The Passionate Attention of an Interesting Man (22 page)

Alex shot me a look, meaning “Translation, please.”

“Cosgrove thinks you’re straight,” I said, “so don’t lots of women try to land you?”

“Hmm,” Alex answered. “The explanation, yes.” Letting down his voice to the depth of a prizefighter’s, Alex told Cosgrove, “I’m as gay as you are.”

“You’d be a hit at my improv class,” said Cosgrove. “Tom-Tom acts out his office headaches, but I present little epics. Some nights, we have a skit with Napoleon, Socrates, Jessica Dragonette. All the greats. You could be anyone you want.”

Then he went back to salad making.

Alex nodded, but he didn’t say anything for a while. Finally: “You’re in charge of him, of course. Right?”

“I pay his bills, if that’s what you mean.”

“
Ha
! If only! Darielle pays Neil’s bills, but he orders us both around as if…and she doesn’t mind, because that only proves how hung he is. You know his take on relationships?” Moving close for a confidence, Alex said, “He tells me, ‘This is the way it works—one is the boss and the other one isn’t.’ So…are you the boss?”

Before I could respond, Cosgrove came back in with “And if that Dennis Savage shows up, you tell him I said this kitchen is ¬
sealed to him
! Now we’ll see!”

And back into the kitchen he went.

“Yeah,” Alex went on, in a slightly dreamy tone. “Darielle? A newspaper junky,
total
-lee. Like fur in Alaska. After the dinner coffee, she likes to read from the editorials to me, then discuss. Not Neil, though. He’s in there watching some basketball game. But after a while he appears in the doorway in just running shorts and that idiotic T he likes, all cut up for summer comfort. There’s almost none of it left except a rectangle under his chest. Though, one must admit, he’s quite…And he says to her, ‘Come to daddy.’ Holds out his hand, so completely in charge.”

Alex demonstrated, waggling the fingers of his right hand.

“Says, ‘Come to daddy, now.’ Can you imagine?”

Cosgrove was back. “Does Dorian come to him then?” he asked.

“Darielle. Yes, she…
Oh
, yes. Leaves the newspapers on the table-o, and goes right…She travels a lot. Because of her job? And when she’s away I ask Neil not to cook for me, but he insists.”

“Can’t you just tell him no?” I asked.

“Well, but then he puts his hands on your shoulders and fixes you with those pushy gray eyes. And you…you…” After sputtering a bit, Alex gave up, thoughtfully watching as Cosgrove left us again. “You can lose your way sometimes,” Alex finally said. “So it’s nice to be looked after. Independence gets so exhausting.”

“What’s your new play like?” I asked, briskly moving us on. So we started in on that. Those of my readers who know actors will have heard this speech, because it’s always the same. The author’s a Shakespeare, the director is Max Reinhardt, and the other actors are the Moscow Art Players. Two weeks later, ask about any one of them, and the answer is invariably, “That cunt.”

Meanwhile, Cosgrove was serving the salad plates, with fresh-parsley butter sauce on the baguettes we get at Gourmet Garage. They’re the authentic kind that stale in a day, and they’re why we live in New York.

In fact, Alex asked about the bread, in case he could persuade Neil to stock it, too. So we were back to Neil—a subject that so obsessed Alex it felt a little like taking tea with Captain Ahab.

Baron Portugee noticed it too. “Alex is soft on daddy,” said the sock.

Alex has a masterly wink, and he treated us to it now. “You want the story?” he said. “Sure, we’re fucking.”

Uh-oh: the heavy stuff. Cosgrove relinquished the sock—“No, no, I want to hear!” the Baron cried—as Alex went on, “You know how it is, when…God, what are these little things with the shiitakes?”

“Polenta sticks,” Cosgrove replied. “Now start dishing.”

“Right. I told you how Darielle’s always on the road. Or actually it’s airplanes. As if she can’t stand, you know, communal…Are there any more polenta sticks?”

Cosgrove took Alex’s plate and went into the kitchen, to Alex’s “Ah, thank you, my man.” Alex in his collegiate voice: crewing on the Schuylkill. And “That is
so
conducive,” he added, when Cosgrove returned with seconds.

Alex
polentaed for a while then decided to eulogize the butter sauce. “Do you feed like this all the time?” he asked. “Because someone has to go to a lot of work…” Licking his slice of bread, he added,  “Spices and herbs and…”

“This isn’t the eating scene from
Tom Jones
, okay?” I said. “I want the story and I want it now.”

Alex went on munching a bit, then let it out: “One of those New York surprises, you know. Last Halloween. I was in that…you remember, that eerie thing set in Renaissance Florence. Codpieces and tights.” He shuddered for us. “I mean, I like to show off as much as anyone, but give me a mesh T any day. Anyway. You recall that play, yes?”

“All male cast,” I murmured, recalling the code words with which early Stonewall porn movies addressed their audience and which adequately described Alex’s Italian play.

“Yes, heavy on skin, wasn’t it?” He chortled at the memory. He didn’t laugh. He didn’t giggle. He didn’t chuckle. He
chortled
. “I was friendly with the costume guy, and he let me walk out of the theatre on the last night in my full kit.” Turning to me, he said, “You didn’t by any chance…”

“No, but I heard.”

To Cosgrove, Alex explained, “The top was a half-coat, with bare midriff. The pants divided at the crotch with a lace-up fly-ez-vous kind of thing that never quite pulled the two halves together, if you can conceive. And of course no undershorts, because they didn’t
have
undershorts in Renaissance Florence. Yes, and so out you go on stage and the entire audience immediately stares down at your junk. You can see the heads bobbing.”

Catching up on his feed, Alex noted, between bites, “If you could just…market these…these polenta sticks…like fast food, you know…you’d make a fortune. It’s a nosh and a half.”

“They’d cost too much” is all Cosgrove had to say about it.

Finally Alex got to the heart of the story. “The Halloween party, now. Neil is usually so busy at the gym evenings that…well, suddenly he was there while I was getting ready for the party. Of course, he thinks it should be illegal to dress so…openly, I guess. Like all sex maniacs, he’s got a puritan front. Except when he’s stroking himself while he talks to you, which he does all the time.”

More eating.

Then: “What do you call this saucy bit with the—“

“Get,” I told him. “To. The. Plot.”

“Bud,” he said, smiling, “you haven’t changed at all.”

“You have,” I answered. “You’re a walking rogue’s gallery, toying with various superhunk identities as you decide which one suits the successful actor-about-town. And I thoroughly approve. It’s gay life: you invent yourself.”

“Man, these polenta sticks!” he cried. “I ate them all till nothing’s left!”

Expectant silence from the rest of us.

“Oh, right. So Neil was there when I got back from…and, yes, I was drunk.
And
Neil followed me to my room, watching me undress. Ho, watching? Running his pickpocket fingers along the laces at my dick on those, what? Casanova pantaloons, saying, ‘Did you score chicks?’ and ‘You don’t need to tell a man with sand what “actress” means.’ He got right into the shower with me, too—or was I even going to take one? Right in the water with me to say, ‘She’s in Houston.’”

Nodding at us.

“Darielle. Sure. You were wondering, right?”

A sip of sparkling.

“
And
he’s soaping me up in that owning way of his, and of course the muttering. He’s a great one for those menacing undertones, our Neil is. Like ‘Think you’re so high and mighty.’ Or ‘Teach you to mind your Ps and Qs.’ Kind of shoving me around sort of thing. Toweling me off very roughly. He loves to be rough. It’s not a pose, though. A
pose
it is
not
. It’s just…how he’s made. Want my plate now?”

Alex extended it to Cosgrove. Using the French bread, our guest had cleaned the porcelain like a Westinghouse. Taking it, and mine, and piling them onto his, Cosgrove told him, “Don’t say any more till I get back.” He deposited them in the kitchen and rejoined us in perhaps three-and-a-half seconds.

“You like a good story, huh?” said Alex. “Do you enjoy it when a big winning guy like me suffers a takedown?”

No—and, anyway, is this Alex’s story or Neil’s? Because why are those
heteros so obsessed with cock that they have to come play big shot in
our
house? And Alex really does make a tempting picture. His dentist strokes his hair, can’t help himself.

“Well. So Neil puts me to bed—you know, that ‘poor guy’s so drunk I’ll have to take care of this myself’ routine. And he left me there, but then he came back with the sex fixings and went right to it. No
cocksucking or anything. Just…‘Knees up to the ears, now’ and ‘Pull you down to me for all-the-way, so take a deep breath.’”

Cosgrove’s blurb was ready: “‘Husband by day, hustler by night,’” and I put in, “‘Come to daddy.’”

“He talks all the way through it, too.” Sip of sparkling, build suspense. “Like, ‘There’s but one way to teach a sarcastic intellectual like you.’ He words you up. But he won’t play me the music. His oh so private audiotapes. See, when he and Darielle are together, I can hear a concert through the door—drums and flutes, some mid-Eastern concoction. And mixed in the tape is some dirty talk and…chanting or something. One voice keeps saying, ‘Honey and figs, what a sexiful treat.’”

“What?” I said.

Alex nodded. “Over and over. ‘Honey and figs’—is that some catchphrase in, like, Beirut? And another voice says, “Do it, do it, do it.” Two beats. Then he went into a quiet half-singing tone: “Do it, do it, do it.” And then he winked at us: a nice one, slow and studly.

“Will you stop?” I said, though I was enjoying it, too.

Cosgrove said, “I would prefer a medley of Kander and Ebb showstoppers.”

“Why doesn’t he play the tapes for you?” I asked.

Alex shrugged. “Couldn’t say, old man.”

“Is he nice to you?” Cosgrove asked.

“‘We’ll soon see how high and mighty you are with your plays and books stuff, when you sigh for me like a chick.’” And, no, he isn’t nice to me. He’s rough with me. I call him ‘Captain.’”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.” Now Alex is charmingly helpless in his all the same man-of-the-world way. “Commandingly rueful”—
New York
magazine. “Who can explain what happens to you? Maybe he puts something in the grilled chicken. He sits me in front of him on the edge of the bed, playing with my ears—ha, you like that bit? ‘I’m going to turn you inside out and seal it with a kiss.’ And this is said,” Alex added, leaning in for a confidence, “in the low tones of a liar of the night.”

“Is that from some play?” I asked.

“Is it weird? Yes, it’s…sex is weird, why doesn’t everybody know that? And, yes, I struggle—because you were wondering, right? But he holds me fast. He—”

“You’re a big boy,” I said. “You can shake him off.”

“Yes,” with a hand on my shoulder. He plays the friend, understanding and forgiving. “But do we want to shake them off?”

Cosgrove asked, “Except does he like it when you call him ‘Captain?’” while Alex finished off his sparkling.

“He doesn’t like or dislike. He’s just gruff and hung as he goes through life. And that unbelievable physique along with him.”

“Does
Dannylynn suspect anything between you two?”

“Or would she care,
Darielle?” Now he’s grinning in a sort of
Private Lives
put on. Alex did the play once, somewhere in the midwest, and the critics complained that his shoulders were too big for Noël Coward. “She knows her man. If it keeps him home instead of out looking for…” He almost absently extended his glass to Cosgrove, who refilled it so fast he passed himself on the way back from the kitchen. “But what if I can apply this someday to my work? One of my long ago acting teachers used to say that everything that could possibly happen to you is in some play sooner or later. You use it all.”

Now he polished off the water and rose.

“Thank you for dinner, and—no, don’t get up.” Of course, we did, anyway. At the door, he said, “I need to come over again and have some more polenta sticks, because the best friends want us happy.”

Some people wait for you to open the door, but actors know how to crack a Segal lock (bottom left, top right), from always making exits. Alex treated us to another wink and vanished.

Boy. How do you come down from that? Luckily, we were distracted by the return of Dino Croc, who had been on a play date with his current boy friend, the schnauzer on the ninth floor, Robespierre. Dutifully frolicking a bit around Cosgrove, the dog then got to the serious business of seeing about dinner.

“You can tell why he’s an actor,” Cosgrove was saying of Alex, while serving Dino Croc’s Salisbury steak and mashed, which he likes fridge-cold, with just a hint of tomato sauce on the meat. “What is his type, would you say?”