Page 474 - Some Dance to Remember

444 Jack Fritscher

scene?”
“Are these your questions or my answers?”
“I’m trying to figure you out.”
“Stop putting words in my mouth. You can shut up. I want nothing.”
“I don’t believe this.”
“Believe it. You’re not running a rap-talk sex scene with Kick.”
“I need to reveal myself to you,” Ryan said.
“So you can forget?”
“So I can remember. He’s slipping away.”
“He was always slipping away. Things fall apart.”
“Who are you? I’ve wondered that from the first time I met you.”
“I’m a patient man.”
“I’m a dangerous man.”
“In more ways than one.”
“Armies have marched over me.”
“Rita Hayworth, Fire Down Below. Don’t quote movies to me.”
“I might be incubating the virus.”
“Look at me, Ry.”
“I can’t chance infecting you.”
“Take a good look at me.”
“I’ve ruined everyone I ever touched.”
“Don’t flatter yourself. You won’t ruin me,” I said.
“You sound like Teddy. You sound like Kick.”
“I’m not Teddy and I’m not Kick.”
“That’s no problem.”
I grabbed his hand. “Can you read lips? I...love...you.”
“That’sss,” he held the sibilant, “...a problem.” He held me out at arms’
length.
“Only as long as you push me away.”
Ryan stared hard into my eyes as if he had not for years looked, really
looked, into a straight man’s face. “Who the hell are you?”
I stared directly back. He had lived so long, so far too long, in the
gay ghetto, inventing gay life, that he had lost touch with the legitimate
otherness of heterosexuality. If Ryan liked reciprocal terms father and son,
hot and cold—words whose meaning depends on another word, then, as
the last friend he had left—and me with no gay closet door to throw open
in blinding straight revelation—I had some, what? Some weird moral
responsibility to bring him around full circle: homosexuality is recipro-
cally dependent on heterosexuality. Neither is understandable without the
other. His gayness needed my straightness as much I needed him in the

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