire memories more than we are living in the present. Things seen, heard, or read will set off a chain of reminiscence—and suddenly we are twenty-two or so and it's the early 1970s and no one has to pay a price for being alive.

“Remember?” he urges.

I nod.

“It was just after they had redone the Sandpiper, and we were waiting for Lionel's ferry. You had some atrocious jingle you wanted to sing him.”

“‘Cock full of nuts is that heavenly coffee,'” I sing.

He reacts exactly as he did back then, with that bossy rationalism that Little Kiwi finds sportive, Carlo finds picturesque, and I find endearing. “A cock,” he declares, “
cannot
be
full
of nuts.”

“Cock next to nuts?”

“
As you recall,
one of those dreary old fat queens was going back to town and he had what was obviously a hired cohort with him. Describe the cohort.”

The tester tested. Sartor resartus.

“Tall,” I say. “Straight dark hair. Twenty-five. Boyishly handsome. Very gymmed. Very style. Very smooth and opulent. An extraordinarily true man.”

“And what was he doing?”

“He was holding the old man, and caressing him, and asking him to stay on the Island.”

“Now the old man.”

“He was … appreciative. He offered to stay, but then the hunk said no, you have affairs to settle in the great city.”

“And what did they pass to each other?” he pursues.

“What is this, my SATs? Little endearments. Rash glances. It was a bit much, truth to tell.”

“Truth to tell, you were mesmerized. If they hadn't been so intent on each other, the hunk would have punched you out for Aggravated Eavesdropping.”

“
You
went out for a snow cone, I suppose.”

“I was as dazzled as you were.” He rose, crossed the room, looked out the window again. “I want to know the same things. But I always believed in them. You have to be shown over and over, don't you?”

“Shown what?”

“That the hunk-host partnership can be as magical, as real, as any. That a beautiful man can show an unbeautiful man attention, and suddenly, one day—”

“The beautiful man runs off with the household cash.”

“
One day it's love,
you unsavory gasbag. It's love, can you bear it? Now, will you please take Cosgrove?”

“No, I'll take the hunk from The Pines that day at the ferry.”

Still at the window, he is contemplative. Maybe the tiniest shrug.

“This is where you really shaft me, right?” I say.

After a while, he says, “This is where I vividly recall seeing those two men embracing right in front of everyone. Because their emotional bond was so strong that they had to celebrate it.”

“They were celebrating a business deal.”

“That gorgeous hunk
loved
that old man!” he insists, advancing on me. “He loved him! Can't you see anything, at long last?”

“Where are they now?” is what I see to say.

So he stands stock-still in the middle of the room, then he nods and demonstrates a quaint little shudder. “‘Where are they now?' Right. And that's it for love and Cosgrove.”

“Well, that's it, I would say, for the promotion of love and Cosgrove. You can't arrange these things, you know.”

“Now you'll run to Carlo, and the two of you will pick it apart and decide that Cosgrove isn't
man
enough for the likes of you. Isn't that how the two of you operate?”

“Terrific: Dueling Types. The kid versus the clone. Why don't you just leave Carlo and me out of this and get your dinner together and give Cosgrove to someone who can appreciate his type?”

“Because I feel guilty.” He sits next to me on the couch. “All he wants is to move in here and become Little Kiwi's little brother. And I'm going to sit him at a table with a lot of intimidatingly worldly men and tell them, ‘Hello, this is Cosgrove Replevin and one of you gets to—'”

“Replevin?”

“That's his last name.”

“Replevin…”

“So who should give the dinner? Kern Loften? He loves making couples. Perhaps because he never—”

“Jesus, I thought you were joking.”

He shook his head. He not only
was
serious, he
looked
serious. “Cosgrove has to go.”

“Cosgrove Replevin.”

“It's your last chance, Bud. Take him or someone else will.”

“Round up the hungry parties,” I tell him. “I'm staying innocent on this one.”

*   *   *

So the dinner was on, and Cosgrove had to go. As the days passed, Little Kiwi began to wane in his support of the project. Coming home from a literary lunch, I found him moping on the sidewalk in front of our building, the tethered Bauhaus, Little Kiwi's thuggish dog, lying on his back in a trance.

“All set for the big dinner?” I asked him.

He eyed me as Isaac should have eyed Abraham. “If Cosgrove knew, I don't think he'd be glad about this.”

“You're the one who wanted to find him a home.”