Object of Desire (3 page)

Adele Mary Horgan Fortunato, better known, to me, anyway, as Nana. Stout and silly, a crazy little jingle perpetually on her lips.
Danny off the pickle boat. Here comes Becky in her BVDs. Sing a song of six-packs and a pocket full of beer.
Nana often made no sense at all, but she always made me smile.

Beside her stood Aunt Patsy. Her daughter. Dad's older sister. Patricia Ann Fortunato. Never married. An old maid. And now Aunt Patsy had cancer. When Mom spoke of it to the neighbors, her voice always dropped to a whisper on the word. “Patsy has
cancer.
They had to take one breast and then part of another. It doesn't look good.” And she'd make the sign of the cross.

Today Aunt Patsy looked very gray and drawn. She wore a bulky sweater even on hot days so that she could cover up her uneven chest. When she smiled at me, her teeth seemed too big for her face. “Happy birthday, honey,” she said. “Are you excited to be starting high school?”

“Yeah,” I lied, accepting the shirt box she was offering me, wrapped in green and blue paper. I knew what it was even without opening it. A white collar shirt from Sears. Probably a tie, too, for me to wear to school.

“Where's Becky?” Nana was asking. “Beckadee, Beckadoo?”

“God only knows,” Mom said. “I can only hope she's downtown, picking up the balloons I ordered for Danny's party.”

“But her car's still in the driveway,” Aunt Patsy observed.

“I know, so she must be off with Chipper. Maybe he's driving her down.” Mom was unfolding a string of silver paper letters that spelled out
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
. “I haven't seen her since this morning. I told her not to forget the balloons, and she'd better not! I'll have her
head!
”

“Mom, please don't pin up that
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
sign,” I said.

Mom looked at me as if I were mad. “Why not? It's your birthday.”

“It's dweebish.”

“You can't have a birthday party without a
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
sign,” Mom declared.

“It's for little kids, Mom.”

She sighed dramatically, folding the sign back up. “First, no pin the tail on the donkey. Next thing he won't want a cake.”

“Where's Becky?” Nana asked again.

We all looked over at her.

“Mommy, Peggy just told us,” Aunt Patsy said gently. I'd always thought it odd that a grown woman still called her mother “Mommy.” “Becky's in town, getting the balloons for Danny's party.”

“Oh,” Nana said. “That's right.”

Nana had been getting forgetful. She sometimes confused my father with her late husband, Sebastian. Sometimes she repeated herself several times a day, asking the same questions over and over. Dad remembered his own grandmother, Nana's mother, getting the same way. Eventually, they had to put her in the state hospital, where she died, crazy as a loon. I looked at Nana and felt very sad. I knew she was thinking about her mother, about the state hospital. She wasn't so forgetful that she'd forgotten about that. She knew what was happening. Nana caught me looking at her and seemed startled. Then she winked at me.

It was getting close to three o'clock. I wished that Katie had been able to come over earlier. I headed back upstairs and sat on my bed, my back against the wall.

“This might be the last time we see each other,” I'd said to Katie almost every day since the end of eighth grade.

She'd always scold me. “Stop saying that. It's not like we're moving away. We still live in the same town.”

Should I have asked Katie to be my girlfriend then? If she were my girlfriend, then we'd have a connection, something to really bind us together. I sensed it would be good insurance to have a girlfriend upon entering high school. It would offer some kind of protection, I suspected, but just what kind, I wasn't sure.

And yet I hadn't asked her. It would have seemed odd after all these years. She probably would have laughed at me. Now, sitting on my bed, I wished I had.

My eye caught movement outside the window.

Chipper Paguni was pulling into his driveway in his rebuilt, repainted gold metallic 1971 Mustang Mach 1, with the black stripe down the hood. I leaned forward to get a better view. The door on the driver's side popped open, and Chipper emerged in a white T-shirt and shiny black parachute pants. I knew he wasn't wearing underwear, and my cheeks flushed a little as the thought crossed my mind. I waited for the passenger's side door to open and for Becky to get out, but nothing happened. Chipper paused to inspect something on the side of his precious car—a dent? a ding? a scratch?—then headed into the house.

I was scared.

Had he seen me out by the pond?

And what had Chipper thought when he couldn't find his underwear?

It didn't even cross my mind to wonder where Becky was.

I
headed up our walkway just as the sprinkler system kicked on, a small, insistent hiss under the bushes, a soft spray of mist across the dry purple night.

We weren't meant to be here. Humans weren't designed to live in deserts. But we did, anyway. We pumped in water and planted bougainvillea. We built swimming pools and golf courses and laid out vast stretches of grass. We put up shopping malls. We did it because we
could.
But that didn't change the fact that we were not meant to be here.

In the air hung the fragrance of dry sage. I paused, looking up at the sky, a vast dome of indigo studded with thousands of stars. At night the desert's stillness never lost its power to astonish me. A quarter of a million souls resided under that big sky, but at night I heard only the rustle of dried weeds. From somewhere far away came the crackly, impatient whine of a coyote.

Against the sky, the mountains ringing the valley were a slightly darker shade of purple. I stood there, trying to make out the line that separated mountain from sky. From eighty-five hundred feet above, the bright white eye of the tram winked at me. I took a deep breath, pulling the dry, clean desert air into my lungs. Then I let myself into the house, uncertain of what I might find.

“Frank?” I whispered.

The living room was dark. I flicked on a lamp, sending light spilling throughout the room, illuminating the sleek black-and-white tiled floor and the low-slung midcentury-modern furniture. On the wall hung two of my prints: a giclée of the Chocolate Mountains and a close-up of a sunflower, which Frank called his green daisy. They were images that suited our house, a classic Alexander built in 1955, a butterfly-roofed exemplar of rational design and modernist style, with its exposed beams and gabled spun-glass walls. Back in the day, these houses were built on the cheap, snapped up by postwar California's tail-finned, consumer-happy middle class, eager to snare their own piece of a desert playground popularized by the Rat Pack and other Hollywood elite. Now original Alexander homes fetched millions. From every oblong window, the house offered stunning views of the mountains, and fifty years of stringent municipal policy had ensured that nothing was ever built too high to obscure that scenery. Very few moments in my life were more treasured than my early mornings out by the pool, sitting with my coffee and watching the reflection of a very pink dawn against the blue gray of the mountains.

I set my keys down on the table and stepped through the living room into the dining area. The hallway was dark. No light emanated from the doorway of the bedroom. Might they both have fallen asleep?

I turned and headed through the kitchen. Only then did I notice the light coming from the second bedroom, which we used as an office. I peered around the door.

“Frank?”

He was sitting at the desk, a pile of papers in front of him, his brow creased, his glasses at the end of his nose. He looked up at me.

“Danny. I didn't hear you come in. How was happy hour?”

“The usual.” I gave him a confused look. “What are you doing in here?”

“Polishing up my syllabi for the start of classes.” He sighed, removing his glasses and rubbing his eyes. “I'll stop if Randall wants to pull out the bed….”

“Randall isn't here. I assume he's tricking.”

Frank looked up at me and smiled. “Well, good for him.”

“Yeah. If it gets his mind off Ike.”

Frank nodded.

“But where's Ollie?” I still couldn't fathom why Frank was in here, poring over papers, when I'd expected to find him engaged in a very different sort of activity.

“He's in the casita.” Frank had replaced his glasses and was once more looking down at his desk.

“The casita? What's he doing out there? And why are you in here?”

He didn't look up at me. “I really needed to get these syllabi done. I don't want them hanging over me all weekend. And rather than having Ollie in the living room, watching television, where he'd distract me, I suggested he go out and watch whatever he wanted to in the casita and get comfortable there, and then, when you got home…”

I nodded, following his line of thought. “So you want me to go bring him in, then?”

Frank hesitated. He took his glasses off again and looked up at me.

“Danny, why don't you just go out to him? I'm exhausted. I'm going to finish this one syllabus and then head in to bed.”

I made a face and folded my arms across my chest. “You don't want to…do anything with him, like we planned?”

Frank smiled. “He came down for
your
birthday, Danny. And look, I'm so beat, I'd just end up sitting at the foot of the bed, watching the two of you.”

“That's all you've done the last few times, anyway.”

That came out harsher than I wanted. Frank ignored it and looked back down at his papers. “Really, Danny, it's fine. I'm exhausted. You go have fun. I'm honestly looking forward to sleeping a good solid nine hours.”

I just stood there in the doorway. There was silence.

“Frank,” I said finally. “It's my birthday. I don't want to spend the night with Ollie if it means I spend it without you.”

“That's very sweet of you to say, baby.” He looked up and gave me a genuine smile. “But, of
course,
you want to spend the night with him. He has an ass you can bounce quarters off, remember?”

“I'm serious, Frank.”

“Oh, baby.”

He stood, placing his hands on my shoulders. We were nose to nose. Once, Frank had been a few inches taller than I, but no longer. Somewhere over the last two decades, he had settled, like the frame of a house. His joints had retracted; his bones had curled inward ever so slightly. I studied him now at close range, observing the dark circles under his eyes, the mosaic of brown spots etched across his high, shiny forehead.

“Are you really too tired?” I asked him.

He nodded. “You can't disappoint him, baby. He drove all the way in from Sherman Oaks.”

I leaned in and kissed him lightly on the lips.

Frank smiled. “We'll take a drive up to Joshua Tree tomorrow, go for a hike.” He took my chin between his thumb and forefinger. “Just the two of us. Maybe we'll even finally spot a bighorn sheep after all these years.”

“Frank—”

“Let me finish this syllabus, Danny. And leave a note in the kitchen for Randall, if he comes back at all, that all he has to do is pull out the bed here in the office. I've already put sheets on for him.”

He sat down at his desk again. I remained unmoving in the door frame, watching him.

“Go,” he said, not looking up at me. “Skedaddle. Have fun.”

I stood there for a moment longer, then turned away.

One of the wonderful things about properties in Palm Springs was the casita—the “little house” on the grounds, which could be used for guests. Ours had a Spanish tile roof and beige stucco walls, accessed by a zigzagging stone path through a garden of cacti and creeping rosemary. Passing the kidney bean–shaped swimming pool, I could see the blue glow of the television from the casita's windows reflected on the water. I looked closely and caught a glimpse of Ollie through the sheer curtains, lying on the bed, shirtless and barefoot and in jeans, the remote in his hands. I think he was watching
America's Next Top Model.
I wasn't sure, because he snapped off the TV as soon as I walked in.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey,” I replied.

The California king bed was so massive that it took up nearly the whole casita. There was no room for any other furniture except the flat-screen television hanging on the opposite wall. A small bathroom and medium-sized walk-in closet completed the casita. “Perfect for in-laws,” our Realtor had said—or, in our case, our boy toy from L.A.

I leaned over the bed and gave Ollie a quick kiss on the lips.

“Happy birthday,” he said.

“Thanks.”

“I got you a gift.”

Indeed, at the end of the bed sat a small box wrapped in blue- and green-striped paper. A white ribbon was tied around it in a clumsy bow.

“You shouldn't have gotten me anything,” I said.

“Well, I saw it at the mall….”

Ollie worked at a Ritz Camera at a mall in Studio City. He'd worked there since he was eighteen. He was twenty-six now.

I opened the gift. It was a cinnamon-scented candle in a glass jar from Yankee Candle.

“I don't know if you like cinnamon,” Ollie said. He remained propped against the pillows, turning the remote over and over in his hands.

“Oh, I do. I do like cinnamon.” I opened the lid and took a whiff to be polite. “It's very nice. Thank you.”

He smiled.

I put the candle aside. There was never much small talk with Ollie. We didn't have much in common, really, other than liking the way my cock felt in his ass. We had met online, on ManHunt, or maybe it was Adam4Adam. Or Connexion. One of them. That first night, he drove all the way down to Palm Springs in his '04 Toyota Corolla, and Frank and I took turns fucking his scrumptious ass. Afterward, he fell asleep between us in our bed. The next morning Frank fried bacon and eggs, while I fucked Ollie one more time. And that, we thought, would be that. Sweet ass not withstanding, Ollie wasn't one of our more memorable tricks. Awkward silences took the place of conversation. Ollie didn't get our jokes and didn't make any of his own. He was either painfully shy or incredibly dull, Frank deduced, and yet, for some reason, I was moved to stay in contact with him, getting his number and his e-mail. In the last year, Ollie had been back down to see us half a dozen more times, and I still didn't know much more about him other than where he lived, where he worked, and that he liked getting plowed.

“Where's Frank?” Ollie asked as I slid in next to him on the bed.

“He's beat. He's got to finish getting ready for his classes. You know they start this coming week. So he's going to bed, and he told us to have fun out here.”

“Oh.”

I had a feeling Ollie wasn't too disappointed. I knew the reason he kept coming back out to the desert had more to do with me than Frank. I wasn't being arrogant. It was just obvious. Ollie would kiss Frank only if Frank made the first move. He would suck Frank only if Frank maneuvered his cock in the direction of his mouth. On the other hand, he was all over me. Frank and I had never discussed this. But I was sure if I'd noticed, Frank had noticed, too. I felt bad, and a little guilty. But I didn't bring it up. There was, after all, the slightest chance that Frank
hadn't
noticed.

Of course, Ollie's apparent disinterest might have been the reason why Frank, the last few times, had chosen to drop out of the sex and simply play the voyeur. He'd sit at the foot of the bed, watching and wanking as Ollie and I sucked and fucked. I'd try to lure him back up, but he'd resist, staying right where he was, shooting his load before we did. When Ollie and I would shoot soon afterward, Frank would be right there, waiting with a towel, like a dutiful butler offering his young masters a cum rag. It broke my heart.

Frank was fourteen years older than I. In five years, he would be sixty. Once, age had mattered very little between us. But increasingly of late, the disparity in our ages had begun to weigh heavily on me. I saw myself becoming Frank a few years down the road, moving slower, my body settling, shrinking, withering. It frightened me.

I touched Ollie's smooth, unlined face. He was handsome, in an all-American kind of way, with sandy hair and blue eyes. We kissed. His lips tasted like wintergreen breath mints, and his little tongue darted in and out of my mouth. I moved my hands up and down his back and over his arms. His was the typical body of a twentysomething white boy who never went to the gym. Not thin, not fat, though his waist was starting to get a tiny bit squishy. Largely hairless, except for a happy trail leading up from his crotch to his belly button. Too many hours spent laboring inside an air-conditioned shopping mall had left his skin pale and pasty. He tasted like deli meat—bologna, maybe, or a salty ham. Leaning back into the pillows as I kissed my way down his torso, Ollie let out an almost inaudible moan. Talking during sex was not for him. No “Yeah, that's it” or “Fuck, man, that feels good.” I only knew he was enjoying himself by the rock-hard six-inch cock that stood straight up in the air, perpendicular to his groin, from start to finish.

I unbuckled Ollie's belt and slid down his jeans. Sure enough, his cock was spearheading his gray Hanes briefs. I got everything off him, jeans and underwear, then flipped him over to showcase his most impressive attribute, that incongruous bubble butt. I was quickly naked myself, dry humping the deep cleavage between those two delectable mounds. And in the process, I caught a glimpse of what we were doing in the mirrored closet doors. Absurd, really. Two grown men, naked, rubbing body parts all over each other like a couple of dogs in heat. I couldn't help but smile.

That was a mistake.

Because in my smile, I saw what I no longer recognized. Myself. The man in the mirror looked nothing like me. I felt as if I were in a
Twilight Zone
episode, where the face looking back from the mirror was someone else's, a doppelgänger from another world. What was it about my appearance that had changed over the last few years? I no longer looked like photographs of myself. I couldn't put my finger on the difference. I hadn't lost any more hair, and Just for Men had kept the gray at bay. There weren't any new wrinkles on my forehead or around my eyes; Botox had taken care of that. So what was it that was different? Why did my face no longer look like me?

Ollie had wriggled out from under me and was now sucking on my cock. Leaning back into the pillows, I looked down at his body, so white, so soft, so unmarked by time or love or pain. A body not unlike the one I'd once had, before I'd started lifting weights and using creatine and protein and finally testosterone cream to replace what I was losing, a little bit more every year. Hair grew in my ears and fell out from my head, but my body remained hard and toned and supple. The skinny little boy who'd hated taking his shirt off in gym class had buffed up considerably by his late twenties, spending his thirties on the dance floor with friends, reveling in the glances of strangers, if never fully believing they were glancing at him. But, of course, they were: for an intoxicating nanosecond, I had actually been beautiful. And for an equally fleeting moment in time, I had believed it.