Page 374 - Some Dance to Remember

344 Jack Fritscher

Ryan adored cheap sentiment. At least in the comedies and tragedies
of page and stage and screen he knew how others in similar situations had
felt, and survived, or did not survive, the crisis he was facing.
Out in radio land everyone knew the lyrics to “Heartbreak Hotel.”
So.
He had promised never to fall in-love with Kick.
So.
He had promised never to say no to Kick.
So.
He had long ago broken the first and was slouching toward bedlam
about to break the second.
So what.
Kick had told him he could have anything he wanted; but Kick never
expected him to call his hand. Maybe Kick loved his deference more than
he loved him; but his deference, given in trust, now that they were in
trouble, was no longer virtue. It was sin. If he rose from his knees, if he
faced Kick directly, if he made them both persons, ordinary persons, he
risked losing the golden, ideal bodybuilder forever.
Cinema montage. Music up. “If You Were the Only Girl in the World
and I Were the Only Boy.” Music under.
Cut to film clip: Crawford and Davis.
Crawford: “You wouldn’t treat me like this if I weren’t in a wheelchair.”
Baby Jane: “But’cha are, Blanche. But’cha are.”
Ryan feared running the film backward. He had played the Beatles
backward and heard that Paul was dead. He feared retrogression. He
feared Kick’s descent from the pedestal, from the posing platform, from
the bed of their high-wire act. Emerson had feared devolution. Tennessee’s
Big Daddy raged against mendacity. His Blanche was afraid of falling
back into the brutal primitivism of human animals even before we were
hairy apes. Ryan’s nerves were ragged as a pair of claws scuttling across
the floors of silent seas. He wished he had never gone to school because
everything he had learned seemed to usurp his own original response to
the universe—the same way Hollywood movies caused him to reference
not himself but scripts, actors, and directors.
Ryan could no longer deny himself, could no longer defer to Kick,
could no longer dissemble to the brute physical power of the bodybuilder,
once lighter than air, whose sheer muscle mass, pumped with steroids, no
longer reflected who Kick was and insistently defined what Ryan could
never be: one of the boys.
Not one of those boys.

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