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

funny, how a little dog will understand all his rules but still can make mischief in a moment. As when everyone is asking, ‘Where is puppy Hanno?,’ and then he pops up with all the family’s missing socks in his mouth. Or when my brother and sister are running through the neighborhood to find puppy Asterix, and we all come back tearful as if he must be lost forever. But he is in the kitchen, wagging his tail. And two weeks later, they take him away, and he cries so that Harry cries, too, and we all three break apart with crying, because he thinks we let him go without caring.… I will stop here.”
    His eyes were wet.
    The waiter was hovering, and Lars Erich brisked us out of the sad moment with “Now we must order our American platters, where the food comes like the Grand Gardens of Babylon.”
    We ordered, did a little number on this and that, and then, at my guidance, returned to Lars Erich’s profession.
    “Well,” he admitted, “it is so strange that examples of each breed will look alike, but each subject has a different personality. We call it ‘the subject,’ the dog we are training. You may think it is always a male, but both genders will be found useful. And you know what is so odd, that these heroic dogs are given to people who so often do not appreciate them or will even mistreat them. This is a great secret, of course. One of those many things that one is forbidden to say in America.”
    His arms bent and swelled as he said this, and Peter helplessly grabbed one to feel. It’s a little annoying: don’t they get enough at home?
    “Do the dogs have any idea of their heroic role?” I asked. “Do they ever wish, do you think, that they were the merest household pets, without responsibility?”
    “A dog does not know choices. In Alaska, the sled dog does not wonder, Why am I not pampered Lassie of the movies? A dog knows only who feeds him and what the rules are to be still more fed then. It is mankind only that conceives of possibilities, of changing one’s position. It is why the gym, so popular now even in Europe.”
    “When you spoke before of the resentment of the extraordinary,” I said, “that really caught me. Because I think homophobia is based on that—or maybe more a fear of the unconventional. That is, not counting the Religion Nazis, who turn Christianity into a hating machine. But the average homophobe simply doesn’t like anything he isn’t used to.”
    “They are afraid of too much everything in the world,” said Lars Erich, with a shrug. “Just a few things they can understand—house, food, jobs, vacations. But ideas”—here he held up a warning finger very close to me, leaning in, flirting and teaching—“are mysterious. Mystery is troubling. They want to kill what troubles them, ja?”
    Peter interrupted by asking Cosgrove, “How are you going to eat with that paper bag on?”
    “By magic,” Cosgrove darkly replied, though in the event he simply removed it.
    “So a folk,” Lars Erich went on, “that lives entirely in its own way is very troubling, very to be killed. Being gay is not just different language, religion, king. It is different in every way.”
    “Please,” said Peter, “enough Citizenship 101.”
    “Instead, let’s name our favorite actors,” said Cosgrove. “Mine is Andrea Thompson, Jill on NYPD Blue. ”
    Lars Erich smiled. “Mine is Aiden Shaw,” he said. “Handsome like a wonderful schoolteacher who is also leading the hiking club on forest trips. Then he is stripped in a movie and it is a very mysterious idea.”
    *   *   *
    M UCH LATER, BACK UPTOWN , Cosgrove asked me, “So what type is the German guy?”
    That was hard to say now, for despite the gay emphasis on looks, personality overwhelms all calculations, and Lars Erich’s personality—his restless intelligence in particular—seemed bigger even than his looks. I’ve known smart hunks, humorous hunks, surpassingly talented hunks, brilliant hunks, and even a hunk with