Some Men Are Lookers: A Continuation of the "Buddies" Cycle (14 page)

Dennis Savage looked at Cosgrove for a moment, then turned back to me—followed me, in fact, into the kitchen. “The point isn’t money,” he said. “The point is that now I’ll have a book in the stores, a bit of media fuss, and maybe a stalker or two.” I was in the fridge; he put a hand on my shoulder and drew me back. “There’s more,” he said. “I’ll also have . . . well, a new friend, so it seems. See, it’s this editor. He’s this sort of needy guy. I think he bought my stories because he . . . Look, I need your help and can we please be serious?”

“Is this a brew-some-coffee serious or a pour-the-Chiquita-brand-Calypso-Breeze-fruit-juice serious?”

“If we could can the repartee? I’ve got a delicate problem here. Tweedy, closeted, Ivy League editor hits thirty-three, gazes deep into the mirror, and suddenly senses that just coming out isn’t enough. Gay is more than what you are—gay is what you do, and he wants instructions, directions to where, I don’t know, the whole
handbook. I mean, the first lunch we had, he was so collegiate. We discussed Dante, Hitchcock, origami. Comes the second lunch and he wants to know if they like it better on their stomach or on their back!”

I handed him a Beck’s dark—the conversation was definitely taking a man-to-man turn—and we went back to the living room.

“Then,” said Dennis Savage, tragically sinking onto the couch, “he asked me about hustler bars!”

“Well, he should consult with Baby Frumkin in that matter,” Cosgrove put in. “He has many a dark tale to tell.”

“Baby Frumkin is a hustler?” I asked. “Under that name?”

“He would be called ‘Nightboy.’ ”

“You know what it is,” said Dennis Savage, not unhappy to be entangled in this wondrous web, this complicated and appetitive yet ultimately intelligible and glamorous Literary World. “He’s trying to befriend me! I think he bought the book because he hopes it’ll bring him closer to . . . you know, the Life. It’s sort of touching, in a way. He wants me to bring him out, socially. He actually thinks I have the key to this . . . this profound sense of camaraderie. Oh, of a shared mission, even. He says my characters are so friendly and fun that you want to meet them. In fact, that’s what . . . well, he really does want to . . .”

“Meet us?” I cried. “Is this a zoo? A parade? I didn’t ask to be in your stories in the first place!”

“Look who’s talking. At least I have the decency to change everybody’s name.”

“What’s mine?”

“Carlotta. Look, will you please listen? I’m giving a dinner. And please—I beg of you—help me bring it off so that he feels he’s seen some truth and joy of gay so he’ll shepherd my book through the processes to fame and glory, or whatever it is they do.”

“Fatty de Pinero took odd jobs on his walk to New York,” said Cosgrove. “This includes shepherding. But the sheep drove him crazy with their frenzied baas. They foretell the weather and comets, you know. They graze in formations duplicating the layout
of Stonehenge. They do the hokey-pokey and they turn themselves around.”

Dennis Savage not only looked at Cosgrove; he demanded, “Where have you been lately, may I ask?”

Cosgrove grinned. “Miss Faye has been writing some of my latest material.”

“Are they real?” Dennis Savage asked me.

“Who?”

“Tubby Lumpkin and Little Grubby and so on.”

“Fatty de Pinero and Baby Frumkin,” Cosgrove corrected.

“I’ve heard Miss Faye’s messages on the answering machine,” I said, “and I’ve actually spoken to Fatty de Pinero. I’m not sure about Baby Frumkin, though.”

“He’s as real as I am,” said Cosgrove.

“That settles it” was Dennis Savage’s opinion.

Then Virgil burst in, very excited about
his
news. “Did you tell them yet?” he asked Cosgrove.

“I couldn’t, because I was in trouble.”

“Tell us what?” I said.

“Cosgrove and I are going to form a guide service for visitors to New York, where we take them on a tour of the plazas.”

“The what?”

“Those big spaces by the new skyscrapers.” Tasting now, just a bit, of the air of the carnival barker, he went on, “What does the tourist see in New York, I ask you? The landmarks, the theatres, the hot spots. But what does the tourist
miss
, you ask me? Why, of course, it’s our famous plazas, a synonym for mystery and romance.”

“That’s so true,” Cosgrove put in, with feeling.

“Why do I sometimes feel,” asked Dennis Savage, “that I am living in a painting by Salvador Dali?”

“The historic sites!” Virgil enthused.

I said, “The most ancient plaza in New York is like fifteen years old. What historic?”

Now Cosgrove abandoned his charts to take voice in this matter.
“We can enlist conspirators to plant Indian arrowheads and strange, dusty coins just before Virgil and I bring our tour group in, which would give us history evidence and dramatic encounters.”

“What conspirators?”

“Are you kidding?” said Dennis Savage. “He’s got Pushy de Clown and Miss Laye on his payroll. The sky’s the limit!”

“Listen, boys,” I told them. “Plazas are just plazas.
Things
. Tourists want glamour, color, fame.
Action
. The world isn’t about who loves whom. The world is about who’s fucking whom. It isn’t necessarily the same thing.”

“Weren’t you saying before that I should get a better job?” Virgil asked Dennis Savage.

“Yes. Just not this job.”

“We’re entrepreneurs.”

“Bud?” Cosgrove asked me, trying to look like something out of Hector Malot.

“Oh, now he’s a tearful waif!” Dennis Savage cried in outrage. “But last month he spent an entire week chasing me around with a whoopee cushion!”

“And you fell for it many a time,” Cosgrove shot back, darkly.

“We can’t forbid them,” I told Dennis Savage. “Let them try it. If it works, good. If it fails, they had their chance.”

Dennis Savage responded with a grumbling fit. A tiny one.

“Frankly,” I said, “this whole project will fall apart before the first group returns to Xenia. That’s the profile of the Virgil-Cosgrove business ambition.”

Virgil and Cosgrove buoyed each other with “Sez her” looks, and Dennis Savage headed for the door. “I have to go design my autograph for the inscribing of copies of my book at my many signings.”

“Cosgrove,” Virgil was saying, “we’ll be known as the Plaza Kings!”

At the door, in an undertone, Dennis Savage said, “Not that it matters, but when
is
Cosgrove’s birthday?”

“Hard to say. He’s had three so far this year.”

“And it’s only April,” said Dennis Savage, nearly in awe.

Dennis Savage not only planned a dinner but made me attend strategy sessions. One day, he’d say, “Cold cucumber soup and boeuf bourguignonne. Too fancy?” Next day, it was “Is it too much to ask everyone to be in jacket and tie?” Then I’d hear, “How about stuffed lamb?”

“Doesn’t this guy want to look in on our daily routine?” I asked. “Our
real
life? He won’t be hoping for Cinderella’s ball.”

“He hopes to be dazzled,” said Dennis Savage, wandering through his place doing those extra little tiny cleaning things, like wiping windowsills and blowing dust off objects.

“Dazzled, right,” I said. “By
us?”

“Listen, after decades of doing the WASP straight rich white-bread thing, he sees people like us as incredibly alluring. The bohemian liberated sexagonzo cruisathon thing.”

“Maybe you’d better prepare me for this guy.”

“I guarantee you’ll like him. Affable, polite, a good listener.”

“Name.”

“Peter Keene.”

“Describe with extreme prejudice.”

“Tall, straight dark hair expensively trimmed, old-fashioned dress-up attire with the occasional madcap tie, long-torsoed and probably in very good shape—it’s hard to be sure when he’s always in a suit. Though, when he takes off his coat, one does notice a shockingly first-rate ass.”

“Face.”

“Very.”

“Huh. So he’s eligible.”

“He isn’t just eligible. In his repressed way, he’s a sex monster tugging at the chain.”

“Gosh. Am I in love?”

“You’re all tied up with our incomparable little Cosgrove,” he
warned me as he cleaned the TV screen. “Though I have to say you two never act like lovers.”

“How do lovers act?” I shot back, brisk and bland.

“You know. With those endearments and touchings and the rueful smiles of resignation at your partner’s eccentricities. You and Cosgrove act like shipmates on an aircraft carrier.”

“Actually, Cosgrove and I have developed extraordinarily arcane ways of communicating our bond to each other.”

“Really? I’ve never noticed.”

“Good, they’re working.”

“Where are the kids, anyway?” Now he was dusting the bookshelves, pulling the books out in threes to brush the tops. I find this kind of thing fascinating. It’s so orderly—like eating spaghetti without getting red bloops on your shirt.

“They’re downstairs,” I said, “firming up the schedules for the Historic Plazas tour.”

That got him; he actually stopped cleaning.

“They’re what?” he said. “No,” he added, changing tone from incredulous to decisive. “No, they will not prolong this ridiculous—”

“Boy, don’t you ever get it?” I said. “They always have a scheme in the works. And it always looks real, but it isn’t real. Remember the Spee-D-Lite Messenger Service? The Quiche Я Us Party Caterers? Besides, what do you care if they end up leading a few—”

“Yes, but who are these odious characters they bring into our lives? They’re bombs going off, can’t you hear them? Miss Faye and . . . who, Flabby Thumbkin?”

“Miss Faye is a drag queen.”

After a moment, he asked, “That’s all I get? I learn no more?”

“Well, you know drag queens. They come in three kinds. Kind One is sleek and womanly. Marilyn Monroe. Kind Two is facetious and resigned, like Eve Arden. Kind Three is a tornado of sleaze and terror. Think Bette Midler crossed with the Luftwaffe.”

Dennis Savage tried to muster the strength to police the area
under the cushions on the couch, but he had gone all limp. He knew the answer yet asked the question anyway: “Which is Miss Faye?”

“Kind Three.”

“Why . . .” He did one of his helpless gestures. “Why do they have to come here? Why must they pervade?”

“I thought we were bohemians,” I said. “Liberated. Remember, your editor wants to see our vitality? Si?”

“I
hate
drag queens. And so does my editor. He told me it was men in drag—and Danny Kaye—that kept him in the closet all those years. He thought that’s what gay
was!”

“If he’s that stupid, I’m not coming to—”

“Oh, for God’s sake!” he cried. “Can’t a body object to a thing now and then? What are we, a monolithic culture? We all order the same plate in restaurants? We all dance to one song? We all own the same pet with the same name and the same cunning little shoulder harness when we—”

“All right, all right,” I said. “Please start cleaning again, so contentment may reign here in Macholand.”

He didn’t start cleaning again; he stood there looking at me. “That’s all it is to you?” he finally got out. “A
man
in a
dress
and
makeup
and a
wig
and you aren’t repulsed? Not even in some obscure, hardly comprehended way? Perhaps you think those of us who are repulsed are hypocritical victims of gender panic?”

“I just don’t have a problem with it,” I said, shrugging. “I call it bohemian and liberated.”

“I just . . . Please,
please
don’t put these Miss Fayes in my life, okay?”

“I’ve never met her myself, you know. Cosgrove says she almost never ventures off her turf.”

“I rigidly hope so.”

He actually shivered.

As always, Virgil and Cosgrove did not go gently into their latest project, but rushed in, complete with motto, pennant, and uniforms.
The motto was lame (“If you long for times bygone, / Plaza Tours will lead you on”), the pennant a handkerchief (“Has anyone seen my di Salgo linen square?” Dennis Savage asked, as the rest of us stared in other directions), and the uniforms were black T’s over black slacks topped by red baseball caps. I thought the two of them looked great and would probably abandon the whole project in about thirty-five seconds; but no. Worse, Cosgrove made me come along for a business conference with his “booking manager,” a travel agent around the corner on Second Avenue.

“Those craziacs!” Dennis Savage cried when I told him. “Can no one stop them?”

He was racing around preparing the dinner, with a dollop of horseradish sauce here and a refolding of the napkins there—“No, Virgil, twist to the left or my literary career lies in tatters!”

“Don’t look hungry,” I advised him. “People are attracted to the dégagé, the autonomous, the confident. Think of Yevgyeny Onyegin, Lord Byron, Jeff Stryker.”

“Just be back by six-fifteen at the latest!”

New York hadn’t undergone its two days of spring yet, so it was nippy, and Cosgrove and I had bundled up. High on the promise of thriving business, Cosgrove was full of piss and vinegar. The elevator slowed as it neared the fourth floor, and we heard a child’s gladsome “I’m going outside hooray Mommy” noises, whereupon Cosgrove declaimed, in a cackly manner, “I’m the Furious Witch of Toscafù and I eat all the cute little children!”