How's Your Romance?: Concluding the "Buddies" Cycle (6 page)

This emphasis on appearance has led some—in what the social and art critic Robert Hughes has termed our “culture of complaint”—to call love of beauty “divisive.” This is akin to calling it “divisive” to favor Debussy over rap. It’s called taste. The smart, the swift, the determined will always get ahead: and the beautiful as well. Outstanding figures are not divisive but unifying, showing us what to aspire to.

So the
Bodybuilder
could be thought of as the democratic invention of the gay world, for virtually anyone can join the corps if he works at it. A very few people are handed everything at birth; the rest of us have to bargain with devils.

The Bodybuilder may not be cute, for the eroticization of physique makes face something that almost doesn’t matter. True—as Peter Keene once told me—“face never doesn’t matter.” He meant in gay life; but it never doesn’t matter, period.

“No, but among
us,
my disputatious friend,” he would characteristically go on, and indeed did so: “the handsome thing ensnares and exhilarates. One gets so terribly worried.”

We’re back in the present, as he and I aimlessly nosed around the classical section of the downtown Tower Records, waiting for Lars Erich Blücher.

“Worried?” I said.

Eyeing the entrance doors, Peter said, “Well, who can know how mutual the attraction is? Who loves more? Who’s just asking you for a tango?”

I am the simplifier. I said, “Couldn’t you go into one of those … they used to be called ‘modern’ relationships?”

“We’ll have to. A moment of monogamy would crowd Lars Erich. He’s so purely what he is, it’s scary. No, wait, I mustn’t lose my mind in the classical department.… Yes, I’ll consider buying a CD of … Look, there’s a composer named Sauguet. And
is
he? So gay? Because Lars Erich changes one’s mind about what gay is. I hope you’re ready for that.”

“He just walked in,” I said.

Okay. Dress: snug but not strangling T over khaki shorts, tiny light gray socks in sneakers.

Eyes: purple, it turned out—they had read as merely dark in his photographs. It’s a color I’d never before seen live.

Greeting: “Kommt ein schlanker Bursch gegangen!”: Here comes a cutie!

That he was, smiling and confident; and why hadn’t Peter mentioned that Lars Erich was six foot five?

“Yes, you are Bud,” he said, almost pointing at me. “Peter is there,” he added, gently applying pressure from his thumb and forefinger upon the nape of Peter’s neck. “And I am wondering which is my purchase of CDs at last. These will educate me and fascinate many friends. We should start by Mozart? French orientalia? But what is trendy now? What is Technicolor?”

“You are,” I said.

Peter made the official introduction and Lars Erich treated me to that horribly squeezing handshake that Europeans favor. As he smiled at me, his eyes seemed to lose some color and glow a bit—probably, I thought, an effect of the store’s lighting facilities.

“It is so interesting,” Lars Erich said, quietly, very nearly to himself. “Peter’s friends.”

“Let me go,” I told him, because his handshake was lasting as long as
Siegfried.

“You will excuse me,” he said apologetically. I’m not attempting to duplicate his accent, but contrary to what Peter had said, it was heavy, though Lars Erich’s English came flowing forth without a pause. “I am very grateful that you assist in this collection of music for the home.”

We talked about that for a bit—what repertory he liked, sonics and price, and so on. All the while, I watched them together—the way Lars Erich kept taking hold of Peter as if claiming him and the way Peter loved it but tried not to show it. The way Lars Erich carefully waited for my sentences to end before ignoring them in pursuit of some tack of his own. The way he flirted, touching your forearm as if for social corroboration but then lingering there, feeling you. Then he’d withdraw his hand and I do believe his eyes
would
brighten. And he’d stand in such a way that his biceps would expand. You couldn’t not look.

“Do you like the big romantic stuff?” I asked. “Piano concertos with cascades of melody? Or the slashing modernists? Think of it as a choice between doing it smooth and doing it rough.”

“Ja, that is a nifty American joke,” said Lars Erich, his attention distracted by a dark-haired Chelsea Boy in a striped vest over a bare torso, his jeans pulled up to emphasize the genitals. “Na, prima Bursche,” Lars Erich whispered. “Mein Arsch braucht dein Fick”: Wow, hot guy, you want to fuck me?

I was shocked, and Lars Erich noticed. “You speak German?” he asked, in a neutral tone.

“Ein wenig”: a little.

He glanced at Peter, then at me, his eyes now gone dark—not menacing or anything like that; they had simply changed color again, to a kind of red-blue.

“Is something wrong?” I asked.

Taking a final look at the Chelsea Boy, who was rummaging through the Bach CDs, Lars Erich started over again: “Now I choose the most super opera singer of all,” he cried energetically. “Because that is what you will play at the dinner party, yes? And this is who?”

“Maria Callas.”

“In
Fidelio,
I am hoping, Beethoven’s holy work, ideal for the festival. I have it now, but not such a fine performance.”

“Callas never recorded it, but she does have a
Parsifal.
”

“You think all Germans like Wagner?” he countered, pausing as a kindly, bearded nerd approached to say, “Wayne Fischer died.”

“Oh no,” I said.

He nodded. “It was on the news this morning.” Turning to move on, he added, “Get out your red ribbons.”

“Do you know that man?” Peter asked me, bewildered.

“He’s probably just a well-meaning town-crier type.”

“Who is dead?” asked Lars Erich.

“Wayne Fischer was the local TV news channel’s AIDS poster boy,” I explained. “They were running a series on his battle with the disease, and now—”

“Ja, I regard this. He is a whiner, always worrying and easily conquered. They make a mistake to show this man as a symbol.”

“All AIDS victims are equal,” I said.

“Yes, it is sad how it happens to each person. But for such a series on television, it is better the heroic figure to show, where otherlanders then see that gay men are worthy of admiration. It is never good for a cause that—” He stopped to touch a hand to his ear, then looked up. “There is a water leak in Tower Records?”

“Let’s check out the Callas section,” Peter suggested. Then he, too, felt a watery discharge on his head. I turned just in time to see a shape dart out of sight at the end of the aisle leading to the budget discs—but Peter grabbed my hand and started pulling me along after Lars Erich, who was heading in the wrong direction. I took out a short list I had made of some of the essential opera sets—the Georges Thill—Ninon Vallin
Werther,
the Joan Sutherland—Janet Baket
Rodelinda
in English, the 1962 La Scala
Huguenots,
and so on—and handed it to Peter and Lars Erich while aiming them at the opera section. I then went off after Cosgrove and his water gun. Of
course
he had decided to come along, against orders; have I learned nothing yet?

However. Not only did he elude me, but when I was all the way over in the C composers he reappeared, sashaying past Peter and Lars Erich wearing a joke-shop big-nose-and-mustache-with-eyeglasses disguise and, it at first seemed, the world’s deepest set of abs, bubbling up under his shirt like lava. At second glance, the abs looked more like half an egg box taped onto his stomach, bottom side out. As I started over, Cosgrove scurried away and disappeared into the Historical section.

When I rejoined Peter and Lars Erich, the latter told me, “In Europe, they are always saying how the first thing to know about the States is that the people are eccentric.”

“Especially that people,” said Peter.

“Is he a crazy stranger, too?” Lars Erich asked.

I quickly rerouted the conversation to the business at hand, but the talk kept sliding into the personal. It was as though Lars Erich could approach a topic only through his opinion of how people function. He doesn’t believe in History: he believes in Napoléon, Stalin, Hitler, the terrible consequences of the particular man in the place at the time. As I, too, see the world this way, I was immediately drawn to him.

He was certainly easy to advise in the buying of CDs. “No,” he said to all my questions about his requirements. “You choose it, I buy it.”

Handing him a copy of the Cetra
Don Carlos,
I was reassured to observe that Cosgrove had parked himself at one of the listening stations, where customers sample the latest issues through headphones. He can become quite engrossed, and has been known to spend more time thus than the employees do behind the counter.

“What about
Scheherazade?
” Peter asked. “Shouldn’t he have that?”

“What is music to fuck to?” Lars Erich put in, not caring who overheard. “They tell me Ravel’s
Bolero,
but that is such cliché.”

“Isn’t there something called ‘The Sabre Dance’?” asked smirking Peter.

“That’s too short,” I said, “unless you’re fifteen years old.”

Peter went off to rummage through the
Scheherazades,
and Lars Erich, watching him go, said, “He is so beautiful. The skin and taste of him, it is all so correct for me. But he is not strong inside. A man should not worry what others criticize. I am not worried that you review me, that you approve of our friendship.”

His tone was even, unchallenging. Yet there was something lavish in the once again darkened eyes, rigid and pugnacious, defying disapproval on the chance that there should be any.

He went on, “I know my living style is not what some respect. Is it all jealousy? There is always resentment of the extraordinary. Every day, I see in the mirror how I am a little bigger, a little more beautiful in the curves and tight fit. It is immodest? But it is true. You have been not once failing to look at my body this whole time. You think I do not see? My body sees. I hear walking behind me on the street, this looking. In the States, you work so hard on the parades and the laws of protection. But what is the real passion? What can we ask for, all of us? It is das Faustrecht zur Freiheit, you know this term?”

It’s untranslatable, literally “Fistright to Freedom” but essentially meaning “If you have the power to overwhelm your enemies, you deserve to.”

“What happened,” I said, “to You are very grateful that I assist in this collection of—”

“Ja, ja, I am too abrupt.” His eyes searched for Peter, still hunting through the Rimsky-Korsakof bins. “It is what I mean, but I should discover not such a sharp way to express it. Oh, here is another American doing the impossible.”

It was Cosgrove with a paper bag over his head, complete with not only eye and mouth holes but ear hinges.

“It is maybe your buddy, ja? Peter has warned me.”

“Do you get air sickness up there?” the bag asked Lars Erich.

Lars Erich took the bag off Cosgrove, saying, “Now see what a nice boy comes through, who wants to tease us with an American surprise.”

“How about this one?” asked Peter, coming up to show us the old von
Mata
č
i
ć
Scheherazade.

“That is not a competitive performance,” said Cosgrove. “The classics are Sir Thomas Beecham and Fritz Reiner, acceptable modern readings are Bernstein and von Karajan, and the greatest of all is the Russian Svyetlanof with the USSR Symphony Orchestra.”

“You will please find me that one,” said Lars Erich, “and one good Bartók, also the postwar Frenchman who sounds like clouds parting over the edge of the world.”

“Messiaen,” said Cosgrove, more or less. Even the French find that name tough to pronounce.

“And then we will already have lunch.”

“Can we go to the green-pea place?” Cosgrove asked me as he marched off to fetch Lars Erich’s CDs.

“This will be what?” Lars Erich asked me.

“We generally go there after, because they have the best split-pea soup in the city. It’s a dive, but it’s quite close by.”

“We go there,” Lars Erich decided.

There was silence then, as Lars Erich reviewed his opera boxes and Peter just drank him in. Isn’t he beautiful?, Peter was, I believe, thinking. Wouldn’t you give up anything to have that on a platter? Isn’t he the prototype?

Yes, no,
and
arguably
are the answers. Meanwhile, I was thinking that more striking than Lars Erich’s body-god looks was the fact that he had a body-god personality to match: expansive, captivating, bossy. This is real danger. A beauty with nothing to offer but physical charm is no more than a date; a beauty who is
personally
gifted will have you risking your self-esteem trying to have impact on him.

Cosgrove reported back, Lars Erich made his acquisition, and we fought our way through Tower’s irritatingly overcrowded ground floor into that strange neighborhood outside. This is lower Broadway, bordered by commercial establishments of no importance yet thronged every day of the week, especially by the young and built. One thinks of the Beach Parade out at the Pines: a show. Walking beside the bursting Peter and Lars Erich and the youthfully trim Cosgrove (who had that paper-bag head back on), I felt like the actor hired to supply jests in a college musical while everyone else in the cast has romances, models hot styles, and introduces the New Dance Sensation.

What a relief to duck into the green-pea place and wrestle with those gigantic enplasticked menus.

I launched the scene. “Peter says you train seeing-eye dogs,” I told Lars Erich.

“You must say ‘guide dogs.’ The ‘Seeing Eye’ is a certain brand. A copyright, one will tell you.”

“How did you get started on such a … well—”

“Back in Germany, when I am growing up, my family are raising puppies which will be educated as guides. You know, they cannot be trained so young. They are a year first, and
then
trained. So we raise many, mostly shepherds, a few white Labs. Always, it is so sad when they leave, for it is necessary to surround them with love, to strengthen them for training. Without love, a puppy has nothing to live for, and then how is there the incentive for training? But we have put in the love, and then they go from us? It was a regular day in our lives, with my little brother and sister weeping and clinging. They are saying, ‘Can we just keep this one?’ Once, Harry hid puppy Törless’ toys, he is thinking that without the toys they wouldn’t haul the dog away. But they did.”