Some Men Are Lookers: A Continuation of the "Buddies" Cycle (39 page)

“I pay for nothing,” Zuleto cried, off-mike.

“Maybe he would come,” Candio went on, “if you ask personally.”

“All right, I come,” came Zuleto’s voice. “Only don’t expect to have a nice time.”

We had a great time, though Zuleto did some minor sulking. Cosgrove was fascinated with Torcello, a thriving metropolis a thousand years ago, when Venice was still on the rise, but eventually a malarial backwater as the young new Venice became Europe’s superior naval power. Brenda told us the tale, in her flawless tour-guide spiel. Cosgrove liked it so much that she did the whole thing over for him in German and Spanish.

It was a lovely visit and a sad leave-taking. Zuleto gave me a luxurious hug and joked that I should make it a habit and return
every
thirty years.

“It can’t have been that long,” I said. “Seeing you brings me back so surely that I must be thirteen again.”

“Candio’s still thirteen,” Brenda observed. “It is part of his cleverness, ja?”

“We call that ‘jailbait,’ ” said Cosgrove.

Brenda expressed interest in collecting this term, and while Cosgrove explained it Zuleto took me aside.

“What do you really think, eh?” he asked me. “The two of them.”

Brenda was listening to Cosgrove, and Candio was standing behind her, gently rubbing the back of her neck with two fingers.

“I think they’re terrific together.”

He winced, then mimed wiping a tear, wrapping it in a box, and throwing it away.

“Vediam’ un po,” I said. Wait and see.

“I wanted other advice.”

“I haven’t any.”

We hugged again, and I was thinking, Next time let’s not wait thirty years.

Cosgrove and I ran our race after dinner; it was twilight before we’d barely started. He took off south of the Grand Canal into Santa Croce, but I held to my usual track along the Strada Nuova through Canaregio, north after the Misericordia Canal, then along the Fondamente Nuove to the Arsenale. That was always my secret, and why I generally won: I kept to unfrequented straightaways and let the others get tangled in the maze. It’s funny, though, how different it all looks when you’re going from end to beginning. I actually took a couple of wrong turns. Then I really started blundering in the last section, in Castello, and finally reached the bench to find Cosgrove nonchalantly eating a gelato. (“My third,” he told me, emphasizing how much I’d lost by.)

“So,” I said, joining him on the bench of my youth and accepting the offer of a bottle of water. “It’s come to this.”

“You were in control before,” he said. “But the next generation is taking over.”

“What was your route?”

“Secret, of course. It can never be told, despite your many blackmail attempts to come.”

“I think that, sometimes, when you tell your secret, nothing happens to you at all.”

“I still won’t tell.”

It was quite dark by now, in that majestically personal Venetian night with the big spaces and little spaces. The everything all mixed up. We were sitting before quite an expanse of water, the Mola, as it’s called, where the Grand Canal opens up into the lagoon. Where the indomitable Venetian fleet would embark or return. What history had happened here! How much
ago
lies in the past, life after life, one generation making another out of . . . goo.

“You know,” I told Cosgrove, “you’re so much more self-reliant when you’re away from your sidekicks. Virgil, Miss Faye. There are these uproars in life from time to time, but we have to . . . Someone cheats you. Someone dishonors you. Someone eats your candy. You don’t chase him with a bread knife. You
ignore
him. You don’t let him into your day. You show him that he has no impact. When I was growing up, there was no celebrity in being a victim, as there is today. Whatever happened to you, you were expected to get over it. Nowadays, we’ve lost the concept of pride, and of shame, and of responsibility. Nobody’s guilty of choosing blameful acts—a rap tape made him do it. He saw a movie. Folks appear on afternoon talk shows and parade their shame. Everyone wants to be a victim. It’s the way ignorant idiots call attention to themselves. It’s chic to claim to be a victim now, screaming for a spot on
Oprah
and a book deal. They’ve even started a support group for men who’ve tested HIV-
negative!”

“Why do you take care of me?”

“Because I like you.”

“That’s not why,” he said.

We sat for a bit, gazing about us in the amazing Venice night. Singing, gondolas, an idyll.

“What would happen about Candio and Brenda?” he asked.

“Probably all great things, as Zuleto gnashes his teeth. He’ll be especially fond of the grandchildren, though, just to be vexing.”

“He’ll never give in about Brenda?”

“Never.”

“Why do you take care of me?” he repeated.

This time I thought it over. “Because I reached a certain age and figured—”

“That’s not why.”

Again we sat there silently. Cosgrove offered me the remaining bit of a pouch of potato chips, but Europeans can’t do junk food the way we can, because Europe isn’t junk. It’s history, art, and kitsch, but it doesn’t understand about turning something beautiful or interesting or useful into trash in order to make money. “Horrible chips,” I said.

“They taste too healthy,” he agreed. “So why do you take care of me?”

“Because you make me feel young.”

“Yes.” He yawned. “That must be it. My favorite thing is how you got rid of your parents eight years ago, and that could give them heart attacks even now, this second. They’re falling around on the floor and can’t get up. Their hair turns white, and green slime drools out of their ears.”

I put an arm around his shoulder.

“You little sweetheart,” I said.

Limited to foods supposedly good for the liver: veal, fish, pasta in bianco (without sauce). Italians believe that a smoothly functioning liver is the key to an effective existence.

Don’t think Cosgrove missed a single integer in this bioemotional equation. But he said nothing. Sometimes he keeps his counsel, and worries, and eventually he tells you what that was.

But he was chipper this day. We were heading for FAO Schwarz to buy him a treat to take the sting off “this Virgil stuff.” Telling Cosgrove he can have anything he wants (within reason) gives him great pause. It’s too late to ask for “parents who liked me”; and who would have thought that “having Virgil around” was something you would have to ask for? Cosgrove knows he’ll be given only a thing, not a new set of feelings. But it must be
the
thing. Then there’d be feelings in it.

He found his thing in a television commercial for a new Super Nintendo game, The Legend of Zelda. This turned out to be what is called an RPG—a role-playing game, in which one taps his name into the program at the outset, then sets out on a sword-and-jerkin adventure. Zelda more or less drops the player into an Oz in which he fights battles and discovers things. Each battle, if he prevails, makes him fitter, stronger, righter.

The game “pak,” as Nintendo spells it (abandon the globe, civilization is doomed), can compute three different role-players at once, so Cosgrove and I punched in separate games, I under my own name; Cosgrove, for some reason he kept as mysterious as possible, as “Fook.”

“If you knew life on the underside,” he hinted darkly, “you wouldn’t ask.”

Zelda was a sensation in our house, a genuine epic, with its desert, forest, lake, mountain, castle, and village sections, its ingeniously elaborate dungeons in which one snatches last-minute victory from near-certain defeat.

“This is how life should be,” Cosgrove averred. “Instead of just D’Agostino’s and the laundry. It’s like having Venice in your own home.”

Two cannot play at once, of course, so he and I waged a sub-battle over screen time, as I would send him off on trumped-up errands or barter game tips and secrets in exchange for portions of Cosgrove’s time allotment. Then, too, we were constantly on the hot line to the Nintendo office in Seattle, where experts stand by from four
A.M.
(why so early?) to midnight, their time, to field frustrated players’ questions.

Well, the house was in an uproar:
stimulated
. And so it should be. I kept thanking the gods for letting me live into the era of video games. Never before Zelda did I in such concentrated doses get so much work done (game rush had me so tanked up that I would hit the desk running), and never did Cosgrove bound out of bed mornings with such determination.

“Today I defeat Mothula!” he would cry, so eager that he was brushing his teeth at the controller.

Finally, I called a two-day moratorium. We were getting hyper, talking Zelda till Dennis Savage was shooting me worried yet sarcastic looks and friends were all but hanging up on me.

I proposed that Cos and I spend the two days collecting ourselves—and we tried. Yet we were feverish, hot for our . . . hobby? Is that all it is? Cosgrove spent the two days wandering around in a daze with his Gameboy in hand, and I got no work done. We listened to irrelevant music and picked at our food and stared at the empty screen.

Came then Dennis Savage’s knock, and I told Cosgrove, “Act natural. No one must know.”

He nodded, flopped onto the sofa, and turned on the Gameboy. I got the typewriter going and clattered for a bit, to suggest work-in-progress. Then I opened the door.

Dennis Savage took one look about and said, “Something’s going on.”

“Nothing,” I said.

“You think you’re so great,” Cosgrove told Dennis Savage in a meandering, unaddicted way; bless his heart. “But I have Gameboy by Nintendo.”

“You
are
Gameboy by Nintendo,” Dennis Savage replied, nosing around the place as if he were Inspector Fortescue and we had hidden a body.

“I’m playing The Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle.”

Dennis Savage shot me his “Can we please?” look, so I reminded Cosgrove about resting his eyes when he uses the handheld, and he went into the bedroom to sing to himself.

“After all this time,” Dennis Savage asked, “what do you see in that?”

“Me, without the advantages.”

“Pardon me, but I hadn’t noticed any.”

“First,” I said, “there was
Mutoid from Hell
, your greatest role. Then
Mutoid 2: The Mutoid Positively Returns
, your greatest sequel. Now we have the greatest performance ever told, in
Mutoid 3: Mutoid Versus Swamp Thing, Megalon, Spawn of the Slithis, and Renata Scotto
. The industry, agog, is talking of an Oscar.”

“For you in the title role of
The Lady Vanishes
—and the sooner, the better.”

“Yes, with your special credit: ‘Gowns and accessories from the closet of—’ ”

“Enough, I’m too old for this!” Flopping into a chair, Dennis Savage. Exhausted, he is. Aghast. But calm. Through the bedroom door we could hear Cosgrove rendering one of his latest numbers:

Puppy had to play,
So Puppy ran away;
He went to the town,
Now he’s barking up and down. . . .

“How’s Billy working out?” I asked.

“Settling in. Not much of a housekeeper, okay. But he runs the errands well. He listens. He types over my pages like a pro.”

“Billy
types?”

“He’s slow but he’s sort of perfect. If you, uh, get my drift.”

“I thought Billy was another Cute but Dumb thing.”

Dennis Savage was miffed. “He isn’t dumb. He isn’t
dumb
. That’s just his way of playing cool.”