Page 406 - Some Dance to Remember

376 Jack Fritscher

Kick, was holding the other end. Only Ryan, by strength of his own
character, held himself, raw, bleeding, and lacerated in the seat next to me.
Sixty seconds it lasted. No more. No less. One minute. And then he
lowered the glasses into his lap and turned his eyes back to the stage.
I wonder if Hepburn, herself, up on that brightly lit stage with all
those upturned faces adoring her, could not but feel herself, instead of
stage-center, triangulated with the two faces burning out in the darkness.
I wanted to write to her to ask her if she felt something more fragile than a
mirror crack that night when her play became only part of another drama.
Before Hepburn took her final curtain call, Ryan rushed us from the
theater. We were escaping.
Jack Woods, the tattooed bodybuilder biker, caught Ryan’s arm. “I
saw everything,” he gloated. He stood 220 pounds in full black leather,
chewing the butt of his unlit cigar.
Ryan rushed us out quickly through the Tenderloin night to Solly’s
penthouse.
“What was Kick doing there anyway?” Kweenie asked. “Some nerve.
I thought he was at Bar Nada.”
“You could never get him to go anywhere but to bodybuilding con-
tests,” I said.
“And to bed,” Solly said.
It was true. Because of Kick, Ryan had given up the popular culture
that entertains ordinary people as much as he had given up his circle of
friends.
“Ryan’s not mad because Kick was there,” Kweenie said. “He was mad
because Kick and Logan were wearing almost identical plaid shirts. He
hates couples, straight or gay, who dress like twins.”
“Kick lives his own life.” Ryan was unconvincing.
“Since when?” Solly asked.
“He always has,” Kweenie said.
“Since before I found out about it,” Ryan said. “I’m the last to know.”
“They say that breaking up is hard to do,” Kweenie said.
“Now I know,” Ryan said. “I know that it’s true.”
The jokey song lyrics could not hide his sadness. I looked him straight
on.
Face, I’ve written more than once, is the essence of cinema. RKO once
spun movies out of the legs of Fred and Ginger, but the best movies have
been built around the memorable faces of the likes of Garbo and Gable,
Crawford and Redford, Newman and DeNiro, Streisand and Streep, and
Hepburn herself. Television has reduced the mystique of Face to talking

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