Page 481 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 451

his Viennese voodoo, and then to the grocery store. One kitchen cabinet
over-flowed with vitamins and immunity supplements. He was careful
about everything. The way a man is careful when he fears he might not
have been careful enough.
Sometimes I caught him staring into the large mirror in the hall. It
was the mirror Kick had used to practice his posing. It was the only thing
he had rescued from the barn one night when I was off teaching, and he
was home alone, and the barn had burned mysteriously to the ground.
He looked at me in the posing mirror standing behind him. “What
movie am I, Magnus?” I made no answer.
“You’re slipping, professor. I’ll give you multiple choice: Olivier and
Hepburn in Love Among the Ruins; Bogart and Bergman in Casablanca;
Irons and Streep in The French Lieutenant’s Woman.”
He pushed me to end the game. “Life is not a movie,” I said.
“Ashes. Ashes. All fall down.”
“It’s over,” I said. “The party’s over.” I meant Kick. “It’s time to call
it a day.” I meant Castro. I meant the seventies. I meant the way they all
were. “Let it be.” I stared at Ryan’s face in the mirror.
He stared deeper into the mirror at my reflection.
“We didn’t fail, did we?” he said. He meant himself, Kick, and all of
gay liberation. “At least we dared.”
“What was, was, as Solly would say.”
“Touch me.” He spoke into the mirror.
I moved my hand forward up his back and over his shoulder.
He reached back and up-caught my wrist and guided my hand to his
high forehead, laying my palm horizontally above his eyes the way Liv
Ullmann touched Bibi Andersson in Persona.
“You’re not real, are you?” he said to me in the mirror.
I felt his skin heating my hand. “I’m very real,” I said.
“We all came to San Francisco,” he said, “to be ourselves. When that
didn’t work, we tried to become someone else.”
“Some maybe,” I said. “Not everyone. You can’t speak for everyone.”
“I can speak for me,” he said. “What is sex besides trying to become
part of someone until you finally become him?”
“That’s not sex,” I said.
“Is it love?”
It was the question Ryan had wanted to ask all along.
I made my voice firm. “I can’t answer that. No one can answer that.”
“I wish I were someone else.”
“What you wish for in California, you get.”

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