Everybody Loves You (29 page)

And “Look what we got a copy of,” Virgil cries as he shows his buddy the latest videotape,
The Wizard of Oz.

“It's magic,” Cosgrove rhapsodizes.

“It's also missing a chunk of the beginning,” Dennis Savage puts in, “because someone in this room decided he couldn't do without a tape of
Pee-wee's Playhouse.
”

“I was just experimenting,” says Virgil, blushing.

“Virgil,” says Cosgrove, “we had a show last night, and a costume party. I was one of the judges of the contest.”

“Was our Cowboy Bud cited?” Dennis Savage asks. Now that he's off the hook he has to catch up on his baiting and teasing.

“I was cited,” I say, “for having the worst friends in town. Now come downstairs and give me your ear.”

“Sit quietly and watch a movie, children,” Dennis Savage tells them at the door. “And no singing.”

“If you tell me what is right to do,” Cosgrove promises, “I will always do it.”

“Cosgrove will be good,” Virgil adds.

Dennis Savage has misgivings, but away we go to figure out what to do.

Yes, yes, yes, got it all figured. Cosgrove stays with Carlo till the London trip. Then he house-sits for Dennis Savage and the Katzenjammer dog. We come back and spang! Cosgrove can move in with me.

“Suddenly this?” says Dennis Savage.

But there's magic. We help him get a job, an apartment. One of those share-a-place services.

“Reality says no,” he tells me. “What job could that little dope hold down? And somehow I don't see him persuading anyone legitimate to let him live in. The kid's a ditz. He'll just get in trouble again.”

No, no, no, we'll help him.

“A terminal ditz—and sorry, but what about the medical problem? For all you know, he may be infected.”

We'll work it out. Some dream that comes true.

“What is it? What's happened to you?”

His hand on my shoulder, yes; but no, don't be sage and understanding because you don't know about feeling so sorry for someone that it changes your outlook. I didn't know about it myself. What I knew about was, for instance, someone brings his new boyfriend to a party and you think, Oh, I want that, and somewhere in there the boyfriend is telling you about his job as a waiter and he can't direct a story and he's not articulate and you wonder if he's just being social to please his lover, but what you are
really
aware of is how he leans in
very
close when he talks to you and tut-tut, mon vieux are we slavering and making a fool of ourselves and will our appetites be dish of the week tonight? We all know about that. What we don't know about is being touched sufficiently by someone's pain to want to gentle it.

And suddenly I remember what the Boy Scouts call the kerchief clasp: a woggle!

“He's not a stray puppy,” Dennis Savage is warning me. “He needs a great deal more than eats and a mat.”

“There is only one life,” I tell him. “He needs what everyone needs. One thing. One word. You say the word.”

“You're the one who never says it, man of the world.”

“Hush, I use it all the time.”

“You write it. You don't say it.”

“I'm getting to it.”

The Woggle

Virgil was so excited about the London trip that he was packed a good two weeks before we left. Reading in histories and appreciations of the city, tackling Evelyn Waugh and Simon Gray, listening to tapes of Flanders and Swann and music-hall records, studying guidebooks, tracing walking tours on maps, and memorizing key routes on the underground public transportation system, he attacked this novel adventure—as he does them all—with a rash savor.

Well he might. He had never been out of the country before, had scarcely been anywhere but Cleveland and New York. Dennis Savage, however, one of those well-traveled people who become tirelessly sedentary on the grounds that they've Done It All, fell in with my travel plans out of sheer desperation.

“A new idea,” he kept saying. “What I need is a new idea.”

Taking Virgil to London was it, then: so I called my travel agent and plonked them into my reservations, not only for the same hotel and plane but even in the two seats next to mine for the flights over and back. This is one advantage of traveling in November rather than in the summer's high season. Another advantage is the proliferation of theatre in London's autumn. Summer theatregoers can only pick up the tail end of the previous season. It's a has-been
cartellone.
The pre-Christmas visitor, however, gets to sample a pride of new works, some of which will close before one's theatre-buff friends can get to them in the spring, thus driving them crazy and adding to the fun.

I logged all my London sightseeing decades ago. Nowadays it is enough simply to traverse the streets of this amazing city, or to cross the Thames on Waterloo Bridge and glimpse Big Ben, the Houses of Parliament, and the Abbey to the west, and St. Paul's and (on the rare clear day) the Tower to the east. The London of Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare vanished in the Great Fire of 1666 and in any case would have lain eastward, beyond the range of the West End of playhouses, restaurants, and hotels that my tour centers on. But Dennis Savage and Virgil were coming as neophytes, to do what newcomers do and undergo the rites of debutant tourism.

Dennis Savage was not looking forward to it. Grumping and grousing, he counted the days till takeoff as if he were going to the hospital instead of to London. Two or three times a day he would stomp down to my place, leaving Virgil to pore over his touring kit alone.

“Trenovant,” Dennis Savage exclaimed, crashing in on the eve of our departure. “Trenovant, okay? That's the latest from our little Brit in residence. If he waves that map at me once more—”

“If you feel that way,” I said, “why did you agree to go in the first place?”

He threw himself on my disreputable couch, upholstered in blankets and pillows to keep the stuffing from dripping out through the lining's thousand tears. I feel like that couch myself, sometimes.

“Why?” I repeated. “No one was holding a gun to your head.”

He just looked at me.

“It's a new idea,” I said. “Right?”

He shrugged. “I'll tell you what I'm hoping: that he'll be so exhausted and homesick after the week is up that he'll be relieved to get back to … I don't know…”

“Life with you?”

Nothing from him, and a face like a blasted wall.

“You know,” I ventured, “lately we've been getting signals of grave misgivings upstairs.”

“Well, he's growing up on me. That's the trouble.”

“Most people look forward to a trip like this, you realize.”

“He's a confident young man. Remember when he was a shy waif?”

“I secured us tickets to the big shows by phone on my plastic—
Follies, Kiss Me, Kate,
the National Theatre
A View From the Bridge,
and the new Maggie Smith–Peter Shaffer comedy. I figure that's all you'll want to see in a week. I'll do the rest of it on my—”

“He's finally figured out,” Dennis Savage growled, “that everybody, but
everybody,
” he went on, “loves him at first sight,” he concluded. “And you know what?” he asked. “He likes it. He knows it and he likes it.”

“What's got into you?”

“
He
did, for a fact. Last night. His first time.”

Possibly not counting Cosgrove.

“Had you ever wondered about that?” he said. “So now we know.”

“How'd you enjoy it?”

“I hate getting done. I've always hated it.”

“Okay. How'd
he
enjoy it?”

“He's out of control. He's all over the place now. Take your eye off him for a minute, he's going for it somewhere. He used to be afraid to walk the streets of this town, took me years to train him how to keep an eye on the scene, watch out for trouble. If he can't be alert, let him pretend to be, right? So he pretended. The wide-eyed kid who sees nothing. Oh, and that worked fine for a few years. Now you know what he does? He cruises. He's wide-eyed all right.”

“Come on.”

“He watches men, just as we do. A few weeks ago, when I was coming back from the grocery, I spotted him about thirty yards ahead of me. I was just catching up to him when a man came out of the hardware store—big fellow, the rangy, lean type. I didn't see his face, but he was wearing bright red corduroy pants, and he had the most incredible butt, the sort that was put on earth to be admired in corduroy pants. And our little boy there, he just stared at this man, drinking him in as they walked together a few paces in front of me.”

Shaking his head ruefully, he paused there, letting his headline news sink in:
UNSPOILED KID TURNS INTO RAVING WHOREMASTER LIKE ALL THE REST OF US
.

“Just think of it,” he went on after a while. “How long before one of those corduroy dreamboats turns around and sees him and picks him up?”

“So he'll cheat on you. Everyone cheats sometime.”

“Yeah, he'll cheat. He'll cheat again. Then he'll happen upon a devastato with a great job and a house in the country and pots of money and charm of death, and Little Whatshisname will ask himself, What do I need with that broken-down Dennis Savage when I can start all over again with the real thing? Because, in case you haven't noticed, the world is full of incredibly nice, alarmingly handsome men.”

“Why are you suddenly doing this? Why
now,
I mean? If he was going to leave you, he could have done so long before. New York has been nice and handsome for quite some time.”

“He needed me before. He … he wanted raising. I was his teacher. Now it's been nine years. For every couple, gay and straight, that's the danger time.”

“I just don't see Virgil picking up street meat. Everything with him is social. If he was to leave you, he'd choose someone like Carlo or Lionel or even Big Steve.”

“Never. They're like uncles to him. He'd as soon go with … with Cosgrove or someone.”

We are all fools.

“No,” he went on, “I think he's ripe for the romance of the surprise encounter. He's finally reached that epiphany of Stonewall that we all had a hundred years ago, when you realize that the world is full of marvelous men and all you have to do is jump out and connect with one.” He sighed. “‘Only connect,'” he added, quoting E. M. Forster. “That's the whole opera, right?, right there. Isn't it? That's all that matters to anyone.”

I said nothing.

“You know I'm right. A feeling comes over you every so often that you've got to put your arms around a certain man and be held back—held tight, I'm saying—and feel the hardness of him, and the hair of his head, leaning against your head. And you can't do it with just anyone, oh, no. A
certain
man, waiting somewhere out in the world for you to come and take hold of him like an apple on the bough. Ah, but what if you never find the man I so pathetically and embarrassingly describe? What then? Can I tell you? This then: nothing that you do in your entire life is ever going to matter, not hardly at all.”

He got up as if to leave but he just stood there. “Trenovant,” he said at last. “He wants to rename Bauhaus Trenovant. Do you know what Trenovant is?”

“The legendary ancient name of London, if you believe the tale that it was founded by survivors of fallen Troy. Totally spurious, of course. One of those majestic bygones that cities sometimes dress their histories in.”

He nodded. “I figured you'd know all about it.”

*   *   *

Well, I do know a lot; but I am yet capable of surprise. I had remarked Virgil's steady maturing as a man of the world, an authentic gay New Yorker. Still, his childlike love of games and frolics had never deserted him, and it obscured the densely gathering articulations of his coming of age. Brought up short by Dennis Savage's talk, I stopped to take a clean new look at Virgil—perhaps as a parent does, one day well along in the course of life, to see the dear pieces of the child all fallen away in the bursting forth of the adult. For years I had taken Virgil for granted as a member of my family. Now I actually felt proud of him. I had helped raise him, after all. There was something of me in him.

My family: an odd notion for an outsider to accept, no doubt. And even some of our own initiates, boys and girls, might take us three for no more than a house party, two queens and their weekend guest. Certainly a lot of my tales deal with people being taken for something they aren't. I wonder what the craggy-featured, Scots-accented British Airways steward took us for as he flirted shamelessly with Virgil, even
over
Dennis Savage and me, because Virgil had insisted on taking the window seat so he could mark his first view of London from the air. It is widely known that a substantial fraction of the airline steward, uh, community is gay; why is that? A bartender once told me that the salient one-up of his profession was “You get to see everyone and everyone gets to see you.” This is true of stewards, certainly. But you know what?

It's also true of writers.

Virgil accepted the steward's attentions with a mild amusement, and as soon as the man passed on to take the other drink orders, our little tourist tried to imitate his speech. Virgil was juggling two guidebooks and three maps, wearing a headset, chattering about the quickest route between Trafalgar Square and our hotel, and balancing the expediency in concentrating on different sections of town on different days or on steaming through the place in a mad medley—all this, remember, put forth in the sketchiest of haggis twangs.

He's a silly boy, but he has great charm. And he does command, in astonishing quantity, one of the most significant virtues: loyalty.