The Passionate Attention of an Interesting Man (10 page)

“Yes. More.”

“You hurt me that time, you know.”

“But it’s so easy to do,” she said, regretfully. She touched his arm.

“Do that to me,” said Junior, who had come up behind them.

“The new F. Scott Fitzgerald,” Portia said, of Lloyd. “Explaining golden youth to America.”

“I’m a golden youth,” said Junior.

They swam relay races, Portia choosing Lloyd as her partner against Clark and
Annamarie. Junior was the referee, and even before they started he cried, “Clark is the winner!”

The supper was a taco smorgasbord, with individual ingredients set out so each diner could invent a unique dish. (Clark skipped the taco and gorged on steak and mushrooms neat.) The conversation was heady:
True Blood
, the poor game support for the Nintendo 3DS, the pointlessness of hats. Lloyd hadn’t remembered these kids being even that lively. And Portia haunted him like a fiancée, skinning him with her hands as if she really liked him.

I enjoy myself too much here, Lloyd was thinking. They make it so easy to be around them, and if your attention wanders they turn seductive, tempting. This whole loop is made of sin.

“You always go too soon,” Portia complained; she could tell he was about to leave. “The chauffeur can drive you later.”

“What time is it?” Lloyd asked. He had given his watch to Junior before the relays.

“You’ve still got all this time left,” said Clark.

“No, I probably don’t,” Lloyd answered. “And I need to be prompt.”

Portia said, “Come for a talk,” and in the changing room, alone with Lloyd, she wove a tapestry of wishes. “But you know Daddy,” she said, several times. She sighed a lot. “And Clark is such a zany idiot, really.” Lloyd was normally a good listener, but Portia was like a contestant in a beauty pageant who wants a raise in her credit max instead of world peace. One tunes out. Lloyd kept hoping that Portia would initiate a sexual encounter—it was unwritten law that the girls made the first move—but Annamarie kept bustling in. Once Junior opened the door, said, “I’m drunk, Lloyd, are you?” and immediately vanished.

“It’s all so endless,” Portia was saying.

Lloyd got to his feet. He suddenly realized that he had had one glass too many. “Where’s the chauffeur, then?” he asked. “And Junior has my watch.”

Lloyd went out to the pool, where
Annamarie and the two boys were performing a water ballet. Lloyd kept trying to get Junior’s attention, and finally he leaped into the water, accosted Junior, and demanded his watch.

“It’s over there, sweetheart,” said Junior, gesturing as vaguely as possible.

While Lloyd hunted for it, Portia hovered about. Once she giggled.

“It’s not funny,” Lloyd murmured. Then, turning back to the pool, from which Junior was just emerging, he said, “Junior, will you
please
tell me where my watch is?”

“Right in the middle of such an intimate talk, though,” said Portia. “Really, Lloyd.”

“It’s just a watch, dude,” said Junior, joining them as he toweled off. “And what’s so intimate? Does this mean you two are going to get engaged now?” Junior asked.

“Oh, I don’t think so,” Clark put in as he came up.

“Damn, who is
that
guy?” said Junior, staring over Lloyd’s shoulder.

The other kids looked, too, while Lloyd got almost frantic in his hunting. “Will somebody for gosh sake please help me find—”

“Is that your brother, dude?” Clark asked Lloyd, turning him around to see:

Tom, in his sleeveless down coat, flannel shirt, corduroys, and snow boots, his eyes dialed to lock and load.

“You have one exact minute to get dressed,” Tom told Lloyd. “After sixty, I’ll drag you out of here naked as a jay if it comes to that.”

Stunned for three seconds, Lloyd then broke for the changing room, pulling his pants on over his wet trunks and grabbing for his shirt as Portia and
Annamarie ran in.

“That
is
your brother!” cried Portia.

“I want to fuck him!” said
Annamarie.

“Find my shoes for heaven’s sake!”

“He’s everything!” Portia noted.

“And so much more,”
Annamarie agreed.

Handing Lloyd a right shoe (Clark’s, but Lloyd put it on, anyway), Portia observed, “There’s nothing like king size, is there?”

In the pool area, Clark and Junior were keeping Tom busy. Clark asked to feel Tom’s biceps, and Tom snarled back, “How about you do some good in the world and tell that son-of-a-bitch to step on it?”

“Better step on it, Lloyd,” Clark lazily called out.

“I’ve got bigger deltoids than Clark,” Junior told Tom.

With his shirt only half-buttoned (unevenly at that) and his belt missing, wearing one of Clark’s and one of Junior’s shoes, and still
watchless, Lloyd came running out while struggling into his jacket. Portia and Annamarie followed him, and Portia it was who spotted the missing watch, so close to the taco platter that it was half-hidden under the lip of the plate.

“Oh, here it is, Lloyd,” Portia called out. As she moved to bring it to him, Tom suddenly stepped forth, went up to her, and held out his hand for it.

“He has no right to that,” said Tom, shoving it into his pocket. The four kids turned to look at Lloyd and see how he took this puzzling yet arresting development, but his face was blank, and he stood motionless till Tom marched up to him, grabbed his arm, and took him away with a “Good night, all.”

The door slammed shut, and Junior said, “Bash me, did you
see
that guy?”

“Are they really brothers?” asked
Annamarie. “They don’t look alike.”

“At all,” Portia added. “And yet…”

“That was a genuine older-brother scowl on the big guy’s face, though,” Clark observed. “I bet Lloyd’s going to get it tonight. He’s going dark, wait and see.”

“As long as there are guardians, there’s going to be rules,” said Junior. “It was bound to happen.”

In the car, Lloyd sensed that trying to talk to Tom would only antagonize him more; they rode back in silence. When they docked and both got out, Tom said only, “Move!” Inside, he reset the safety alarm, turned to Lloyd, and ordered him to follow Tom to his room.

When they got there, Tom sat Lloyd on the bed and, towering over him, said, “Can you give me one reason not to beat the tar out of you tonight?”

A couple of answers occurred to Lloyd—light ones, not flip but soothing—yet in the end he just said, “Can I take off my coat?”

Ignoring that, Tom said, “You know how strict I am about the house curfew. Which is midnight. Not”—as he checked his watch—“almost one-thirty A.M. by now.”

Lloyd got up to get his coat off, but Tom told him to sit back down.

“I wouldn’t put this man’s anger to the test if I were you,” Tom told him.

Lloyd sat.

“Jake warned me to give you a licking right off. Then you’d behave because you’d know what to be afraid of.”

“I know what to be afraid of, Tom.”

“No, you
should
be afraid of being rebellious!”

Disloyal
! Irresponsible!

“Tom, I know I should have phoned up to say…and so on, but I lost my watch. The time just…and I must have had too much to drink, which isn’t like me at all. I feel a little lightheaded.”

“Lightheaded? That’s what you feel?
Lightheaded
?”

“‘He shall be slain immediately upon the place,’” Lloyd quoted. “Yes, because they smooched me up, and I let them. They took me out of myself with…the sweet temptation of security…”

Lloyd stopped speaking as Tom angrily took off his own coat and gloves and threw them onto his desk without taking his eyes off Lloyd. The gloves landed on the desktop next to a book Lloyd had not seen before, but before he could focus on it Tom was on his case.

“You know what you’re about to feel instead of lightheaded?” Tom asked Lloyd.

“But if I had called to say I would be late just this special night, I might have awakened you.”

“I don’t go to bed until you’re home, and you know that!”

“That’s right, Tom. Checking up on me, to see if I’m obedient.”

“To see if you’re
safe
here and out of the possibility of
harm
!”

Lloyd went silent.

Pursuing his text, Tom asked, “And there you are, playing around with rich kids! Lost your watch, huh? And still running around in that cheap playtime coat when I—”

“
Tom
! Is that…on the desk, is that the Walther’s catalogue?”

Now Lloyd jumped up. Tom grabbed him by the shoulders to push him back down, but Lloyd held his ground, trying to break away to get to the desk. “It came today, didn’t it? Why didn’t you tell me right off?”

Tom forced Lloyd back onto the bed, Lloyd holding Tom’s arms, trying to relieve the pressure and stand on his own.

“How was I supposed to know that it arrived today?” Lloyd cried. “Yes, and
that’s
why you’re so sore at me! Because you think I skipped out on our first…because I don’t care about the trains, right? I betrayed you? You think I would flip you off for those…those goodtime chuckleheads? Those toy people? Well, I have so spat with the whole gang—you see if I haven’t! It’s back to Avatar with the lot of them!”

Confused for a moment, Tom relaxed his grip, allowing Lloyd to dart off to his room. Soon enough, Tom followed in an insultingly confident amble.

“I don’t know where you think you’re going” came Tom’s voice down the hall, nearing Lloyd’s bedroom. “But when I get my hands on you, you will not be happy tonight.”

Pulling open the top drawer of his desk, Lloyd got out a manila folder just as Tom entered, moving right up to Lloyd to force him backward by sheer presence.

Now pressed against the wall, Lloyd said, quite calmly, “You’re not going to hurt me, Tom, and we both know that.”

With an angry “I’ll hurt you if I want to,” Tom set his hands on Lloyd’s shoulders as if to fix him in place, but Lloyd managed to raise the folder into view between them.

“Look at this, Tom.”

“Why should I?”

They stood there for a while, Tom holding Lloyd and blazing at him. Then he let go of Lloyd and took the folder from him, never moving his eyes off Lloyd’s.

“What’s in it?” said Tom.

Lloyd didn’t answer.

“You going to tell me or not?” Tom went on, as Lloyd’s left hand felt his right shoulder where Tom had pressed it.

“Tom, just…just look at it, will you?”

Tom flipped the folder open, glanced at its contents, looked back at Lloyd. Then he went over to Lloyd’s desk and spread open the four sheets of paper that he had found in the folder: Lloyd’s schematics of their model railroad. Not the roughs, but fair copies painstakingly executed in four-color draftsmanship, using the tools in the garage.

“Here’s the layout, I see,” said Tom, after a long while, staring down at the drawings. “The serious town and the crazy town.” The Tom and the Lloyd of it. “And this?”

Joining Tom at the desk, Lloyd said, “Yes, that’s the trestle bridge I told you about. I measured the elevation in inches and it…see, it rises from the southeast on a trunk line and tunnels through the mountain…here…to join the main line in the northwest. See how the bridge runs directly over another line, northeast to southwest?”

Looking at one of the town plans, Tom noted, “Bank. Grocery. Wait…a bike rental?”

“Well, it’s small. To save space.”

“Took time to do all this, I bet.”

Opening one of the desk drawers, Lloyd hauled out a stack of roughs nearly an inch high. Tom had a look at them, too, comparing them to the fair copies, nodding here and there and grunting once in agreement with something or other.

“Tom feels betrayed by his buddy,” said Lloyd, “only to discover that he has actually been extravagantly reaffirmed.”

Now Tom was inspecting the town and bridge plans next to the full layout plan, noting where tiny details in the main blueprint enjoyed specifications in the smaller ones, coded to size and material through orange and brown ink.

“It isn’t fun when anyone is mad at you,” said Lloyd. “But when I’m getting madded at by such a handsome guy, it’s really hard to bear.”

Tom looked at Lloyd. “What’s handsome got to do with it, for hell sakes?”

“Everything.”

Tom dug into a pocket of his trousers.

“Here,” he said, handing Lloyd his watch back.

“Boy, I’ll be hearing plenty about you tomorrow from the guys,” said Lloyd, fastening his watch on his left wrist. “I mean, if I give them access.”

Still immersed in the plan for the crazy town, Tom nevertheless asked, “You think the blonde liked me? You know the one I mean.”

“That’s
Annamarie. She wants to fuck you.”