Free How's Your Romance?: Concluding the "Buddies" Cycle by Ethan Mordden Page B

beautiful who’s this big and that fascinating? You can’t be just in love with that, you have to be in idolatry. There! ”
    Standing behind Cosgrove, I presented him to Dennis Savage. “Neat,” I said, my hands on his shoulders. “Tailored,” moving down his sides. “Charmant,” at his waist.
    “Very handsome,” said Dennis Savage neutrally.
    “And yet I come like night,” Cosgrove diabolically intoned.
    “That isn’t Byron, surely,” I said.
    “It’s a Cosgrove original.”
    We three met Lars Erich and Peter outside the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, where the former assured us that the saga of the world’s greatest ship was celebrated in German- as in English-speaking countries.
    “Georg Heym, ‘Die Seefahrer’!” he cried. “‘Aber wir trieben dahin, hinaus in den Abend der Meere’”: Yet on we drifted, out into the evening of the sea. “It is quite the story to put to a musical, ja? So much at stake, so much love and life! It is thrilling to be here, more to know of Peter’s coterie. But I, too, have friends, which we are meeting later at a soirée.”
    Lars Erich troubled to draw Dennis Savage out—“What are you doing as a career?” and so on—while Cosgrove explained J.’s new life to Peter and I stepped back a bit and took stock.
    One, Peter was underpowered, almost quiet. Not tired because of an exacting schedule, not too busy listening to talk: without force, as if something had been drained out of him.
    Two, Lars Erich was wearing unreproachable slacks and impressive dress shoes, but his top was a Very Designer form-hugging thing in off-white that wasn’t see-through but looked as if it should be. Quite classy but so hot: as if Lars Erich won’t be one thing without being another thing as well.
    Three, Cosgrove was discussing J.’s travails—or was it schemes?—as if they were events in a television series, something one views rather than experiences.
    Four, I was visualizing myself as a contestant in one of those pageants where you get a chance to hope for something important, such as World Peace. All I hoped for was for my friends to be happy: meaning that the Family would hold together.
    Inside, we sat up close, thrown right into the heart of this resplendent show, the last of the great operettas, in which grace, wit, and comedy (and a grand theme) accompany the Big Sing that too many cheaply operatic musicals have debased for us. Titanic is the real thing—and Cosgrove knew it at once, when the prelude of water music moved from gentle to rough, like a date that slips past teasing into rape. Just after, the action begins not with the expected harbor scene but with the ship’s architect wandering on in front of the curtain, phlegmatic, optimistic, concerned … and Cosgrove turned to me and nodded.
    I never fail to get a kick out of the uncanny sense of communitas that live theatre provides: all those people, silent and motionless in the dark, yet at their quickest as they fix upon the stage to absorb a single entertainment each in his fashion. Of course, it was in the theatre where I signed my gay contract; I’m sentimental. Still, theatregoing is gay life in miniature, isn’t it?—all in the same playhouse, each admiring the show in his unique way.
    Cosgrove certainly admired this one. As the first-act curtain fell on the now famous view of the little model of a Titanic crossing the stage to meet the (unseen) iceberg, Cosgrove almost jumped out of his seat with excitement. During the intermission, he tried singing snatches of the score as the rest of us milled about and exchanged the odd pleasantry with acquaintances. Peter and Lars Erich were huddling and cooing in that new-kids-on-the-block manner that I find a bit irritating, though I did enjoy watching Lars Erich angling his torso this way and that to display his shockingly expansive V-slope. Peter couldn’t keep his hands off the guy.
    “I just love having a Lars Erich Blücher in our gang,” Dennis Savage was