Everybody Loves You (25 page)

“Cliff, my ace, you are dead wrong. He wasn't sharing love—he was putting out because he thought he had to if he wanted to stay in paradise.”

Cliff threw a rock. “Anyway,” he said, “I changed his life, right?”

“You changed a lot of lives,” I said. “Anyone else, I'd bet, was fishing for this. But you're so busy taking care of everybody you probably never noticed how much care you took. And nobody knows you. They don't know you at all, because there's so much of you. In the baths, they thought you were some hotshot top. At the Firehouse, you were the Great American Organizer. In San Francisco, you're a chance not to loathe New York. At the airline, you're straight. With Stephen and Luke and Guillermo and Greg … you're the reason the center holds. Held.”

Lighten up, boy.

“At brunches, you're a matinee idol, a little on the robust side, perhaps. But at dinner tonight…”

I stopped, out of breath. Jesus, that man is handsome.

“At dinner you were a hero,” I went on. “I admire what you did. I've always admired you. When I first came to New York, I was afraid that all the gays were going to be like the ones in
The Boys in the Band,
full of self-hatred and cultivating phobias. You know what I saw instead?”

He is smiling. “What, chief?”

“You. And the people you knew. They came in every kind going—queens and clones and up-towners and villagers.” I wrote in the air: “The ambitious and the slack”; he grabbed my hand and held it for a while. Stop writing, Human Typewriter.

“Okay,” he says.

Okay. “That was a whole world,” I went on, sensing some distraction in him, something on his mind that he means to hide. My observation chills me, for even here in the darkness his sorrow glows, rigid, unsharable, uncharacteristically not okay. My retention will hold the visual, my imagination fear the worst. That may be one of my problems. Take it easy and you'll live longer.

“A whole world,” he says. “I am thinking of that world, ace.”

“Your friends all took their sexuality for granted, is the thing,” I tell him. “It wasn't a cross to be borne, but their gift. They were great examples for someone like me.”

“Where are all the self-hating gays now?” he wonders.

“They're writing book reviews.”

“Bet you Colin doesn't admire what I did.”

“Colin has a different take on everything,” I told him. “He's of the great world. We're ghetto boys. Inside.”

“Inside.”

“Nobody knows you.”

“Right you are, ace.” He patted my head, his sorrow a flame. It lit up the beach. I took his hand, and he looked away, toward the Grove—which is also toward Washington State, where Cliff, incredibly, was once a kid who needed help himself, band-aids and love and a paper route—and he asked me, “How come I never scored you, chief?”

“You mean,” I said, “how come I never scored you. Because I wasn't good enough. You only go with the best.”

Now there was a great space of nothing, and finally he nodded. “Maybe just as well, my good friend,” he said. “Because I've got it too, now, and who knows if I wouldn't have given it to you?”

He gently pulled my hood back and put his hands on my shoulders. “I haven't told anyone yet, because … I don't know why. Because nobody knows me, maybe. They need me to keep them tough. Stephen was fit for the white coats the night we heard about Greg, you know. He kept asking me why I wasn't there to stop him before … stop him in time. Got me so mad I belted him. That's all I do now, get mad. I've had pneumonia already, and now I've got KS. I'm not ready to tell them. I don't want anyone to forget me. I don't want the world to go on as if I hadn't been here.”

“Cliff,” I began, but he clamped his hand over my mouth.

“Don't sympathize, ace.” He shook his head. “Don't be kind to me, don't. Better not test me. This would be the wrong time.”

Listen, the wind.

“I thought we were going to achieve a new evolutionary state,” he said. “If this was a heart attack or a car jumped me, I could take it, right? Sure. Because everyone else would be left to remember me. But if we all go, who's going to be there to know we were here?”

“I'll be there,” said a man standing before us, an outline in the ink. “I promise I'll remember.”

“Who goes there?” I said.

“Do you two live here?” he asked, approaching. “I've been wondering who does.”

The Midnight Rambler!

“My friend Colin lives here,” I said, “and he's very annoyed with you. Why do you use his house for access?”

“I have dinner with my ex-lover and his wife in the Grove every Saturday night. How else can I get home?”

The stranger was close enough now to glimpse. Thirty-five or so, a woozy preppy with a southern accent.

“Aren't you Cliff Dickenson?” he said.

“Yeah. How would you know that?”

“Everyone knows you.”

Cliff shook his head. “Nobody knows me.”

Staggering a bit, the stranger very gently touched Cliff's face. “If you're Cliff Dickenson,” he said, “how on earth can you be crying?”

“Because I'm going to die.”

We were still sitting on the walk, looking up at the stranger like boarding school truants being chastised by an indulgent junior master, and he said, “There was one night in the Eagle. You were standing with an unbelievably beautiful man. Laughing. And then you were quiet. Just looking at him. And he opened up the buttons of your shirt, very slowly. One button after another, right there in the bar. He ran his hand down your chest. And I thought if I could know you, I would give ten years of my life. Just to be your friend.”

Cliff whispered,
“Is that what I'm going to be remembered for?”

The wind tore at us and the ocean thundered. It was like the moment just before a hailstorm, when the sky blots out black and God hates you. It was like earthquake fever, when animals craze and the earth, not yet shuddering, is furtively lurking, ready, avid.

Cliff began to sob, and it was like the end of the world.

The Tale of the Changeling

Late october now, on the mild side, a drizzly Tuesday. I had to come up with a costume and was rummaging through my closets for something picturesque yet flattering when Dennis Savage came down for a grouch session. He was on sabbatical this term of the school year, so he was around all day; but so was Cosgrove, it seems. Thus the grouching.

I had been wrong about Cosgrove and Carlo. That was not love: that was Carlo's soft heart accommodating Cosgrove's need. Technically the kid was still living in Carlo's apartment, but Dennis Savage's place remained Cosgrove's headquarters, just as before.

“I hate to tell you,” Dennis Savage let slip, “but I don't even like him. Call me a scandal, do your worst, I don't care. You think he's a cute little number, right? Well, he's a little fiend. A tyke thug.”

“He was a little honeystuff, if I recall it correctly, when you were trying to park him on me a short while ago at your Pines bride-finding ball.”

He takes a deep breath and nods. “Oh, yes. Yes, you're quite right. I was totally wrong about him. But it took a while for me to absorb the depth of menace in that kid. To see through his disguise. He looks like a homeless orphan, but in fact…”

I was trying to assemble the parts of my old Boy Scout regalia. I had the shirt, the shorts, and the neckerchief; I couldn't find the doodad that goes on the kerchief. What do they call those things?

“What are you doing?” Dennis Savage asks. “Planning to disrupt another Jamboree?”

“I'm trying to decide on a getup for this Halloween weekend thing in Woodstock. Saturday night is a costume party.”

“First, that's not a costume, that's a uniform, and second, you couldn't get into that today with a six-foot shoehorn.”

“If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?”

“Why don't you go as a corpse? A real one?”

“Boy, Cosgrove really brings out your sweet side.”

“He fucks from the bottom up.”

I looked over at him from my hunt for the thing that holds the kerchief straight.

“Yes, I thought that would get you. A new story, right? Yes, he's a born catcher—but even so it's as if
he
were in charge. In his sad, scared little way he's always looking for an angle. A hook. So no wonder he tired of Carlo—there's nothing to hook on to, is there? But, oh, here's a nice den of bachelors or whatever you call us, and some of them are lovers and some of them are friends, and let's just see, shall we? What can we get out of them? Everyone's going to feel sorry for me, right? Poor little me, never hurt a thing, secretly vicious and crazed, but they won't figure that out for months and months … oh,
now
what?”

“Well, I've got a few cowboy shirts, the string tie and the hat and the boots. With a pair of jeans I could—”

“That's Village prowling attire, not a Halloween costume.”

“Straights think it's a costume. Remember, this is a publishing party—mixed grill. They're not too up on Village prowling attire. Anyway, I can't find the Boy Scout tie thing, so I'll go as a cowboy,
force majeure.
What are you going to do about Cosgrove?”

“I'm going to throw him out of my house.”

I looked at him.

“Let him do it to Carlo. Not to me. No more of this from him.”

“Do you think Virgil is going to stand by and let you toss that kid into the streets?”

“I'm not tossing him into anything, because he isn't my responsibility to begin with. His parents are the ones who did the tossing—though, for all we know, they're roaming the town right now with lantern and bloodhounds crying for their lost boy. And ho, do my ears delude me or did I hear you call somebody Virgil?
Virgil?
”

I was looking for my boots in the coat closet. “You may as well face it,” I told him. “He's not your private little nonesuch anymore. He's not a little anything. He's twenty-eight and he wants a job and he's got his own little something in tow. He may have more whimsy and frolic in him than all of E. F. Benson put together, but he has other things, too. And you can't stifle them. You're going to have to let him be what he is.”

“Or else what?”

“Or else your relationship is going to become very troubled.” I found the boots and took them to the bed. “He came down here a few days ago and asked if he and I could have, as he said, ‘a man-to-man talk.' The gist of it was that he wants me to call him by his real name from now on, and would I please help him to convince you to do the same?”

“Never,”
he seethed.

“Maybe you should try for a compromise,” I suggested, trying on the cowboy drag. “He'll let you call him Little Kiwi and you'll let Cosgrove stay.”

“You still don't realize what I'm up against, do you? Cosgrove is not the innocent victim he pretends to be. He's the Eve Harrington of Fifty-third Street. Besides, no one who is truly innocent is that expert in bed at the age of eighteen.”

“How good can he be?”

“He's not good, exactly. He's
hungry.
It's like making love to a black hole. Debauchery is his … his language. The medical problems alone are bound to be overwhelming, somewhere in the near future. I mean—imagine what he was doing before he met us. Imagine with
whom.
And the emotional problems are intolerable. He's a
bad influence,
like some … some kid from across the tracks in a fifties movie. A rotten apple. He's corrupting Little Kiwi.”

“Oh—”

“I'm telling you! You should see the two of them, singing that idiotic song, like … like demons plotting a raid.”

“You mean ‘The Ballad of Fauntleroy'? It's just a—”

“They sing it deliberately to annoy me. Whenever I leave the room, they drop whatever they're doing and start in, verse after verse of that unseemly nonsense. Grinning at each other and … dancing…”

“What?”

He nodded. “They dance to it. It's like a Black Mass or something. And when they get to the choruses, they put their heads together and lean forward to make their voices go down to bass. It's
indescribably
repulsive.”

“Maybe it's a new form of safe sex.”

“That shirt's a little tight on you,” he gloated. “Cowboy Bud's been hitting the chuck wagon a little heavy.”

“It'll pass.”

“You should hear the new lyrics they've been putting in. ‘Fauntleroy, he was home all day,'” he quoted, “‘laid a kid, then he let him lay.' What the hell is that supposed to be? What … what could be running through their minds when they sing that? And why do they have to put their heads together and drop their voices? It's so—yes,
you
think it's funny, thanks a lot! You don't have to live with it. Why can't I just have a lover? Why do I have to have a lover who is also a performer?”

“All gays are performers. But is it possible that this tirade is a mere projection of guilt?”

“What guilt?”

“Yours,” I said, tugging on a boot, “for taking a taste of Cosgrove. His being around so much magnifies your sense of self-reproach, no? Hem-hem, my dear. George Cukor said that Clark Gable had him fired from
Gone With the Wind
because Cukor recalled Gable from his first days in Hollywood, hustling the gay Circuit for money and notice. Now you want to fire Cosgrove for nearly the same reason. It's understandable, but is it fair?” I rose. “What do you think?”

“Oh, look, it's John Wesley Mordden,” he said, somewhat unenthusiastically. “Head for the hills, the savage is loose.”