Page 293 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 263

lovers, have of not living up to an audience’s expectations. For nearly three
years, Ryan had managed to be every inch the man Kick expected. Love
was a speed trip.
The maitre d’ appeared on the garden porch and switched on the
over-head heating units. The summer evening had turned cool. A family,
escorting an ancient woman, entered and sat near Ryan, talking in soft
German-Jewish voices. Their happy entrance and the taped classical music
pleasured Ryan. He felt cosmopolitan.
His heart leapt up. He spied Kick. His broad shoulders and grin-
ning face filled the open French doorway with his Command Presence.
Ryan smiled one of those smiles of a summer night that come so easily to
the faces of lovers. Kick moseyed through the crowd. Diners stopped in
midbite. Ryan heard the young woman with the German Jewish couple
say, “Ausgezeichnet!” They looked, nodded among themselves, and smiled
first at Kick then at her.
Kick looked at no one but Ryan. He wore a large Pendleton shirt pat-
terned with the soft beige and blue that looks dynamite on blonds. The
sleeves were turned halfway up his forearms revealing the regrowth of the
thick blond hair that matched the hair Ryan had shaved from Kick’s body
before the Mr. San Francisco and had saved in fetish-Baggies at home in
a drawer.
“I missed you like shit.” Kick sat down. “Did you miss me?”
“Miss you? Last night I turned on the oven. I lit the gas. I was either
going to kill myself or bake a cake. Obviously, I baked the cake. Your
favorite.” Ryan raised his eyebrows three times in the butch-flirt he had
learned from Tom Selleck on Magnum P.I. “Later tonight I figured we
could have our cake and eat it too.”
“Jeez,” Kick said. “You look good.”
“Aw, go on. You’ll look better three days dead than I look now.”
“You’ve got more muscle,” Kick said.
“I’ve kept my workouts up,” Ryan said. “Even by myself, you’re always
there coaching me, squeezing out one more rep.”
“I knew you could make great gains.” He leaned across the table. “I
told you not to be afraid of steroids. You’re taking only enough to do you
good, not harm.”
Ryan knew the bodybuilder rationale. It was the same fatalism as
Solly’s. What is, is. They took steroids, as if, given all in life that is disap-
pointing and destructive, they, as elite bodybuilders, felt they themselves
had a right, even an imperative, to inflict a little of life’s possible damage
on themselves. Besides, Solly, who had tried heroin, reassured Ryan that

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