Object of Desire (24 page)

“Hey,” I called over to him. “What do you call cows with a sense of humor?”

He moved toward me through the water. “You know, Danny, I probably should apologize for the other night.”

I was treading water with my feet. “Apologize? Why?”

“All those jokes and stuff.” He gave me a weak smile. “I was pretty manic.”

“You were fine. I had fun.”

“I did, too.” He looked up at the moon. “But I was nervous to meet you. So I did a line of coke before going to the restaurant.”

“You
did?
” I didn't quite know what to say. “Why were you nervous to meet me?”

“Because you're so…you know. Successful.”

I laughed. The irony was too much. I'd thought I'd been the one who'd been anxious before dinner, that I'd been the one who'd been nervous about meeting him.

“Kelly,” I said, “I hope you realize now there was no need to be nervous.”

The moonlight reflected in those big black eyes. “I don't get asked out to dinner by guys like you very often.”

“Oh, come on,” I said. “You're fucking gorgeous. You're a bartender. You must get hit on all the time.”

“I don't know if I'm all that attractive, but sure, I get hit on.” He moved closer to me. I was now leaning against the side of the pool, my arms stretched out on either side. “But that was the thing. You didn't hit on me. You said you wanted to see my drawings.”

I smiled a little.

“You're out of my league,” he said to me.

I could barely reply. “You've got to be joking,” I finally said.

“No, I'm not. I look around at you and your house and Frank and the life you guys have, and I think, ‘Will I ever have that?' I just can't imagine it. I'm going to be twenty-seven next year.
Twenty-seven!
And I still don't have a clue as to what I'm doing with my life, or where I want it to go.”

“Twenty-seven is nothing,” I said. “You've got plenty of time.”

“Yeah, keep saying that and I'll be fucking thirty!” His voice was louder now. “I mean, it's so frustrating! I get a job, and then I get fired. I start to save money, and then I get laid off. I mean, I was supposed to be Jacqueline Fucking Onassis! And here I am, still bartending at dives in the desert, with nothing to show for myself. Nothing.”

“Oh, I don't know about that.”

“Why do you think I didn't want you to come to my apartment? Because it's a pit. A studio with a mattress. I don't have any furniture. I'm twenty-fucking-six and nothing to show for it!”

His face was a mask of despair. I touched his cheek. “You've got plenty of time, baby.”

“No. Not plenty of time.”

“Sure you do.”

His eyes were wild. “When did you meet Frank?”

I hesitated. “Twenty-one.”

“Right. And by my age, you had a whole life going for you. Don't tell me you didn't. I saw it in those pictures. You were younger than I was, and you had Frank and a real home and even a dog!”

“Yes,” I said, “but, Kelly, it was a long, long time before I figured out I wasn't going to make it as an actor. It took me until I was in my
thirties
to wake up and decide to do something else. This art stuff is still relatively new.”

He was floating away from me. “So what?” he called over his shoulder. “You had a
life.
You had Frank. I wonder if I'll ever have that. If I'll ever fall in love and have somebody in my life. I envy what you guys have. I can see it. Not only in the pictures, but in the way you talk to each other. I can see all the history between you. There's a real commitment there.”

My commitment to Frank was definitely not what I wanted to be talking about at that particular moment. I started to say something to get us back on track—the track that led out to the casita. But Kelly took a deep breath and, lifting his shoulders and pushing himself forward, slipped headfirst under the water to swim across the length of the pool. I watched his body move under the surface, transfixed. When he emerged at the other end, his body, strong and solid, glistened in the moonlight. He stretched his arms out at his sides, the eagle tattoo above his shoulders spreading its wings in unison. If he'd asked me a question at the moment, I would have been unable to answer. I was too overcome.

“Laughing stock,” he said, turning to face me.

I stared at him across the pool, not understanding

He smiled. “Cows with a sense of humor.”

“Damn,” I managed to say. “You just can't be stumped, can you?”

“Nope.”

Our eyes held.

Then I copied his swim. Dropping down under the water, I swam close to the bottom of the pool until I saw his feet. Rising past his legs and his cock and his stomach, I emerged from the water directly in front of him. We stood nose to nose.

“You are so incredibly beautiful,” I said, shaking water from my hair.

He said nothing, so I kissed him.

He was like stone.

I pulled back. He was looking at me.

“I can't,” he said.

“Can't what?”

“Frank is inside.”

I smiled. “It's okay. Frank is cool about this. We have one of those marriages you so admire. With all that freedom and individuality.”

He lifted his eyebrows.

“It's why we've lasted so long,” I explained. “We give each other freedom. We play together and we play separately. It's cool. I wouldn't have kissed you if it needed to be a secret.”

“I still can't,” he said.

“Why?”

He shrugged. “I just feel odd about it. I mean, he's right inside. Only a few yards away.”

“We can go to the casita,” I said.

“No,” he said. “I can't. Not after all those pictures.”

“It's not an issue—”

“
No
,” he said sharply, moving aside and hoisting himself out of the pool.

I followed. “Hey, look. I didn't mean to—”

“It's totally cool,” he said. His wet feet slapped against the concrete. We both left trails of water as we headed for the towels hanging on the chairs. Kelly was quick to cover his nakedness.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “It's just that…I'm very attracted to you. More than to anyone in a very long time.”

He was discreetly drying himself off. “I'm flattered. You're a great guy.”

“And I want to help you.”

His eyes flickered over to me.

“Hey,” I said. “I know what it's like. To leave home, to head someplace and try to make something of yourself. There were lots of times I was just as frustrated as you are right now. And you're right. I was lucky. I had Frank to believe in me.” I drew closer to him. “Maybe you just need someone to believe in you.”

He was silent.

“Can I kiss you good night?” I asked.

He nodded. I kissed him. This time, to my great satisfaction, he kissed me back a little.

Then he got dressed. He must have thanked me a dozen times for dinner. I walked him out to his car, an old Mercedes C-Class model, probably 1995 or so. Its white exterior was a little rusted, and the backseat was loaded with bags and magazines. I imagined at one time it was a beautiful car. I wondered how he'd gotten it. My guess was Donovan Hunt. So Kelly hadn't rated a brand-new car.

We hugged; he thanked me again; then he drove off. I went back inside. I was filled up with the thought and the scent of him. I couldn't go to bed just yet, slide in next to Frank and listen to him snore. So I headed into my office and sat down at my desk, staring at the photos on my wall.

But instead of any of my own images, I was drawn to the tiny little frame off to my right. Lifting it from its hook, I brought it close to my face. I knew who those people were. I'd memorized them long ago. From person to person, I moved my finger. David and Honora Horgan, white haired and shriveled, my great-great-grandparents from Ballyhooley, County Cork, Ireland. Daniel Horgan, buttoned up and somber faced, my great-grandfather and namesake. His wife, Emily, and their daughter, Adele, who became Nana to me.

Finally, there was my grandfather, Sebastian Fortunato, the first Eye-talian to crash the Horgan family, and in Nana's arms, my father, in a bundle of white lace.

And someday I was supposed to take another picture of Dad and Mom and Nana and me and Joey…

“Danny?”

I turned.

Frank was in the doorway.

“Everything okay?”

“Yes,” I said softly.

“Come to bed,” he whispered.

I waited a few moments, still staring down at the photo; then I replaced it on the wall and followed Frank into our room.

I
t was the last day of my freshman year. I had made it. I had made it through an entire year at that hated place. Brother Pop stood in front of my last class of the day, admonishing us all to spend our summers as good Christian young men. I heard snickering from the back row. A straw wrapper shot past my ear. Then the bell rang.

“Thank God that's over,” Troy said as we headed down the hill on our walk home.

“Two and a half months of freedom!” I shouted.

Since it was our last day, we'd been permitted to doff the shirts and ties for once. I'd worn a T-shirt emblazoned with the enormous face of Deborah Harry. Troy's shirt read
THE KNACK
in big white letters. Free of books, we bolted down the hill as fast as we could run.

“Pussy,” Troy called, “I'll beat your ass!”

“Oh, no, you won't!”

I was a fast runner. There wasn't an athletic bone in my body, but I could probably outrun an elk. I arrived at the crossroads a full thirty seconds before Troy did. I stuck my tongue out at him.

“Don't stick that tongue out unless you plan on using it,” Troy said.

I smirked. “That's for later.”

Ever since that day at his house, we'd been sucking each other off whenever we had the chance. Once we even did it in the stalls of the boys' room at school, during rehearsals for the school play. The two months of rehearsing for that play were the best time of the whole year. We'd put on
How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying
in conjunction with the girls at St. Clare's. Katie and the Theresas were in the chorus, too, but time had moved on, and we weren't really friends anymore. I hung out only with Troy. The play was the one extracurricular school activity I'd participated in all year, and I'd only signed up at the last minute because Troy had encouraged me.

Boy, was I glad he had. I'd loved, loved,
loved
opening night, made up with all that pancake and rushing out from behind the wings into the glare of the spotlights. I loved singing as loudly as I could, no matter if I was off-key. I loved parading around in costume in front of all those people in the auditorium, the smell of wood polish and floor wax filling my nostrils. Then and there, I'd decided that I wanted to be an actor. Next year, I'd vowed, I'd land a real part in the play. They were doing
Oliver!
next year, and even though the leads always went to juniors and seniors, I hoped I could snag a few lines in some small role. Already I'd checked out the play from the school library and decided I would try out for Mr. Brownlow, the guy who adopts Oliver. Mr. Brownlow didn't have to sing anything, which was good, because my singing voice was shit, but he had a whole mess of lines. I couldn't wait. Maybe even Mom and Dad would come this time.

“I got some really smooth weed,” Troy was telling me, slightly out of breath.

“Excellento!”

I couldn't wait to get to Troy's house. I knew the routine. We'd say hello to the maid, grab a Coke from the refrigerator, then head upstairs to his room. We'd smoke a doobie and then start sucking face, which quickly moved to sucking cock. I no longer cared what it meant. So what if I was bisexual? David Bowie was, too, and David Bowie was very cool. And in an article I'd read in a
Rolling Stone
magazine that I found at Troy's house, Elton John said everyone was a little bit bisexual.

Everyone.

We were getting ready to cross the street when a gold Mustang Mach 1 pulled up alongside of us.

“Yo, Danny,” Chipper said, leaning out the window. He was wearing a white T-shirt, and I noticed the way his bicep splayed against the car door. “You want a ride?”

“I'm going over to Troy's,” I told him.

Chipper's eyes moved over to my friend. I didn't think Chipper liked Troy all that much. He never said anything about him, but sometimes when he saw us together, he kind of made a face. But Chipper had kept good on his promise to watch out for me. A few months ago, he'd had to intercede once again when he saw a bunch of idiots picking on me; he'd told them he'd crack their skulls together if he caught them being assholes to me ever again. After that, the harassment dropped into low key. The occasional paper airplane still bounced off my head, but word got around that I was friends with Chipper Paguni, and most of the kids backed off.

Friends with Chipper Paguni.
That made me very pleased indeed.

Chipper moved his eyes back to me. “I can give you a ride to his house if you want,” he said.

“Cool,” I said, and we hopped into the car, Troy in back, me up front.

Once again, Aersomith was on the eight-track. Chipper lit up a cigarette as he steered the car back onto the road.

“So how's your mother?” he asked.

“Well, you know, the same.”

He exhaled smoke. “Oh yeah, I do. She had some FBI guy come over and talk to me. Did you know that?”

“No.”

“Man, my parents flipped. I mean, the fucking FBI!”

“What did they want?”

He took another drag on his cigarette, then let it out. “Same old shit. When did I last see Becky? Was I sure I'd never heard from her since? All that crap.”

I shook my head. “I'm sorry.”

“It's okay. I mean, your mom's just never gonna give up, huh?”

“No.”

I looked out the window. It had been almost ten months now since Becky had disappeared, but Mom still got up every morning and went to her desk in the living room, like it was a job. She'd review her notes, pore over police reports, make phone calls. I knew she'd gone to the FBI, even if I was unaware that they'd paid a call on Chipper. Mom had had Bud the taxi driver haul her all the way down to the FBI office in New Haven. Armed with maps and signed statements from that guy Warren and his biker friends, she'd reported how a girl matching Becky's description had been seen on Cape Cod in the company of a biker known as Bruno. Bruno was “one mean son of a bitch,” Warren had told Mom, and was part of a New England motorcycle gang. And since it would appear that Bruno had taken Becky across state lines, the responsibility of locating her now fell to the FBI. The agents had listened to her story politely and promised to look into it.

I didn't know if Mom was aware that they'd gone to see Chipper. She didn't talk much about her investigations these days, since they were the source of major tension between her and Dad. Some real doozies of fights had taken place lately. There was so much crying and so much shouting in our house that Father McKenna, the pastor of our church, suggested that Mom and Dad talk to a counselor. He found one for them, a lady named Dr. Page, and they went a few times. Once, they even dragged me along. “This affects you, too, Danny,” Mom had insisted.

Dr. Page's office was downtown in one of those new, modern medical arts buildings with skylights and fake rubber tree plants. She wore hardly any makeup and said very little, just sat there and nodded as Mom ranted and raved. Dad would try to say a few words; then Mom would shout over him, and he'd sigh and retreat into silence. Dr. Page asked me how I felt about my sister being missing, and I told her I didn't know. Mom told me to stop being so stubborn. “He misses her terribly,” she said. “You can see it. They were
very
close.”

Dr. Page did explain that if Becky
had
been kidnapped, she might be suffering from something called Stockholm syndrome. She told us that a few years before, four hostages had been taken by bank robbers in Sweden, and eventually they became so brainwashed, so entranced with their captors, they didn't want to leave them. “Kind of like Patty Hearst,” I said. Dr. Page smiled wide at me and replied, “Exactly, Danny.” I felt proud of myself that I could contribute to the discussion.

But the visits to Dr. Page didn't end the strife between Mom and Dad. Dad thought Mom should just trust that the police were doing everything they could to find Becky. Mom disagreed, vehemently.

“The
police!
” she shrieked. “The fucking East Hartford police!” She had started swearing a lot. No one was surprised by it anymore. “I expected a hell of a lot more than what they've been doing. I expected helicopters with searchlights! I expected an all-points national bulletin!”

“Peggy, what the hell does that mean?” Dad asked.

“I don't know,” Mom said. “But I expected it. And you should have, too! Becky is your daughter, too! You don't care about her like I do!”

I heard Dad slam the door and head down into the basement. He'd been going down there a lot in the last few months.

I was upstairs, listening. In this, I sided with Mom. Peter Guthrie, the detective in charge of finding Becky, just didn't get it. To him, Becky was just a picture on a xeroxed sheet stuck to a telephone pole. He didn't wake up from a sound sleep like Mom did, screaming that Becky was being raped in some abandoned warehouse. I'd hear her scream out in the middle of the night, and I'd lie there in bed, desperate and distressed, unable to bear the idea of my mother in such pain. When I was a boy and I'd get sick in the middle of the night, Mom had always been there with a bucket and cold damp cloth for my forehead. But there was nothing I could do for her in return. I hated the police for not making my mother's pain go away. They didn't even want to take her phone calls anymore.

“Don't tell me to trust the police!” Mom shouted from the top of the basement stairs down at my father. “That goddamn Guthrie didn't even take fingerprints from Becky's room until
three weeks ago!
He keeps telling me she's a runaway, that she'll come home when she's ready. He says I should just accept that! My Becky! A runaway! There's no reason in the world that she would've run away from home!”

Mom seemed to have forgotten the fights she and Becky had had in those last few weeks. They had fought over stupid stuff, like Becky being pissed at being Mom's personal chauffeur, and bigger stuff, like Mom insisting Chipper was a bad influence. But if Becky had run away, she would've come home sooner or later. I mean, she was just sixteen years old—okay, seventeen soon. But a teenage girl couldn't just leave home and get a job somewhere and start a new life.

Could she?

My whole freshman year in high school was now complete—and the whole time, Becky had been gone. It felt so strange. I mean, all last summer Becky had known how nervous I was and how unready I was to leave St. John's and all my friends. And she'd say, “Oh, Danny, don't be such a dweeb.” It seemed so bizarre that she wasn't around now to look at me with that face she always gave me—the one that was so superior and condescending—and say, “Didn't I tell you that you'd get through it okay?”

That was when I started to agree with Mom. If Becky had run away, she'd have been home by now. She
must
have been kidnapped. It was the only explanation for why she'd been gone so long. And of all the leads that had come in, only Warren and his biker friends had ever come through with any kind of real description of Becky. Only Warren, out of all the leads we'd gotten, had mentioned the crescent moon birthmark on her arm. Dad countered that the descriptions of Becky that had been distributed everywhere had contained that bit of information, so it wasn't like Warren was telling us something he couldn't have known otherwise. Still, Mom was convinced he was the real deal.

I felt sad, sitting there in Becky's seat in Chipper's car, listening to Becky's favorite band. I remembered the cardboard fort we'd built in the giant maple tree in our yard when she was ten and I was eight. We'd sit up there on the branches and read comic books all day. I'd read
Green Lantern,
and she'd read
Betty and Veronica.
Mom would come out, pretending not to know where we were, and call our names. We'd giggle behind the pages of our comics. It all seemed so long ago now.

“Take this left up there,” Troy said from the backseat, indicating his street.

Chipper grunted in reply.

He'd worn jeans to school. I'd thought about doing the same but wondered if that would be pushing the “dress down” rules too far. Chipper didn't worry about things like that. He just did what he wanted. I looked over at him, at his denim legs in the leather bucket seat. There was something about his thighs that made it hard for me to breathe. His legs really filled out his jeans. When I wore jeans, they just hung on me. I was such a beanpole, but Chipper worked out. He wasn't as big as a lot of the football players were, but you could see just by looking at him that he was strong. I wished I'd gotten to see Chipper play this year, but back during football season, Mom had never let me go out of the house except to go to school. It was right after Becky had disappeared, and she was paranoid that someone would snatch me, too. Now she didn't seem to notice when I was home or not, so consumed was she in her search.

I could see Troy's house up ahead. Suddenly I didn't want to get out of the car and leave Chipper. Without even thinking about it, I turned to him and blurted, “Do you want to come with us and smoke some pot?”

I knew Chipper liked marijuana. He'd admitted to smoking it with Becky. Of course, it wasn't my pot to offer. I didn't dare look around to see Troy's face.

Chipper stopped the car in front of the house. “You guys got pot?”

I nodded. “Yeah, up in Troy's room.”

Chipper looked into the backseat.

“If you're thinking of being a narc,” Troy said to him icily, “I will just deny it. There's no way to prove it.”

“I could get kicked off the team,” Chipper said. “I almost did once already.” His eyes returned to me. Big brown eyes, which I fell into, headfirst. “So you guys gotta swear you'll never tell.”

“Never!” I promised.

“Man, I'm not a narc,” Troy told him.