Some Men Are Lookers: A Continuation of the "Buddies" Cycle (41 page)

Because I had put down the brush and was sitting on the toy box in which Cosgrove keeps “all my worthly possessions,” especially including the Gameboy, the game paks, my old ice skates, my father’s collection of miniature hotel soaps, and the forty-two crisping sleeves from fourteen boxes of Belgian Chef frozen waffles. If Cosgrove ever leaves, it’ll be an easy move.

“We were all in this building,” Billy is telling me. “I’m a guest there, you understand. But this lawyer is a tenant, all by himself. And a cop lives there, too, also by himself. Two single guys. So just imagine the elevator. Because the lawyer is hot like I told you, but now the cop is so beautiful he’s freaky. Only you can tell his asshole doesn’t tingle when you cruise him. He doesn’t like that, right? Heftos and slendys. You take your choice. And there’s me, surely, Billy Boy. And every so often”—he pronounces the “t,” by the way—“here comes some guy saying, ‘Well, you’re this kind of Huckleberry Finn.’ You know who that is, right?”

I nodded.

“Me, too. I know they tingle for a slendy like me with the Big Thing. That’s all they can think about. But I don’t want them, certainly. I don’t even want the lawyer or the cop. I want them with each other. And guess what else?”

“The cop wants the lawyer,” I said.

“You’re smart. That was years ago. I was a little kid in the elevator then. But they’re together, those two. Can you imagine? All this time? And the cop is looking at the lawyer, and the lawyer’s asshole is tingling like the Liberty Bell. And when they’re in the elevator, riding up and riding down, the lawyer has to grip his briefcase tight to keep from throwing his arms around this guy who loves him so deep he’s never going to leave him. They’re going to stay and stay and stay. I’m not going to cry in front of you, even though my voice . . . I don’t want you to hear that part of me. Just listen to these words. Because how come
I
don’t get that? I’m thoughtful, aren’t I? I’m friendly. I fit in anywhere you put me down. I’ve got the Big Thing.”

I was painting again.

“Don’t I?”

“That’s for sure. If Pasolini had seen you, he’d have wanted to remake
Salò
.”

“So why . . . I don’t get it. What kind of score do you have with Cos? Heavy stuff?”

“You don’t see rope in here, do you?”

“I mean, do you—”

“I take care of him.”

“Right. Cops take care of lawyers. The guy with the eyes reaches out for the guy with the stuff inside . . . the feelings. That always works out somehow. The cops screw the lawyers. The guy with the piece takes hold of the guy who understands. You know what I mean? Taking care of Cosgrove. I hear that. He’s the lawyer. It’s just . . . sometimes you don’t know who’s the lawyer and who’s the cop? You can’t guess who needs . . . I mean, just by looking . . . Listen, do you want to fuck with me now?”

I kept on painting.

“Everybody does, usually,” he said. “I don’t mind. Cops and lawyers. And I’m going up and down in the elevator. Cosgrove and you, yeah. He’s happy here, surely now. He told me how bad it was for him before. Take care of him—aren’t those funny words? ‘Take care’?”

I was eyeing the toy box. Paint it white?

“So why don’t we fuck?” said Billy.

“Thanks for the flattery. But there’s too much agenda going on here.”

“Just being neighborly.”

I stood back and inspected my work.

“One way to stop them from leaving is to make them laugh. You notice that, ever? Everybody wants to laugh and feel good. Oh, they want the Big Thing—but if you can joke with them it kind of soothes them down from their daily troubles, you know? I believe I’m talking about someone who’s great to be with even after you screw. Some cop, I may have to suppose. The six-footer kind of guy who says how much he likes you. He doesn’t care if you cry, because it doesn’t make you nothing in his eyes.”

I found a thin spot to touch up.

“Some big friendly hefto cop who holds you all night because of who you are. He doesn’t need anything else.”

Done.

“So how come you don’t want to fuck with me?”

There was a knock at the door. I let Carlo in; he took one look at us, immediately sensed what was happening, and said, to Billy, “I was starting to like you, so don’t screw up.”

“What’s the word?” I asked.

“I spoke to Cash. I told him he can’t have Virgil anymore.”

“You actually said that?”

“That’s what it is, isn’t it?”

“He went off of his own free will, though,” I said.

“That little boy belongs to us,” Carlo replied. “We know what’s right for him, and Cash doesn’t.”

I closed up the paint can.

“I want him back,” said Carlo. “I truly could treat him rough for doing this to us.”

“Boy, what a cop,” said Billy, admiring Carlo. “Yeah.”

“Say what?”

“How did Cash respond to all this?” I said, putting the paint things and newspaper in the kitchen. “He didn’t strike me as the sort who takes orders on whom to include in his romantic life.”

“Oh, he made territory noises, ‘Who’re you pushing?’ and such. But way in the deep of it, he doesn’t care. You know: If it’s Sunday, this must be Virgil. Come Monday . . . well, there’s always someone heading around the corner in Cash’s way of life.”

“Something else,” I said, washing green apples, my favorite afternoon snack. The most freckled ones are the tartest. “Even if Virgil
wants
to come back, where’s he to come back to? Dennis Savage won’t have him.”

Carlo glanced at Billy, who—despite a gift for speaking his heart even when the moment direly needs discretion—was silent.

“You don’t know how fiercely Dennis Savage was hurt by all this,” I said, washing and then handing the apples around. Billy held his. Carlo bit right in, like a horse. “He feels demoted to nothing, from root to tip. You have to remember, it wasn’t some insoluble problem that grew and grew. They always got on fine. Then, suddenly, Virgil left him for someone he preferred, and that can be hard to take.”

Carlo looked at me. “So what do you suggest?”

“That we don’t yet know what this is. And that more feelings are mixed up in it than you may suppose.”

Carlo glanced again at Billy, who decided to eat his apple.

“Maybe everybody walks sooner or later,” I went on. “Maybe that’s the way of the world and we’ll just have to—”

“Well,
damn!”
said Carlo. “We got us a problem here, do you not see that?”

“You’re going to do the right thing,” Billy observed, of Carlo. “I would look up to you in the elevator.”

Carlo gave this a bit of thought, then asked me, “What’s he saying?”

Billy was filling in nicely, and we were all starting to like him. He was a hustler with generous instincts. As the warm weather cut into New York’s clipped, useless spring, and the sun came out, and the Park closed off the loop to cars, Billy’s duties took in taking Cosgrove bike-riding every weekday. Dennis Savage and I even chipped in to buy Billy a bike.

I had warned Billy to be very protective of Cosgrove, and Cosgrove reported that Billy was indeed “pretty guardian about it,” though Cosgrove’s approach to lapping the Park mystified Billy.

“He doesn’t do laps, exactly,” Billy told me. “He does these rest periods with a little pedaling in the middle.”

“Well,” says Cosgrove, “there’s that awful big hill after Seventy-second Street. It takes forever. So then I have to sit on a bench to recover, and sometimes I try a Frozade for refreshment.”

“What do you mean, ‘try a Frozade’?” I said. “You’ve been living on them. That’s like Salome trying a veil.”

“This guy comes up to us,” said Billy. “In a raincoat, you know?, and his hair was, like, it got plugged into a radio? And he was looking at Cosgrove and he sang a weird song and then he beat off.”

I said, “What?”

Billy nodded and shrugged. Whatcha gonna do?

“He sang a weird song?”

“He stood there and . . . yeah. It was like ‘Love them but leave them, and . . . and now they’re all lonely’ or something. Some kind of song. Then Cosgrove shot him up with the water gun.”

“I
knew
he had funny pants on,” said Cosgrove. “I could tell how weird he was.
Normally
, I use my water pistol on those pesky blade runners for taking up too much room. But this guy was asking for it.”

“All those Frozades,” said Billy, trying to joke, “will make you fat, Cos. Who’s going to like you then?”

“Biking is good exercise,” Cosgrove replied.

“What about crunches?”

“I try to eat at least two a day.”

While Cosgrove would run through his vocal repertoire in the shower, Billy would recount the afternoon’s events: dead rats and squirrels in the roadway, accidents they’d happened upon, an altercation near the merry-go-round.

“Just watch out for him,” I said. “I don’t want anyone running into him or anything.”

“Be the cop for him, yeah. I will, because he’s a sweet guy. How come the boss doesn’t dig him?”

“Oh . . . it happened at a performance of Verdi’s music-theatre piece,
The Strayed One
. Dennis Savage took a Jungian view of the action, but Cosgrove held to the hard Freudian line and there was a riot of professors screaming and huffing as ivy crumbled and syllabuses puffed into balls of smoke . . .”

“Yeah. That’s your joke, huh.”

“The Strayed One,”
I repeated, tasting it. How it feels when they leave you.

Billy said, “That Cosgrove, he notices things. Like in Sheep Meadow, because we rest there sometimes. I like to watch the straight boys play Frisbee and stretch their whole bodies. They appear unconcerned. It’s a really hot thing, because you know how loose they are at that age, and you can do just about anything to them if you catch them alone and they’re sure no one else’ll find out.”

“What’s Cosgrove doing while you’re cruising the Frisbee boys?”

“He watches the mothers.”

“Say what?”

“With little kids. Like this one he always looks at, four- or five-year-old. Stumbling around with his shirt out of his shorts. You
know, with those little stomachs they have sticking out? A tyke who’s running all over. He had one of those kazoos he was playing. And he showed his mom how, but she couldn’t do it. Or that was what she pretended. They kept passing it back and forth, and Cosgrove was looking and looking at this little kid, who then plays this jump game where he falls down and gets up and runs around a tree and falls down again. And Cosgrove keeps watching.”

“Does he say anything?”

“He said, like, ‘That boy doesn’t need toys. He just plays.’ ”

“ ‘What are you
doing?’ ”
I murmured.

“What are you saying?” Cosgrove asked as he came out of the bedroom, showered and dressed. Sometimes he stands in a doorway and listens; he wants to learn what people know.

Billy grabbed Cosgrove and mussed his hair and threw him around a little, and Cosgrove laughed. He loves that—unlike Virgil, who suffers himself only to be delicately and lovingly held, like ribbon candy.

The phone rang, once. Cosgrove froze. After a bit, the phone rang again, twice. Another bit, and Cosgrove made
shh
fingers at us. Next the phone rang nine times, cutting off in the middle of the tenth ring.

“It’s Virgil!” Cosgrove cried. “That’s the secret code!”

He rushed to the phone, stood over it hungrily, and snatched up the receiver on the next ring like a suitor choosing among caskets in a fairy tale.

“Yes,” he said tensely.

He listened.

“Yes,” he repeated.

After more listening and yeses, he hung up.

I said, “So you’ve been in contact.”

“That’s the miraculous Virgil I keep hearing about,” said Billy. “The one who left. Carlo said everything is rotten with him gone.”

“We all miss his fun-filled ways,” said Cosgrove.

“I don’t know if I’m his replacement or what,” said Billy. “I
mean, there were auditions, and I got the part. But I’m not . . . like him. Am I?”

“Would you throw your family away for a date?” I asked. “Would you turn into Roaring Dick and kick a whole world off its axis? Fare you well to the folk who comprehend and sustain you? Because that’s what he did.”

“Who knows? I might,” Billy replied. “But first you’d have to translate some of that for me.”

“He didn’t throw us away,” said Cosgrove. “How could you say that? If you know Virgil, then you realize that there is some secret message hidden in it. Virgil always seems to know what it
is.”

“He went out fucking,” I said.

“You don’t understand. He is under surveillance all around the clock. They have made him a slave to passion.”

“They?”

“If only you knew,” said Cosgrove, shuddering.

“I have to type,” I said. “Why don’t you two screen something till dinnertime?”

“Alien,”
said Cosgrove.

“Yes, I should think so. The monster among us.” That sounds rude of me, but I was thinking of Virgil, actually