Everybody Loves You (26 page)

“Well, I've got my costume set, anyway. I'll go back with you and show off to the two buckaroos upstairs.”

“That'll make their week.”

“Are you going to spend your whole vacation like this? Maybe you should go away somewhere. You haven't traveled for fun since—”

“I'll tell you where I'd like to go: back in time.”

We walked the two flights, and even before we reached the hallway we could hear a chorus section of “The Ballad of Fauntleroy” through Dennis Savage's door:

Fauntleroy,

Home all day,

Laid a kid

Then he let him lay.

Imagining the two boys head to head in the center of the living room, ooching down to deepen their voices, perhaps dancing a bit as well, I tried to look nonchalant. But Dennis Savage's jaw was set as he pulled out his keys.

Even before he had clicked the metal home, the singing cut off, and when we got inside, the two were across the room from each other, sitting and reading. Virgil, bless his heart, held
The World According to Garp.
Cosgrove was deep in the
New York Times.

“Little Kiwi, I told you to lose that disgusting song.”

The couple stared at each other.

“What song?” asked Cosgrove, the third man, with an edge.

“Cosgrove,” said Dennis Savage, “go home.”

“This is his home,” said Virgil.

“This is my home,” Dennis Savage snapped back. “Cosgrove, out. Go back to Carlo.”

Cosgrove shot an imploring look at Virgil.

“I had some good news to tell you,” said Virgil, putting down his book. “I thought you could be in a good mood. The magazine called and they said the guy they hired didn't work out and I could have it instead.”

“Have what?” Dennis Savage asked; but his features jiggled a bit and I saw that he already knew.

“The job, remember? That I had that interview in the summer for? They said I can start right after Thanksgiving.”

“I'm going to get a job, too,” Cosgrove vowed.

“Are you still here?” Dennis Savage cried, wheeling on him.

“Please don't be mad at me,” Cosgrove pleaded, getting up. “I am always trying to be nice. Please let me be nice.”

“Don't pull that stuff on me!”

“It isn't stuff!” Little Kiwi cried. “It's Cosgrove!”

“Little Kiwi—”

“And stop calling me that! My name is Virgil Brown!”

Cosgrove got behind Virgil, watching Dennis Savage as if ready to dodge a flying chair.

“Why don't I take Cosgrove down to Carlo's?” I said. “I haven't been out yet today, anyway. We can settle this later.”

“Now,”
said Dennis Savage, his eyes boiling.

“I'm going with Cosgrove,” Virgil said.

“The hell you are!”

“I won't stay with you if you treat me like this,” Virgil told him. “I can go to Carlo's, too.”

“Virgil,” I put in, “you'd best remain here and straighten it out about your job. Congratulations; and you two have a lot to talk about.” I asked Dennis Savage, “Okay?”

“Who the fuck are you to call him Virgil?”

Cosgrove ran for the door, hauled it open, and fled.

“Cosgrove!” Virgil shouted, and began to follow, but Dennis Savage grabbed him by the arm and threw him back on the couch.

“You go fix it up with that little monster,” Dennis Savage told me. “I'll handle this one.”

“You're the monster,” Virgil told him.

As I wasn't moving, Dennis Savage turned to me. “Please,” he said.

Fourth man. Carlo, no doubt, completes the quintet. He's the oldest of us all, did you know that? “Just as long as you're always trying to be nice,” I warned Dennis Savage as I left.

Cosgrove, in the hall, was frantically pushing the elevator button. When he saw me, he cried, “Don't do anything else to me, you can see I'm going now!”

“Just take it easy. No one's after you.”

We rode down in silence, Cosgrove glaring at me, till the fifth floor, when one of my neighbors joined us.

“Can't the Tenants' Committee do anything about that street trash that's always hanging around?” she asked me. “You never see a policeman anymore.”

“We're meeting with the precinct captain next week,” I told her.

“Everyone's mean to me,” Cosgrove put in.

She glanced at him; then, back to business: “You have those meetings every year and it doesn't do a bit of good. Pushers, dopers, vagrants, and faggots, they must think they own the—”

“Cosgrove!”

No sooner had the door opened than he pushed past us and ran for the street. I caught up with him a few doors east, but he pulled away from me and kept running—and not in the direction of Carlo's. Hunched under the umbrella line, weaving furiously through the heavy weekday afternoon pedestrian traffic, he lost me in no time. I hadn't realized how upset he was. I had also forgot that my costume made me look a little, uh, sightly in the middle of midtown. To the grins of passersby I went back upstairs.

Frost greeted me at Dennis Savage's; these two were calm but unmollified.

“Where's Cosgrove?” Virgil asked.

“He didn't want any company,” I said. True enough, however evasive.

“I apologized,” Dennis Savage told me, in the tone you'd use for “I confessed under torture by sadistic Mongolian devil midgets.”

“Not to me, yet.”

“You're both monsters,” said Virgil.

“I told him we can go on a trip,” Dennis Savage explained.

“But he won't take Cosgrove.”

“A new idea,” said Dennis Savage. “That's what you have to have every so often. You need a sudden shift of tactic, right?”

Virgil shrugged. “I don't care.”

“We're losing something here,” Dennis Savage went on. “We're getting confused. Where's our list of goals, you know, to write down and shoot for, like on those long yellow pads?”

“When do I get apologized to?” I asked.

“Oh, please. Once you lead a sit-down strike at the Valley Forge Boy Scout Jamboree with someone, you're brothers for life. You never have to apologize to him no matter what you do.”

“Do you by any chance remember what they call those things we put on our kerchiefs, to hold them in place?”

“At this point, I don't even remember what they call Valley Forge.”

“I don't want just any old trip,” Virgil grumbled.

“How about coming with me to London?” I asked.

Gasps, thrills, fears, and silence.

“Well, why not? My trip's all set and the timing is perfect—mid-November. You won't have any trouble slithering in on my dates at this time of year, and we'll be back just before Thanksgiving, so Virgil can start his job right on schedule.”

The two of them treated each other to bellicose looks but said nothing.

“It's a bargain with the hotel tie-in,” I went on. “And just think, Virgil's never been to Europe. It's a new idea.”

“I want to see the Colossus of Rhodes,” said Virgil.

“
Finito.
But you can see Westminster Abbey, Big Ben's tower, and St. Paul's.”

“What are they like?” asked Virgil, weakening.

“Fabulous.”

“I'm willing,” said Dennis Savage. “Anything to escape this glut of arguments.”

“Can we really just
go
to London?” Virgil asked. “Like that?”

“Why not?”

“One of us needs a passport,” said Dennis Savage.

“This time of year, it'll come in a week. You can apply right at the post office. A mere block away.”

“London!” Virgil marveled. “A mere block away! Do you have a map of London?”

“I've several.”

“Can I see one? Right now?”

“Sure as Bob's your uncle.”

As we left, Dennis Savage appeared to be tidying up in a desultory manner, but he wore the face of a man new-made. I paused at the door and caught his eye; he said nothing, but his face read “I apologize.”

*   *   *

True, the Question of Cosgrove was as yet unsettled. The boy did not go back to Carlo's—nor, especially, Dennis Savage's—but he stayed in contact with Virgil. Dennis Savage told me the phone sometimes went dead when he answered its ring; this was almost certainly Cosgrove fishing for Virgil. Dennis Savage also suspected that Virgil was sneaking meetings with Cosgrove and giving him money out of his allowance. Most unpleasant was the realization that I had exacerbated the trouble by letting Cosgrove slip away from me. Virgil must have thought me the blackest of scoundrels. But the subject was so tense as it was that nobody wanted to bring it up again, and we all kept our counsel.

Friday night before Halloween I packed up and went upstairs for a bit of visit before going down to wait for my ride to the publishing-world weekend party in Woodstock. Carlo was there, in a thoughtful mood, darkening what was, as so often those days, a gloomy place. Even Bauhaus, snarling to himself in a corner, seemed peckish, his growls perfunctory and his eyes half-closed.

“Next thing,” I told them, “you should pull down the blinds and cover the mirrors and stalk around with veils over your faces like the women in
Vanessa.
”

“There's romance blues in this house,” said Carlo. “It happens when love loses its mystery.”

“How would you know?” Dennis Savage asked him, almost piteously. “All you've ever had are flings.”

Virgil was looking at me, rather militantly for him. “See what everyone is like now, because a certain person went away?”

“Listen, guys,” I said, “we all better air our feelings and find some solutions, or we won't be happy again. I've never seen you like this. Like a bunch of sulky children.”

“And the dinner,” Carlo observed, “was very mediocre. BLTs and potato chips.”

“Sandwich platter,” I replied, “in The House of Mary Gourmet? Then is there truly trouble in paradise!”

“You're not supposed to make Mary jokes during Stonewall,” Virgil told me.

So Carlo winked and said, “Virgil's getting into New Age.”

Dennis Savage, who bristled, glowered, or passed a sarcastic noise at every mention of this name, muttered something about not having been raised to be a short-order cook.

Then there was silence.

I cleared my throat. “Okay, gang,” I began. “I'm going to start it off and Carlo can be referee and you two just better get this Cosgrove thing wired down so we can all go back to being glad about each other and supportive and so on. Now—”

“How about if you let Cosgrove be your house-boy?” said Carlo. “Then he can be real close to the kid himself here and we wouldn't have to worry about where he is.”

“That's a
wonderful
idea!” said Virgil.

“That's a quite terrible idea, actually,” I said, “because—”

“See, I tried to take him in,” Carlo went on, “but he truly didn't like it around my place.”

“—goes against the sacred beauty of the libertarian bachelor plane of existence, besides which—”

“It's feasible,” said Dennis Savage.

“I think Cosgrove would forgive you,” Virgil told him, “if you let him visit anytime.”

“—would really throw my work routine out of—”

“Does anyone know where he is now?” Carlo asked.

“I have a theory that some of us do,” said Dennis Savage, eyeing Virgil.

“—not to mention, of course, that I am allergic to being in rooms with people in them for more than an hour or two, three at most, and—”

“Well,
someone
had to make sure that nothing happened to him,” said Virgil, facing Dennis Savage down. “He only just turned eighteen and he's very sensitive.”

“Oh, he's legal now?” said Carlo. “That's outstanding.”

“—couldn't possibly agree to any arrangement that would so to say encircle my—”

“Oh, please shut up,” Dennis Savage told me. “It's the only way out for everyone.”

“We're trying to be nice,” Virgil told me.

“I'm afraid to be nice,” I concluded. “And anyway I have to go downstairs and wait for my ride.”

“La, the merry dance of New York,” said Dennis Savage.

“This is much better,” observed Virgil as I went for my bag. “I don't like it when everyone's mad and Cosgrove is in distress.”

“You were worried about that Cosgrove, huh?” said Carlo.

“It's a dirty job,” muttered Dennis Savage, “but someone's got to do it.”

“I call it a good thing,” said Carlo, “to see someone worried about his pal. Come here, Virgil.” They were sitting next to each other on the couch; he meant, Come closer to me so I can hold you. Resting contentedly in Carlo's arms, Virgil said, “I just want to make sure he's all right.”

“Yeah, I know that,” Carlo replied. “You have a real good heart deep in there, and you know what? That's why everybody loves you.”

“But how come nobody loves my Cosgrove? He has a good heart, too.”

“Well, yeah,” Carlo drawled out. “Yeah, okay. But that Cosgrove … well, he's run into a spell of bad luck, I guess.”

A shadow crossed Virgil's face then, because he knew that Cosgrove was pledged to sorrow far more deeply than this. “I just…” Virgil began, and gulped, and was quiet, and Carlo shook his head and held him tightly and said, “You truly goddamn very sweet little kid.”

I was at the door, staring, and Dennis Savage said, not unkindly, “So go.”

*   *   *

Something fancy happened downstairs as well. It was warm for the end of October, and a great many people were out, rushing and strolling and lurking, including the usual complement of midevening hustlers, though the plague and its concomitant closing of most of the local buy-a-kid bars had thinned the ranks to a large degree. Glancing down the block to the east, I saw Cosgrove in front of the antique armor boutique.