Page 297 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 267

He wrote in his Journal:

Tears well up in me sometimes when I look at him, when
I look through his surface and see the fineness inside. He has a
rich interior life. Once I said to him, “You are so fine, so good,
so together. “And he said, “Like the company I keep.” He knows
I love him. He knows I am in-love with him, with his body, his
head, his whole being. He is a particular man I love because he
gives me so much access to the universal goodness and beauty
I worship. He knows I have done the forbidden thing and have
fallen in-love with him; but he knows I’ll handle it properly, keep
it in check, and never hurt him with it.

“So,” Kick said, “what’s in the folder?”
“The final draft of Universal Appeal. All it needs is your imprimatur
and your signature on the model release.”
“Whatever you write is okay by me,” Kick said. “I release me in your
life to you.”
“I really think you should read it. It’s bottom-line stuff. It’s about
you.”
“It’s about us. It’s about this time in our lives.”
“Remember this.” Ryan raised a warning finger in jest. “Years from
now, when they finally catch us and ask us exactly what we were up to,
your story and my story may be wildly different and yet totally the same.”
Kick shook his finger back. “But there won’t be any villains in either
version.”
“How could there be?”
A mist, strange for summer, drifted down on the flowers and ferns
of the Patio garden. At the next table, the old woman said she was cold.
One of the men called for the check. Her family rose to leave. The young
woman took one last look at Kick, then helped her mother from the chair.
They made a slow procession toward the French doors when suddenly the
old woman slipped and fell. Kick turned his head at the commotion. Ryan
stood up. Gay men at the nearest tables sprang to their feet to help her.
She said she was alright. Her family was full of apologies.
“It must be terrible,” Ryan said, “when you’re old to know your eye-
sight is failing and your bones are brittle and you are vulnerable to falling.”
“It’s the old story,” Kick said, “of quality of life versus quantity of life.
What is our book about if not that?”
“Just a thought,” Ryan said. “I read the other day that Lillian Gish

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