Page 352 - Some Dance to Remember

322 Jack Fritscher

Ryan. She kept a secret she could never tell him. It had been raining one
afternoon. Ryan was at work. She had let herself into the Victorian. Kick,
fresh from the gym, and stripped naked for the shower, had shouted,
“Who’s there? Is that you, Ry?”
“It’s me,” she said.
Kick, pumped sweaty to the max, had made no move to cover himself.
She had moved in on him, talking to him, admiring his muscle, doing
Ryan’s act. She had known about the Third Runner-Up in the Miss Ala-
bama contest. If she couldn’t have Ryan, she’d have Kick. He was a sucker
for muscle flattery. It had been fast and easy. Kick gathered worship where
he found it. Brother and sister were so alike it was all the same to him.
Neither Kweenie or Kick had even promised never to tell Ryan. That was
implicit. Had Kweenie not had the abortion, Ryan, who was the ultimate
fetishist, would have kept the baby, especially if blond and only if a boy.
Had he known, he would have killed them both. Not for their fucking.
Not for her conceiving. But for her aborting, with money he had lent to
Kick, the only thing he couldn’t have: Kick’s child.
“Let him have his fun,” Ryan said to Kweenie. “I want him to have
everything he wants. He knows what he’s doing. And most of all, I know
what he’s doing. This won’t last long.”
Ryan committed the last sin a person can commit against his own
soul. He lied to himself.
His lie covered his anxiety.
He could not sleep, insomniac again, sleeping single in a double bed.
Kick failed to heed the plea his mother had made in the hospital cor-
ridor after the Runner-Up for Miss Alabama had thrown herself from his
car. He failed to recognize that in certain, distinct ways the downtown
Birmingham faggotry that his mother had despised had been carried
cross country from all the little down towns of America to the great big
downtown of 18th and Castro. Ryan would one day tell Kick that he had
become what his mother had loathed back in Birmingham when she had
asked him directly, “You’re not like those people downtown, are you?”
Kick, living high, with his paternal inheritance still frozen in Bir-
mingham, had joined the gay, Gay, GAY ranks of all those photographers,
writers, artists, and performers on Castro who never photograph because
their cameras don’t work; who never write because they’ve got this, you
know, block; who never paint because the light in the apartment isn’t
right since the roommate made them move their bedroom to the back of
the flat; who don’t perform because, well, San Francisco is not New York,
New York, you know.

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