Buddies by Ethan Mordden

Author:Ethan Mordden [Mordden, Ethan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Gay, Romance
ISBN: 9781250086419
Google: A9M4CQAAQBAJ
Amazon: B00XHHRXP8
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Published: 2015-06-02T07:00:00+00:00

The Preppie and the Clone

An east side romance.

Carlo decided that he wanted a preppie lawyer and no one could talk him out of it.

“It’s not for you,” we told him.

“Their vested suits,” he would reply.

“You’ll be bored, Carlo.”

“Their luncheon clubs and business talk,” he would go on. “Their fox trots, tennis rackets.”

“What would you speak about?”

“They went to Harvard University! Look, I’m tired of hunks and stars. I want something different this time. Maybe someone over forty. I like them…” He grew blissful.

“Ripened,” Dennis Savage offered.

“Practiced,” Carlo corrected. “And they’re nicer when they’re older.”

“Grateful,” Dennis Savage observed.

“No. They just have the time to be generous.”

I grinned at Dennis Savage’s lack of expertise. But then his taste favors bashful youth, and we habitually take our reading of romance from our own narrative, neglecting all other data.

It was the Friday after Christmas, a television afternoon at Dennis Savage’s: one of those amusingly wastrel days New Yorkers sometimes schedule before plunging back into the grid of themes and ambitions and opinions that stretches across every social intersection of the town. Dennis Savage was free of his teaching duties, I was taking the afternoon off, Carlo was as usual living on unemployment, and Little Kiwi, on temporary enforced leave from the mailroom of BBDO because he had bitten a coworker for calling him “a derogatory epithet meaning an aficionado of oral gay sex” (as Little Kiwi put it, after working it out on a piece of paper), had been packed off to the grocery with his fey Godzilla of a dog, Bauhaus. We other three had settled down to cruise the soaps for skin. Strangely, instead of suburban bedrooms and health clubs, all we could find were political intrigues in exotic places, with heroines in tattered gowns crying, “No, Mark! Don’t leave me here in the jungle, alone with the Ishtar Ruby!”

“Whatever happened to love?” I asked. “I thought soaps were about romance.”

Dennis Savage scoffed. “Soap opera is about the illusion of romance. The characters fall out of love as fast as they fall in.”

“Falling out of love is easy to do,” said Carlo. “It can happen overnight.”

We stared at him.

“You should go into it,” he explained gently, “without expectations.”

“You say this, after wishing for a lawyer?”

“I need a new adventure. I’m so truly bored with having a hot time and trading Circuit buzz terms. I want … I want someone I can electrify. That’s what I want! Hot men are neat, but they already know everything, don’t they?” His eyes lit with a wild surmise. “I surely believe I want a virgin!”

“Back to the sixties,” Dennis Savage breathed. “Remember when no one knew how to do anything?”

“A lawyer with a terrace,” Carlo went on, dreamily, “and a bulging briefcase.”

“He’ll be dull, Carlo,” I warned.

“He won’t, because we’ll fall in love. Don’t you know that everyone is good in bed when he’s in love?”

A key clicked in the front door and Little Kiwi marched in with the groceries, the mail, and dire Bauhaus. “You’re watching soap operas?”

“The best people watch soaps nowadays,” I told him.

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