Page 99 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 69

crazy he felt. The faster the track the less time to be depressed. Ryan was
my friend, but I won’t fail to admit that if Ryan wasn’t exactly the cause of
all this, at least he was to the maelstrom what the eye is to the hurricane.
Ryan was the center. None of these people would ever have crossed
purposes if somehow or other they had not wanted something that Ryan
had. That cutting edge, that way he had of pushing reality with words,
of course, is the point of my working through this wreckage of fools who
spoke the word love more than any word they knew.
Ryan, lying in his bed, with Teddy sitting on the edge, ready to bolt
for refuge in his own room, could not say the words. He was slightly
amused. Teddy proved his suspicion correct that if people knew what he
was really like they would flee for their lives. He planned to be very careful
with Kick.
Teddy knew, but Teddy was more scared of the world than he was of
Ryan. Teddy knew men existed who would gladly do to him the unspeak-
able acts he wanted and feared they would do. In the gay world, where
there are no limits, Ryan was his protector.
“If you’re what having a lover is all about,” Ryan said. “You’re my first,
last, and only lover. I’ll never speak the word again!”
Ryan was always in a rage about love. He thought love could change
people. He knew he would be changed by Kick’s love. He was planning
on it. He had wanted to change Teddy, but Teddy had not changed. Ryan
burned a slow smoulder because Teddy had somehow failed. He could not
forgive him. He went into a rage that someone he had chosen, someone
he had trusted, poor Teddy, had failed to understand, by design or defect,
what intensity and depth of feeling Ryan had attempted to share with him.
“I understood him,” Teddy said.
But I knew he hadn’t, not always, especially not that crucial night
when Ryan had called him to his bed, and he would not lie down. Teddy
hadn’t understood at all that cold gray hour before dawn. If he had chosen
to climb between the bed covers and hold Ryan that night, he could have
held him forever. Kick or no Kick, he could have salvaged everything
between them. Ryan was offering him a truce. He was offering peace
terms. If Teddy had climbed into Ryan’s bed that night, he would have
so emplaced himself in Ryan’s heart that Kick would have been no more
than a long-distance affairette. But Teddy was too gun-shy to stand his
ground. Ryan never pulled punches with him. He could not figure what
snare Ryan was laying to capture him. He grew nervous sitting on the
edge of the bed.
“I have to go to my own room,” Teddy said. “Don’t involve me in

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