The Passionate Attention of an Interesting Man (3 page)

And then, towering over Lloyd, he went right into what he asked of a housemate and how he viewed the world, “because there are too many freaks and swindlers who never get punished for their crimes.” Then there was a pause. Lloyd filled it in with “You’re awfully young to own, though. A house, I mean.”

That created another pause. In fact, the young man was twenty-four, though he didn’t say so at the time. He didn’t say anything apropos at the time: he was always saying something else or nothing at all. For instance, after another pause, he suddenly told Lloyd that he lived alone and took everything very seriously. It seemed like a line from another scene, even another play. Then he said that he had unbreakable rules that he might as well get into right the way off. ‘Cause there are rules to live by, so he believed. And if anyone says he's wrong, well, he may just have to get rough about it.

His name, he said, was Tom Buckner. “You should know by now,” he added, almost as if challenging Lloyd.

Who simply responded by giving his own name, then suffering another crushing handshake.

Tom Buckner’s house rules were fine with Lloyd, and the house itself was wonderful. The people who had lived in it, Tom’s people, had clearly loved it, kept it working well and looking right—fresh paint, sturdy old furniture, and a faint smell of cleansing pine. The room and bath on offer, reached down a far hall from the day rooms, looked very comfortable. There was even a kitchenette along one wall of the bedroom, with a tiny refrigerator and a toaster oven. Yogurts and toast, Lloyd thought—his favorite midnight snack.

But here’s an odd moment, as the two men walked by the only door in the house that was closed. Lloyd kept on moving, but Tom dallied. It was momentary, like slowing for a speed bump. Nevertheless, Lloyd felt a silent roar of energy in the way Tom said, in these words alone, “My daddy’s room.”

Lloyd thought he might have got Tom’s very limited biography wrong. “He still lives here?”

“He died.”

Before Lloyd could rejoin with the customary regrets, Tom took Lloyd’s arm with the authority of a drill sergeant and steered Lloyd away down the hall with “Show you the garage.”

They traveled through the kitchen to a back door, into an index of middle-class life: tires, storm windows, toys, ages of man. You could almost hear children’s joyous cries, reclaiming
hobbycrafts or hefting shovels to clear away snow.

“So full of stuff now,” said Tom, “that I use the carport, and I couldn’t tell you where another vehicle would go. You drive?”

“I run a bike.”

Tom grunted pleasantly.

Gazing around the garage, Lloyd said, “You have sisters.”

“How would you know that, now?”

“I see two bake ovens. Two art kits.”

“You got it right, anyway.”

Taking hold of one of the drawing sets, Lloyd asked, “May I?”

Tom nodded.

“This was well used,” Lloyd observed as he opened it. “The pieces have seen a lot of work, yet they’re all neatly in place, waiting for…” Lloyd smiled. Gently pulling out a stub of chalk, he added, “Someone was very fond of carmine.”

Tom had moved off a bit, evidently with some purpose.

“My daddy encouraged my sisters to be artistic,” he said, absently. Then, with more intention: “My brother and I would build things. Dad taught us right here.”

He indicated an elaborate tool bay extending behind an old refrigerator and not easily admired till Lloyd walked over to Tom.

The bay was virtually a place of its own, resting in a kind of military formation: a broad worktable, three stools evenly spaced in front of it, a sawhorse, and an astonishing array of software, fanatic and beautiful in their order, their symmetry.

“He showed us here, my dad. My brother and me.”

“Do you still use it?”

“No.”

Tom picked up the sole freestanding piece on the worktable surface, a miniature locomotive and tender sitting on a small section of mounted track. They looked absurdly small in Tom’s monster grasp, and Lloyd felt a pointless twinge of irritation. Yes, all right, you’re a handsome guy, but why do you have to be so darn big about it?

But what Lloyd said, guided by the “G. E. R.” on the tender’s side, was “That’s a Great Eastern, isn’t it? Did you make it from a kit?”

Startled, Tom looked quizzically at Lloyd, then silently handed him the model.

Rather than chance dropping it, Lloyd set it on the worktable, saying, “Ours all came ready-made. Some modelers build their own, though. Amazing, isn’t it?” Lloyd was smiling, affable, sound housemate material. He’d be neat and unobtrusive; you could just tell. “They assemble all those parts and literally fashion their own trains.”

Tom pushed the little model closer to Lloyd: an unreadable but perhaps friendly gesture.

“Did you run a railroad when you were a kid?” Lloyd asked.

“We wanted to. But my dad said it was wasteful. All that work to build it, and then what do you get? A lot of choo-choo, my dad said. He liked us making things we could use.” Then: “You can hold it,” Tom urged Lloyd.

After a moment’s hesitation, Lloyd picked it up, and Tom asked, “What kind of railroad did you run? Did you lay it out yourself?”

“It was given to us, actually. The whole thing, with a mountain and a tunnel and a town. Märklin HO gauge. A beautiful set, though it didn’t have a trainyard. We had to pick out the cars from a box and plop them onto the lines.”

He raised the locomotive and its coal car in the air, holding it between them as if in illustration of something.

“You favor a roundhouse, then?” Tom asked him. “You like the reality of it?”

“Well, but it takes up too much room, I suppose.” Lloyd set the train model back on the worktable. “If I could build my own layout, I’d have to find some original solution.”

“Tell me what you do again, Lloyd.”

Lloyd told him, and Tom suggested they talk business over coffee. But when Tom led Lloyd to the kitchen and got out the instant, Lloyd suggested they take the conversation to the Starbucks across the road.

“Rich people’s coffee,” said Tom.

“We’ll order their coffee of the day. That’s for the
proles.”

“What’s that word?”

“Regular folks. My treat?”

At the coffee bar, Lloyd ran the chat: because otherwise they would have seemed to be meditating, adrift in the silences of Tom. Or Tom would blurt out something way off-topic.

“They’re looking at you,” he suddenly told Lloyd.

“Who?”

“Chicks. My view, nine o’clock and two-thirty. Go ahead and turn, check them out. They like it.”

Instead, Lloyd took a sip of coffee and said, “You don’t suppose maybe they’re wondering about the big Viking sitting across from me?”

Tom took another look at the girls. “One of them’s waving,” he said, waving back.

“Think of all the advantages,” Lloyd went on, “that a man can have—looks, money, intelligence. He could be famous as a local dignitary, or even a rock star of some sort. Or competing on a reality show—famous at the Olive Garden. But say a guy is good-looking and also really big-sized, like you.
Everyone
responds to that, because it’s what any man wants to be and what any woman wants to hook up with. Everywhere you go, you’re tilting the room.”

Tom grinned. “You practicing for more newspaper writings?”

He helped himself to another pause, and now Lloyd was starting to enjoy them.

“This coffee’s nice,” Tom finally said. “It’s deep and crazy. Rich roast.”

“Is one of them cute, at least?” Lloyd asked. “The chicks?”

“They’re all right.”

“Skip it, then.”

Lloyd tried a smile. He had three; this was the emptily engaging one. It was known to charm, but Tom just looked at it.

“Say more about your model layout,” Tom said. “How did it come to you all made?”

“A Quaker family did that thing they sometimes do, when the kids have had enough joy of something and now it has to be shared with the less fortunate. And…brace yourself for the fun part…I’m an orphan.”

Tom thought that over. “Like from the orphanage?”

Lloyd nodded. “See, that’s who Quakers give their toys away to. One day, out of nowhere, it just arrived, and—"

"I’m sorry for your misfortune.”

“No, I’m fine with it. Really. We all start somewhere.”

“It’s supposed to start with a family.”

“Well…yes. But the sisters were very nice to us, and Father James gave us the…moral fiber thing. St. Catherine’s, this was.” Pensively swirling his coffee as if he had said all he ought to, Lloyd suddenly continued with “I kind of liked it, actually. Except when they farmed us out to foster homes. They had to, because of, like,
no
budget. Still, we’d wind up with the worst people. We always ran away, even the girls. Fifty, sixty miles sometimes. Father James would try to be grim about it, but he was secretly glad to see us back.”

Now it was Lloyd who commanded the pause. Then, as if coming out of a trance, he said, “Oh! Sorry. We were
theming trains, weren’t we?”

“No, what did they do to you in those foster homes?” Tom asked. “‘Cause my daddy was strict with us, but he never—"

“They weren’t strict, fosters, they just hated us. They took kids in for the state money, is what.”

“Man, that’s hard on children.”

“It toughened us up, I suppose. It taught us to create our own lives.”

What a liar. Lloyd is fragile and has been dependent on the good will of stronger beings as long as he can remember. Lloyd’s a courtier, an actor.

“My daddy was too severe with my sisters, I always felt,” said Tom. “Girls being of tender disposition. But he was one of your cold-hearted types in general. Efficient about everything. It came with his line of work.”

“What did he do?”

“What I mean, he wasn’t demonstrative.” Taking a swig of his coffee (inundated at the accessories desk with half and half), Tom put in, “Now, I sure do like this coffee. How come I didn’t know about this place?”

Pausing yet again, for what appeared to be an appraising look at Lloyd, Tom decided to go on: “Dad was a loving guy, all the same. He struggled to give us as much as he could afford, and never once did he duck out when we needed him. You will read nowadays on the net about a dude my very age, old enough to vote and marry, and he’s into his credit card for a party in a strip club. ‘Cause he got through college. And the bill was fifty thousand dollars.”

After another gulp of coffee, Tom nodded. “Yes, sir. Fifty whole thousand jokers. His daddy’s protesting the bill, of course. But what for does that kid need a strip club to celebrate college? What kind of education did he get, to end when a slut licks your ear while your buddies make yipping noises? For fifty thousand dollars, you should be scoring Anne Hathaway! What’d
he
get? Cherry Jubilee or some such! Fifty thousand—you ever make that in a
year
? F’I were his daddy, I would surely punish him for his crimes. But some of these modern parents…all shout and no
do
.”

Two couples walked by their table on the way out, and one girl, in a halter top with a tempting bare midriff, gave Tom a lingering eye-fuck. Both men saw it, and with some this can provoke an ego-war sequence. But Tom simply turned back to Lloyd with “I’ve already got a date, name of Lucy. How’s two hundred a month sound?”

“For…Oh, the room.” Now Lloyd paused, just for effect. “In fact—"

“Okay. Make it a hundred.”

Lloyd’s stunned hesitation. Then: “I’ll take it, Tom.”

Lloyd’s first weeks as Tom’s housemate were uneventful in an almost solitary way, as Tom spent most of his weekend with Lucy and was out each weekday on his day job, topping this with a two-hour gym addiction. By the time he got home with his brown bag of a dinner—a sandwich or some diner’s tired old Special of the Day—Lloyd would often have gone off to socialize with “the
Portias” or whatever other merry group he was cultivating. Lloyd is socially nimble and on the make.

Tom’s house rules were entirely about security. No friends over at any time, no giving out of the address over the internet—“Smart guys get a P. O. box,” said Tom—and a strict curfew of twelve o’clock midnight. As Tom explained it, he didn’t want to come out of a heavy sleep at all hours not knowing why he was hearing noises in his house.

“And you don’t need to be stirring,” said Tom. “You have your own fridge and bathroom, and if you lean to be night-thirsty you can set up a water jug and glass in your room, like me. Preparation. Control. And you should know that I don’t like a rebellious housemate.”

“I won’t be rebellious, Tom.”

When they did cross paths, they were companionable enough, and Tom might bring forth one of his books on model railroading and initiate a discussion. Store-bought models or make-your-owns? Weathered facades on the buildings or clean-cut? How many trains to operate? Wiring, geographing, backgrounds, kit-bashing. Tom said he would love to see shots of Lloyd’s old layout, but Lloyd had no photographs of anything. He wasn’t maintaining his past: he was in flight from it.