Page 98 - Some Dance to Remember

68 Jack Fritscher

“What’s the matter with you. You said you wanted me to leave you
alone. You told me to move out. I don’t like it here anymore. I won’t be
able to sleep in here. This used to be my bedroom too, you know. Why
can’t you say what’s the matter?”
Ryan, the writer, grasped for a word to explain. Over Teddy’s shoulder,
the digital clock read 4:40. Dawn was already gray outside the windows.
“If you can’t say what it is, it can’t be too important,” Teddy said. “You
always have a word for everything.”
“For some things, words fail,” Ryan said. “Some things cannot be
spoken.” What he meant was, some things cannot be asked. Some things,
if they have to be spelled out to someone who should know, are not worth
saying. If Teddy could not see what Ryan needed, or would not give it
to him, then asking for what was not given betrayed the integrity of the
sharing.
All Ryan needed was to be held. Just held. Just for a moment. To fold
his body into the warmth of another man’s body. To imagine how warm
his father’s body might have felt that hot afternoon in the car in the woods.
To warm himself with the familiar shared warmth of Teddy’s body against
the cold dawn. “This is your chance,” he wanted to say to Teddy, “to regain
your ground. Love me because you love me, not because you’re desperate.”
But he said nothing. If he had to ask to be held, then the holding could
never be the same as an embrace freely given. He could not ask Teddy for
it. This was the test, the supreme test, for them both: the one could not
ask, and the other could not figure out what was to be given. They stared
at each other impassed, like two men trying to go opposite directions
through the same door at the same time: neither one moving to the right
or left, both waiting for the other to step aside, or step forward, to solve
the squeeze.
Hindsight tempts me to think that if one or the other or both had
reached out, they might have changed the course of their personal history.
They might have salvaged what had been a genuinely innocent, boyish
love between them. They might have averted slammed doors and loud
voices. But at that moment, when their future history could have been
born or aborted by a simple embrace of human love, neither man reached
out, and events began to collide the way people on foggy freeways crash
into each other. No matter now. What’s done is done. The truth is that
Ryan alone could have stopped all of this if he had wanted; but not know-
ing what he wanted more than adventure, he knew he at least did not want
to stop the madness around him, because deep down Ryan liked hysteria.
It distracted him from his anxiety blues. The crazier the world the less

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