Page 212 - Some Dance to Remember

182 Jack Fritscher

bondage together, trapped here on this mundane planet, like two visitors
unsure they wanted to stay. Ryan had fought his way from the burbscape
of Peoria to Misericordia to Chicago to the Castro to the country. He had
fought his way over thousands of men’s bodies to the safe harbor of Kick’s
body. He wanted nothing more in life but more of the same.
“Let’s take it,” Ryan whispered, and he meant muscle, and he meant
love, “to the limit.”
In answer, Kick pulled Ryan’s face to his own.
Through their moustaches their lips met and parted. Their tongues
found lodging. Kick’s hand on the back of Ryan’s head pulled them closer.”
As far as we can take it,” Kick said.
He held the kiss so long his sweet breath became Ryan’s life-giving
oxygen. Ryan was no longer kissing Kick. Kick was kissing Ryan.
Ryan knew, under those shooting Christmas stars up in the country,
that this was the kiss against which he’d measure every other kiss in his
life.
Later, in bed with Kick, Ryan no longer minded his sleeplessness.
That night, back in the iron bed in the barn, with Thom and Sandy’s wild
family asleep up in the main house, a gay sense of well-being filled Ryan’s
soul. They had made love again. Kick had fallen into an easy sleep. The
bedside lantern dropped soft light across their spent and naked bodies.
Nothing this good, Ryan thought, can last forever. He pushed on the
moment the way a small boy’s tongue plays a loose baby tooth that hurts
so good.
“Be here now,” he cautioned himself. He thought of Francie in A Tree
Grows in Brooklyn; she looked at everything as if it were the last time she’d
see it. He had never forgotten the line he had read twenty years before in
a seminary English class.
He studied Kick’s sleeping guileless face, and realized that he trusted
this man more totally than he had ever trusted anyone, and his wonder
was that he had not surrendered any of himself. The light rhythms of his
best friend’s breathing soothed him. Even if they continued on forever,
every moment of all of it he wanted to remember. Ryan felt he had every-
thing in the world a man could ask for. He smiled about his health and
his writing and his ranch and the love he received and gave. He had, he
knew, miles to go before he would ever really sleep. He could brave that
kind of existential insomnia. He knew in life he already had more than
most people ever know is available if only you’re attentive enough. He had
everything. He was certain that the only thing he now wanted was truly
more of the same.

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