Page 282 - Some Dance to Remember

252 Jack Fritscher

wouldn’t and couldn’t go out of his penthouse where he lay divine invalid
on a couch playing Camille. It was easier to visit Solly, who only pretended
to be dying, than it was to watch Tony slip away.
Ryan made all the excuses people make when they can’t face visits
to the hospital. The excuses made him guilty. The guilt finally drove him
to Tony’s bedside. They were alone together. Tony lay quietly, more in a
trance than asleep. Ryan sensed it was the last time. He leaned in over the
aluminum bed rail, his face lowering slowly over Tony’s face, feeling no
heat rise from his friend’s cold body, finding surprise at the moist sweat
on the dying man’s forehead when he kissed him lightly.
“I love you,” he said.
He rose up and walked backward, slowly, away from the bed, like a
camera at the end of a movie dollying away from some final freeze-frame
image that recedes deeper and deeper into the dark screen, like the last
shot of Long Day’s Journey into Night.
“Listen to us in our darkness, we beseech thee, Oh, Lord; and by thy
great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night.”
None of them knew yet the coming peril that would stalk them all.

5

Things beyond Ryan’s ken began to happen. Only later, after Tony
Tavarossi died, did pieces fall together. For instance, the evening the Lou-
ise M. Davies Symphony Hall opened its doors for the first time, Kick had
two tickets comped to him by January Guggenheim who had been in the
City for the premiere.
“I must fly back to El Lay, darling,” she said to Kick. She was all
autographs and sunglasses. “I’m producing a miniseries and my director
is in trouble.” She handed Kick the tickets. “I haven’t seen Ry,” she said.
She arched a very suspicious tweezed eyebrow.
Kick smiled at her.
“Ah,” she said. “Got to fly!”
Kick drove her to San Francisco International in his red Corvette.
“You guys enjoy,” she said.
But it wasn’t Ryan who sat next to Kick in the Grand Tier of the gala
opening.
It was Logan Doyle.
“I figured you were so busy with Solly and Tony and the next issue of
Maneuvers,” Kick explained. “Besides, Logan’s never been to an opening.”
Opening? Opening? Never been to an opening?

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