Object of Desire (32 page)

The words shattered his hardness. He broke like a plate-glass window under a well-aimed baseball. All the pieces shimmered and shook, then collapsed to the ground. He looked as if he would cry.

“Oh, Danny,” he said.

“What's going on?” I asked.

He looked away, sighed, then returned his eyes at me. “I was out at the bar tonight and ran into some of these guys, and we decided to come back here. One person invited another, and soon there was a party. And all of a sudden I looked around at them, and I just got so depressed. I looked at them and said to myself, ‘If this is my life, I might as well just end it now.'”

“And you texted that thought to me.”

He smiled a little. “You're the only one I can admit such things to.”

I sighed. “Are these people that bad?”

“You saw them.” He paused, seeming to remember something. “And apparently you
know
Jake.”

“I barely know him.”

“Yeah, right. You don't have private little love names with someone you barely know.”

“Kelly…”

His eyes flashed. “You know, it's all your fault I was feeling so depressed!”

“My fault?”

“Yes, your fault! I was just going on with my life when I met you. Everything was fine until you started telling me I could be something more than I am. That I could take classes at freaking CalArts! That I had talent and potential!”

“But you do.”

“Oh, fuck you, Danny.”

I gripped him by the shoulders. “Kelly, the reason you're acting this way, the reason you got depressed, was that you did too much coke. And then you drank too much on top of it. You've got to stop it.”

He laughed. “No. The reason I got depressed was that I looked around at the losers in my life. They're all gypsies like me. Gypsies who spend a season in Palm Springs, bartending or waitering, and then leave here when too many bridges get burned. Then it's a season in West Hollywood or San Francisco or Miami or Lauderdale or Provincetown…and that's it. That's what we call our lives. Moving from shit-bag apartment to shit-bag apartment.”

“That doesn't have to be your life, Kelly.”

“Well, it's
not
going to be.” He looked at me smugly, defiantly. “Because I've found myself a boyfriend.”

“What?”

“Damian. He's my boyfriend now. Hot, don't you think? I've had my eye on him ever since I first got out here. He's a massage therapist. And so sexy. I like my men big and dark and hairy.”

He had just used three adjectives that emphatically did not describe me. “You're
dating
him? Since when?”

“Since the other day.”

“Since
what
other day?”

“We're moving to New York,” Kelly said, ignoring my question. “Damian lived in Manhattan for a couple of years. He worked for all the big promoters. He knows everybody there. I've always wanted to live in New York.”

“I thought you didn't want a boyfriend.”

“Now, Danny.” He smiled at me like a grand duchess. “Don't think that I'm not appreciative of everything you tried to do for me. I'm very grateful for your confidence in me. When I'm a big, successful artist in Manhattan, you'll have to come to the opening of my first show.”

I looked at him. “Why are you saying all this?”

“Saying all what?”

“You're deliberately trying to push me away.”

“I have no idea what you're talking about.”

Just then the door opened. Jake Jones stood outlined by the dim light from within. “You guys want to do another line?”

“Yeah,” Kelly said, brightening. “I need to come up a little.”

I reached out and grabbed Kelly's forearm, stopping him from going inside. “No, you don't. You've had enough.”

He made a face. “Since when are you a prude?”

“Since I've seen how your emotions can go up and down like a roller coaster.”

“Come on, Ishmael,” Jake said, his voice all syrupy, folding his thin arms across his chest and leaning up against the doorjamb. “Come in and have some fun with us.”

“No, thank you,” I said.

Kelly looked at me intensely. “Yeah,
Ishmael.
Why don't you come on inside? Or do you need to run back to the little twink you've got waiting for you at home?”

“Maybe I shouldn't have left him,” I said.

“Guess not.” Kelly broke free of my arm and hurried back inside. I could hear him calling, “Damian! Want to do a line with me?”

Jake was still in the doorway, watching me. “So, tell me,” he said, once Kelly was gone. “Why did you come to the party if you won't come inside?”

“I guess I wasn't really invited,” I said.

“You can be my date.”

“Thanks, but I do need to get home.”

Jake smirked. “You really have a twink waiting for you there?”

“I don't know.” I started down the steps. “But I know my husband will be.”

Reaching my Jeep, I gripped the wheel and closed my eyes. What I wanted to do, of course, was rush back up those stairs and burst through the door and carry Kelly off, like Richard Gere did to Debra Winger in
An Officer and a Gentleman.
But I steadied myself and started the ignition, even if I still sat there, not driving away quite yet.

I don't have time for any of this,
I thought. The old fiction that we have an unlimited amount of time to do what we want to do, so necessary when we are young, no longer functioned for me. For all Kelly's despair, he still had time, but mine was running out. Every day, a little bit more.

I pulled away from Kelly's apartment. I hated the fact that tears were in my eyes. I hated the fact that I had cried more in the last few weeks than I had in years.
Decades,
in fact. Not since those first couple of years in high school had I cried so much, those days when I lived in constant terror of some biker showing up at our front door and shooting my mother through the chest. I hated that Kelly had turned me once more into that blubbering, stupid kid.

But I wasn't a kid. That was terribly obvious to me now.

“There's no fool like an old fool!” I shouted as I drove. “No fool like an old man chasing after a boy who doesn't want him!”

Driving home, running red lights again with brazen impunity, I realized there was one other adjective that Kelly might have used to differentiate Damian from me.

Young.

Damian was
young.

He was under thirty. Twenty-nine, tops.

And I was a blubbering old fool of forty-one, who had just burst into a party of kids and made an ass of himself. To think that I'd ever had the gall, the hubris, to think I could make a beautiful young man like Kelly fall in love with me. No one had ever loved me first—no one had ever loved me more than they loved someone else. Why had I ever thought that this time it would be any different?

Ollie had left by the time I got home. I wasn't surprised.

“I knew it wasn't going to work,” Frank said, already in bed, waiting for me. “I could tell he wasn't into it after you left, and then, of course, neither was I. So we had a cup of hot chocolate and sat talking by the pool for a while, but you know he's really not the best conversationalist. After a couple of stretches of awkward silence, he went home.”

“I'm sorry,” I said, crawling into bed beside him and shutting off the light.

“So Kelly's okay?”

“I wouldn't use that word to describe him.” I sighed. “But he's not going to kill himself. At least not tonight.”

“You care about that boy a great deal,” Frank said from the dark.

“I don't want to talk about it.”

“Okay.”

I turned to him. “Frank, maybe you and I could—”

“I can't, Danny. I'm sorry. I'm just too tired now.”

“Okay.”

We lay there for a few moments, both of us on our backs. Then, silently, I turned on my side as Frank, in unison, turned on his. His nose nuzzled the back of my head and his arm reached around to pull me close. I took his hand. I held it tight.

“Sleep well, baby,” Frank whispered in my ear.

And despite my worries of a sleepless night, I did.

P
ixie had just piddled on the carpet.

“The landlord's going to
freak!
” I shouted, rushing over with Windex and paper towels, the only cleaning tools I could find in the place. We had just moved in, and I hadn't yet gone shopping.

“She's marking her territory,” Frank said, unperturbed. “It was just a little piddle.”

“You're always making excuses for this dog,” I said, trying to soak up the liquid from the carpet with the paper towels. “She knows better than that.”

But those black button eyes refused to allow me to stay angry with her. I rubbed my head against hers, and she rubbed me back.

“Danny, come here. Look at this.” Frank was in the bathroom, standing at the window. “I told you this place had a view.”

“A view of what? A brick wall?”

“No, come here. Look.”

He had just gotten out of the shower. That was the moment when I always thought Frank looked the most beautiful, before he'd combed his hair and shaved his face. He was wearing only a towel wrapped around his waist, but his hard, round ass still made itself known. His hair had that vibrant, shiny aliveness that a good shower and a vigorous towel drying always gave it; even the light hair on his chest was alert and electric. As I passed him, I ran my hand across his torso and purred.

“You see there?” Frank was saying. “Look this way out the window. No, this way. Turn your head. What do you see?”

I peered out and turned my head in the direction he was indicating. Yes, indeed, a brick wall—but just over there, almost out of view but not quite, was a glimpse down the hill of Santa Monica Boulevard and the valley beyond.

“Well, I wouldn't put it in the description, like they did in the newspaper ad,” I said, laughing, “but I'll grant you, it's a view.”

Frank laughed, too. “So you want to take a walk down to our new neighborhood for dinner?”

I shook my head. “Nope. It's our first night in our first place together. And it's not going to be a home until I've made dinner here for the first time.”

Frank smirked. “You? Danny Fortunato? You're going to
cook?
”

“Shut up, smarty-pants. It's not like you're Julia Child, either.”

Frank followed me into the kitchen. “Well, what are you going to make?”

“My grandmother's recipe for baked macaroni and cheese. I'm going out now to buy the ingredients. There's a little macaroni and a little cheese—but a whole hell of a lot of butter.”

“Mmm,” Frank said. “Just what I need.” He patted his stomach.

I made a face. “Like you have to worry, Mr. Thirty Waist, Mr. I Bike Everywhere Even If It Is Los Angeles.” I glanced at myself in the mirror. I was still just a twig, the way I'd been all my life. “I really need to start going to the gym and building some muscle.”

“Baby, you're perfect just the way you are.”

I hooded my eyes at him. “Keep saying that, stud, and you'll get a lot more tonight than macaroni and cheese.”

“That's what I'm counting on.”

I smiled, grabbing Pixie's leash from the hook on the wall. She immediately came dashing toward me. “That's right, puffin,” I cooed as I hooked the leash to the collar. “That's right. We're going for a walk.”

The grocery store was only a few blocks over, but down a very steep hill. Pixie loved to run down the hill, so I had to keep a strong grip on her. It was one of those unexpectedly windy days, when the palm trees rustling overhead sounded like rain. The sky was a sharp blue, so sharp it hurt my eyes. I slipped on my sunglasses and plugged in the earphones of my Walkman, grooving out to Tina Turner's latest album
Break Every Rule.
I had become a huge Tina Turner freak. No more punk for me; Tina ruled. Tina was how I wanted to be: bold and brassy, a survivor, sexy as fuck, despite all the odds being stacked against it. I kind of imagined myself as a younger, whiter, male version of Tina Turner. Heading down Holloway, I sang along. “All I want is a little reaction, just e-nuh-huff to tip the scales….”

A red Porsche 944 Turbo was slowing down alongside me. I kept walking, ignoring it.

“Oh, they say that you match your wits with the best of them,” I sang, “but I know when I'm close you're just like the rest of them….”

I glanced over at the driver of the Porsche, dropping my sunglasses down my nose. “Hello, Donovan,” I called through the open window.

“Where you going, angel puss?”

“Grocery store.”

“Wanta ride?”

“I don't mind walking.”

“I don't mind driving.”

I sighed.

“You can even bring your little ball of fluff with you.”

I smiled. Scooping Pixie up under my arm, I ran around to the passenger side of the Porsche and hopped in.

“Nice car,” I said, inhaling the fragrance of the leather seats.

Donovan flashed me his perfect white smile. “I've been offering to take you for a ride for months now.”

“Guess I've been otherwise engaged,” I quipped, settling Pixie on my lap. She remained still, like a well-behaved little girl. But her eyes watched Donovan with a glint of distrust. I gave her a little squeeze to show her she had nothing to worry about.

I liked Donovan Hunt. Well, I liked flirting with him, anyway. He was rich. Richer than even Gregory Montague. And Donovan was no withered old Katharine Hepburn clone in male drag. He was tall, handsome, successful—and only a few years older than I was. “Quite the catch,” Randall kept pointing out to me after I'd met Donovan one night at a club. “But I already
have
quite the catch,” I'd tell Randall each and every time he said it. Frank might not have had Donovan's money, but at least he was devoted to me. Donovan Hunt, however, seemed to have a different boyfriend every time I saw him.

“So what are you doing riding around town?” I asked.

He sighed. “I just had to get out of the house. I had a huge fight with my father on the phone. He told me he should never have allowed me to come out here to L.A.”

Donovan's family was old money. I think he liked the fact that we both hailed from Connecticut, though East Hartford was a world and several broken-down factories away from Greenwich. I asked him why his father was being so pissy.

“Because I want to invest some money in a film that he thinks is going to be a huge flop,” he told me. “But I think it's going to pay off really well.”

“What film is it?”

“It's this action-adventure thing with Bruce Willis.”

“You mean the guy from
Moonlighting?
”

“Yeah. That's the one.”

I laughed. “Somehow I can't see him as an action-movie star.”

“It's an exciting project. He plays a cop who fights back against terrorists.”

I rolled my eyes. “As an actor, Donovan, let me tell you, these special-effects movies are killing Hollywood's artistic soul.”

We had reached the grocery store. He pulled into a parking space and switched off the ignition.

“Danny, I've told you I'd love to fund a serious movie with you starring in it.”

“Great. So find me a script and a director.”

“Sure. Let's have dinner, and then we can talk about it over breakfast.”

“Oh, you're a funny, funny man,” I said, my hand on the door.

“Please don't go yet,” he said. “I really am kind of down about the fight with my father. Talk to me for a while.”

I looked at him. “Okay, what do you want to talk about?”

“You and me.”

I laughed. “You're someone who gets what he wants all the time, don't you?”

“No. But seems
you
are.”

“Me?”

“Yeah. The boyfriend, the dog…”

I laughed again, louder this time. “Oh, Donovan, you have no idea about my life.”

“Nor you mine.”

I narrowed my eyes at him.

“When I told my father I was gay, he told me he hoped I got AIDS.”

“Wow,” I said.

“Yeah. So here I am in L.A., and all I want to do is make more money than my father so I can call him up and say, ‘Hey, Dad. Fuck you.'”

I was quiet for a moment, looking off at the sky. “Well, Donovan, we live in very different worlds, but I suppose I can understand the whole parental thing.”

“Really? What's your relationship with your family?”

“None.”

“None at all?”

“None at all.”

My parents had no idea where I was. When I first got to L.A. more than two years ago, I called my father as I'd promised. I told him I was okay, that I'd gotten here in one piece. He seemed happy to hear from me and asked for my phone number. I replied that I'd just moved in, and didn't know the number. That was a lie. I still felt the need for a safe distance. A little fear lingered that my mother would somehow come barging across the country for me and drag me back home. Dad asked me to send my address when I got settled, then he turned to my mother and asked her if she had anything she wanted to say to me. I heard her say no. Dad came back to the phone and said Mom was asleep. I was glad then I hadn't given the phone number. And I never sent the address or called them again.

But I didn't tell Donovan any of this. I just kept looking at the sky through his green-tinted windshield. The wind was picking up. The fronds of the palm trees were all blowing in one direction. “I guess that's what Los Angeles is all about,” I finally said. “All of us gypsies can come here and try to start over.”

“Yeah, but it's a hard city in which to get a foothold.”

I shrugged. “And why
shouldn't
it be hard? It's a city founded on illusion and make-believe. Everything's artificial here. And so we go along and invent scenarios for ourselves, and we try to live them out, just like they do on the screen. Our scenarios might not be any more real than the ones in the movies, but they're better than nothing.” I laughed, a little hard. “And if we expect anything more than that, we're going to be disappointed.”

Donovan looked over at me. “You're really content to live with that?”

“It's not so bad,” I said, stroking Pixie.

“You're really something, Danny. You know that? I can talk to you like no one else out here.”

“Oh, go on. You have a thousand boys hotter and hipper than I am.”

“Not really.”

I laughed. “Thanks for the ride, Donovan.” I opened the car door.

He smiled. “Thanks for the talk.”

Pixie and I hurried over to the store. Soon my basket was filled with two boxes of elbow macaroni, three hunks of sharp cheddar cheese, a half gallon of milk, salt, pepper, paprika, bread crumbs, and a pound of butter. “This is going to be so tasty,” I told Pixie as we walked back home, the wind whipping my hair, Tina Turner blaring in my ears.

Frank, bless his heart, had found a couple of candles and had lit them by the time I came back in through the door. The little apartment flickered with soft candlelight as the sun set through our windows. He'd also gone out and bought a bottle of champagne and two plastic glasses. We had glasses somewhere, but they were in one of the boxes stacked against the wall. We had no furniture yet, so we set out paper plates on the floor of the living room, careful to put down a sheet first to cover any remnants of Pixie's piddle. I boiled the macaroni, recalling Nana's recipe from memory as best I could. After it had cooked, I poured it into a glass baking dish and added the cheese, milk, butter, bread crumbs, and spices.

Nana had been such a good cook, far better than Mom. When Becky and I would stay at Nana's when we were little, we loved what she made for us. Orange-marmalade chicken and the mac and cheese. Cinnamon streusel cake and strawberry-rhubarb pie. We'd eat and eat, and then we'd head outside to run around the field behind Nana's house, ignorant of, and indifferent toward, the world beyond those yellow hills. All that mattered back then was the full, happy, exhausted feeling I had at the end of the day, falling asleep in Dad's old room, Nana tucking me in, saying, “Good night my sweet Danny off the pickle boat,” and kissing me on my forehead.

“Danny,” Frank was saying. “Baby, what's wrong?”

I was crying. “Oh, nothing,” I said. “How stupid of me.” I shrugged my shoulder to wipe my tears as I placed the baking dish of macaroni and cheese into the oven.

“It's not stupid, baby.”

“Yes, it is.” I noted the time on the oven. The macaroni and cheese needed to bake for at least an hour.

“Baby, I can only imagine what it was like to lose your sister like that, how it turned everything upside down.”

“Oh, no, that's not the way it happened out here,” I told him. “See, that's what's great about L.A. Here the movie can end happily. I can imagine that Becky came home. It was all just a big misunderstanding, a big farce. She got a loving cup stuck on her head. So she couldn't see and got on the wrong bus. But then Ricky and Fred found her and brought her home in time for the fade-out. You know, big laugh track, the end.” I tried to smile. “Really, Frank, I'm fine.”

“You were thinking about her,” he said.

“No, actually I was thinking about my grandmother. She's the one I feel the worst about. I used to dream that I'd make a lot of money, and I'd bring Nana out here to live. She must be dead by now, and Dad wouldn't have had any way of letting me know.” I let out a long breath. “But in a way, if she's still alive, that would be even worse. To live so long in that state. In that half-light of existence. In that netherworld. Oh, poor Nana.”

“Come here, baby.”

“No, I'm done crying. Come on. We've got to toast our new home. Where's the champagne?”

Frank held the bottle over the sink and popped the cork. It hit the ceiling. The bubbly flowed into our two plastic glasses.