The Passionate Attention of an Interesting Man (2 page)

“You’ll have to come to the next pool party,” Portia told Lloyd. “A sophisticate
so
raises the tone.”

She took Lloyd’s hand in hers, massaging the separations between the fingers.

“I love a sophisticated man,” she explained.

“Whoa, there,” said Clark. “Because he’s older? I’ll be sophisticated, too, at that age.”

No one knew Lloyd’s age, or anything else about him, because he was an orphan. A foundling in fact. He seldom brought it up, because it made nice people feel awkward and devious people wary, as if being an orphan was a con, a setup before you hit them for a loan. Lloyd himself was an opportunist, but an open one, too breezy of style to trouble to connive. Early on, he took a wife because she ran a very profitable business manufacturing children’s clothes, and she accepted Lloyd because he was broke but entertaining. She agreed to support him while he assembled credits in the “looks” professions—as actor, television personality, model. He did some local work, hosted idiotic events (there was actually a Miss Steak contest), and wrote. Then his wife’s brother suddenly turned up.

She had never mentioned him before, and Lloyd asked her why.

“Oh, Jack is so…you know” is all she said.

She could have said a lot more, for Jack was a questionable item. He conversed exclusively in conspiracy theory—not just who killed the Kennedys but who was protecting the interplanetary alien population. Worse, he clonked in and out of the house throughout the night on unnamed errands. Finally, Lloyd came home unexpectedly to hear his wife and Jack making jubilant love.

Lloyd packed and fled; he never heard from or about his wife again. Broke and entertaining once more, Lloyd oddjobbed around, trying to put his intelligence to work as a fulltime writer. It’s an easy life, at least, once you catch on with a readership. But Lloyd found it hard to break in. He kept moving and starting up again, as one sometimes has to. He wore a moustache for a time, but it ages you. He tried dating rich gay men, but the sex was irritating.

And now, in the latest new town, Lloyd had finally found work that matched his skills: as movie critic, copyeditor, and, mainly, features writer for the daily. He was not only prominent but solvent—and, as long as he didn’t have to run a car, the salary floated him. He was hunting for a place to live within a bike ride of everywhere he needed to go, including the North Side,
where the rich kids held their recurring pool parties in Portia’s family’s house. It was an indoor pool, a big one, heated in winter, because the doctor told Portia’s father that he had a choice: swim laps each day, every day of the year, or die quite soon.

Portia’s father was wealthy enough to tear off a wing of his home and erect a vast pool house in its place. Folks said, “Golly!” and he just shrugged. There were swimming pools at Junior’s and
Annamarie’s, but these were backyard affairs. Just as Mrs. Astor’s ballroom of the four hundred made her the sovereign of New York society all those chronicles ago, “Portia’s pool” gave Portia an uncontested social regime. She ruled with a light touch. It was the boys, Lloyd suspected, who decreed who was to be included and who left out. They called it
uninstalling
. The pool parties busied these kids two or three nights a week, and there was always a guest list. One dropped in at peril of hostile rebuff, especially from Clark.

“Let’s uninstall Hardin
Wensley for a bit,” Clark would say. “I’m cooling on him.”

“Yes!” Junior would agree. Then he’d say, “Why?” Junior loved to stand with Clark when he wasn’t standing against him.

“Why?” Annamarie echoed.

Clark replied, “He’s so corny is why.”

“He’s corny,” Junior told Annamarie, as if translating from a foreign tongue.

There were servants at Portia’s pool parties, but no chaperones, much less parents—no grownups with authority. Portia’s father had laid down strict rules, all the same, such as a ban on cell phones. He said they made kids stupid, encouraging them to talk when they had nothing to say. Besides, important people don’t answer ringing phones. They are given messages, some of which they do not respond to.

Lloyd and his readers found every tidbit of the story interesting, with its blend of youth and money. Yet these kids had no content in any real sense; they offered a kind of pointlessly meaningful lesson in how to make the most of endless summer leisure. If they were special at all, it was for the stylish way in which they wasted time. After an hour of splashing around in the water, Clark would climb out and ooze his way around the pool like a stripper. Junior, acolyte and rival, would perform his robot dance. Then it was time for a pizza snack: cook would appear, and Portia would order by describing her mood. “Up too late and seen it all,” she would say. “Needing to be soothed.” Cook would nod and make—from scratch—paper-thin slices with mushroom and basil. Or Portia would say, “Adventurous,” and the gang would get the works. Do you, too, want to live like this? was the question that Lloyd’s columns seemed to ask his readers. Would you happy in Portia’s world?

Would Lloyd?

And here’s an arresting surprise: these all but unsupervised young people had no contact with drugs of pleasure or with those who did. Names would come up: of kids who got into coke and stole from their friends and weren’t allowed at Portia’s any more. Clark would run a finger across his throat, and Junior would cry, “It was bound to happen!” as though drugging, thievery, and social ruin were sins that came as a set.

In fact, these kids had a puritanical streak about almost every indulgence except sex. Lloyd discovered this at his very first pool party, when he entered the bathroom to find Junior’s swimsuit around his ankles and Portia sucking his cock. Backing out as suavely as possible, Lloyd brushed against
Annamarie, who gently pushed him back into the room with a pianissimo “Am I late for the contest?” Then she pulled Lloyd’s Speedos down to make a twin with Portia.

It was Lloyd’s theory that most women sucked you off as incompetently as possible in the hope that you would never ask for a repeat. In sex—according to Lloyd—women liked one act only:  having a marriage license. They seemed not to enjoy sex but rather to tolerate it in trade for certain privileges, such as childbirth and knowing the exact location of their husband second by second.

Portia and Annamarie, then, were rare women, avid for sex and extremely good at it. In the progressive—or simply absentee—atmosphere that Portia’s parents created, there might be strictures about cell phones but not, apparently, about physical contact. Yet how fastidiously Annamarie slipped a non-lubricated condom onto Lloyd’s member—from where? he wondered—before she began. These kids had all the flaws of youth except recklessness. They really were golden: healthy and handsome and free of danger.

And now Lloyd was giving them the fame of the county in his columns even as readers pestered the paper for more. E-mail commentary tripled, subscriptions jumped, professional loudmouths hectored the subject from pulpit and cable talk-show set. Lloyd himself began to entertain a crazy dream: either of the two girls—but preferably the auburn Portia—would fall for Lloyd, marry him, and save him from the vexatious day-to-day of slogging through life on the material expectations of an orphan.

Lloyd knew it was crazy. Girls of Portia’s status didn’t marry men of unknown origin. Lloyd couldn’t even say whether or not he was single: he had escaped but never actually dissolved his early marriage.

Yet Portia—and
Annamarie, and a few of the others of their coterie—unmistakably found Lloyd attractive. He knew how that worked. Anyway, by the standards of the region Lloyd was a hotshot, so full of ideas and observations that he charmed almost everyone. He was careful to do this in a soft way, in order not to alarm or provoke. He never got into politics or religion—so often the same thing these days. And he never risked looking like a showboater. When Portia and Annamarie held one of their blowjob contests and, after sampling the contestants, declared Lloyd the winner, he never preened but rather let his features go blank, an ideal way to receive Clark’s “Fierce, bro!”

And Lloyd knew how to avoid being drawn into the kids’ favorite sport, bickering. When Portia would prefer Lloyd to Clark on some pretext—as Portia loved to do—Lloyd would contrive to look skinny and futile, no man’s rival. Indeed, Lloyd would look on uninvolved as Portia and Clark merrily bayed at each other, to the play-by-play critique and footnoting of
Annamarie and Junior. This would usually break out at about eleven-thirty of an evening, after the rest of the crowd had departed and Lloyd was alone with the central quartet.

“Really, Clark,” goes Portia. “With your squalid blandishments and historically suspect family oil revenues!”

“What suspect?” Clark will ask.

Portia quotes: “‘Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.’”

“Look who’s talking! Miss Oil Money of the Year!”

“Portia is way collegiate, Clark” comes from
Annamarie, though you could never tell whether she was serious or riffing. “She commands fantastic wisdom, and—no! You cut out that silly swimsuit dance! Junior, make Clark stop!”

“Stop, Clark,” says Junior, looking as if he’d like to fall into Clark’s arms. After a moment, as Clark does not stop, Junior joins him, trying to imitate Clark’s moves.

“These hopeless local beaux,” Portia remarks.

“What do you expect,”
Annamarie laments, “when you invite the neighborhood?”

“At least we can count on our suave
cosmo role-model,” says Portia, beaming at Lloyd.

Dancing past them, Clark says, “I’m suave for my years.”

“You?” cries Portia. “You’re rough as nails!”

“I’m suave, too,” Junior puts in.

“I have the edge,” says Clark, “because I’m a love entrepreneur.” He stops dancing, and Junior stops, too.

Fetching his pad and pen, Lloyd asks Clark if he can quote him in a column.

“It was bound to happen!” Junior cries.

“Quote me?” Clark replies to Lloyd. “I love that concept, dude.”

It was Lloyd’s self-defensive flattery, a way of pacifying the anger of strangers before they got angry: tell them they sound interesting.

The advertisement, in Lloyd’s own paper, was brusque and concise:

Housemate wanted.

Own bedroom, bath.

Landlord on premises. Rules apply.

Smokers no way.

Rent is low if I like you.

The address was attractive, across the road from the very mall that Lloyd had started his columns on, with the salad bar and the refurbished gym. The area was fifteen minutes from Portia’s by bicycle, an older part of town that was half middle-class domestic and half parvenu slick: old two-storeys with cluttered garages surprised by apartment complexes and trendy leisure shops.

The landlord, on the phone, spoke with the voice of his ad, tough and plain and maybe a bit old-fashioned, as befits a guy who places his messages in newsprint instead of on Craigslist
. Lloyd arranged to look at the room in three days, on the following Saturday, but first he decided to bike over to scout the quartier.

It was a perfect fit. The house in question looked trim and happy: a ranch-style with what appeared to be an extension built for extra bedrooms when the kids arrived, perhaps some time in the late 1980s. Revisiting the mall across the way, Lloyd noted with pleasure a laundry, a Starbucks, a vast grocery outlet, and a pharmacy (all very handy when you’re going carless) along with the gym and food shop. Lloyd took an early lunch there, before it got too jammed, and once again he was amused at the etiquette of the buffet, as the veteran gourmets swooped down on their platters of fashion while
newbies stared at a bill of fare too dense for their modest sense of free will. Lloyd watched them study how the other diners did it, and “I’ll Have What They’re Having” became his next piece, this one made of interviews with the customers. Pedalling home with his notes, Lloyd outlined, wrote, and clicked the column off to his editor for a next-day printing. Twenty-four hours later, the eatery tripled its business.

Then came Saturday, the day of Lloyd’s appointment with the house guy. Lloyd biked over early so he’d have time to get off the wheels, sweat out the exertion, handkerchief himself dry, and look good for the landlord. A big blond high-
schooler pulled the door open, inspecting Lloyd and offering a handshake that smarted for minutes. Then he beckoned Lloyd inside with a blunt gesture.

He was not a teenager, it turned out, but the landlord himself, twenty-something and massive, the muscles of his upper torso aggressive in a white T over light-blue jeans and yellow
Timberlands. How does the Danish lookout phrase it in
Beowulf
? “Never before have I beheld a greater warrior on earth.” He wasn’t much of a talker, though. He asked questions about Lloyd’s work and finances, but he kept his opinions to himself.

He didn’t offer much biography, either. Nor did he say what line of work he was in, although, young as he was, he did own the home outright, having inherited it from his father. And he admitted this much: his dad had held down a respectable job and raised four kids by himself. “Because life isn’t fair,” the young man explained, “and my mom died young.”