The Way You Look Tonight, by Frank W. Butterfield (Whit & Eddie 10)

[Ulysses]

The Way You Look Tonight (Whit & Eddie 10)
Frank W. Butterfield
Published by the author, 2021
Five stars

The best moment in this book is getting to meet Beverly. I won’t tell you who she is, but she is worth reading the whole book for.

Of course, there are plenty of other wonderful moments, as our heroes, Whit and Eddie, move around the country, from a funeral to a wedding to the Statue of Liberty. There is a mixture of comedy, tenderness, love and loss woven into the typically wandering plot. Nothing is accidental, which is one of the chief reasons I admire Butterfield’s writing so much.

Whit and Eddie’s lives are not normal, one evidence of which is the six full-time security folks that follow them everywhere. They cannot move without a motorcade. In fact, in this book, for the first time, Whit and Eddie are compared to Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, and the richest man in the world. For a while, our boys have been trying to come to grips with not just being rich, but being scary rich. They are not selfish prats like most billionaires in the world today. And they’re gay. How are they going to make sure they’re different; to make sure they live up to the legacy that Nick Williams and Carter Jones created?

Well, that issue isn’t resolved in this book, but we get glimpses of where this might go, and I found it thrilling. The world is really tired of selfish rich people. Whit and Eddie can give us hope for better, just as Nick and Carter did. Whit and Eddie might be white guys, but they are woke. I love that.

There is a lot of family dynamics in this book, something I also love. I continue to be slightly puzzled by Eddie’s odd fragility—his moments of anger that seem to come from nowhere logical and dissipate just as quickly. As confusing as this human-ness might be, it is a constant reminder that these two men are just guys, and they have no illusions as to their humanity. They have known pain, and all the money in the world won’t protect them from it.

I want to take them on a tour of the museum where I used to work. I’m sure I could bring Eddie around.