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Kramer enters to uproarious applause.
“Hey,” Jerry says. He’s wearing the usual, tucked in solid colored button up shirt, denim. Today’s a purple shirt day. It’s a good color for him, and he’s aware of it. It makes him a little more confident in his gate, as a good bit of color has been known to do. He’s halfway through a turkey sandwich and the latest New York Post. No blurb about him, though he hadn’t really been expecting one.
“Hey,” Kramer says. His bowler’s shirt is wrinkled, the suede overcoat is not. He fumbles half-heartedly with the door, does a full 360 in the process, and still doesn’t get it completely closed. “Say, you ever had sex with a man?”
Jerry, experienced in Kramer-wrangling and already shutting the door behind him, doesn’t even blink. “How many times in my life am I going to have to dodge these allegations? I feel like Nixon!”
“You don’t have to be gay to have same sex,” Kramer tries to explain. “Human sexuality –“ He makes a wavy motion like the ocean with one arm, and smirks. The audience chuckles softly. “Is fluid.”
“Have you had sex with a man?” Jerry asks. He schools his face, very serious. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”
Kramer’s turn not to blink. “Of course.”
“‘Of course’, like I’m supposed to know this,” Jerry replies. He sets down the sandwich and the tabloid, folds his arms to Kramer. He’s not yet beside himself but growing a little incredulous. His voice pitches. “Why are you just bringing this up now?”
“I’ve been watching you, Jerry,” Kramer says gravely. “I’ve been watching you go all over the city, in your little clubs and errands, and I’ve seen how you watch the women.”
Jerry makes a face. “You’ve been following me?” He pauses. “Again?”
“No!” Kramer exclaims. “We just happened to show up at the same places at the same times, and whenever that happened, I couldn't help but notice: You don’t watch the women anymore, Jerry! You don’t want the ladies. Am I wrong?”
Jerry touches his temples, the echo of a studio audience bouncing around his skull. “You’re wrong, Kramer. I watch the women. I get with the women. I’ve got a bachelor’s degree in women, and I don’t intend to let it collect dust on the shelf. I’m just taking a break –“
“A-ha!” Kramer exclaims, the shock of it sending him rocking backwards, vibrating at full speed. He knocks into the coatrack with one finger extended. “So you admit you aren’t going after the women!”
“I admit no such thing! My last breakup was the ugliest of my life, I’m not running back into the warzone until the field nurse says I can take these stitches out of my heart,” Jerry says, a touch miserably. He had been with so many girls, but he had really thought Karmen was different.
“She was just so thorough, you know?” Jerry continues, reflecting on the intelligent brunette he’d been seeing, a writer for various women's magazines. Kramer does a large nod. “Six months isn’t that long to be together, but it was as if she scanned my thoughts and read ‘em like a diary. She was good with her words, and she used them. Every insecurity, every flaw, everything. She tore me limb from limb!”
“Limb from limb,” Kramer echoes. “So, piece yourself back together, Frankenstein.” He grins lopsidedly.
Jerry frowns. “You’d be my bride, with that head of hair. Anyway, I’m taking a break from the dating scene. I’m not suddenly gay over it.”
“Sure, I’m not gay,” Kramer says. “But sometimes… absence, makes the heart grow fonder. A bit of chocolate... makes the vanilla sweeter.”
The buzzer buzzes, Jerry leans over to hit the thing. He squints hard at Kramer as he goes. “Come on up.”
“I’m really not sure what you’re advocating here, buddy,” Jerry says.
Kramer shakes both hands at Jerry, shooing at him. “Sure ya are.” He turns on the squat, balding figure as his next target. “George, have you ever slept with a man?”
George stumbles backwards, braces himself against Jerry’s doorframe with one hand. “Get a load of this guy, trying to kill me, trying to give me a heart attack!”
“Well,” Jerry says to Kramer. “He is trying to get a load of you.”
“But is it true?” Elaine wants to know. She meets Jerry’s eyes over her cup of coffee, the rim of her glasses.
“Is what true?”
“That you’re really not going after anybody after Karmen? You are still at least seeing people, even if you’re not dating?” She swallows her lukewarm sip, waiting.
Jerry sucks at his teeth, looks down at the scraps of lunch instead of his best friend. “She really did a number on me, Elaine. On my confidence. I told you that.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t think it was that bad! What’s six months? I’ve had leases longer than that!”
“So’s everybody,” Jerry deadpans. “Do you know how long the average lease is?”
Elaine rolls her eyes. “Anyway, what did Kramer even mean? You don’t think he wants you to go find some guy to sleep with, that’s crazy talk.”
Jerry attempts to hide behind his own mug, though it’s mostly dregs. He brings it to his mouth, holds it up just a little too high over his lip. “Tell me you haven’t wondered.”
Elaine goes deathly quiet, and it seems to Jerry the rest of the restaurant does too. He glances conspiratorially around the mostly deserted Monk’s. Maybe this wasn’t the correct setting for this particular discussion, but his cat was already out of the bag. A big, ugly, matted, mangy tomcat right in the middle of their civilized lunch.
“About having sex with another woman?” she says, hushed. She tugs at a curl, sets down her mug with a soft thud. “Of course, I have. I was supposed to be the best man at a lesbian wedding.”
“I remember,” Jerry says. “So you do understand.”
“But you’re not –“
Jerry shrugs, glances up at her so she knows he's serious. “I’m not really beating the allegations anymore. Thin, single and neat.”
“But you’ve always –“
He shakes his head, holds out his palms in defeat. “I’m getting old, you know? The Times has already outed me like, twice. Maybe I have some things I need to try before I die.”
Elaine shakes her head, purses her lips to unsuccessfully hide a smile. “Be safe out there, cowboy,” she says meaningfully. The audience laughs.
“The thing about men,” Jerry tells the nightclub. The crowd is a haze of skin tones, a lively mesh of reds and yellows and whites and browns. He can’t pick out a single individual face from where he’s standing, and the lights on his end are too bright to try. He might as well be talking to the mirror.
“Is that we love other men. Our fathers, our Gods, ourselves - and Superman. But if you are to point this out to a man, all the men he loves, he’ll get defensive. Why is that? Because to most men, love is irrevocably in some way attached to sex. Which is a shame, because when I say I love this double chocolate chip cookie, I am not trying to fornicate it!”
“Hey, can I use your telephone?”
Jerry waves Kramer towards the dialer instead of answering and turns to shut the wide-open door. Kramer’s always around, and always has been since the beginning of time. Before there were dinosaurs, there was Kramer raiding Jerry’s fridge for lunchmeat. And Jerry’s spent a good amount of time wondering what on God’s green earth women saw in him, in the big clumsy oaf with a heart of gold, but any true dissection of his friend’s character usually answered the question.
It was hard not to like Kramer. It was hard not to admire the spirit you needed to possess to get through the cruel, hard world as Cosmo Kramer. Like a square peg in a round hole that still managed to get where it was going.
“Alright. 3 o’clock on the dot. Thanks. Bye-bye now,” Kramer tells the receiver. He grins at Jerry. “Meeting some guys later,” he says.
Jerry takes a bite of his apple. He pauses to consider the bite. He pauses to consider his friend. “Would you have sex with me, Kramer?”
“Literally, or figuratively?”
“Figuratively,” Jerry says reflexively, immediately. He hadn’t been expecting that question, of all questions. He looks away, immediately can’t stand it, and looks Kramer square in the eyes. “Literally. I don’t know, I’m in a weird place.”
The audience laughs.
“Of course, I would,” Kramer says. “You’re a good-looking bucko. And you’re famous!”
Jerry grins a surprised grin. “And that matters to you? In a potential partner?”
Kramer shrugs. “Doesn’t hurt.”
Jerry sets down the apple. He squares his shoulders, feeling suddenly very inadequate. He rounds the side of the counter and perches himself on the arm of his couch, two full seats away from Kramer. He sighs.
“What’d you have to go and bring it up for? I would have gotten over the thing about Karmen eventually. You got in my head,” Jerry says. He covers his eyes.
“I didn’t do anything. If it’s in your head it was always there, I just knocked the dust off it,” Kramer says. It’s a defense, but his tone is nowhere near defensive. “People always assume you’re gay. How could everybody be that wrong?”
“What kind of logic is that!” Jerry exclaims. “That’s the faultiest logic I’ve ever heard of! If everyone assumed you were the Zodiac Killer, it still doesn’t change your alibi of being a child in the 60s!”
“So, you don’t want to sleep with a man?”
“I don’t know! Where would I even find this man? You can’t just be falling into bed with any man, I’ve talked to enough women to know that,” Jerry says, hardly able to believe the words leaving his mouth, but unable to stop the conversation in its tracks. The train was totally off the rails, and Jerry was no longer conductor.
Kramer nods vigorously. “That’s true. Lots of shady characters running around.” He twitches.
Jerry drops himself onto the couch cushion properly. “I don’t know where to find men. Surely men don’t find men the same places women find men. I know women don’t find women the way men find women, so I assume it to be the same, vice versa.”
“Stop rambling, Jerry,” Kramer mutters. “I’m a man, you’re a man. Bingo, bango.”
Jerry’s face is hot. He can hardly feel the air going in and out of his lungs. He wants to ask Kramer if he’s blushing, but in no way wants to hear the truth. He looks up from his hands. “You want this?”
“Do you?” Kramer's very nearly whispering, which is maybe the strangest thing about the whole situation. Jerry desperately wants to tell him to speak up, and absolutely doesn't. He was just as afraid to shatter the moment as Jerry was, at least.
Their knees are touching. When did they move into knee-touching territory? Jerry's stomach drops, he's about to excuse himself to the bathroom to be sick, actually. He opens his mouth to say the words -
And then Kramer's mouth is on his, swallowing up his sentence. Even in the twenty second lip lock they had shared on Kramer's whim, he had used his hands well.
Jerry's own hands sort of flap around uselessly, until he remembers where Kramer's waist is and manages to find it. He balls up his hands in the already wrinkled striped shirt, an action that would absolutely peeve him off to be on the receiving end of, just to have something to hold while his whole world gets flipped on its head.
Kramer, with one big paw cradling Jerry's jaw, deepens the kiss.
“What on earth are you calling me at this hour for, Jerome?” A ripple of laughter through the audience at the use of his full name.
“He’s a really good kisser, Elaine.”
"But didn't you already know that?" Elaine yawns, half genuine and half played up. It was past 1 in the morning, Jerry never called at this hour unless he needed to be picked up from the airport and forgot to get a ride. "All this theatrics over something he's already done before?"
Jerry's line goes so quiet, Elaine almost dials him back. Then he says, in the softest voice Elaine has ever heard coming from her friend's big, obnoxious mouth, "Well..."
"I want to know, I wanna know, Jerry!"
Jerry sighs, two steps outside his apartment with his keys poised just outside the lock. "I think you're being a little hysterical, George. A tad insensitive, a bit self centered, even. This is why I didn't tell you."
"I just wanna know," George says hotly. "If we all have to be a part of your brothel to get into the apartment these days!"