Page 425 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 395

to hurt a guy. He kept all the Pendleton shirts and leather fetish clothes
I gave him. Those he can still use with his new tricks.” His voice rose.
“Don’t you understand? He sneaked in and piled on the floor inside the
bedroom window all my gifts that were...personal!”
“So what are you going to do?” Kweenie asked.
“I’m going to teach Charles Bronson a thing or two about revenge!”
“First you have to find him,” Solly said.
“I don’t ever want to see him again.”
“I’ve been playing Miss Marple,” Kweenie said. “He’s been at the gym
every day.”
“Naturally,” Ryan said. “Mr. Schmuck wants to be Mr. California.”
“And,” Kweenie said, “he’s taken a studio apartment in the Castro.”
“Location,” Solly said, “is everything.”
“Some surprise,” Ryan said.
“If you want a surprise,” Kweenie said, “Logan has left town for good.”
“Bad pennies,” Solly warned, “always return.”
“This one won’t,” Kweenie said. “Sources close to the couple...”
“Out with it,” Ryan said.
...reveal that Logan split with the truck and the grass.”
Ryan felt a rush of pure satisfaction. What he had to do he could now
do with full clarity that he was not doing it because Kick had run off to
live with Logan. Things were back to square one. What was between the
two of them was between them only. He was bent on teaching Kick one
final ultimate lesson.
I think, and this I have said many times, that when men go against
the heterosexual norm and dare to love each other, they love each other
somehow more intensely, precisely because the world is against them, and
when that intense love ends, its passion becomes enormous rage, at each
other, and at themselves, for making the straight world seem right and
them seem wrong.
Yet what hurt Ryan most, among all the returned gifts of the unbond-
ing, was that Kick, a man, a male, one of his own kind, had in fact acted
badly, acted in the way women always protest a man in a relationship
finally always acts. The seducer becomes the lover becomes the betrayer.
“He woke the man in me,” he wrote in Armageddon, “but he killed
the child.”
“Make a man of me, indeed!” Ryan could not forgive Kick for coach-
ing him into a sexual hyper-manhood and then turning him into an aban-
doned lover worn, like some gay trick, by the wars of the sexual revolution.
He had thought Kick’s form and face, his manly grace had ushered him

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