Object of Desire (26 page)

I watched from the window as the women climbed on the backs of the bikes, gripping their men tightly. The roar of the engines was deafening. The bikers revved their machines a few times in the driveway, then tore off down the road, one following the other. The sound was louder than any thunderstorm I'd ever heard.

Dad was immediately back in the room. “Jesus Christ, Peggy! You invite these degenerates into our house, let them drink my beer—”

“These degenerates are doing more to find your daughter than you are!” Mom shrieked. “And as for your beer, I think you've had quite enough liquor for a while!”

“Can you take me home?” Nana's little voice piped up in the middle of the argument. She was still sitting on the couch, turning that handkerchief over and over in her hands. “Can you take me home, please?”

“Oh, Jesus Christ,” Mom screamed, her big hands in her hair. “All day long I have to put up with this! I can't take her anymore!”

“Oh, Ma,” Dad said, his voice ripped with sadness. “We shouldn't have been yelling. It's okay.”

“Can you take me home?” Nana repeated.

Mom started to cry and rushed out of the room. Dad attempted to reach down and touch Nana's hand, but he was so drunk that he lost his balance a little. He steadied himself and then turned away. He headed down into the basement, where he had set up a chair and a television set. He'd probably sleep down there, too. He did that a lot lately.

In the air, the cigarette smoke still lingered. Nana's eyes were watering. I propped open the front door and began gathering up the dirty ashtrays and beer cans.

“Can you take me home?” Nana asked again.

I set down the trash in my hands. I walked over and sat beside my grandmother.

“Nana,” I said, “this is home now. I know it doesn't seem that way. It doesn't seem that way to me, either. But it is.”

She just looked at me with those sad, vacant eyes.

“You remember who I am, don't you, Nana? Danny. Danny off the pickle boat.”

“Danny,” she repeated.

I smiled.

“Danny,” she said, “can you take me home?”

I thought of Nana's home, the big white house in Manchester, where my father and Aunt Patsy had grown up. How I used to love to go there when I was a kid. Nana was the best babysitter. She'd make her homemade macaroni and cheese and her cinnamon streusel cake. Becky and I would play in the big field out behind her house, catching fireflies in jars. And when we'd sleep over, Nana would tuck me into bed in Dad's old room, which had a big bay window overlooking the field. In the mornings, I used to like to sit there and listen to the crows and watch the sun come up. The room would turn all pink and gold. I loved Nana's house. And at the moment I missed it very badly.

“Will you take me home?” Nana asked again, in barely a whisper.

I put my arms around her. “Nana,” I said, “we're just gonna have to make the best of this one for now.”

We sat that way for a long time. She didn't ask again if I could take her home.

“I
told you it was a pit,” Kelly said, stepping aside so I could enter his apartment.

The last slanting rays of the sun sliced through his half-closed venetian blinds, striping the room with orange. A mattress sat on the floor, wrapped tightly in a sheet and covered with a Mexican falsa blanket. Three milk crates placed on their sides held papers and drawing pads. An old door held up by four cinder blocks served as a table. There was a single straight-back chair. The walls were bare except for one spot over his bed, where a black-and-white glossy photo of Jackie O in sunglasses was secured with Scotch tape.

“You should hang some of your sketches,” I said. “It'd brighten up the place.”

“My landlady won't let me put holes in the walls.”

From what I could see, it would hardly matter: the plaster was already cracked and peeling enough as it was. I turned to Kelly and smiled.

“It's not a pit. It's cozy. It's a roof over your head. Now bring out the work. I'm here to see some Nelson originals.”

Kelly laughed. “There's not much to show.”

It had taken quite a bit of persuasion to get in here. Over the last week, we'd been texting back and forth. I'd ask for a look at his portfolio; he'd say no. I'd ask again. He'd reply with a joke.
DOES A DUCK PAY FOR HIS DRINKS AT A BAR
? This time I figured it out, and with glee, I texted back,
NO
.
HE JUST PUTS THEM ON HIS BILL
.

That was what got me in here, I think.

That, and the fact that I'd told Kelly that I'd spoken with a teacher at CalArts about him. The teacher was a guy I'd met when I was taking classes there, and I'd read that he was offering a course on illustration next semester for the general public. I had him send me the description, and I handed it to Kelly now.

“If you like the class,” I told him as he looked over the papers, “maybe you should think about applying to the school. I mean, you could maybe get a scholarship.”

He looked up at me with scorn. “Oh, please. You haven't even seen all my work.”

“From the little I've seen, you're damn good.” I smiled. “So show me the rest.”

He sighed. He sat down on his mattress and reached into one of the milk crates, withdrawing two sketch pads. “Okay,” he said, patting the place next to him on the mattress. “Sit down.”

I obeyed. He flipped open the first pad. There was a series of doodles and crossed-out images. The next page was more of the same. When he turned to the third page, however, I saw a more complete sketch, a caricature of a woman with a big nose. After that came several more sketches, some more finished than others. Most of them were done in pen, but others were in pencil, with attempts at shading.

I said nothing as he flipped through.

“See?” he said. “I told you that you wouldn't be impressed.”

“They're fine, Kelly. Let me see the other pad.”

It was here that I recognized the sparkle I'd seen in the drawings he'd done in my presence. It was here that he'd started drawing Jackie O. Jackie in a pillbox hat. Jackie with Caroline and John-John, watching the funeral procession. Jackie with sunglasses and a scarf around her neck. Jackie with Aristotle Onassis. They were brilliant renderings.

But most of the rest were doodles and scratches.

“You have real talent,” I told him. “You just need to finish some of these. Give them the same passion you give when you're drawing Jackie.”

He laughed, flopping backward onto the bed. His shirt inched up, revealing his belly button and the little tuft of black hair that grew up from his groin.

“Finish them?” he asked. “There's the problem. I don't have the discipline to finish them.”

“Draw me,” I said.

His black eyes looked up at me. “I thought we were going for pizza.”

“Not until you draw me.”

He sat up. Our thighs were touching. So were our shoulders. He looked me straight in the face, not two inches away.

“I can't draw you,” he said quietly.

My heart was thudding. I could smell him. His soap, his shampoo.

“Why not?” I asked, my throat tight.

He smiled. Oh, those dimples. “Because you're too nice to me,” he said.

“Too nice?”

He stood, breaking the electricity that had connected us, and walked across the room. “Yes. Too nice. Nobody has ever talked to me about my sketches as if they mattered before.” He turned to face me. “And here you are, telling me I ought to go to CalArts!”

“You said you don't want to remain a bartender all your life.”

“Why do you
care?
”

I stood now, too. “Because I was like you once. I see myself in you.”

He tilted his head and looked at me. “No other reason?”

That was the question. I'd asked myself exactly that on my way over to his apartment. Why was I so insistent I see his work? Why did I feel such a compulsion to encourage him? Was it just a crass strategy to finally get him into bed—something I'd now been frustrated out of twice?

But even as I asked myself the question, I already knew the answer. My fixation on Kelly these last couple of months had never been solely about sex. I wanted something more from him. Something much more. I wasn't quite sure what it was that I wanted, but I knew it was far more than sex.

“I have no ulterior motive,” I assured him.

His eyes didn't let go of mine.

“So draw me,” I said again.

He walked over to the makeshift table. A small grin stretched across his face. “I need inspiration if I'm going to draw. Is that okay?”

“Is what okay?”

A small wooden box sat on the table. Kelly picked it up. “Maybe you'd like to get inspired with me.”

I still didn't know what he meant. He opened the lid on the box and withdrew a small plastic bag with white powder inside.

“Oh,” I said. “That kind of inspiration.”

“Are you passing judgment?”

“No,” I said. “But I suspect your inspiration might be more lasting if it came from somewhere else.”

“Will you join me?”

I hesitated.

“I'm always happier when I do a little blow,” Kelly said. “You've seen me. Happier…and friendlier.”

There was the slightest emphasis on the last word. Was he promising me something?

“How do you afford it?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I don't buy furniture.” Then he laughed.

I suspected he saved very little of the tips he made. He used them to buy his blow. I knew how it worked. I'd done the same once.

“It's been a long time since I've done coke,” I told him.

He was already opening the plastic bag and using his driver's license to arrange a couple of lines on a small handheld mirror. “Did you like it?” he asked.

“I did. A lot.” I paused. “Too much.”

“Do you have a crisp new twenty?”

I hesitated but opened my wallet and handed him one. “In my day, we only used hundreds.”

Kelly flashed his smile at me. Those dimples again. It was hopeless. He had me.

“Well,” he said, “I know you're a big, successful artist and all, but I didn't think you were
so
successful, you walked around with hundred-dollar bills in your wallet.”

“Not yet,” I told him.

He rolled the twenty tightly into a little tube. “You're gonna join me, aren't you?”

“Why? You coming apart?”

He scrunched up his face and laughed. Then he bent down and snorted one line off the mirror. Wiping his nose and licking his finger, he handed me the twenty.

I stalled for the slightest second—he wouldn't even have noticed—and then accepted. I blocked everything else out of my mind and placed the tube in my nostril, inhaling the powder. It was just like old times. My heart was beating in my ears.

“Just a little,” Kelly said. “Just a little to start. Maybe more later.”

I sat back down on the mattress. In seconds my head was light, and I was happy. I'd forgotten how good a little white powder could make me feel.

“Okay,” Kelly was saying. “Now I
will
draw you. Sit there.”

He sat on top of one of the milk crates and opened his pad, getting busy with his pencil. He studied my face, then made a few scratches on the paper. He looked at me again, considering my eyes, my nose, my mouth, my ears. Kelly was looking at me—
seeing me
—noticing me. I was, in that moment, his entire focus, his whole world. I couldn't stop smiling.

“Look serious,” he chided, but it was impossible. I was just feeling way too happy, way too lighthearted, to stop smiling.

“Well, if you're going to stay that way,” Kelly said, “you're going to end up looking like a big old Cheshire cat.”

“However you draw me is going to be transcendent, I am sure,” I told him.

I couldn't remember when I'd last felt this happy. A long time ago. A very long time.

And there was one other thing I'd forgotten about coke.

How fucking horny it made me.

“Hold on one more minute,” Kelly said, making a few last adjustments to his sketch.

“I can't hold on much longer,” I said.

His black eyes flickered up at me. “Why so impatient?”

“Because I can't stand it anymore,” I said.

He grinned. “Stand what?”

“I've got to make love to you, Kelly. I can't leave this place tonight without making love to you.”

His grin turned into a smirk. “Oh, is that so?”

“Yes. That's so.”

He turned the drawing around to face me. “Well, what do you think?”

It was pretty damn good. Awesome, actually. In those few minutes, he'd captured me. There I was, smiling away, my happiness caught by his pencil. And the drawing sure looked a whole hell of a lot more like me than my own mirror image did these days. It looked like the young man I once had been—or anyway, the young man I liked to believe I had been.

Kelly came over and sat down beside me on the mattress.

“So you like it?” he asked.

I answered by kissing him.

“Look,” he said, pulling away from my lips. “We can have sex. But I'm not big into kissing. Is that okay?”

I made a little laughing sound, but it was hardly a laugh. “You're kidding.”

“No, I'm not.”

It was as if someone had just dropped a brick on my foot. The happy feeling didn't completely evaporate; I was too high up to come down that fast. But his statement shook me off my pedestal.

“No
kissing?
” I asked in disbelief.

“Well, okay, just a little. I'm just not that into it.” He closed the sketch pad and set it on the floor. “All that foreplay business. It's not really for me.”

I didn't know how to respond. I dropped a few pegs down from my high.

“Just fuck me,” Kelly whispered, leaning into my ear. “Fuck me hard.”

This wasn't how I'd imagined it. I'd imagined a quiet conversation, whispered words in each other's ears. I'd imagined soft kisses on his neck, Kelly throwing his head back, allowing me to undress him. This was not at all how I'd imagined it.

But what was there to do? It was now, perhaps, or never. I did what he asked. I pushed him down on the bed. The Mexican blanket was scratchy, so I pulled it off, revealing his blue and white striped sheets. If he didn't want it slow and easy and sweet, I'd give him what he wanted. Off came his shirt, his pants. I unbuttoned my own shirt, unbuckled my pants. My cock was raging. I popped it out of my underwear and straddled Kelly's chest, plunging it into his mouth. He sucked eagerly.

“Yeah,” he said between mouthfuls, “fuck my face.”

I complied. But after a few moments I bent down, bringing my lips to his.

“I'm sorry,” I said, “but I need to kiss you just a little bit, okay?”

He didn't stop me. But it was like kissing a mannequin.

“Kissing is very important to me,” I whispered in his ear.

“Oh, Danny, fuck me,” he groaned. “I need your big cock up my ass.”

Down a couple more notches I dropped from my high.

But still I wasn't going to give up. I pulled off my clothes, grabbed hold of his thighs, and pushed his legs into the air, his big, uncut cock flopping against his stomach like a Polish kielbasa. Reaching into my pants on the floor, I pulled a condom from the pocket. I'd placed it there earlier this evening, with just this moment in mind. But this moment was supposed to come after a long night biting ears and licking skin. I didn't expect this—
this!
—would be the first thing I did.

“Fuck me, Danny,” Kelly breathed.

I fell still farther down.

“Lube?” I asked.

His arm flailed off the mattress, and he felt around on the floor. His fingers closed around a small tube.

“Thanks,” I said as he handed it to me. After I'd rolled the condom onto my cock, I squeezed out some lube, using my forefinger to lubricate Kelly's hole a little as well. He moaned as I did so.

“Give it to me, Danny.”

I aimed at his hole. But despite the lube, my cock was getting soft. I could almost see it shrivel. I tried pumping it with my hand, closing my eyes and imagining Kelly's smile. His dimples. His astonishing black eyes.

But the more I imagined, the softer I got.

“Sorry,” I said, rolling over onto my back.

“Oh, man,” Kelly said. “Finger me then.”

I did as he asked. He was jacking his own cock now. Pretty soon he came, a frothy bubble of white erupting over his fist.

I was completely down now.

I stood and found a small towel in his bathroom. I wiped up the cum from his abdomen, then tossed the towel onto the floor.

“I should get going,” I said.

He sat up quickly, as if he were on a spring. “Don't you want to come?”