Some Men Are Lookers: A Continuation of the "Buddies" Cycle (17 page)

Slowly lead to it, yes?

“Where was I?” Miss Faye muttered, during Peter’s recollection of how his family, when he was six, packed and fled from Grosse Pointe in their yacht during the 1968 Detroit riots.

“Oh, yes!” Miss Faye went on, back in her Cloris Leachman voice. “How to win Oscar.” She let loose an at most mildly compromised smile, waved at a fan or two, looked back while tossing
an imaginary scarf over her shoulder, sighed, and began.

“Now, of course, I had Teacup Scene, in
The Last Picture Show.”
Miss Faye displayed relish. “You remember, when that beautiful boy was inattentive and then came by for solace, and how I was then seen by rapt millions to
throw
the coffeepot
right
across the
room
—lovely in my rage, as you may imagine—and it strangely became known as Teacup Scene, though . . .
Anyway
, then I grow all tender and fond, as one must when beautiful boys are by. And I say . . . I say, ‘Never you mind.’ How loving that is, how skillfully forgiving. The diva absorbs our sins, and thus she wins Oscar—because in our belief in her we believe in ourselves. Don’t you see that yet, you tiny fools? I am
Cloris
!”

Here she rose.

“I
defy
you! I defied them all: Darryl Zanuck, with his bossy cucumber. L. B. Mayer, who hoped to fuck me with a balalaika while Georgian peasants hummed ‘Marche Slave’ in some exotic, perhaps Oriental key. And that
querulous
, ever-shrewing Rory Calhoun, costar in my strangely long-forgotten Scottish epic,
The Trial and Kotex of Mary Stuart.”
Miss Faye was pacing the room, dramatizing, on exhibition. “Major scenes were shot in Princes Street, Edinburgh, at Flodden Field, in the haystacks near Aberdeen. This was real location work, I say! There we were, eating haggis. And Haggis turned around and said, ‘You’ve got exactly two hours to cut that out.’ Then . . .
the rains came!”

Miss Faye grew tragic and still. Carlo was grinning, as at any good show; Peter was braced for the next helping of Miss Faye; Virgil was trying to look like a guest at the most scintillating soirée since the opening-night cast party for
Private Lives;
and Dennis Savage was mechanically forking up dinner as, I imagine, Napoléon might have taken a little something after Waterloo.

“The
rains
!” Miss Faye wailed, in Faye Dunaway’s “wire hangers” mode. “But I showed them all what Cloris
is
and
was
! Didn’t I show that Dominique Sanda, with her Lesbian Dance Sequence? Oh, yes, you remember, in Bertolucci’s
The Conformist
—and now, on every picture, all she asks the director is ‘When do I get Lesbian
Dance Sequence’? Yet
I
never dreamed of repeating Teacup Scene—though I would win Oscar in a second if I did. No, the scene I long for is Rosalind Russell’s tear-the-shirt episode from
Picnic
, when the male torso is bared and all stand mute in wild, discordant joy!”

“You speak,” Peter began, then clammed up as Miss Faye—well, Cloris, except now she was Rosalind Russell as
Picnic’s
Rosemary, the repressed yet erotically greedy schoolteacher denouncing and decreeing—started pacing the room in explosively repressed fury.

“I mean,” Peter went on, as Virgil and I nodded in support, “you speak as if life were nothing but the accommodation of sexual hunger.”

“All life,” Rosemary spat out, “is a yearning for something that just
damn
isn’t available! Yes, I said it! Come on and fire me!”

Peter was perplexed.

“Come on, cowboy,” Rosemary cried to Carlo. “Dance with me!”

Wondering what had happened to Cosgrove, I slipped off, but he wasn’t in the bathroom. I found him in the bedroom; he had thrown the overcoats off the beds and was gleefully stamping up and down on one, and I lost my temper.

“You little idiot,” I cried sotto voce, grabbing and tossing him halfway across the room. “It’s not enough to humiliate Dennis Savage’s editor by sneaking that haunt into the party, you have to mortify his
coat
, too?”

“This isn’t his coat,” said Cosgrove. “It’s your coat.”

“How would you like to move into the street?” I said, really angry now and ignoring the uproar that was suddenly cascading out of the living room. “I found you in the gutter and I can throw you back there any time I—”

“No!
I’ll be good!”

“This is too late to be good,” I told him, really revved up. “I keep saying
stop
and you keep right on going! My parents are like that—you know what I did to them?”

“Excuse me,” said Peter, who had suddenly joined us, anxiously looking for—“Ah, there it is,” he said, retrieving his coat from the floor.

“It strangely fell,” Cosgrove alibied; but Peter was off and away. “I’m so terribly sorry,” he called over his shoulder. Then the front door clicked open and slammed shut.

What happened? Cosgrove and I looked at each other for a bit. Then he warily peered around the corner of the doorway into the living room.

“Carlo has skin,” he said.

Joining the others, I found the place in that silently aghast moment just after a bomb has gone off. Everyone except Dennis Savage was standing, a few plates had fallen onto the carpet, Carlo’s T-shirt was torn from collar to navel, and his pants were down to his ankles. Miss Faye said, “Beulah—my wrap,” mimed throwing a stole tail over her shoulder, and made her exit. “Thanks for the use of the hall,” she concluded, posing in the doorway before pulling her curtain down.

Dennis Savage carefully laid his plate aside and rose. He surveyed us all, frozen except for Carlo, who was pulling up his pants.

“He fell in love with my stories because he fell in love with my friends,” Dennis Savage began. Believe me, President Wilson at Versailles did not with greater majesty address civilization at large on the Meaning of Democracy Among the Nations. “He fell in love with my
friends’?
Because, somebody better tell me, why have I just fallen
out
of love with them?”

“What happened?” I asked.

“A fair question,” said Dennis Savage, beginning to pace. “Who knows the answer? Our esoteric little Cosgrove, with his novelty-shop booby traps? Is it our almost biblically redemptive Carlo, so gleaming and undreamed of, who
I was hoping
would intrigue my editor with pastoral fantasia and instead dropped his pants—”

“That drag lady truly shucked them off me before I—”

“And you”—Dennis Savage favored Virgil with a look—“were no help, either.”

Virgil, indeed, looked helpless.

“He loves my friends, can you stand it?” Dennis Savage asked, with an operatic laugh, Lily Pons laced with Boris Christoff. “Well, that’s all over, now that he’s seen you guys up to your jokes.” To me he said, “Can he cancel my book?”

“Has he made the offer? The advance and the due date and so on?”

“No.”

“Well . . . Then . . . He could . . .”

“Say it!”

“What happened?”

Virgil said, “Miss Faye tried to tear Carlo’s shirt off but it didn’t all come away, so she pulled down his pants. Then Peter Keene jumped over and was kneeling and held Carlo’s thighs and sucked on his—”

“No,” I said. “That doesn’t occur.”

“In this room,” Virgil insisted.

I turned to Dennis Savage. “That guy with all the dignity and aplomb just . . .”

“Sat down and ate Carlo’s coccus. Yes. Yes. Yes.”

“And we all saw,” Virgil added.

“It was bigged out when my pants went down,” Carlo added, “because that Lady Faye had been working on me, making me all sticky. I couldn’t but notice that she wears a cheesy scent, too.”

“Miss Faye,” Cosgrove hotly contested, “is the world’s leading drag artiste!”

“And he really?” I asked Carlo. “Jumped down and? He
really?”

“Well, my thumper there was pointing to Do It, and that editor guy had this look on him, that he’s just got to. I’ve seen it from time to time. Like years ago, when guys were getting arrested just for staring at something in a tearoom? They knew it was risky, yet
they had to. So, imagine, if this guy’s coming out and he—”

“Well,
I
came out,” said Cosgrove, “and I didn’t have to make a fuss at a party and run away. So what’s that editor’s problem? Everybody’s gay now. TV actors are gay. Con Edison is gay.”

“We have to be patient with newborns,” said Virgil.

“Con Edison is gay?” I asked, mystified.

“Enough with these inessentials,” said Dennis Savage. “What happened? One, Miss Faye tore Carlo’s shirt like Rosalind Russell in
Picnic.”

“Two,” said Carlo, “she stole kisses.”

“Then she, yes, pressed her mouth to his,” Dennis Savage went on, “whether to taste of the beauty of love or to outline an arcane satire, we will never be sure. And
then
she, three, opened up his pants. And, of course, he wears no shorts, so—”

“Why should I? They’re extra money, and who needs them, anyway?”

“So
, out flopped the Great American Flagpole, and suddenly the neat and controlled man in the suit goes cock-crazy and blows his self-esteem and marches out of here with my career in a shambles. Thank you
so much,”
he told Cosgrove, “for destroying my dinner. Thank
you,”
he told me, “for knowing this thing in the first place. Thank you,” he told Carlo, “for being so wonderful that the center cannot hold when you’re in the room. And thank you,” he told Virgil—but then the phone rang.

“Ignore it,” said Dennis Savage, falling back onto the couch with a sigh of despair. “The tape will take it. I just can’t handle any more . . .” He finished the sentence with a fagged-out wave of his hand.

“Come on,” I said, over the taped greeting of Virgil promising spiritual advice, romance tips, and information on Plaza Tours, Inc. “He won’t cancel the book just because—”

“He
revealed
himself to God and gays,” Dennis Savage insisted. “He showed his hunger! My life is rags.”

But, lo, it was Peter Keene on the phone; and this was his message:

“Well, I’ve had a few blocks’ walk and some minutes to collect myself, and . . . Yes, okay, I of course am calling to apologize for my, uh, performance, and I hope Carlo isn’t too . . . Is anybody there? Or perhaps you’ve shut the gizmo off. But some gizmos can’t really quite
be
shut off, if you take my meaning. It is as if there are parts working away in us like the insides of a watch, whether we admit it or not. And I think that’s why I was so drawn to your, uh, characters. Well, your people, really, isn’t it? Because they don’t pretend that their insides are . . . Are you sure nobody’s there?”

(Dennis Savage turned as if to move to the phone and pick up, but I held him back, because then major dish would have been lost in his ear, and I owe it to my readers to stay intimate with all the details of the, uh, characters’ comings and goings, in the name of the higher realism.)

“Anyway, I’m very embarrassed, and I hope my rash behavior won’t drop me from your guest list, and the contract should be along in a few weeks, but let’s have lunch again in the meantime. We can try that place you mentioned, where all the waiters are . . . Well, any old howzle, tell Carlo I hope I didn’t make him feel cheap. I guess my alarm went off before I knew what was happening. And, if you’ll pardon a word of advice, the little maniac should retire the animal toy, though I must say his vocalism is impressively postmodernist. Again, I’m . . . I’m really sorry. But at the same time I think I have a lot to look forward to—and not the least of it will be assembling my own circle of people as vital and positive as yours. First thing tomorrow, I’m joining a health club. They say Better Bodies is reasonably spiffy, and right in the thick of the . . . the community, so to say. So long, sir, and thank you.”

“What
little maniac?” asked Cosgrove, suspiciously, as the tape machine ran through its clicks and whirrs.

“Oh, my God,” said Dennis Savage, his voice low but rising. “It worked. He liked it! He’s embarrassed but happy! The contract is coming! I see the galleys, messengered to this very building for me to appraise, amend! I see the dust jacket, one of those . . . oh so deftly understated yet
magnificent
depictions. I see . . .
my book
. . .
in store windows, and I have only to enter one such emporium for crowds of devotees to—”

“Who does he think was a maniac?” Cosgrove pursued. “That’s what I should know!”

“I truly think he was referring to Bauhaus,” said the conciliatory Carlo.

“Bauhaus doesn’t have an animal toy or do vocalism.”

“Haven’t you had enough?” I asked Cosgrove. “You’re already up for certain punishments for your—”

“No!
What punishments?”

“No birthday CDs this month, for starters.”

“Rats,” he said, doubtless picking out an alternate birthdate some six weeks hence.

“Not to mention,” I went on, “corporal admonishment that may have to be visited upon your person.”

“Tonight?” Cosgrove asked, pensively. “With sweet talk, and twisted enchantments whispered into my ear to show how it’s really affectionate, to make me a better boy?”

“Can I come, too?” Carlo asked.