Page 363 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 333

“I want to live.”
“Thank you, Susan Hayward.”
“This plague isn’t the end of us,” Ryan said. “This will turn out to be
only an episode. We’ve got to think positive. We’ve got to be unsinkable
like Molly Brown.” Ryan stopped. “Those gay boys are still going to the
bars and the baths,” he said. “They deny Death. It’s so sad. They don’t
believe it’s really happening.”
“Or else they do and they defy Death. Eat, drink, and be merry.
Tomorrow we may die. I have no intention of not having sex with my
boys.”
“We have become Poe’s imps of the perverse.” Ryan blew his nose. He
quoted Poe quoting Corneille: “Weep, weep my eyes, repose in water. Half
my life has placed the remaining half in the grave.” It was the first time
Ryan had ever cried for San Francisco. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s Christmas
and all. We’ve become Poe’s desperate revelers continuing to party down,
faced with the masque of the red death.”
“Stop!” Solly said. “You went to school too long. You went to church
too much. You’d have been better off ignorant. Please! Stop the allusions.
You are what you are. You’re not a metaphor of something else. The is of
you, can’t is!”
“I want to stop. I don’t want to think about the plague,” Ryan said.
“You mean you don’t want to think about Kick and Logan.”
“I’ll go crazy,” Ryan said. “I’ll think about it tomorrow. Who said
that?”
“See? See what I mean! You’re not Scarlett O’Hara. You’re Ryan
O’Hara.”
“Nothing but the Death rate has changed in San Francisco.”
“I can live with that,” Solly said. “Eat some more sausage. You’re going
to need all your strength when your Christmas present arrives.”
They whiled away the morning drinking Irish coffee. By mid-after-
noon, Solly was mixing Absolut Vodka and Coca-Cola. They were not
drunk, but they were feeling no pain. Ryan was almost having fun. At
half past three, the doorbell buzzed. Solly called down the intercom to
the street door.
“Party-time,” he said to Ryan. “It’s your Christmas present.”
He buzzed the boy into the lobby. Ryan listened as the elevator
groaned and lifted itself up the shaft to the penthouse. Solly waited at the
open door of the apartment and welcomed the boy into the room. He was
young, husky, tattooed, and blond.
He could have been Kick’s delinquent little brother.

©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved
HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS BOOK