Some Men Are Lookers: A Continuation of the "Buddies" Cycle (43 page)

J. and Cosgrove hugged again, more joyously this time. Now he’s J.; do you believe that?

“But I have to ask if you could put me up on your couch for a while. Because I don’t know where else I can live.”

“I want a puppy,” said Cosgrove.

“One addition at a time,” I told him.

Well, I staved off the question of the puppy, but, with J. moved in, my life became complicated in odd little ways. True, J. and Cosgrove immediately became as inseparable as of old, and could be counted on to turn even the simplest errands into the work of six or seven hours, minimum—which gave me plenty of free time to work in. But J.’s presence stiffened Dennis Savage, got him all prickled up. Conditions were tense in every direction: The elevators were no-man’s-land, and the mail room felt like the crush bar at Drury Lane during the feud of Alexander Pope and Colley Cibber.

J. and Cosgrove never took the opportunity to get to Cosgrove’s movie. They
talked
about going; mainly, they went bird-watching. This is J.’s latest craze, which Cosgrove seized upon (using my old opera glasses; J. has giant binoculars). Neither of them really has the authentic commitment of the bird lover. Or maybe I misapprehend the scene. But I always thought the idea was to spot specific birds—to “watch” them—and thus collect some sort of meaningful experience. J. thinks all you have to do is peer around in your binoculars and call out the various phyla (or whatever they are) of any bird at all.

So Billy and I are out in the Park with our two bird-watchers.

J. says, “Ah, the scarlet tanager.”

“Hm,” Cosgrove responds. “The Arctic tern.”

“A cardinal.”

“Various robins.”

“Look at how pumped up that kid is,” says Billy, referring to J. “Lats and delts poking around inside a dress shirt in the Park with those binoculars; that’s really something. Pointing at the birds, and his whole upper body does this and that. There’s a hot class of something, now surely.”

“Ah, a flock of swallows,” J. observed.

Cosgrove was ranked out, but only momentarily. “Uh-oh!” he called out. “A pelican!”

Billy and I are ensconced on a bench, the two of them wandering now near us and now some distance away: rather as J. himself has been for a while. Billy’s watching them, J. especially, for Billy fears that J. is not only his predecessor but his successor as well.

“Shit, that kid is hot,” Billy tells me. “Pretending he doesn’t know he’s cute, and all the time . . . What does he like to do, anyway?” Billy meant in bed.

“I don’t know what he likes,” I say. “He used to enjoy just being a very-well-taken-care-of young man, secure in the indulgence of a lover and doting uncles. Suddenly he went off like a Roman candle.”

“I could enjoy him.” Billy is nodding, intent.

“Just leave Cosgrove alone, okay?”

“What about the other one, huh?”

“You can push him under a trolley car.”

A pause as Billy takes this in.

“Yeah, I know he’s not too popular around about, right?”

“Right.”

“What’d he do?”

What’s the answer? He did what we all do: got hungry and browsed. He needed to rack up a few while he was in his prime and the sun was out.

“He took the rest of us for granted,” I said.

“Now he’s back,” says Billy.

“Yes.”

“The boss won’t let me mention him, you know? Can’t ask about him, don’t know about him.
It’s final
, get it?” He laughed. “I’m just asking you this one thing, okay? How final is it?”

“Love that deep is infinite. I don’t know if they’ll ever get back together . . . even if they’ll speak. But I know that their feelings will run deep forever. It’s funny about why folks couple.” Watching J. and Cosgrove ranging the greensward with their game, and their birds’ names, and their love. “I’ve seen it for hot sex. I’ve seen it out of empathy. As in
Othello.”

I had paused. Billy said, “Go on.”

“I’ve seen it for sociopolitical reasons. And out of affection. Out of a need to be understood. Out of wonder. Out of ambivalence. Out of fashion. And of course there’s the well-off older man and the penniless kid.”

Billy, also watching the kids, shot me a look.

“Look who’s talking?” I said.

“No offense.”

“But of all these bonds, the simplest is just ‘We fit.’ That’s love at first look, of course, and it generally lasts as long as the two men live.”

“So?”

“So Dennis Savage and J. are the fit. But something went wrong, and I don’t—”

A crash and yelling turned our attention to the roadway, where one of those ridiculous surrey contraptions worked by pedals had run into a rollerblader and fallen over. No one was badly hurt, and everyone was yelling.

J. and Cosgrove examined the altercation through their glasses, like aficionados at the opera. I had jumped up at first, but now I settled back on the bench, and before Billy and I had got out three sentences between us the police arrived.

Billy said to me, “Did that kid really think his new boy friend
was going to come after him? Like sex cops? Arresting you for refusing to be, like, punish-fucked?”

“Punish-fucked,” I echoed. “Jesus, our sex is complicated. One thing you have to say for straights . . . and I think, on balance, it’s the only thing . . . when they have sex, they always know what it’s going to be. He’ll be on top, and she’ll say, ‘Ooh, yes,’ and everybody’s happy.”

“Think so, huh?”

“Will you look at that? Or am I in a movie?”

I meant the accident, and Billy looked: at J. and Cosgrove, apparently explaining the whole thing to the police, who were taking their statements.

“They’ll get in the papers at last,” said Billy.

The two of them then came running over to us, thrilled to the eyeballs, all birds forgot.

“Did you see us telling those policemen how—”

“‘I am James Fenimore Castaway,’ I explained,” J. told us, “ ‘and I happen to have seen the whole thing. And this is my associate, Mr. Replevin.’ ”

At which Cosgrove bowed.

“I said, ‘Officers—’ ”

“Now can I have a puppy, because I’m responsible and a public citizen?”

“It is a matter of becoming important,” J. observed, and I’m not sure whom he was talking to. He’s been beyond us for some time now. “It is a matter of being respected as a man of power. Of knowledge, even.”

“ ‘What did I stop being?’ is what he says to me,” said Billy, looking at J. “I can’t help but mention this. What Dennis Savage says. He goes, ‘What did I stop being, huh?’ ”

“He didn’t stop,” said J.

“Then you
stopped,” said Billy.

“I didn’t stop being anything.”

Cosgrove was looking through the opera glasses. “Ha!” he
cried. “A flock of ravens, black as the night of the prom!”

“That isn’t how it happens,” J. sadly added.

So what does happen? Billy and I talked it over after we got back, as the kids showered. Billy paced as we spoke, but slowly, not restlessly: as if he might be concentrating not only on our talk but on some deep through-line of the mind that would tell him of his fate.

“ ‘What did I stop being?’ ” Billy echoes, a shaman uttering a summons. “You think that kid is going back in, like?”

“I don’t know.”

“Does he want to, I mean?”

“I imagine so. If only because he has nowhere else to land. But I don’t believe it will content him to be Dennis Savage’s little hound dog all over again. He’s been rebelling for years without knowing it. Used to be, his projects were all private acts, things that Dennis Savage and I would giggle at in his living room. Then he started getting all these ideas for things he could do
outside
. Jobs, and his cabaret act with Cosgrove, and travel . . .”

“Should I split?”

I said nothing.

“I mean, it’d make it easier on everybody, wouldn’t it?”

“Not necessarily.”

“I got places to go to, you know, me. I’m not just some street kid. Got my black book of clients, certainly. Lonely nights, Billy calls with that Big Thing. Ask me over, flip me two bills. You can believe that, right?”

I nodded.

“Even got my family. I suppose they’ll always take me back.” He looked at me. “Brooklyn. Yeah, Red Hook. Imagine. You know where that is?”

I pointed east.

He laughed. “Yeah, that’s . . . Yeah. If I could take that birthday-wedding-funeral jazz they’re always playing . . . You get born in a family like mine, your social calendar is very full from birth. Man, you’re eight years old and Great-aunt Teresa is picking
out the hat she’s gonna wear to your high school graduation ceremonies. Cousin Daniela has reserved the hall for your wedding reception. Her husband, Dominic, knows this girl in Bay Ridge. And she’s somebody’s cousin, too, right? I mean, who can live like that, with, like, a history on top of you? Those straight guys think they’re so macho, but they let their relatives fuck them around for life. They get told what to do, right?, and the thing is, they do it. Slaves is what they are. Then they strut around like they’re Jerry Lewis.”

“Maybe that’s why they strut,” I said. “To rid themselves of the . . .”

Billy was listening to something.

“What?” I said.

“Are those two fucking in there?”

“Probably.”

“Yeah
. Really?”

“You have to understand that the personal and sexual relationships in this family are so mixed up that a few of us aren’t sure who belongs to whom anymore. Besides, they’re probably just holding on.”

“Kissing each other?”

I shrugged.

“Kissing leads to cumming,” he said.

“Look, I don’t know—”

“You sure you don’t want to let me move in here with you and Cosgrove? Because I could take care of him, too, you know? Ease up on your time, take him to
Gobblers
. . .”

Then the kids burst in, totally nude and toweling off. They do that sometimes. Billy watched them. For a flash of time I thought he might grab one of them, or slap them with the towel, or dance around them. Billy is very smooth-skinned but for a line of hair that slithers up to his navel; it’s the kind of thing one is rather conscious of.

Billy left us. He said, “I got to . . .” and he gestured.

Something.

“I have thought about it,” Cosgrove began, “and I absolutely have to have a puppy dog.”

“Which we will now name,” said J.

“How about Fala?” I said.

“So I
can
have one?” Cosgrove cried.

“All right—but only a Highland White Scottie.”

“Well, of course,” Cosgrove rejoined. “Just what kind is that?”

“Those little white dogs, very trim and intelligent.”

“I want a little faithful dog with a cute nose that he pushes against you because he doesn’t know what will become of him.”

“Cosgrove,” said J., “you may call him Billy Monday.”

“No.”

J. looked challenged, not congenially.

“It has to be a name that
I
would give,” Cosgrove explained.

“Well, at least I’ll make spaghetti carbonara for dinner, I expect,” J. told us as he rose above it.

“That was the Pines dish of the 1970s,” I said. “Cash taught you it, right?”

“So what, who taught me?”

“So gays are becoming like straights. One enters and all follow.”

“Oh, that is such a platitude,” said J.

Then Dennis Savage came in and everyone froze.

“This is the seventh day,” Cosgrove muttered.

Dennis Savage and J. were staring at each other.

“Well, well, well,” I said. You keep it moving, like a sitcom. You don’t want anyone’s feelings exposed.

But J. was fearless. He strode up to Dennis Savage and, looking him spang in the eye, extended his hand.

Dennis Savage looked past him, at me. “Actually,” he said, “I came down to discuss my story with you. There are crucial changes I am determined to make in the way it feels to the reader. I have thought about these changes very carefully and I want to make them irrevocably.”

J. said, “Aren’t you going to shake hands with me?”

Now Dennis Savage looked at him. “No,” he said. Then, to me: “If you could drop in later on, I would appreciate the—”

“Please,” J. urged him.

“No.” And Dennis Savage left.

J. glanced at Cosgrove and me and gave a little shrug and sat on the couch.

“You can crash with us,” I said. “Until . . . well—”

“Until what?” J. asked, eyes round, a totally unknowing young man now, the J. I used to know.

“James Fenimore,” said Cosgrove, coming over to him, “we still have to name my Highland White puppy who licks my face and loves me.”

“I just didn’t expect . . .” J. began, then stopped. “There’s hardly some good reason not to shake hands.”