Page 404 - Some Dance to Remember

374 Jack Fritscher

growing hotter, growing physically bigger next to me. He was huge. He
transmitted to Kick in the same way—now I was witnessing it, actually
witnessing—that he had confided to me they communicated in bed and
out. Beyond words. Out of time and space. A single laser of light, red-
gold at Kick’s end, muting to virulent green at Ryan’s, cut through the
low-lit gloom over the seated audience who were facing the stage waiting
for something to happen, and something was happening. Palpable. Real.
“Turn yourself down,” Solly said. “You’re going to explode.”
Ryan said, with no self-pity, and with full salute to the irony, “This
could only happen to us.” And he knew there was no more us for them.
Kick was not alone. “Do you see now,” he said to me. “I wasn’t making it
up. This stuff between us keeps happening. Keeps growing. Never stops.”
He grew big as a blotter that could absorb very little more.
The houselights dimmed. The stage lights came up. The play began.
Dorothy Loudon entered the set. Polite applause. The audience, set-
tling into Loudon’s opening soliloquy, anticipated the great Hepburn’s
entrance. The light from the stage fell, even to my eyes, directly on Kick
at the right end of the second row. Kweenie and Solly and I tried to watch
the stage, but the lightbeam from Ryan to Kick, and back, was so power-
ful I was distracted from the stage more than Ryan had ever been by the
most unruly audience.
Kick’s blondness, objectively and truly, was striking. No matter what
drugs he was taking, he was not becoming the mess Ryan projected on
him. Kick Sorensen remained a brutally handsome man. Square jawed.
Sculpted features. His carefully groomed blond head sat on a thick mus-
cular neck. His broad shoulders spanned the seat back, inadvertently pres-
suring those seated on either side. The woman on his left did not pull away.
Logan seemed to enjoy Kick’s hard shoulder pressing against his own.
Kick’s athletic presence glowed in the stage light. He eclipsed everyone.
Even Logan.
I felt sorry for Ryan, really sorry for him, in a way I had never fully
realized before from his telling of it. Kick was the stuff of theater. He was
dreams and fantasy and ideals and aspirations. He was from Central Cast-
ing. He could have played the title role of the drop-dead blond athlete in
Albee’s The American Dream.
The designed curve of the front-row seats turned Kick, at the far cor-
ner of the stage, almost full-quarter profile toward us. He kept the impas-
sive plate of his face directly on Hepburn.
He knew. I knew he knew. I knew he knew Ryan knew. I knew he
knew we all knew. We were that tight little circle around Ryan that he

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