Free I've a Feeling We're Not in Kansas Anymore by Ethan Mordden Page B

babe?”
    Little Kiwi dropped his eyes; his fingers rustled as if Wacko the Puppet were turning over in his grave. Then he looked at the man and said, “Little Kiwi is afraid of you.”
    The weightlifter laughed, patted Little Kiwi’s head, and moved off as Dennis Savage glared daggers in my direction.
    “Don’t look at me,” I told him. “I’m not in this scene.”
    Oh yes, I was. As our host and Little Kiwi collaborated on dinner in the kitchen, Dennis Savage laid me out to filth in the living room.
    “What have you done to him? What did you say? Where did you take him? I’ve never seen him like this before. He’s … crestfallen. ”
    “He saw the magic of the Island.”
    “I’ll just bet he did! When he left this house today he was a Pan of the Circuit. He had presto, mistos, contempo.”
    “Sounds like a new series of designer bank checks.”
    “This always happens when I let him alone with you!” Dennis Savage raged. “That time I had flu and he had dinner at your place, he came back saying the world was going to end. He was afraid of the dark for weeks!”
    “He asked about Spengler’s theories because he saw—”
    “Spengler! Spengler? Little Kiwi wouldn’t know Spengler if he caught him rimming Hegel in Xenon!”
    “The book happened to be lying open on the ottoman of my armchair and he asked me—”
    “I suppose you and he discussed Kant this afternoon and that’s why he showed up at tea in such a merry mood!”
    “Oh, Christ! What should I have done, then—taken him to the meat rack? What do you think the magic of the Island is, pray?”
    “It’s ever such delicious quiche, of course!” cried our host, sweeping in with a hot one. “And salad! Vino! ” Trivets and flatware erupted and settled. “Now, get set for, yes, the pêche de résistance! Okay, Little Kiwi!”
    Out came Little Kiwi, solemnly bearing a bowl of fruit.
    “Look,” declaimed our host, “at what Little Kiwi made!”
    “Grapes and a peach?” I asked.
    “He made fruit selection! ”
    “By myself,” Little Kiwi added.
    We tried to make dinner festive, but Little Kiwi’s funk seemed to have deepened. Every innocent gambit of conversation I played somehow kept coming around to Heavy Topic, Dennis Savage could utter nothing but insults (directed at me), and our host became so dizzy trying to enliven us that the table might have been flying through the air at a drag ball. Even Bauhaus picked up on our troubles; he was whining so, we had to tie him up out on the deck. Finally, in desperation, we tried eating in silence, whereupon poor Little Kiwi put his head down and wept.
    We were too shocked to do anything. Or no: we did that stupid, helpless, wasteful thing—we sat and watched.
    “I don’t want to,” Little Kiwi told us. “I don’t like it.”
    Our host started to get up, but Dennis Savage signaled him not to. “What don’t you want?” Dennis Savage asked evenly.
    “I don’t know what to call it.” Little Kiwi wiped his eyes but they just got wet again.
    “You know what it might be?” our host suggested. He lives quietly, has never had a lover, and isn’t used to Scenes. (I could visualize him asking, like Little Kiwi, “What are they for? ”) “We raced home from tea-dancing and went right into the kitchen, so we never took that wonderful Fire Island time out on the deck to sip a cocktail and watch the sun go down.”
    “That isn’t it,” I told him.
    “Don’t be too sure,” he replied. Little Kiwi was still crying, head down, grabbing the sides of his chair, a sweet doubting no with hurt feelings and soft black hair. “Almost all my guests tell me how much they love just sitting out there in that silence with their friends. I would read Walt Whitman aloud to them, but I don’t dare, of course. Still, the atmosphere is so … well, so magical that—”
    “Look,” I said, “I’ll tell you about the magic of the—”
    “Little Kiwi,” said Dennis Savage dangerously. “Stop