Everybody Loves You (21 page)

For which he got nothing. Not just silence:
nothing.

“Carlo was supposed to take him home,” Little Kiwi went on. “This is home.”

“Maybe he's at Carlo's home,” I said.

“Why would he be there?”

A fair question.

“I'm going to go find him,” said Little Kiwi—but Dennis Savage put a hand on his shoulder and looked at him.

“Well,” I said, “we probably should figure this out.” The two of them glaring at each other. “Where Cosgrove is just now.”

“So go find out,” said Dennis Savage, turning away.

Carlo's house is way on the other side of The Pines, on the sea to the west, filled with suave, rich, grey-haired men on weekends and empty on weekdays. It was silent and dim, but Little Kiwi purposefully pushed in and I followed. He stood there for a moment, listening. Then he walked to Carlo's bedroom.

And there he froze.

I waited for a bit; I don't know why. The whole caper was running past me, somehow, like those ideas, those feelings, that flew by me in rooms filled with my friends, ideas of déjà vu mixed with feelings of the avant-garde. When I drew up to Little Kiwi, over his shoulder I saw Cosgrove lying in bed next to Carlo, the boy's arms wound tightly around the man. Cosgrove was sleeping, but Carlo was awake. Wasn't he? It was hard to be sure in that odd light. He was looking at us, I believe. And we looked at him, certainly, for quite some time. Then Carlo did something I found unforgivable yet beautiful: he ran his hand through Cosgrove's hair. Cosgrove said, “Please.” And Carlo said, “Yes.”

Just that.

I couldn't tell whether Carlo was smiling or just being there, just having screwed Cosgrove, just knowing who Little Kiwi is and who I am, just being able to point to us if he is ever challenged to produce friends.

Cosgrove said, “Please,” again.

I gently pulled Little Kiwi back through the house to the boardwalk, both of us silent.

Until Little Kiwi said, “Everybody takes advantage of Cosgrove.”

“‘Out of luck in an old dump truck.'”

“You can just see how much he needs love, and that's how they lure him into the trap.”

We walked on.

“And you know how handsome he is,” Little Kiwi added. “So they're going to start grabbing for him. They think he's some little punk, so it doesn't matter what they do to him. But I know that he has feelings just like the rest of us, and you have to be very careful with Cosgrove.”

“Were you very careful when you fucked him?” I asked.

Yes, he was shocked, but he kept his cool. We were passing the harbor, to some the most romantic part of The Pines, a great horseshoe of welcome scooped out of the sand, where boatloads of mythical figures would sail up before one, standing there on a Friday evening on the verge of perhaps the major weekend of one's life. To others, the harbor is the scandal of The Pines, the straight section, where abrasive owners of little cabin cruisers would rend the serenity of a Saturday trading atrocious gobbling noises; and where the mainland kids invaded in the evenings.

I have very mixed feelings about the harbor. Sometimes I try to believe that it is merely one of the places I have frequented over the years, like D'Agostino's or my roof. A location, no more. But this is hard to believe. The Pines harbor is where, in my twenties, I first realized that in coming out of my former life of lies and excuses, I had caught a fabulous adventure by the tail, its danger no less intoxicating than its exuberance. This is what my friends and I call “the rapture,” and I feel it acutely every time I pass the harbor, even if only on an errand to the grocery—even now, in the midst of trying to trick A-list dish out of Little Kiwi, wretch that I am, sleuth and storyteller that I call myself.

“I knew that Cosgrove was unsure,” said Little Kiwi. “I had to be protective of him. That's what I knew.”

The thing about Little Kiwi is, he cannot lie.

“Poor little Cosgrove is not what you think. He's very unknowing. And he always says please.”

“Did he say, ‘Please love me'?”

“He said he would die if I didn't take care of him. I couldn't just shove him away, then, could I? When he was holding on to me, and he even cried?”

I cleared my throat. “So, did you in fact—”

“And poor Cosgrove is so dandy when you're nice to him. You and Dennis Savage don't know that, because you never are. You just laugh at him.”

“But did you and Cosgrove finally—”

“Oh, it did him no good, did it, at the dinner? All those rich men around the table. It was like a meeting of a fancy club.”

“Well, he got blitzed rather quickly, didn't he?”

Little Kiwi said nothing.

“And not,” I went on, “by chance.”

After a bit, he said, “I had to do something. You guys were turning the whole place back on us. You were giving us plenty of worry.” He shook his head. “I told Cosgrove to drink a lot so we could push them all away.” He sighed. “My poor little Cosgrove.”

We walked on some more. Then: “So did you,” I asked, “or didn't you?”

Long pause. Long, long, long pause; and we were almost home.

“Well, everyone's so mean to him but me. I was the one who had to make him happy, because he's my pal. So what else could I do?”

“So
what
 … did … you … do?”

“Well, he wouldn't let go of holding me, and he kept saying please. And Cosgrove is so little when you hold him like that, and he gets scared so easily. So then…”

“So then
what
then?”

He thought about it for a long time. “I made him happy,” he replied.

That is all he would say on the matter, and all I was ever to hear, but now I knew two secrets about Cosgrove, one from Dennis Savage and one from Little Kiwi. And by then we were back and Dennis Savage said, “Well?”

“When Carlo offered to take Cosgrove home,” I told him, “that's exactly what he meant.”

“You've got to be kidding.”

“It's all over but the retrospectives.”

“Carlo and
Cosgrove?
”

“Why not? I've known stranger pairings to occur in the misty elegy of a Pines nighttime.”

Dennis Savage suddenly got busy poking around in the fridge.

“I don't feel so good,” said Little Kiwi quietly, sitting alone in the center of the couch. “Something didn't happen right.”

“What didn't happen?” asked Dennis Savage.

“Cosgrove went to the dinner,” Little Kiwi began, tripping over his thoughts the way little kids do when they don't know how to center an all-pervasive complaint. “He went to it, and then he was afraid and went to sleep.”

“Afraid of what?” I asked.

“Everyone's bigger than Cosgrove. He isn't smart enough yet. I was going to teach him. Now he'll always be afraid. Poor little Cosgrove.”

“Poor little Cosgrove?” I said. “He just got a date with the hottest man in town. He's surrounded by loving friends.” Then: “
Deeply
loving,” I added, tossing it to Dennis Savage.

“I don't know that he is that well loved,” said Dennis Savage, facing me down this time.

“He's not,” said Little Kiwi. “He's lonely in the crowd.” A tear ran down his cheek. “What will Carlo do to him? I know that Carlo is kind, but he's a big fellow and Cosgrove is very delicate.” Another tear appeared. “He doesn't know anything. He's just Cosgrove.”

“Not anymore he isn't,” I said. “He's one of us now. He's a buddy, staying over in the best little whorehouse in The Pines.”

“I'm mad at everyone,” Little Kiwi blurted out. “My feelings got hurt!”

Dennis Savage pulled him up, held him for a moment, then let him go. “Get on upstairs,” he said, putting his hand lightly on Little Kiwi's head, right there on top. “I'll be up in a jiffy.”

“All right,” said Little Kiwi, wiping his eyes as he started for the stairs.

“Boy,” I said to Dennis Savage, as that oddly confidential but remote feeling pestered me again, begged me to know what it meant to me and my friends. “Back there, an age ago, when you first came to New York, did you have any idea all this was going to happen? I mean, that all this was possible?” Now, the feeling nudged me; yes, it urged; forward, it says. I wonder if at just that moment Dennis Savage felt it, too—he was looking at me in an indefinably certain way, as if he had just forgot something terribly important, or just remembered it.

“Could we have French toast for breakfast tomorrow?” said Little Kiwi as he trudged upstairs. “With powdered sugar on mine?”

“Have we ever refused you anything?” Dennis Savage replied.

“You didn't let me wear my mesh T in the parade last year,” Little Kiwi told him.

“That parade is perilous enough without you in your mesh T.”

“When I was very young,” said Little Kiwi, pausing as he reached the second-floor walkway, “I asked my parents that since there was a Mother's Day and a Father's Day, how come there was no Little Kiwi Day? And they said that every day is Little Kiwi Day.”

“Well, today,” I announced, “is Cosgrove Day.”

“Now they tell me,” Little Kiwi said tragically. And he went into the bedroom.

“Poor kid,” I said. “He lost his devotee.”

“Everyone's been losing out on something in this adventure,” said Dennis Savage. “Except you, as usual.”

“I have nothing to lose.”

“Stop rehearsing Cocktail Dandy lines on me.” He started upstairs. “Go take a walk in the misty elegy of the Pines nighttime. That always revives you.”

“I was planning to, actually.”

He stopped halfway up. “What was it like at Carlo's?”

“Scary.” I pulled on a hooded sweatshirt. “Cosgrove was saying please.”

“He always says that.”

I looked at him. “Always?”

“I mean, he said it to me that time.”

“Did he, now?”

“It'd be funny if Cosgrove couldn't walk around for the next few days after … you know, after Carlo. He'll be limping around with his legs crossed and falling all over the place.”

“We could rent him a golf cart to ride around on.”

“Tell me something. What exactly did you see there?”

“Two people becoming.”

“Becoming what?”

The feeling roved through the room. I felt it very powerfully. I felt haunted. I felt inflamed. I felt daring and reckless, like a child playing war games with, yes, nothing to lose. I felt so free I could have been generous to my worst enemy that night. I felt grateful that there were still things to be comprehended, even discovered.

“Becoming what?” he repeated.

I shrugged. “I'll tell you when the story is over.”

He went upstairs and I took a walk.

*   *   *

Strolling the beach at night does revive me; I suppose I feel stimulated by the dense rustling of the curtain as it falls on another day in the life of the gayest address in the world. Maybe I just need the solitude, the peace. Heaven knows, it's quiet there on the edge of the sea. A good place to think about your feelings.

The lights were on around the pool at Carlo's house, and I caught the firefly of a toke moving softly in the dark. It was Carlo, surely, smoking the day's last joint, and I walked up to his deck. This is what is known as the
scène à faire,
the obligatory confrontation in the well-made play. All the world's a stage, and this is the end of the story.

“Well,” he said, “I truly thought you might be along soon enough.”

“I know two secrets.”

“Yeah, you're always around when someone's life is falling into little bits, aren't you?”

“How's Cosgrove doing?”

He exhaled deeply and proffered me the roach. I shook my head.

“You always have to do everything your own way,” he said. “Beautiful kid's up for grabs, you don't want him. Someone's smoking, you don't smoke. The trouble calms down, you're collecting secrets.”

“Don't blame me. I'm not a snoop, I'm a confidant.”

“You're a snoop.”

“I've been a good friend to you,” I said. “Haven't I?”

He relit the reefer and took another puff.

“I just noticed something,” he said. “So here's another secret for your collection. Unless you already made your quota for the day.”

“Carlo, I'm not a snoop.”

“Did you ever wonder what guys are really after when they have sex with someone new? A hot time, you'll say. Sure. Some guys, now, that's very true of them. They want pleasure. Sex is a pleasurable thing. That's very true of sex. But some other guys want something besides that. What do you believe they want?”

“Tell me.”

“They want a friend, some guys, now. They want a friend so bad they don't even care is the sex good or not, precisely. Not as long as they can know that other guy as close as it gets, know him to death.” He stabbed the cigarette out. “But then there's another kind of guy here, and what he wants is to be taken care of. That's what I just noticed. You'll say, sure, that's what kids are like.” He shook his head. “No, sir, my friend. I've seen kids'll top you so hot they make Big Steve look like a seven dwarf or something the like. Some little twerp thing. No, there's kids who don't need a friend, don't need someone taking care. It's not kids versus men. It's not the size of a man anymore now, it's the shape of his feelings.”

“Was Cosgrove afraid of you?”

“Secrets,” he breathed out. He waited a bit, looking around at the night. Moody man. Then he said, “What do you mean, afraid of me?”

“I mean, he's very nearly a virgin, after all.”

“The hell you say.” He laughed softly. “Let me tell you about was he afraid of me. Let me tell about that. I've never been with a real little kid before, so I played like Big Steve does. You know that scene, on the lap and so on? I toyed around with him, and I whispered sweet talk in his ear, like Big Steve loves to do. He's really good at that … cajoling stuff. He can make you anything he wants, turn you into something he thinks will look real cute on you. I asked that Cosgrove, Has he been a good boy? He said yes, he was always good. And I said, What about how you drank more than your share tonight and got pissed and went to sleep? And he admitted he was not a good little boy tonight. So I asked him what he thought we should do about that, especially because he has such a beautiful little butt which is all ready to take a very heavy whipping.”