Page 201 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 171

declared to the press with calm dignity: “Harvey Milk’s people do not
have anything to apologize for.”
Opel took my arm and happily surveyed his crowded gallery. “We
are,” Opel said, “a charmed circle.” He led me toward Ry standing next
to Kick.
“Vettes are muscle cars,” Kick was saying. “Men look good in a Vette.”
“Let me tell you,” Ryan was still on. “You have to understand the emo-
tional importance of bodybuilders’ affection for Corvettes. They’re meat
wagons.” Wine. Cheese. Gallery small talk. “They’re designed to show off
the hulk climbing out of the cockpit. There’s a whole Corvette mystique.”
“I never knew that,” a man in pressed jeans and a designer sweater
said. “How, really, thank you, interesting.”
“Bullshit,” I whispered through my smile into Ryan’s ear.
He was determined to finish. “When two guys in Vettes pass each
other, they wave forearm up and fist rampant. ‘Yo!’”
Kick made the motion that Ryan described. Anyone could see how
they played bravura off each other. Ryan’s words gave Kick easy reason
to display his arms to the surrounding crowd. Kick’s moves made Ryan’s
cocktail pontificating all the more enjoyable. It was easy to figure the
mutual rap-and-flex sex they enjoyed. Ryan talked the scene while Kick
powered it out.
“Aren’t they a pair,” I said to Opel. “One on the ground. One in
midair.”
“A pair,” Opel said, “in the Great Tradition of Pairs: Mickey and
Judy, Tracy and Hepburn, Jack and Jackie, Liz and Dick, Sid and Nancy,
Daedalus and Icarus.” He gestured across the gallery. “When I set up the
lighting for their performance tonight,” Opel said, “I thought if I was ever
going to hit a man with ‘Old Master’ lighting, Kick is certainly a subject
to soak up the watts!”
Kweenie swooped by us. She pulled us tighter into the circle around
Ryan and Kick. On her arm she escorted a short gay clone with a black
moustache. He was her old roommate, Evan-Eddie, who had cruised Ryan
on the steps up to his sister’s apartment. He wore a tux. He looked like
a singing waiter in a Cole Porter musical. He couldn’t take his eyes off
Kick. Ryan stood amused, watching the muscle-lust rise in the slender
gay boy’s face.
“Those arms of yours!” Evan-Eddie unabashedly reached out to touch
Kick’s biceps. “I’d do anything to have arms like that.”
“Even work out?” Ryan shot the line across the circle.
Undaunted, Evan-Eddie said, “But can he talk?”

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