How's Your Romance?: Concluding the "Buddies" Cycle Read Online Free PDF Page B

teacher’s apartment, student reveals titanic gym development and longtime wish to ball teacher, both go whee! ”
    Cosgrove looked doubtful. “It isn’t hot to say whee!, though, is it?”
    One pats his head or rubs the back of his neck at such moments. “Figure of speech, pal.”
    Buzzer: Doorman: Peter Keene coming up.
    “Look, I’ll help you,” I said. “Give it some thought, then I’ll show you how to outline it. Remember, though: you don’t start with a situation. You start with characters. ”
    “Could I start with Vince Choclo? Except what type is he?”
    “Why Vince Choclo?”
    “Because it’s such a good name. It’s so dumb and dippy, he’ll have to be hot. He will be pleading in the big scene, where everything’s at stake and the crowd are fearful as the Zombie Contessa goes into her monkey dance.” After a moment he added, “I may be writing postmodernesque porn.”
    Peter came in wearing running shorts, a sleeveless muscle-T, and a do-rag; I think he would have failed the dress code at a dog fight.
    “Hey, pirate, where’s your doubloons?” Cosgrove asked him.
    “You go make coffee,” Peter told him. “For I have news, friends. I have fallen very, very heavily for a fellow man, and if I could only—no, you mustn’t congratulate me, for this is a wondrous yet terrible thing. You feel so enlarged, so re-created … but you, yes, mope with joy, you worry…”
    He sat on the couch, excited and flustered, wanting to spill thirty secrets at once.
    “Could this be just the slightest bit premature?” I asked. “I mean, you picked up some guy in the street for the three hundredth time and—”
    “No, no, my—and I don’t blame you—cynical friend. I’ve been a glad slut. But I never mentioned the ‘L’ word before, did I? For the last three weeks, I’ve been trying to … well, yes, to shape this lecture I knew I’d be giving you, yet I still don’t know where to—”
    “Let me call Dennis Savage down,” I put in, going to the phone. “If it’s that serious.”
    Peter went right on talking, ignoring the fact that I was briefly speaking to Dennis Savage and completely missing the appearance of the head of Fleabiscuit from under the couch, deftly to teethe on one of Peter’s shoelaces and pull the knot open. It’s his latest trick. Through all of this, I caught snatches of the time-honored phrases. You know: “… when I realized I couldn’t wait the required three days…” and “He wasn’t going to get out of my apartment alive” and “We just held each other and…”
    Absently retying his shoelace, Peter mused, “If I told you his name, would it … or if I tried to describe the taste of his…”
    “Week-old underpants?” said Cosgrove from the kitchen doorway.
    Peter was quietly beside himself, running down like a fake Rolex. “Where do I even start?” he bleated. “It all comes out at once. One … raves.”
    “‘That is the usual method, but not mine— My way is to begin with the beginning,’” said Cosgrove.
    Peter paused, then asked, “Isn’t that Byron somehow?”
    I nodded. “Cosgrove’s studying Don Juan in preparation for a writing career. He’s starting with porn, but who knows? Maybe one day you’ll publish his first novel, perhaps a high-society whodunit.”
    Cosgrove agreed, and even offered a working title: The Secret Diary of the Zombie Contessa.
    “The beginning … His name is Lars Erich Blücher. His family came here when he was six, so he speaks fluent English with the sexiest little accent and blunders that bewitch one fatally. I met him in Sheep Meadow three Sundays ago, and we haven’t been apart for a day since, because he’s life itself. Around him, everyone else becomes … meaningless. But then, you two must know what I…”
    Regarding Cosgrove and me, Peter stopped, decided not to go there, and as he dived into a rhapsody on Lars Erich’s looks, he again failed to notice that Fleabiscuit had poked his way out