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

of the essential opera sets—the Georges Thill—Ninon Vallin Werther, the Joan Sutherland—Janet Baket Rodelinda in English, the 1962 La Scala Huguenots, and so on—and handed it to Peter and Lars Erich while aiming them at the opera section. I then went off after Cosgrove and his water gun. Of course he had decided to come along, against orders; have I learned nothing yet?
    However. Not only did he elude me, but when I was all the way over in the C composers he reappeared, sashaying past Peter and Lars Erich wearing a joke-shop big-nose-and-mustache-with-eyeglasses disguise and, it at first seemed, the world’s deepest set of abs, bubbling up under his shirt like lava. At second glance, the abs looked more like half an egg box taped onto his stomach, bottom side out. As I started over, Cosgrove scurried away and disappeared into the Historical section.
    When I rejoined Peter and Lars Erich, the latter told me, “In Europe, they are always saying how the first thing to know about the States is that the people are eccentric.”
    “Especially that people,” said Peter.
    “Is he a crazy stranger, too?” Lars Erich asked.
    I quickly rerouted the conversation to the business at hand, but the talk kept sliding into the personal. It was as though Lars Erich could approach a topic only through his opinion of how people function. He doesn’t believe in History: he believes in Napoléon, Stalin, Hitler, the terrible consequences of the particular man in the place at the time. As I, too, see the world this way, I was immediately drawn to him.
    He was certainly easy to advise in the buying of CDs. “No,” he said to all my questions about his requirements. “You choose it, I buy it.”
    Handing him a copy of the Cetra Don Carlos, I was reassured to observe that Cosgrove had parked himself at one of the listening stations, where customers sample the latest issues through headphones. He can become quite engrossed, and has been known to spend more time thus than the employees do behind the counter.
    “What about Scheherazade? ” Peter asked. “Shouldn’t he have that?”
    “What is music to fuck to?” Lars Erich put in, not caring who overheard. “They tell me Ravel’s Bolero, but that is such cliché.”
    “Isn’t there something called ‘The Sabre Dance’?” asked smirking Peter.
    “That’s too short,” I said, “unless you’re fifteen years old.”
    Peter went off to rummage through the Scheherazades, and Lars Erich, watching him go, said, “He is so beautiful. The skin and taste of him, it is all so correct for me. But he is not strong inside. A man should not worry what others criticize. I am not worried that you review me, that you approve of our friendship.”
    His tone was even, unchallenging. Yet there was something lavish in the once again darkened eyes, rigid and pugnacious, defying disapproval on the chance that there should be any.
    He went on, “I know my living style is not what some respect. Is it all jealousy? There is always resentment of the extraordinary. Every day, I see in the mirror how I am a little bigger, a little more beautiful in the curves and tight fit. It is immodest? But it is true. You have been not once failing to look at my body this whole time. You think I do not see? My body sees. I hear walking behind me on the street, this looking. In the States, you work so hard on the parades and the laws of protection. But what is the real passion? What can we ask for, all of us? It is das Faustrecht zur Freiheit, you know this term?”
    It’s untranslatable, literally “Fistright to Freedom” but essentially meaning “If you have the power to overwhelm your enemies, you deserve to.”
    “What happened,” I said, “to You are very grateful that I assist in this collection of—”
    “Ja, ja, I am too abrupt.” His eyes searched for Peter, still hunting through the Rimsky-Korsakof bins. “It is what I mean, but I should discover not such a sharp way to express it. Oh, here