The Passionate Attention of an Interesting Man (24 page)

Looping his tie, Alex told
Korby (and very casually, this, almost as if uninterested in what the reply might be), “I’d like for us to get acquainted. You got a place, youngster?”

Korby
nodded, and off they went—no, first I stopped Alex to inquire just what that scene was about. He laughed, resting his right hand on Korby’s right shoulder with such tender authority that the boy shivered. Come to daddy.

“Why ask?” Alex said to me. “Lookers get their way, that’s all.”

And
then
off they went.

Teetering on his chair with a wicked smile, Davey-Boy asked the question of the day: “So…was it real or an act?”

No one responded. Around us, the room was very gradually emptying as the guys finished off the pizza, put heads together, cleaned up the space under Tom-Tom’s fastidious leadership (in French), and departed. Cosgrove, putting some chairs in order, quietly but repeatedly sang the first strophe of “If I Knew You Were Comin’ I’d’ve Baked a Cake.”

Then I answered Davey-Boy’s question. “We’ll find out if it was real or an act after Alex’s play opens and he makes an appearance in my apartment to explain what was happening.”

“And you would know that how?”

“These stories always end that way,” I said.

Alex’s play got raves and the entire troupe was cheered, so he was dropping in and dinner-partying all over town, to enjoy being as doted upon as a newborn Italian male. He even made a date with Cosgrove to learn the recipe for polenta sticks by watching over the maestro’s shoulder. Cosgrove shooed me out of the kitchen so I wouldn’t distract with show-biz kibitzing.

Just as well: because Dennis Savage’s reading lamp died of old age and he didn’t feel he could tackle Bed, Bath and Beyond singlehanded. So I rode shotgun.

We have an outlet nearby, an odd place: vast yet filled with all the stuff you’re never glad to buy. For instance, a bathmat instead of the piano selection of some obscure English musical of the 1930s.

Dennis Savage is no connoisseur of reading lamps. He chose the first one he saw and we were back on the street in a moment. On the way home, he announced that he was going to give Cosgrove the blueprint for that meatloaf after all—but when we got home, Baron Portugee roiled out of the kitchen (followed by Alex with a plate of polenta sticks, but Alex doesn’t do much in this scene).

“
Go
!” cried the Baron, at Dennis Savage. “And never darken my towels again!”

“He’s going to give you that recipe,” I put in.

Cosgrove hesitated. But the Baron would not be soothed. “
Ha
!” he retorted.

“Very well,” said Dennis Savage, picking up the box of lamp. “I think I’ll just lock up that recipe in a galaxy far, far away.”

Infuriated, Cosgrove followed him as he headed for the door, both he and the Baron imitating Dennis Savage’s walk. But suddenly Dennis Savage put down the lamp and, without turning, quietly asked, “Are you animating that stupid puppet behind my back?”

Cosgrove said nothing, and when Dennis Savage whirled around to surprise him in mid-puppetry, the Baron was not to be seen.

“I’ll give you the recipe,” said Dennis Savage, “if you give me the puppet.”

“
What
puppet?” asked Cosgrove, defiantly.

I told Alex we’d best sit and watch the show. Laying down the polenta sticks, he said, “You guys should put in a popcorn stand.”

“Show me your hands,” Dennis Savage told Cosgrove.

Keeping his
puppeted right hand behind his back, Cosgrove slowly produced the left one.

“The other hand, too,” Dennis Savage ordered.

Cosgrove slowly withdrew his left hand, transferred the puppet behind his back, and now extended the empty right one.

“No, both hands at once,” Dennis Savage insisted.

Cosgrove very, very slowly deposited the puppet in the waistband of the rear of his trousers, and produced both his hands at once. The encounter had taken on the feeling of a duel to the death by Kabuki samurai. With an
adagio
that would have had Tim Conway’s slow-moving-old-man portrayal gasping in awe, Dennis Savage tried to circle around Cosgrove while Cosgrove matched him step for step, always keeping Baron Portugee hidden from view.

It was Dennis Savage who lost the war of nerves. “
Give me that puppet
!” he cried, throwing himself upon Cosgrove and seizing the baron. “
Yes
!” he called out, giving the baron a victory shake. “
Now
!” he added. And “
See
?” he triumphed. (So to say.)

“But the other player,” Alex noticed, denoting Cosgrove, “is impassive. Enigmatic, you see? We are left wondering where his dramatic arc will take him.”

Indeed, Cosgrove waited quietly, his features expressionless, as Dennis Savage took a folded-up scrip out of his pocket and gave it to Cosgrove with “Here. And that’s the end of the puppet show.”

“Young Cosgrove seems to have lost,” Alex went on, as Cosgrove opened the paper to be sure it was the longed-for recipe. He momentarily gazed up at Dennis Savage, who just stood there holding the puppet—the sock, really, for the days of Baron
Portugee had surely come to an end.

“He
seems
to,” Alex continued, gorging on those polenta sticks. “But he got what none of us ever has enough of.”

I made a guess: “The trade of something worthless for something he needs?”

“The passionate attention of an interesting man.”

Parking himself next to us on the couch, Cosgrove began reading as he muttered, “Little does he know that I have another puppet just like it in my dresser.” Now in a suspicious tone, he said, “Wait a minute—did you leave something out? Where’s the turmeric?”

“There isn’t any,” said Dennis Savage, retrieving his lamp after stuffing the baron into his pocket.

“The whole town knows you put turmeric in everything!”

Well, Dennis Savage took his lamp upstairs, Dino Croc returned from another play date, and Cosgrove decided to test drive the meat loaf model and went off to the market. Alex and I fed the last of the polenta sticks to a grateful Dino Croc, who then went into the bedroom to see about a nap. So Alex and I were alone. And he began:

“Some years ago, when I was still a young ‘un, I worked out of state with one of those veterans who’d done every classic in the canon and shared the stage with many a name. You and the other
startingouters go out drinking with him, and he tosses all his stories at you. He told us about a job he had, opposite an actress of great respect. Yes, you would know her, Bud. Crazy, of course—all the great ones are. I hope to be crazy one day. But deep and searching, too, this dame
aroo
of the stage. No jargon on this lady—never uttered word one about ‘finding my cadence’ and all that amateur twaddle. But—the old veteran told us—she had this sort of fabulousness quirk, that she never finished rehearsing. Just kept on working on her role right through the run. The show might freeze, but she never did.

“And the old actor hated her. Because he had finished his character prep, and the blocking, and whatnot. Games with props. An almost undetectable limp. Learned his lines. He had
done
his
work
, is how he put it. Yes, but playing with her…well, he never knew what she’d be up to next, did he? She didn’t miss cues or change lines, no. Still. Once she got into a scene, you had absototalutely no goddamn warning of how she was going to play it. Because her character would mesmerize her. Turn her inside out. She couldn’t resist it. It was a case of…in his words, this is, now…‘Needing the knowledge.’ You
need the knowledge
. Because it makes you smart and new. Makes you young. That’s why I did that improv, by the way.”

He got up.

“I needed the knowledge,” he repeated. “How it feels to…”

“How’d it go with
Korby?”

He smiled, Benedict
Cumberbatch in a National Theatre revival of
The School for Scandal
that has all London agog. “What a sweetheart. Right? We’ve talked of moving in together, only his place is too small.”

Following him to the door, I said, “You’re going to give up that monster sublet of yours?”

“Everything’s curable when you’re in a hit,” he replied, which didn’t answer my question. “Next stop, one of those unbearably prestigious cable series.”

He shook my hand, winked his all-
bigged-up-now wink, and left.

I’ll wrap this up symmetrically, on another weekend picnic in the park with Ken and Davey-Boy. Cosgrove had packed a basket for us—an actual wicker basket with interior leather straps to anchor the various containers, which I had no idea we owned. And, bless his heart, he had made hundred-taste meat loaf sandwiches. With cucumber salad and individual crocs of Santiago relish.

And of course Ken had smuggled in one of Tom-Tom’s jars of French jam, for which I have acquired a taste.

“What was that song your buddy was singing?” Davey-Boy asked me, as we took in the passing gentry. “‘Will Jizz For Pie?’”

“‘If I Knew You Were
Comin’ I’d’ve Baked a Cake.’”

“Tom-Tom says there’s a brand of this,” said Ken, of the jam, “where they make it without sugar.”

“Alert to shirtless very older bald guy crossing the road from the baseball diamonds,” said Davey-Boy. “Totally build.”

We looked: at a possible fifty-something in jeans and sandals, the beltline unfastened for maximum impression. Not so tall, but with a walk of great authority. His hair, around his skull
and dusting his forehead, was grey. So was his bushy mustache and so were his eyes, in a match so incandescent that we could make them out at twenty yards. Further, he was in implausibly good shape, the torso rising in a grandiose V to a heavy chest and water-polo shoulders.

“Heading right for us,” Davey-Boy noted.

“He’s angry,” said Ken.

I asked, “Can I have some more of that jam?”

Ken passed the jar over as Davey-Boy let out a low whistle.

“Look who’s with him,” he said—and I suddenly knew who was with him without looking.

It was Alex. And that must be Neil. But this improv wasn’t going so well, because Alex seemed to be hanging back with a morose look. He’ll spot me any moment, I thought—but he was too absorbed in the scene, fixed on his costar. Neil had crossed the road; pointing at Alex, he then pointed at the ground with a “Right here and I mean now!” attitude. Alex shook his head even as he slowly went up to Neil.

“‘Come to Daddy,’” said Davey-Boy, creating the soundtrack, as he likes to do.

“You know that guy?” Ken asked.

“‘Why be you so headstrong?’” Davey-Boy went on. “‘You know my ways to make a handsome
fella pay me mind.’”

“Don’t swipe all the jam,” Ken warned me as Alex wove his way through bikers and strollers to come up to Neil.

“‘You’ll take it fresh from the cock,’” Davey-Boy went on, riffing on what Alex had said in the improv class. “‘You’ll scarf up every drop, or I’ll find out why but good.’”

Alex started to say something to Neil, but he gave up with a hopeless look as Neil laid a hand on the back of Alex’s neck and slowly propelled him northward along the path, away from us.

I said, “Alex told me he was giving that whole scene up.” Didn’t he?

“‘Giving me up?’” Davey-Boy echoed. “‘When I get you home, you’ll turn over like a flapjack in a shantytown hash house.’”

I’d never heard anything quite that spicy from Davey-Boy before, and as I turned to him to comment, Ken took the jam from me.

“Hey!”

“You weren’t sharing properly, cousin,” said Ken. “Aren’t you going to say hello to your friend?”

“They were right in front of us,” I noted. “Inches off, really. If Alex had looked this way—”

“Actors don’t do any looking,” Davey-Boy observed. “Actors are looked at.”

“Scope the crowd staring at them, will you? Haven’t they ever seen a sex monster dragging his unwilling boy friend home for
crashbang sex before?”

Ken giggled.

“‘Come along, lad,’” Davey-Boy continued, as Neil and Alex went on up the road. “‘If you’re an actor, then you can act the way I say to, and show respect with expert cocksucking such as you actors know how to do. Then I’ll ball you roughways but, after, I’ll hold you in my arms, to make you as tenderhearted as can be. Because daddy knows best.’”

“I don’t notice
you
sharing that jam all of a sudden.”

“Too much jam is no good for a writer. It’ll make you drowsy.”

“Look how daddy still has his hands on the actor’s neck,” said Davey-Boy. “So dangerous and protective.” After a moment, he added, “Ekcetera.”

Ken handed me the jam, and as I spooned up the last morsels, Ken said, “Didn’t you say that actor guy had destiny control now, with a hit play and any boy friend he chooses?” Watching me finish off the jam as though he’d suffered sharer’s remorse and was going to snatch the jar back, he added, “Not a care in the world, you said.”