Page 371 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 341

Christmas was an agony. Something was happening to him.
“Ryan,” Kweenie said, “are you alright? You look feverish.”
He gave her a present and scooted her down the hall.
“Here’s my hat,” she said. “Here’s your door. Take your hands off me.
What’s my hurry?”
Ryan envisioned loving Kick with a new love, a higher, purer love. He
examined his human heart. He loved Kick more than muscle. He knew
the solution. Kick had promised him he could have anything he wanted.
Clearly, he knew he wanted one thing only: they must keep on keeping
on together, more nobly, more ideally than before. They had to clean up
their act. Kick might not like him speaking out, but they were lost anyway
if he didn’t. Kick was the muscle. He was the talker. He made his living
with words. Kick loved his words. He was resolved to the conversation he
knew they must have after New Year’s.
He feared he did not dare the act. He knew he must. He had been first
cause and finally accomplice of Kick’s fall. He had offered Kick a pedestal.
Kick had climbed eagerly up. Ryan, kneeling in adoration at Kick’s early
natural splendor, could no longer ignore the poisonous transformation he
had steadfastly refused to acknowledge. Kick’s feet were turning to clay.
He had muddied himself with serious steroids. He was growing too heavy
to take high flight. Kick was becoming like everyone else on Castro. He
was becoming ordinary against their promise never to become ordinary
to each other.
Ryan, in conscience, like Streisand wanting Redford to become even
more perfect, resolved, if necessary, to slap Kick awake. That Christmas
here read Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” He
quoted O’Connor often. She was the only Catholic novelist of the Ameri-
can south, and a woman at that. O’Connor had once explained her own
grotesques so flat out that Ryan could not forget. She had said that to the
deaf you have to shout and to the almost blind you have to write in very
large letters. Ryan owed Kick, for all the extraordinary pleasure Kick had
given him, at least this warning due his angel, he feared, flying too close
to the edge.
Ryan shied away from the A-Group holiday parties. He could not
bear to go alone, answering the same question he had been answering for
months.
“Where’s Kick?”
He was no longer Ryan-Orion.
He was the left-behind half of a Famous Couple.

©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved
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