Page 203 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 173

sure. You’re living up to your press releases. I know exactly what kind of
macho fascists you musclerama fags are.”
“Forgive me,” Ryan said. “I was beginning to think we knew you too.
As it happens, we only recognize your type.”
“Why, thank you, Miss Scarlett.”
“Shut up,” Kick said. “No one calls him that.”
“Not to his face.” Evan-Eddie stood firm. Kweenie held his arm. He
was fuming in the steam of his own lust and rejection, like a train in a
1940s movie standing in its own steam while lovers kiss.
Ryan always loved that bittersweet cliché: one lover with hand pressed
against the train window; the other lover standing alone on the boarding
platform, both receding into the distance of time and space.
How often had he left Annie Laurie and Charley-Pop that way when
they put him on the train at the end of each summer to return to Miseri-
cordia. Somehow somebody’s always saying good-bye. Funny. It was
always his father’s face, not his mother’s, that he last glimpsed dissolving
in the steam.
Evan-Eddie took one last shot at Kick. “I’ll dance,” he said, “a gay
fandango on your grave. You...You...steroid meatball! Let your hack write
about that!”
“I’m going to kill him!” Ryan said.
“Passion! Wonderful!” Opel said. “Art happens NOW!”
“I guarantee,” Evan-Eddie said to Kick, “that you won’t live long.”
“Wunderbar!” Opel shouted. “The evil eye!”
“And you,” Evan-Eddie said to Ryan, “will live too long.”
“Thank you, Vampira,” Kweenie said.
Opel led the applause. “Isn’t Evan-Eddie’s act buffo?” His punch line
dissolved the tension to guffaws.
“It isn’t an act,” Kweenie said. “It’s his way of being!”
Opel turned from his little happening, then charged back into the
ring of laughter pulling a woman dressed in black jersey. The energy
changed directions. “Everyone,” he said. “This is January Guggenheim.”
“And the answer,” January said, “is no.”
“No what?” Kweenie asked.
“No, she’s not,” Opel said, “one of those Guggenheims.”
“I’m one of these Guggenheims,” she said. She planted her hand firmly
in Kick’s crotch.
Just as firmly, Kick removed her hand. “Thank you, Ma’am,” he
drawled, “for the compliment.”
“Darling,” she said. “Darling Kick. I’ve heard so much about you and

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