Some Men Are Lookers: A Continuation of the "Buddies" Cycle (21 page)

“Hey, kids,” I said.

“Better hide everything,” Cosgrove muttered.

“I don’t care if he sees,” Virgil answered.

“Okay,” I said. “What’s going on?”

“No, show him,” said Virgil.

Cosgrove gave him his “You’ll be sorry” look and handed me a series of snaps devoted to Peter and me cruising the road worker.

“Jeepers!” I said. “Where
were
you?”

“We’re the Photo Snoops,” said Virgil, in the tone that the American lieutenant must have used when he spoke of destroying a Vietnamese village in order to save it.

Then Cosgrove passed me another series, this one closing in on the worker himself, washing up at a fountain, leaving the Park, entering the subway.

“Boy, you’re thorough,” I said.

Now Cosgrove handed me views of Peter and the worker talking.

So he
did
make a move, the pirate!

Yes, and snaps of Peter and the worker having hot dogs at the cart by the band shell. (It was a different day, because Peter’s shorts had changed from blue to red.) And snaps of them sharing a joke. (Yet another day.) And snaps of them walking out of the Park together on the West Side, where Peter lives. And snaps of them on the street. And snaps of them entering Peter’s building.

“This cannot be,” I said. “It isn’t real.”

“Virgil,” said Cosgrove, “how rich can we get as the Photo Snoops?”

“We’ll never be rich,” Virgil grumped. “All our pictures come out wrong. We can’t even find celebrities. You wasted a whole film on a bunch of high-school girls coming out of the Limelight!”

“I thought they were Madonna,” Cosgrove pleaded.

“There’s not enough ambition around here!” Virgil went on, as Cosgrove reddened and saddened. “All this lollygagging is getting us nowhere. We keep getting these great ideas, but nothing happens!”

“Maybe they aren’t great ideas,” I said, gently.

Fuming, Virgil collected his photos and left like an Avignon Pope storming out of a session with the Holy Roman Emperor.

“What’s he so jumpy about?” I asked.

“I told you, he’s like that sometimes. He’s impatient with me.” Cosgrove’s eyes moistened. “He can be like parents.”

I held him for a bit.

“How about we rustle up some BLTs and then I take you to a movie?” I asked.

“Okay,” he said, a touch lamely.

We never got out; halfway through the sandwiches, we had a call from Carlo, who’d been arrested for soliciting and had to be bailed out. Anyway,
Jeopardy!
was coming on.

“What’s ‘soliciting’?” Cosgrove asked as I made ready to leave.

“Saying yes to someone over fifty.”

“Cosgrove’s Life for four hundred,” said Cosgrove, settling in before the television.

“English Literature for a hundred.”

And Alex Trebek read out—but who cares? Cosgrove announced the answer as “Virgil,” then answered the question as “Who was mean to Cosgrove today.”

I headed off to the cash machine for Carlo’s bail money, thinking that Virgil was slacking in a quality I especially prize: loyalty.

“He crumbled like Jericho,” Peter was telling me. He was cool and happy, but he was pacing my apartment like a cornered bear. Every so often he glanced at Cosgrove, apparently gone from the temporal world as he listened to CDs through his headphones on the far side of the room. “First, he’s the young husband and father of two little ones, with those pictures they carry in their wallet. Then . . . he’s mine.”

“I keep hearing these stories about straight men—or, at any rate, married men—getting fucked, and I don’t know where to turn.”

“If you could only see him as he lets me lay him out on the bed. The way he sighs as he turns his head, or the incredible stillness as I spread his legs for greasing up, bit by bit, left leg, right leg, slowly, inch by . . . trusting, he is. The slow dividing of his . . .”

“The sages are right,” I said. “Women are romantics and men are fetishists. Was he Czech after all?”

“Russian.
Konstantin,”
he uttered, with some baloney concerto of an accent. “His English is very halting and primitive, and that makes him seem dumb, which . . .” He was watching me, to see how violently I might resent this next observation. “Well, it can be very attractive on some men.”

“So you just ambled up to him and—”

“Please! It was a painstaking courtship, step by step. A little more each day. And right from the start, it was clear that he knew what this was about. He . . . well, yes, he knew I wanted him, and he let me woo him. Even his buddies seemed to know. They’d laugh and whistle at him when I showed up. Isn’t it funny? When you’re closeted, most of the world seems straight. When you come out,
everyone
turns out to be gay!”

Coasgrove, I noticed, had quietly taken off the headphones, to listen, though he had not moved or even shifted his gaze.

“He’s sweet, though,” Peter went on, joining me on the couch. “He . . . depends on you. He needs to learn. Perhaps he regards me as part of his Americanization. Oh, he’s so tender and open.” Rapt in his fondness, Peter waxed metaphorical. “He has the flavor of an early Diebenkorn.”

“Didn’t the fact that he’s married . . .”

“What? Turn me on in extra ways?”

“‘Make you feel guilty?’ was what I had in mind. Whatever happens, three innocent people are caught up in this.”

Curious, he said, “You. Dennis Savage? And—”

“His wife and kids!”

“Well, you oughtn’t be mad at me. It’s
society
that—”

“No, it’s cowards like your Konstantin who create these problems. No—okay, yes. Societies are tough on gays. But
I
came out without victimizing a woman, and Dennis Savage came out without victimizing—”

“He won’t let me use a condom.”

I was speechless, and really angry now.

“Most guys won’t,” he went on.

“And you don’t tell them, ‘I will use a condom or I won’t fuck you’?”

“Of course . . . Well . . . Yes, but how is one to turn down a so very luscious coupling just because—”

“Just because?
Do you want to die and kill people? Is
that
what? Listen—”

“Yes, it’s Skullamask, headmaster of hell,” Cosgrove cried as he jumped up to confront Peter with octopus fingers. “His greeting card is love, but his touch is death and fire! He has the flavor of early chicken corn and the color of a South Sea isle, but beware!
Beware Skullamask!”

Peter, scandalized, possibly because Cosgrove was not only chanting but dancing and creeping, said, “Kindly tell your live-in to chill out.”

“The death god lurks and spies, spreading his wicked ways from near, from far. The pumpkin monster distributes sweet candies to the little children, who immediately blow up in a minty shower.”

“Cosgrove,” I said, “cool it.”

“I’m not Cosgrove,” he replied, treading fantastical steps as he neared me, “I’m Skullamask, the Pumpkin Lord.”

“You’re Cosgrove and cut it out,” I told him, pulling out my ever-ready X-Men pocket folding comb, a necessary item in my summer of constant bike rides. He stood still, letting me comb his hair. “Apologize to our guest, or at least make some grudging concession.”

“‘I call myself Phoebe,’ ” Cosgroved darkly uttered.

“That shows a good heart,” I told Peter. “He’s willing to meet you halfway.”

“I’m willing to feed on his liver,” Cosgrove cried, “at casual midnight suppers!”

“Cosgrove,” I warned him; and Peter said, “There’s something very, very wrong about that—”

“Don’t insult him when I’m in the room,” I told Peter. “Don’t ever do that. Because the young man and I have bonded.” I turned to Cosgrove. “Right?”

“I walk between raindrops and spit butterflies of poison at the good little—”

“How would you like no allowance this week?”

He finally melted back into Cosgrove, and went into the kitchen for a cleanup.

Peter said, “I wonder if that’s what you mean by the term ‘dangerous queen.’ ”

“You’re luring a man away from his wife and children, and you think
Cosgrove’s
a—”

“Yes, but
I
don’t attack—”

“‘Homewrecker,’ I believe, is what straights call—”

“If it’s this easy to wreck a home, surely there can’t be much of a home to—”

“Saved by the bell again!” I said, as the phone rang. It was Dennis Savage. “Everyone’s getting arrested or going crazy or degrading the social contract,” I informed him. “How are you? Get home quick, because everything’s coming apart!”

It was my father who turned me on to Polish food. He served in the OSS during World War II as a liaison between—do you now see why I’m so twisted, boys and girls?—the Russian army and Polish partisans. Russian he had taken in college, and Polish he mastered in a six-week cram course. I still own his textbook. Anyway, while in Poland, fêted, if that be the word, in country barns and the like, my father developed a taste for Polish cooking. Serious historical study suggests that Polish cooking at this moment in history (roughly 1944) consisted of consommé of tree bark and sautéed rat. At Teresa’s, I usually order chicken cutlet with lemon slices. Superb!

I can always tell when fall arrives, because the Quarto Society mails out its annual prospectus. This is my English book club: quite beautifully turned editions of classics and curiosities, from Procopius to
Cold Comfort Farm
, bound now in morocco, now in silk, and often lavishly illustrated. Aquatints! Engravings!
Three Men in a Boat
with map endpapers charting the voyage! An atlas that Gibbon might have consulted while tracing the fall of Rome! Then, too, a quarterly magazine of the Higher Brit Literacy, with the reassuring spellings of “theatre” and “honour” that my high-school English teachers favored, completes the experience.

Each fall, members accept various giveaways and buy four titles from the year’s new offerings or from the backlist. Because my library is already pretty extensive, I don’t usually want four books—so Cosgrove suggested that he launch his own Quarto library with one volume of my four, and we’ve been doing that ever since. As with his CDs, he makes a big occasion of it, poring over the club’s many brochures and catalogs (plus the magazines), all of which I’ve saved over the years.

Then come the questions: “How scary is
Nightmare Abbey?”
“How could Gibbon write about the Roman empire a thousand years after it went away?” “Would I like
Love in a Cold Climate?”
“Why would someone be called ‘Damon Runyon,’ because it sounds like a fish poem?”

Anyway, I know it’s fall; and I also know that Virgil and Cosgrove will drop whatever they were doing (such as the Photo Snoops) and take up a new diversion, which, this year, turned out to be the Sex Survey, a question-and-answer poll that they would conduct and then sell to “the networks” for a fortune.

It was Cosgrove’s idea; Virgil, at first, balked. But pep talks from Dennis Savage and me—and, especially, my intense warning that Cosgrove was counting on him—persuaded Virgil to sign on,
and the two of them cooked up an interview form, which they unveiled at Peter Keene’s dinner party.

Here was a first for our new gayomaniac friend: an evening with a guest list drawing exclusively upon homosexual males. I’d been to plenty such parties, of course, but every so often Peter gazed about himself in a perplexed sort of way, like Mother Teresa at a convention of Arian heretics.

“I went to college with most of the men in this room,” he whispered to me at one point, “yet suddenly I don’t understand half their conversation. For instance, what’s the Mineshaft?”

Cosgrove came up to have his hair combed in our new ritual, very useful in soothing him when he goes ballistic.

“How little we know our own friends,” Peter went on, as a neatened Cosgrove sauntered off. “Well, I mean, when we’re closeted, how little. Because now I see all the fun they were having behind my back. Wait, where is he?—yes,
that
one [he pointed to Greg, a tweedy fellow holding forth at the center of a riotous group] has been here six or seven times, and
every time
he had a date with him!
A girl date!”