Page 191 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 161

become ordinary to each other. Kick had asked him that they love each
other, but never fall in-love.
Never fall in-love.
It was a strange caution, like one of those weird rules in a fairy tale
where someone can have anything he wants so long as he doesn’t do the
one forbidden thing.
“We love each other,” Kick had explained. And we love each other
perfectly. Let’s not cheapen it like the gay boys do. They fall in-love and
can’t think straight.”
“That’s what makes them gay,” Ryan had said. “That’s why they don’t
understand homomasculine love.”
“Guys say they’re in-love with me all the time. I hardly know who
they are. They think I’m responsible for their happiness.” Kick had shaken
his head. “No way. I’m not responsible for other people’s happiness. You
know that, Ry.”
“I’m perfectly in charge of my own happiness.”
“That’s why I love you,” Kick had said. “That’s why I know I don’t
need to tell you never to fall in-love with me. In-love? What does in-love
mean?”
Ryan groped toward the answer Kick sought. “Being in-love means
singing somebody-done-somebody-wrong songs.”
“You said it, coach.” Kick had put his big arm around Ryan’s shoul-
ders. “I want us to have what we have forever.” He had brushed his thick
blond moustache across Ryan’s cheek. “I love you. You love me. The only
way I know for us to ruin our love for each other is to fall in-love with
each other. That’s indulgence. Love is not indulgence. Love is discipline.”
Solly was off fussing in the kitchen, and flossing in the bathroom.
Ryan stared out at the City around and below him. Maybe, he mused,
Kick and I are too rarified in our values. In what we appreciate, celebrate,
create, want. Intensity keeps us together. We are not overextended into
principles that are too high. We are, rather, fully extended. We are as
fully extended as Kick is fully developed. His body is the measure of our
intense push toward the best of everything. In a world that settles for
half measures that it reviews as excellent, truly full extension of self-into-
quality poses a definite threat to a world that has adjusted downward in
praise of mediocrity.
Maybe San Francisco was the wrong place for high-flying love. It
once called itself “The City That Knows How.” But the City that knew
how, forgot how quality was accomplished. Somewhere along the way San
Franciscans, always tolerant of the eccentric, had gone too far and given

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