Page 368 - Some Dance to Remember

338 Jack Fritscher

but he never figured that personal love was more dangerous than AIDS.
During wild nights of sex in the City before Kick and before the plague,
he was always on his guard. But in-love, first with Teddy, and then with
Kick, he let his defenses down. Teddy’s first betrayal taught him that not
even in-love is everyone a safe person. The first night when he knew he
loved Kick, as much as he was in-love with him, Ryan said: “You could
hurt me now.”
“I won’t ever hurt you,” Kick said. “I’m fragile myself.”
“Then we’re safe people,” Ryan said. He spoke the declaratory, almost
indirect way that he had learned from Kick’s nondemanding southern
drawl. Until the night Ryan dared to address Kick directly, the night Ryan
drove old Dixie down, their dissembling style was to infer their need or
preferences to each other.
Ryan perversely found a sexual pleasure in always deferring to Kick.
If Kick wants to top me, I’m his slave. If Ryan went wrong in love, it was in
his deference. It was unnatural to him. He himself had always shone. He
had deferred to Monsignor Linotti and the other priests and priestlings at
Misericordia until he could defer no more and he had left their cramped
little world. He had deferred to his parents but not to his brother and sister.
His aggressive strength against them destroyed Thom while it strength-
ened Kweenie. He had never deferred to Teddy and Teddy had gone down
to an alcoholic defeat Ryan had never intended.
“The strength I thought was a virtue,” Ryan said, “was no more than
selfish pushiness. It is, I think, a fault in my character.”
Before Kick, Ryan had always been the sun in any relationship. He had
Energy. He burned bright. His style had driven Thom mad. His strength
had made Teddy weak. He felt he had two strikes against him. “Three and
I’m out,” he said. He was determined never to overshadow Kick.
Thom’s and Teddy’s weakness made him angry. He could not tolerate
weak men. He wanted Kick to come to his senses and be more than strong.
He wanted to take Kick beyond strength training to achieve real power.
Power is the ability to apply strength. All his coaching of the bodybuilder
to a super physique was his physical way of shoring up the inner strength,
the moral fiber, the large soul of the man he wanted to be perfect.
His Catholicism had taught the boy in him lessons the man he became
could not forget. In moral theology class at Misericordia, he had learned
that grace builds on nature: the more perfect the body, the greater the
capacity for sanctifying grace.
“This means,” the ancient priest, a professor of moral theology, had
taught, “that you must remain healthy in order to receive grace. When

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