Read How's Your Romance?: Concluding the "Buddies" Cycle Online

Authors: Ethan Mordden

Tags: #Gay & Lesbian, #Literature & Fiction, #Fiction, #Gay, #Romance, #United States, #Gay Romance, #Genre Fiction, #Lgbt, #Gay Fiction

How's Your Romance?: Concluding the "Buddies" Cycle (30 page)

You know? Anyway, I went into the darkened bedroom, where Red was standing in a corner wearing my old Yale sweatshirt and nothing else.

“I knew they’d send you in,” he said. “Will you play music?”

“Take this simple test, Red. You’re alone and uncertain because, one, You’ve fallen into something and can’t handle it. Two, You just wish it weren’t moving so fast. Three, Other: please specify.”

He thought about it for a moment, then said, unhappily, “That sounds like school.”

“Second Approach,” I announced. “Let’s not worry about what to call it. It doesn’t have a name, okay?”

“It does, though.”

“The Third Approach is no-fail,” I went on, with my usual overconfidence. “Given the rules of the place you come from, you don’t realize that everyone in
this
place likes you just as you are. We’re not laughing at you or locked in a lifelong rivalry that pretends to be fun-filled. We want to know how you feel about things so we can learn from you. We’re curious. And we notice things. We recognize patterns. And, fine, let’s call it what it is:
gay.

I paused to gauge his mood, but he was simply listening and not, apparently, reacting.

“I hear you ask, Why do we recognize patterns?” A little dry humor. “It’s because gays have to identify hetero in order to imitate it, out of self-defense. At some later point, we enter the gay world and don’t have to recognize patterns any more. Because anything a gay man does belongs to gay culture. We’re self-inventors. But note the irony—when straights come into the gay world, they’re completely lost. Because they haven’t acquired the ability to spot the patterns. Or I guess they aren’t really straights, because…”

It’s a valid concept, but it suddenly felt so irrelevant.

“What’s wrong, Red?” I asked him. “Just tell me.”

I could see that he was trying to piece his wording together, so I waited. Finally, he said, “I’m not a great-looking guy, and I know that. But Tom-Tom likes me for some reason. So we can joke around. And I really like that, when I tell him how I feel about things. And then come these … ideas. You know. To do stuff.”

“You’re a major type, Red. You don’t know that, because everything in the world has been telling you that it’s all about pretty. That’s true of chicks, Red. Chicks can be hot in only one way—Marilyn Monroe. But men can be hot in variety, because it
isn’t
all about pretty. It’s also about power. You’re a hetero-culture power dude who doesn’t know his own valence.”

“You must be right, because I don’t understand any of it.”

I gave his right shoulder cap a light bonk of my fist and suggested we join the others.

“I always knew I had to, sooner or later,” he said, not moving.

“Come on, then.”

He came, half-nude as he was, and the others raised a yay for him. Allured by the Pre-Raphaelite symmetry of Red’s exposed bottom, Peter drew near, but Tom-Tom warded him off with a look.

“Speech, speech,” said Cosgrove.

This time, Red actually did say “Gawrsh,” followed by “Let Bud do it.”

But I was fresh out of invention by then. Instead, I simply recounted the greatest story ever told, that of The Mechanic and the Librarian. The latter’s car breaks down in the small town of … Tom-Tom helpfully thrust out his arm for me: somewhere in that direction. The Mechanic needs a spare part, how long will that take?, perhaps tomorrow, you can bunk with me tonight. The Mechanic is kinky and the Librarian ambitious, and they’re still together as we speak, in that small town of … Tom-Tom threw out his arm again, now letting it rest on Red’s back. Red looked down. Dennis Savage and Nesto grinned at each other in their blanket. Peter Keene was mainlining a bottle of seltzer.

“Each one can choose who to be, Mechanic or Librarian,” I noted. “So it’s the perfect gay story.”

“If
that’s
the gay story,” Peter pointed out between gulps, “you would have had nothing to write about.”

There was a pause as Carlo started to move, Fleabiscuit leaped off him, and Carlo rose to take some of the water off Peter.

The other guests drifted off to the bedroom, so Cosgrove asked, “Where’s everyone going to sleep, I wonder?”

“No time for that,” I replied, “as we finally hear from the sinner’s own lips of his physical contact with a certain Virgil Brown, currently known as J.”

“Never.” The little traitor didn’t even bother to seem defiant.

“It’s my throughline,” I insisted. “We can’t conclude without it.”

“I don’t feature that for your throughline,” said Carlo. He set down the empty water bottle and crossed the room to stand behind Cosgrove as if they were a pair of something. “More like some guy from nowhere cuts into this world of, like, arts and sciences. Maybe I got the phrasing wrong, but that’s your through-line. Because otherwise that guy might well have ended up in police trouble with the ladies, where they invent charges against him and he goes to jail. Because the one who first says ‘He did it to me’ is the winner. Guys don’t know that about women. They will lie to send you right to jail.”

“Why?” I asked.

“’Cause they want to be married, and you’re not marrying them. See, they don’t have sex the way we do. They give something up with sex, or they truly think so. And you have to give something back, which is love.”

“It’s the mystery of the universe,” said Cosgrove, glad of the distraction and still standing directly in front of the lecturing Carlo.

“And there’s society, too, isn’t there?” Carlo went on. “Making you turn into what they want. But then…” He rested his hands on Cosgrove’s waist, brother to brother. What are they, a valentine? “Then you wander into this strange location where everybody is in charge of his freedom. No control. No one saying, ‘You have to be my husband. My son. My slave.’ You reject them to be yourself, and your new friends will guide you. They play you music, take you to the show. You could have been a criminal. Instead, you’re everybody’s friend.”

“Who are you talking about?” Cosgrove asked, his head tilted up at Carlo’s face. “Me or you?”

“Both, my boys,” I said.

Fleabiscuit came crawling around at this point. Snuffling and whining, he planted himself among us, afraid to listen yet welcoming it as youth must welcome the wisdom of frost.

“In
Les Mis,
” said Cosgrove to me, “when wonderful Gavroche died, he left those two younger brothers all alone. Who can save them then? They just want nice guys to like them.”

“We have to help the newcomers,” said Carlo, a hand atop Cosgrove’s head.

“Who will help me someday?” I wondered, gathering up the Christmas cards for filing in the new throwaway. The old one looked so old and wrecked that I sent Cosgrove to Bed Bath & Beyond to replace it, and somehow he managed to return instead with a giant antique B. Altman’s Christmas-themed shopping bag, which is what we use. “What if I need an umpire?” I asked. “Or even just a grown-up?”

“Look what I have,” said Cosgrove proudly, pulling an Emergency Dollar out of his pocket.

Happy New Year, boys and girls. Thank you for listening.

O
THER
F
ICTION BY
E
THAN
M
ORDDEN

I’ve a Feeling We’re Not in Kansas Anymore

One Last Waltz

Buddies

Everybody Loves You

How Long Has This Been Going On?

Some Men Are Lookers

The Venice Adriana

HOW’S YOUR ROMANCE
? Copyright © 2005 by Ethan Mordden. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.stmartins.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mordden, Ethan.

How’s Your Romance? : concluding the “Buddies” cycle / Ethan Mordden.

p. cm.

ISBN-13: 978-0-312-33331-7

ISBN-10: 0-312-33331-5

1. Gay men—Fiction. 2. Male friendship—Fiction. 3. Manhattan (New York, N.Y.)—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3563.O7717H69 2005

813'.54—dc22

2005046577

First St. Martin’s Griffin Edition: October 2006

eISBN 9781466854130

First eBook edition: August 2013

*
 I found a pile of this stuff remaindered at ten cents a roll in 1983 and bought twenty-five rolls. We’ve got three rolls left as I write. (We would have had six rolls, except Cosgrove used a few to go out as a baby mummy two Halloweens ago; the costume took two hours to build and fell apart before Cosgrove had reached the first traffic light.)

*
 Cosgrove really has become the kitchen master. At any given moment, the fridge disgorges tuna salad, shrimp cocktail portions in individual plastic containers with tiny appointments of cocktail sauce and lemon wedge on lettuce doilies, chicken drumsticks marinated in fruit preserve and broiled to extra-well-done perfection, and miniature salmon–cream cheese sandwiches on pumpernickel. I have to hand over my Chase Visa Rewards checks, which Cosgrove, aided by the usual “someone I know,” turns into his favorite thing, Tower Records gift certificates; but at least I no longer have to go out hunting for food every day like a lion in the jungle.

*
 Have you noticed how important it is to have a live-in who is alert and listening and does not, in a crisis, call out a “What?” as vaguely as possible? An alarm is a
summons.
I have known couples of whom one half could accidentally burn himself while cooking spaghetti sauce and scream his building down till neighbors break into the apartment, douse him in cold water, phone 911, and see him off in the ambulance, whereupon the other half would wander out of the bedroom and say, “You want something?” To deserve love, one must
listen
to it.

*
 I coined this exit bit years ago, at a party, when conversing with someone who turned out to be bad company. I had meant to say, “Oh, there’s Patti LuPone, I must say hello.” However, I couldn’t remember her name. Her most famous role at that point was Evita, and that’s what came out. I still use it, because it has an unexpected quality that gives the subject pause, allowing me to slip off into the crowd, or at least behind a prop tree. Also effective is Dennis Savage’s variant, “Oh, there’s Evita, I must call the embalmer.”

*
 Lee Strasberg said that to Robert Lewis during rehearsals for the Group Theatre’s only musical, Kurt Weill and Paul Green’s
Johnny Johnson,
in 1936. The Group were thespians of intense vocation, but they weren’t singers, and Paula Miller—Mrs. Strasberg and, incidentally, Marilyn Monroe’s future acting coach—was laying an egg with “Mon Ami, My Friend.” The number left Miller alone on stage to make an exit to a humiliating silence, and actor Lewis suggested to director Strasberg that Miller leave during the music as a cover; Strasberg gave the response I quote. For some reason, Lewis’ memoirs recall the incident yet stop short of the last line. It’s a treasurable outburst, because Strasberg is exactly wrong. What does he mean by “vaudeville tricks”? Good stagecraft? We did not hear the anecdote in full true till Lewis shared it with an interviewer; it is quoted in Foster Hirsch’s
Kurt Weill On Stage.

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