How's Your Romance?: Concluding the "Buddies" Cycle (17 page)

He suddenly got to his feet.

“I’d better go help Evan set up,” he said, and I was alone. So I took a stroll and found my other two in the barn, playing records for the burro. Of course, I promptly told Dennis Savage about that scene with Slim. He didn’t find it all that odd.

“This is a different place,” he reminded me. “It’s bound to have different people in it.”

“Different from what?” I asked.

“This little guy prefers Cole Porter to the rest,” said Cosgrove. “His ears go higher for the hot stuff.”

I let it drop, and just enjoyed the music; finally it was time to go to the party. We had been hearing the guests arriving, in fact, and when we, too, went into the basement I thought of that moment in
The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone
when Vivien Leigh walks into her own party and some woman cries out, “Trust you to know
that,
Rollie!”: queens of both sexes, aging boys, and cousins of the parish. The queens were vapidly abrasive little snitches, the aging boys were as narrow as their crew cuts, and the cousins were good sports, always looking to be helpful. They bustled about with paper plates and cups as Evan conducted the buffet like Stokowski. Slim, looking guilty, assisted Cosgrove in the performance of another variety show in the puppet playhouse.

“They’re straight, they’re guilty, he’s ready to rule!” Cosgrove was declaring. “Judge Cosgrove!”

Slim was endearingly clumsy at it—real men have no art, have you heard?—and there may have been some displeasure, at least from the queens, at Cosgrove’s lack of shyness. Contrary to proverb, when in Rome one does absolutely nothing, hanging back with respectful timidity: or the Romans will resent one’s self-assurance.

It was a long party. After the eats, the jukebox came on and there was dancing to old hits recalled from proms. “Teenager in Love.” “I Just Saw an Angel.” Slim and Evan slow-danced like the designated couple at a wedding as the queens managed to applaud and sneer at once, the aging boys got lost in thought, and the cousins doted. Then Dennis Savage cut his finger on some broken glass.

“Where on earth did you find any glass down there?” I grumbled as we headed up to our rooms for a medical interlude. “With all Evan’s millions, you’d think he’d do better than paper plates and—”

“That’s the club style, informal and easy-go. Gosh, this thing is bleeding.”

“Hold it under the cold water, that’ll discourage the flow of blood. I’m going to wash my hands separately.”

Hauling out the first-aid kit, a steel box of heavy content, I then scrubbed my hands at the bathtub faucet.

“What is that,” said Dennis Savage, eyeing the metal rectangle, “the cabinet of Dr. Caligari?”

Fishing out a tube, I told him to wave his finger in the air to lose the excess water. “This is a common household antibiotic, and you will notice that the salve does not come into contact with my fingers. Okay. Band-Aids”—as I undressed one—“are now packaged with a useful peeling gadget instead of the old red string that always failed to work.”

Still considering the big steel box with worry, he said, “Are you going to operate or something?”

“Let me see the wound.”

He extended his finger and I fastened the bandage. “Firm, you see? Neither loose nor tight.”

“Neither Slim nor Evan. Why do you talk so while you do it?”

“To put the subject at ease.”

“I am about as at ease as Trotsky was when Stalin’s friends came for trick or treat.” He inspected his finger. “It’s very professional, though.”

“I got a merit badge in First Aid.”

Sitting on one of the beds and admiring his Band-Aid, he said, “A Boy Scout merit badge? Not a merit badge from some underground theatrical organization for beginning the beguine more times than … What?”

Packing up the first-aid kit, I asked him, “What do you think of Slim, by the way?”

“He’s very sexy and confusing. One of my least favorite types.”

“What’s your favorite? When you were recruited, what special person did you name?”

“Ty Hardin.”

A rustling in the hall warned of approach, and a queen and an aging boy appeared. The latter said, “Evan wondered … you know…,” and the queen put in, “If you can tear yourself away from your thrilling coffee-klatsch, that is.”

Dennis Savage held up his bandaged finger. “We had a medical emergency.”

“Poor puss,” said the queen, in the combination of sympathy and assault that serves as the type’s defining tone.

Dennis Savage looked at him for a bit, then asked the aging boy, “Why do you pal around with that?”

Probably joking, the aging boy replied, “You don’t get a lot of choices in a small town,” and the queen let off the customary enraged comebacks. We just pushed past them and returned to the party.

*   *   *

T
HE NEXT DAY WAS
unprogrammed, so we kind of hung around and assisted at the more colorful agrarian activities—yes, they work on weekends—while Cosgrove played 78s for the burro and improvised in the puppet playhouse. We had promised our hosts a gourmet dinner from scratch: Cosgrove’s latest masterpiece, spaghetti and meatballs. This is not the standard plate of noodles. The meatballs, a blend of beef, pork, and lamb, are exquisitely tiny; the spaghetti sauce is really some melted “fresh grated”; discreet tablespoons of tomato sauce are no more than distributed here and there.

It never fails to delight, and Cosgrove was eager to show it off, so he, Dennis Savage, and I decided to spend the afternoon in town, picking up the makings. “Town” was no more than a crossroads civilized by commercial establishments; we walked there, partly to pass the time and partly to try the rural atmosphere on a lovely rural day.

That turned out to be a mistake, but without bad decisions life writes us no stories. In the grocery, Cosgrove was rounding up his “ingrediments,” as he puts it, when one of the aging boys from the night before came in with a queen we hadn’t met.

“No,” the queen told us immediately after the intros, “they keep me away on the important occasions.” Leaning in too close, he added, “Afraid I might
blab.
”

Dennis Savage decided to help Cosgrove—immediately—and I used my trusty escape line, “Oh, there’s Evita, I must say hello.”
*
But the two of them caught up with us at the checkout, where the queen offered us a ride back. I knew to say no; but I hadn’t planned on Cosgrove’s having to tote quite so much in the way of raw fixings. So we piled into the queen’s old Ford—the aging boy went off somewhere—and by the first stoplight the queen was ripping into Evan and Slim and their love affair of the ages.

“It’s all such a fraud, isn’t it?, for all those high notes Evan loves to sing. Doesn’t tell you about all the times he had to go chasing after Henry in some bathhouse. Yes, we have them. You New Yorkers didn’t invent sex.”

In the back, Cosgrove pretended he had suddenly noticed Dennis Savage’s bandage, presumably to interrupt the flow of slander pouring out of the queen.

“Did Bud do first aid at you?” Cosgrove asked. “When I see that metal box come out, I take the first bus to Indianapolis.”

“Thank you for noticing,” said Dennis Savage. “He’s going for another merit badge.”

“I long to know what merit badges
you
won,” replied Cosgrove, to prompt a new line of discussion.

“They should give Evan a merit badge for lost causes,” the queen put in. And then he burst into song, to the tune of Edith Piaf’s old standby “La Vie en Rose”:

Don’t you know we love the land,

Our Pennsylvania land?

It’s in the Muller bloodlines.…

He went on, “Yes, we call that ‘the Evan cabaret,’ don’t you know.”

“That’s your idea of a song spoof?” I said. “‘Our Pennsylvania land’? What kind of queen are you? You’ve got the meanness and the anger, but you’re completely missing the zippy fun. If I gave Lypsinka thirty seconds and any Piaf solo of his choice, he’d come up with something zany. Sidesplitting.
Gay.
Didn’t you hear we’re not in Kansas any more?”

Determined to spin out his tale, the queen raced back in with “You’re so right, my dear, except every Muller male has died young and crazy trying to make a living out of nothing. Henry hates the farm. He’s only there because Evan keeps it going. He’s not like us, you know. Evan. He’s a spoiled rich kid.”

“Bud’s a spoiled rich kid, too,” said Dennis Savage. “He and Evan were the last to free their slaves, and even then they forced them to tour in a bus-and-truck
Porgy and Bess.
”

“Would you please?” I told Dennis Savage.

“Maybe we should walk this last section,” said Cosgrove.

The queen went right on with “Everyone thinks Henry is the man of it, but Evan likes to play boss, doesn’t he? His money gets into everything. He bought Muller Farm and Henry Muller right the way with it, didn’t he? Then he tells Henry who can come to their parties, and who of us Henry can have sex with. Henry does anything for money, I bet Evan didn’t tell you that. Yes, till Henry runs away again. We have a cabaret about that, too.”

“Don’t sing, please,” said Cosgrove.

“But Evan always finds him. He hires detectives.”

We swung into the driveway of Evan and Slim’s place, and the queen was silent till we got to the house. Evan was standing there, and not, surely, by chance. He seemed to know that his legend had just been elaborated upon. The queen got out and slammed the door defiantly, but then he just stopped where he was, gloating for certain. Cosgrove went off to the kitchen. Evan glanced at the queen, then left him where he was and guided Dennis Savage and me indoors.

Let me say this: I demand Live and Let Live from others, and I obviously, then, spend heavily of it myself on their behalf. I don’t care what some queen, or anyone, says. It’s none of my business what Evan is or isn’t.

Dinner was uneventful, despite that wonderful pasta. Cosgrove troubled to keep the conversation humming, but he got scarcely a drone out of Evan; and Slim was, as Dennis Savage said, confusing. And these are our poster boys, children—this the alternative to the alleged drugasexo turpitude of Stonewall.

Suddenly, Dennis Savage got on a jag questioning the validity of the queen as a type. My best friend is normally anything but controversial among people he doesn’t know, but this night he was unstoppably off on a thinkpiece about the behavior and purpose and meaning of the queen.

“Why, for instance,” he asked, “do they use that catty little bleat for everything they say? They’re like those jackasses who pull on your cheek making nauseating koochy noises who get offensively surprised when you shove them away in disgust. Or wait—are they some show-biz invention? A blend of Oscar Wilde and Auntie Mame? They’re playing a role that doesn’t exist. There never was an Auntie Mame, and I wonder, after what I’ve come to know as a gay man, if there even was an Oscar Wilde.”

Cosgrove, who is very close to a queen called Miss Faye, ran off to toss the salad.

“Bud complains that his cousin’s Chelsea Boy coterie lack every sort of intellectual curiosity. Every time he sees them, they’re exactly the people they were before. They won’t learn, so they don’t grow—and such tales of their exploits as have been detailed to me reveal the usual testosterone competitiveness. They quarrel. They fight. But they never try to degrade each other with whiny cawings. They don’t strike poses. They’re men and they act like men. And you know what? People who meet them don’t think they’re picturesque or difficult or loathsome. People who meet them like them.”

Silence.

“I have spoken,” Dennis Savage finally said, taking up his fork again and adding, “Cosgrove, this is your finest dish of all.”

Well. That was good for me; how was it for you? Slim and Evan were by now completely silent. I’ve never seen the salad go so fast. Then Evan got up with “Come with me for a talk” on his face and I followed.

We went outside in the snappy cool of an October that isn’t doing fall quite yet, and Evan began, “I haven’t lived a lie, despite what you may have been told this afternoon. I lived an ideal. It’s a work in progress. All ideals are.”

“You don’t owe me an explanation,” I told him as we walked his pathways, lanes running between great places where things grow, where matter is created. The farm is life.

“What did he say to you?” Evan insisted.

“That which all queens tell of—love is our doom, not our blessing. We are beyond even His redemption at last. That’s what he said.”

That hint of religious consideration can throw people off, but as we walked I could tell Evan was rebounding. Of course: we share a background, and he knows what I know.

“If you understood our struggles,” he said. “How he wrestles with his demons. Such as those lost weekends in Harrisburg. I guess you heard of
those.
”

“Lost weekends in Harrisburg?” I echoed, murmuring in the tone one takes for “Snow White used her strap-on on Dopey?”

He came to a stop and said, “Look around you. Yes, look.”

We had reached the horses’ corral, empty in the evening. It was, informally, the center of the front part of the farm—the façade of the place, so to say—with the farmhouse and outbuildings to one side, the barn off to the left, and fields stretching away to the right.

“Isn’t it fine to live in a place that belongs to you?” Evan asked me. “A place with meaning? With
liberty?
Who owns a city? An apartment building? Who owns your life?”

I had nothing to say to that, so I turned a page of text to “Do you know that all my life I’ve had a crush on you?”

He looked puzzled. “Why?” he asked.

Why?
Because—if younger readers will pardon a reference valid only to their elders—every generation has its Letch Feeley, but every individual of us has an Evan McNeary. Letch stuns us into knowing who we are; Evan tells us where to go with it. You might see the one as the ideal and the other as the work in progress.

We had stopped. Now we started moving again, not talking any more. Well, I did indulge myself in a repetition of “Lost weekends in Harrisburg,” for echo texture. Otherwise, we were silent all along our walk, around the corral and among the fields and at length back into the house through the rear door leading to the basement rec room.