Page 329 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 299

“No,” Ryan said. “We don’t need drug energy. We need our Energy.
Sometimes emotional exhaustion, exactly like muscle failure at the gym
when your muscles get so tired you can’t grind out another rep, is neces-
sary. Without that final exhaustion rep, the muscles won’t grow.”
The heart won’t grow.
“But I hurt,” Kick said.
I hurt too.
Ryan felt something pass over the playground, something like the
shadow of a hawk, something like the Nameless Dread he had felt all his
life in his own heart, something now stalking Kick himself.
“Trust me,” Ryan said. Logan. “Through all this. Trust me. You
always said we were safe people for each other. I won’t hurt you. Why
would anybody ever hurt anyone else like that? Don’t retreat from me.”
Don’t go back to Bar Nada. “Don’t retreat from anyone.” And he meant
Logan. “Especially not ever from me. I’ll never crowd you. You know
that.” He flicked an ant, lost in the blond fur on Kick’s arm, into the grass.
“You and I both worship the same concept of manliness. You happen to
have it incarnate in your body. That’s a hard gift. I worship that in you
the way you worship it. But beyond that, leaving go of that, I know the
difference. I love you, the private real you, wherever you are inside that
face and body.”
“You can’t know what it’s like,” Kick said.
“I’m finding out. Someday I’m going to write a book called The Other
Side of Death in Venice. It’ll be Tadzio’s story. No one has ever consid-
ered the psychology of blonds beloved by dark men.” Ryan ran his hand
through Kick’s thick blond hair.
“After all this time,” Kick asked, “am I still so blond to you?”
“Fair is fair,” Ryan said.
For all his fatigue, Kick lay splendid in the grass. His current sadness
detracted little from his Look. If he was not a god come perfectly incarnate
to Earth, he looked at least as if some advanced interstellar scanner had
computed the ideal male form from all of Earth’s sculpture and painting
and then filled out that form with shining golden protoplasm from some
pleasant alien star.
“I wish this pain would pass,” Kick said. “This never happens to me.”
How can you let Logan call the shots?
“It’s happening now,” Ryan said. “Maybe it’s good it’s happening
now.” God knows I’m an expert when it comes to depression. He never felt
more like a father-confessor than at this moment lying in the grass.
Ryan later wrote:

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