why don't you turn the other cheek?

(extra/alternate tag to "Win One for Felix")

"Hey, Felix."

Not the warmest way to start. Oscar didn't know a better way, but...where's your enthusiasm? You sound like a petulant child crawling to your comeuppance because your mommy made you.

Not that it much mattered. There was no answer. His head was still bent over the football covered in scrawled signatures - Kramer, Chubby, and of course Leonard, just to name a few. Great bunch of kids, even if they had or even if they hadn't wanted to sack him for not knowing what a sack was. Even if they just appreciated good brownies.

"I'm sorry."

And he was, but then again how do you be sincerely sorry for wanting to keep your nephew's childhood - not even adolescent! - hopes and dreams from being crushed by someone who just doesn't know how to play football? How can you not know how to play football, jeez, every guy knows how to play football, it's practically part of the gender. Comes with the territory.

This apartment wasn't so much Oscar's territory anymore. Was that the trade, one half of an apartment in exchange for one half of your progeny? That's a stupid thought. You're playing his games, Oscar. Playing games.

"I had a lot of fun teaching you, you know. Except for maybe the part where you screamed when I put my hands on your hips, but hey, you touched my butt, I'm allowed to touch yours, right?"

Felix turned, but it was in his own pirouette. Slow, steady, just as perfect an arc as a dancer would turn, but no dancer had the gift of that much time with which to pick and choose the diameterous minutes and seconds of their rotation.

Mr. Unger, you've suspended time. You've put it in a bottle. You've trapped it up next to your pills and your sprays and your cultured condiments and you own the spacetime of this apartment. You own me. And I want you to.

But how can you say so, Oscar? How could you ever possibly say so? Take up another joke. A potshot for the one with the nine-hundred dollar set of cookware. Meanwhile, I'll eat ketchup on my charred-up scrambled eggs and spit the pits, pits, pits out of my juice, juice, juice. You make my life so complicated, Felix. And yet everything is so stupidly simple.

"And, y'know...I'd kinda like to dance with you sometime. I mean, if you want to. Because, I said I didn't, but I'm always assuming, and I know what you say about making an ass out of U, and ME," and his hands were wild and splayed as he tried to commute Felix's ineffable and frankly over-the-top emphaticity, but then the motion petered out.

Felix was just standing there, looking at him, eyebrows upturned to meet each other and lips almost pinched like they held something crucial just behind the wobbling cellular walls. Of course they did. Everything Felix said was everything. He talked so much, he had so many repetitions, he was so annoying with the honking and the tsking and the humming and the fussing and what the hell would I do without you, Fel'?

Oscar made one more fruitless waggle of his wrists, jerkish below, even beneath, cuffed-up sleeves. Why did Felix always have that...posture? Always something. For all his pin-sharp refined-ness, for all he lamented the loss of relatability towards and to his own son because his hobbies were so indiscernible and limited in their sheer back-bending expanse of anti-universality, he truly contained so many worlds beyond this pitiful square footage.

Yeah, it was a nice place, 1049 Park Avenue couldn't help but be in any era, but...it really hadn't been nice before Felix. It really hadn't been home, maybe not even with Blanche. Not because of the tidiness, not even really because of the starkness of contrast to his mess. Just...just because.

The lips trembled excitement, intrepidation, cautious studious longing. Amusement, too, because if either of them ever had the upper hand it was Felix. Victory that the gridiron hadn't provided because of...because of a lot of things. "Are you saying you'd like it if I called you 'babe'? And not just because it's what the guys do?"

What the guys do. Living with your best friend in a studio apartment in New York, New York, because you're both divorced and halfway to depressed isn't really what the guys do. It's not. You've both got your tremendously successful careers, it's all great and jocular, but it's not...stop with the ellipses, will ya? You'd never write a column that staked this many pains, that was this achingly gentle. You'd be laughed out of the business.

Oscar's crooked grin, present through all his deliberating thoughts, was making his face ache, now. "Yeah. I think I would. How 'bout you?"

He didn't say it first. Like teenagers on third, fourth, fifth dates (how did that even work, anyway, really? he hardly remembered), they danced around saying it first. Yet they had lived together for five closing on six years. Dancing. There's room for dancing. But why don't you do it with your feet, now, and not your feelings?

Felix bent his chin down, and his ears wiggled. "Sure. I already did it, didn't I?" Already did it. It's all already done. That's what they call common law. But Felix...ain't nothin' common about you. Oscar searched in the loning darkness of the room lit yellow and cheery and bright as day for something that would be worthy of a next rejoinder. Something theatrical, something placed, something that was as pristine as Felix deserved.

Because Oscar wasn't that. He wasn't, on his own or of his own, the perfect little representation of family and companionship and sharing and charity that Felix would like. Yet Felix liked him. Yet Felix thought enough of him not to dismiss him, to really care about the depth of why Leonard had gravitated.

Not "my son shouldn't like you instead of me because you're sloppy and you have an ulcer and you drink too many beers," but "my son shouldn't like you without me because there is no you without me and there is no me without you."

Oh, there. "Gloria said...she said I knew you better than she does. That's a hell of thing, ain't it? I mean, we were never even married!"

Felix smiled, tucked his lips together as if the frog were about to escape, or perhaps as if it had already sprung free, and his cheeks braced up like the rising sun. "That's debatable. I feel very married to you."

Oscar's own cheeks burned with the reflection, the refraction, the absorption of that light. "Okay, honey. So we're married. That means I'm allowed to steal your son, right?"

"You're allowed to do a lot of things. I could never stop you."

He could. With one word, one sigh, one breath, he could stop everything. The motif was the emotive, the goal was posted, don't move the target, please. Please just stay right where you are.

"Fine, fine. I'm allowed to give you a kiss goodnight, because I know there's no way you're gonna let me cuddle you in my bed."

The smile turned into a breathy smirk. Okay, Felix. I can accept that change.

"You got that right, babe." A little unnatural, maybe, but at times Oscar thought that Felix was the most unnatural limping leaping gazelle of a creature that he'd ever seen. The most beautiful.

Felix's cheek was very clean, very cold, almost electric to be up close next to. That blue shirt with the stripes made him look very natural. Not like the ice-cream dandy-man getup with the ascot bigger than Times Square. Secretly, or perhaps not so secretly, Oscar loved Felix's outfits, every last zaniest one, but not if they meant he was stepping outside of his element. Not when the electricity had to ground.

"Can I kiss your other cheek too?"

His sweater and shirt combination matched Felix's shirt. "Why?" Why, indeed? Whose costuming? Whose stage?

"I'm a writer, right? I'm allowed to be a little literary." Again with the allowance. At least if you're going to steal his son, pad his pockets. Be so munificent, Uncle Oscar. Felix would be. If you'd bothered to have kids. Makes him better than you, doesn't it. You could never be a father.

"Oscar."

He was leaning, chin still tucked over shoulder and hand still hovering over waist. Why on earth does that come into it, now? See the kinds of thoughts he has you thinking. You'd never think them half so languidly, so handsomely, so marvelously, if you were on your own.

"I love you, Felix."

"Love you too, Osc."

And then Felix turned his other cheek, and Oscar felt so warm burying his nose in it. In home.

i miss them