Everybody Loves You (27 page)

He was looking at me.

Just then an atrocious fat geezer came up to him and started talking. Cosgrove made some brief reply, refusing to look at the man, but the stranger went on with what was obviously a john's sweet-talk spiel.

Cosgrove shook his head.

The man went on, unperturbed, smooth, rehearsed by experience, and Cosgrove moved away a few paces, toward me.

The man hesitated, started back to Second Avenue, paused, looked around, and followed Cosgrove.

Again Cosgrove bore the man's come-on in irritated silence, then said something sharply and moved away again. By now he was almost up to the garage of my building, about thirty feet from me.

Still the man pursued him.

So I picked up my bag and went over to them. I told Cosgrove, “Pack it up, 'cause you're all covered for tonight. Deep-pocket appointment in Yorkville. Real pretty gig.” I don't know the lingo, but I can invent.

“I was just telling this fine young lad,” the man told me, with oily geniality and a shabby smile, “about my place on Park Avenue.”

I gave him a B-movie once-over and said, “Beat it, scum.”

Luckily, he did.

I put down my bag and waited till he was out of hearing. “Cosgrove,” I asked, not gently, “what do you think you're doing?”

He looked down, hands in his pockets. “Just waiting,” he said.

“Waiting for what? Money and death? Have you been selling yourself on the street?”

“What do you care?”

Good question. “What do you think Virgil would say if he knew?”

Better question; and Cosgrove was silent.

“He's working his tail off to fix things up for you,” I pointed out, “and meanwhile you're turning into street grunge. Nice timing.”

Cosgrove looked at me, soft anger there, and despair, and a flash of hope.

“Where have you been staying at night, Cosgrove? Tell me. I won't get mad. Just tell me what you've been doing.”

He started to weep. Wiping his eyes, he said, “I had such a nice time in the summer at the beach with everyone. I wanted to go on like that. I don't do anything wrong. Why are people always so mean to me?”

“Hey, Mordden, get your bod in the truck!” somebody yelled, and a horn sounded, and someone else called, “You're missing the trivia championship of the age!”

My ride to Woodstock. Cynically cheery faces at the windows, Cosgrove gazing wonderingly at the car, my bag in hand: the weekend begins.

What would you do? I took Cosgrove to Woodstock.

Even in a packed car, no one seemed put out or even surprised at the extra man. Straights of the publishing world, from senior editors down to assistants in the sub-rights department, generally take gay in their stride, perhaps enjoy it as another aspect of the rebellious glamour of fast-track New York. Granted, the attitude varies from house to house. The corporation-oriented places that emphasize textbook publishing and the tight-assed trade houses that cultivate an air of Ivy League old-boy conservatism both frown on rebellion and glamour, all the more so in combination. But my houses of choice admire originality and eccentricity, and their people are quite used to the sudden appearance of an attractive young man with no word of explanation beyond his name. Of course: this would be the current … beau, date, companion. The
trick.
But perhaps that last word should be made outcast; it reaffirms the myth that gays fuck rather than love. You're not supposed to make Mary jokes during Stonewall. In any case, Cosgrove was not my trick but my emergency, charge, friend in need. My charity.

Cosgrove was quiet, afraid to make the move or say the thing that, life had taught him, suddenly and mysteriously turns people against you. Breadsticks and fruit were as plentiful as shop gossip and jokes as we headed for the West Side Highway, yet Cosgrove didn't dare partake of any of it. He was listening, watching the faces to guess how they would treat him; and he was hungry, clearly, because he so carefully tried not to look at the food. I handed him two Granny Smith apples and a box of breadsticks while holding my own in another of those trivia challenge contests we of the great world obsessively hold, trying not to think of what Cosgrove had been doing in the last few days. We were one married couple, two women, and two men; we represented Knopf, Random House, and two magazines; we quizzed Hollywood, Modern European History, and Famous Murder Cases; we piled smarts upon knowledge and wrapped them in put-down drollery; we were good company. But Cosgrove was still, all the way to Woodstock, no doubt in the hope that if he did absolutely nothing, nothing bad would happen.

*   *   *

The merrily neutral acceptance of Cosgrove continued through our arrival, to his shyly growing delight. He stayed close to me, which tells us how unsure he is of strangers: for was I not as mean to him as anyone, laughing at his faux pas and standing by when Dennis Savage threw him out of our lives? Dinner was a big do-as-you-please buffet in a basement rec room, something like the opening night of the opera season blended into a freshman mixer. Cosgrove's eyes searched the room, but he never circulated, and I felt that if I let my hand dangle he would have grasped it like a child on his first day in school.

Everyone was nice to Cosgrove, though no one attempted to trade more than a line or two with him. Discretion? Thoughtfulness? Miriam Sonkin, however, decided to dote on Cosgrove, in her ambiguous, stepmotherly way. The maximum leader of the party, organizer and maintainer of many such expeditions, Miriam has an eye for all kinds of people—but I believe pretty kids with an air of worry most comfortably fascinate her.

Cosgrove was careful with Miriam; but then so am I. He quickly warmed to the attention and didn't hang back when I suggested he refill his plate at the buffet table. While he was there, someone spoke to him and he responded, and soon he was in lively conversation with some PR people from Simon and Schuster. I recalled Eliza Doolittle running her gauntlet at the embassy ball in
My Fair Lady.

Miriam was humming, any old notes, ironically intoned.

“Do tell,” I dared her.

“No, you. Who is he and what is he like?”

“You just met him.” Keep it light, lots of footwork. “What's your impression?”

“I want the long view.”

“What he's like … is raw and wounded. Who he is…” I gave her a smile and a shrug. Two for nothing. “He's nobody's boy.”

“Wounded. Raw.” She sighed, mock-sighed, surely; but who knows? “These are a few of my favorite things.”

“I can cover Cosgrove's share in the—”

“Already covered,” with a forgiving flat of her hand. “Someone didn't show, can we talk? We collected more than we needed, anyway. You don't mind if I put you in the faggot suite, do you? The only other gay couple is—”

“Don't use that word to me.”

Startled, she blinked in retreat, bit her lip as she regrouped, and stormed forth with, “My brother is gay, my ex-husband is gay, and half my friends are gay. If I can't say ‘faggot'—”

“You can't.”

Maybe a little humor? “Don't crab my act, buster. I'm breaking par tonight. I'm hot.”

“If you were Jewish and I called you a kike, wouldn't you mind it, no matter how sure I was that I'm not a bigot?”

Another hesitation. Maybe we'll fight about it. “I am Jewish,” she says, challenging me not to be appeased.

No way, ma'am. “Then you know exactly what I mean.”

*   *   *

Perhaps I should say something about this party. It is not typical of the publishing world, or of any world I know of. Weekends around New York tend to run on more intimate connections, and publishing socializes in one-on-one lunches, Friday afternoon booze rodeos at a favorite café handy to the office, and Christmas parties, as a rule. Grandly organized weekends like this one, especially thus centering on a camp holiday such as Halloween, are usually the notion of someone who is eager to attain to a reputation as top madcap and is fearful that no one else's invitation will fulfill it. So Miriam, a major editor in a minor house, gives her own party—fifty bucks a person for expenses, transportation mildly guaranteed, prizes for the costume party Saturday night—at a surprisingly sizable old house in Woodstock, the inherited property of a friend of Miriam's who likes noise and fun every so often.

This is a party for in-house staff rather than for authors, middle-level people at that and not the fabled great of the book world who steal each other's writers over a nosh at the Russian Tea Room. Miriam's guests are young enough to believe in crazy silly weekends built around charades and costumes and free enough to spare the time. Perhaps this is what makes the party typical: the very ambition to pull off a party of this size is New York, as is the availability of a crowd sharp and fast enough to finagle the details of an end-of-the-world costume and to fill out a tournament-level charades match.

I don't like party games. The simple instituting of teams and rules and time limits reminds me, horribly, of the Boy Scouts; I have only to take part in anything involving the supervised activity of a group for my hands to begin tying imaginary sheepshanks and my throat to choke on the memory of campfire Spam. Old pressures die never; and look, I didn't move to the City to recall the collectivist energies of the Country. Monopoly, where it's every man for himself, is so much more civilized than, for instance, Capture the Flag.

Still, I must admit that Miriam's friends play a wonderfully wild-and-mad, anything-goes charades. Each player puts down on a slip of paper a title, name, or quotation for someone on the other team to try to communicate—yeah, you know all about that, right? But my contribution was Rimsky-Korsakof's opera
Skazaniye o Nyevidimom Gradye Kityezhe i dyevye Fyevronii.
I expected a cry of Foul! from whoever got saddled with this impossible challenge, but no: the player studied the paper, nodded, and set to—and he was gamely plowing through when time was called on him. This is what I call zoom. Most players dispatch their assignments in seconds—this, mind you, in a game that bans the aid of category definitions as amateur style. No mimes of “movie,” “book,” or whatever for this crowd: you check your slip, call out “Time!” and start in. Now this (for those of you from other places) is New York.

Not everybody plays. Bands of kibitzers gravitated to far corners of the basement hall, and a few people served as spectators for the game and, led by Miriam, cheered us on impartially. Cosgrove chose to play, encouraged by the friendly atmosphere. I fretted. I was certain he could never master the intricate deployment of wit, speed, and body language dell'arte called for: and true enough, when it was his turn at bat—on a quotation from Lord Chesterfield's letters to his son—he had his team completely mystified. Nor was he adept at reading anything in his teammates' mime. But he did realize, quickly enough, that a goodly number of the slips of paper posed movie titles, and he began to punctuate the turns by calling out anything that came to mind, such as “Movie!
Close Encounters in the Third World!
” or “Movie!
Hitler on the Roof!
” This scattershot approach will get one nowhere, right? But then someone on Cosgrove's team was struggling badly, unable to get a single word out of his band. With time running out—this was a “sudden death” round, and you lose five points if you don't get your message across within forty seconds—Cosgrove's teammate had taken to repeating an obnoxious pantomime over and over, walking and insistently pointing at his feet.

“Legs?”

“‘Cripple Creek Something Blues'?”

“Play:
On Your Toes?
”

“Movie!” Cosgrove happily shouted,
“So Wales Was My Valley!”

The actor of the turn stood stock-still, then beckoned wildly to Cosgrove.

“Movie:
How Green Was My Valley,
” someone corrected, and the points were saved—the bit with the feet and the walking was supposed to suggest “grass,” hence
Green.
Cosgrove, quite accidentally, had made the touchdown, and I watched his eyes grow wide as his teammates clapped his shoulder and shook his hand.

Poor guy, I thought. If you hold your self-esteem hostage to such idle compliments, you will never know peace.

I was afraid, too, that his success would make Cosgrove tipsy and lead him into some indiscretion. But something happened first. The
How Green Was My Valley
actor was one half of the only other gay couple at the party, and as he went back to his chair, he affectionately ran his hand along the back of the neck of his lover; and his lover, smiling but not looking at him, grabbed his hand and held it for a moment. Most of us scarcely took notice, but Cosgrove was so transfixed by this little byplay that he said very little for the rest of the game.

This gay couple, I should warn you, is another of those “ideal” combinations, both of them handsome, firmly built, intelligent, polite, strong and tender, young but on the rise, uncloseted junior editors working in separate houses. I think they're a pain in the ass—like Lanning Kean, the kid down the street from us, who always got straight A's when I barely skidded through math. “Why can't you be like Lanning?” Mother would fume; and of course telling her that she is a rag and Lanning a brownie, though good for the soul, cannot defeat the sensation of Overwhelming Reproachful Comparison. Miriam's gay couple, Jack and Peter, always make me feel like a rolodex in a gay dating service.

Jack and Peter rather impressed Cosgrove. Like Lanning Kean, they went to bed like good little brownies sometime around midnight, while the rest of us continued to play. The wine flowed, sweet music soothed us, and Cosgrove was drowsy long before he and I climbed to the faggot suite.

We can say it. They can't.

Jack and Peter were asleep in their bed; we two undressed in darkness. By now Cosgrove was so tired he could barely stand, yet he stared at Jack and Peter for a long moment, as if trying to place the playful hand-squeeze from the charades game in this utterly pastoral scene, two lambkins intertwined in a misty spring on some farm where no one eats mutton. I was already in bed, and Cosgrove joined me as coolly as a mandarin taking a bow. He knows his business, I thought to myself, as he calmly folded about me, one arm under the pillow and the other around my chest.