The Passionate Attention of an Interesting Man (4 page)

The two men made it a regular thing to meet on Saturday mornings over coffee, though Lloyd had to persuade Tom to acquire a grinder so he could brew them both the true-bean drink. And Tom declared that donuts dunked into real coffee tasted twice as good.

“You never argue with me,” said Tom on one of these Saturdays. “Everybody else? Non-stop bullshit all the time. Resist me whenever I need something, always some damnhell reason made of nothing. You just say yes. Like I have a new idea about the mail, ‘cause I never know whether I’m seeing it all if you bring it in. So how about from now on just leave it in the mailbox and let me pick it up?”

“Okay,” said Lloyd.

“See?”

“I just don’t like fighting,” Lloyd explained. “Most guys are waging permanent ego war, you know. They press for control. ‘
Give me, give me
.’ And if you dare thwart their will about anything, they turn on you as if you were the enemy.”

“They will be punished for their crimes,” said Tom mildly, as he poured more milk into his coffee. He cultivated a set of key phrases, tirelessly quoting them. “Rebellious” was anyone who blocked his agenda. “Obedient” was high praise. Consideration of others was the rule to live by, and “punishment for their crimes” befell those who broke the rule.

Every serious relationship reaches a tipping point, when it slips from light over into dense: from “friends” to
friends
. For instance: hot day, need water, buddy exits the store with a single large bottle for you to share. It’s a marker. The subject is trust, and trust is everything.

Or this: Tom comes home one evening with a to-go dinner just as Lloyd is sitting down to fish sticks and spaghetti. Tom had scarcely lunched and then got caught up in overtime, and he is now back from the gym ravening like a lion. Stuck with cold anything in a brown bag, Tom gazes upon Lloyd’s old-fashioned hot homemade with the look of one who has somehow managed to hurt his own feelings.

Lloyd, about to squeeze lemon onto the fish, asked, “Do you want my dinner, Tom? I can make myself another in a jiffy.”

Tom knew he should express gratitude and say no. But he was madly hungry and Lloyd’s meal looked irresistible, set out in a curved-bottom wooden bowl with the fish nested beside the pasta in a delicate red-and-yellow sauce.

“Take it,” said Lloyd, as he happily pushed the bowl across the table, then went into the kitchen. It’s a marker.

Tom immediately dug in, calling out, “Could I have seconds while you’re at it?”

So Lloyd made two more servings, and when he gave Tom his second plate (and a hunk of Italian bread), Tom gobbled it up as he had the first.

“You were hungry,” Lloyd observed.

“That’s a tasty recipe,” Tom replied as he scarfed up the last of the sauce with the bread. “After my work and the gym, I don’t always get a square meal.”

“Tom, you never get a square meal. You’re going to fast-food your way through life.”

“Time,” Tom explained. “Convenience.” Then: “You eat slow, the way kids do.”

“Would you like me to make you dinner now and again? Cooking for two is as easy as—”

“Yes, I want that, and why is this sauce so nice?”

“It’s my own invention, where you…Tom, why do you always eat take-out and donuts?”

“Sometimes my girl dinners me, though I’m usually over there way after eating time. Lucy. She can do steak bits in a pie.”

The two agreed that Lloyd would cook their supper three nights a week. Once Tom got home, he would shower and change into shorts and a T to sit at the kitchen table nursing a
Löwenbräu in a ceramic mug with his name on it. Lloyd would play chef, occasionally coming out of the kitchen to trade opinions with Tom over local events.

Tom was easy to cook for: he liked everything. Sometimes Lloyd would fetch chicken cutlets from the hot-food salad bar in the mall across the road, adding crusted rice and a green salad. Or he would platter up the parts of make-your-own BLTs, Tom’s favorite.

“I didn’t know you could order this at home,” Tom would say, chomping into a rickety pileup of eight slices of bacon, three of tomato, and lettuce in passing. “I guess it’s weird, one guy cooking for another. My old pal Jake would score us off as a pair of degenerate characters.”

Lloyd’s BLT was evenly balanced and cut into quarters. This allowed him to wax philosophical.

“Why are so many people,” Lloyd asks, “instinctively hostile to anything they’re not already used to? You mention some new thing and most folks put it down or wave it away.”

“Let me try you on something,” Tom replies. “Are you comfortable with novelties? Don’t you really just like what you’re used to, like everyone else?”

“But surprise is our education. The smarter you get, the younger you stay. Oh, wait—is there a column in that?” Grabbing his pad and pen, Lloyd hastily jots down a few words while expanding on his theme with “And the older you get, Tom, my man…yes…just let me…is the sooner you will go all befuddled…and grouchy about everything…” Note taken, Lloyd snaps back with “Right! You’ve got to maintain your curiosity about things to the end. It’s like exercising a muscle.”

After a swallow of beer from his mug, Tom fixes Lloyd with a wry look and says, “‘Are you comfortable with novelties?’ was a yes or no question, Lloyd, my man.”

Then, one day, Lloyd found tall, stemmed glasses in the garage and made frozen parfaits in them: chocolate and strawberry ice cream, fresh peaches, and nuts on top. There were six, and when Tom found them he ate the set.

“Tom!” cried Lloyd, laughing. “They’re supposed to go one at a time.”

“It’s my house,” Tom answered. He was laughing, too.

Lloyd was fucking Portia in the spare bedroom just off the pool palace. Is this me? he wondered, or is it the latest Australian action-hero hunk scoring a fan in his trailer? Well, Lloyd did call her “My sweet” at one point, with Hollywood tang. Or does she prefer a bit of the rough stuff? Men never know what women want because women don’t know themselves, except in the most abstract way: someone who’ll make them feel the way their father did when they were four
years old, sheltered by his protectiveness and power. The man who can inspire that feeling can have any woman he wants. Or so Lloyd imagines.

He thought he was admirably adroit in getting the condom on, but Portia calmly pulled it off and replaced it with one of her preference, some rich brand. These kids enjoy their wealth even during sex.

She rules through beauty, Lloyd thought fleetingly, as he sought to create something compelling out of the skin-on-skin. Suddenly, she achieved, soundlessly, her head flung back, shaking wildly then abruptly still. She gently pushed him back a bit, but she was not yet done. Pulling the rubber off him with a whispered “But warn me before the flood, dearheart,” she got her mouth on him. It was as if she was using Lloyd to visit where he had been, unbearably close, purest  Portia there—yes, he thought, just like  that—and she let out a little coo as if she could taste the very spot. The thought of it sent him flying straight off the ski jump, kicking in the air, crying, “
Now
, Portia,” and she zipped out of range.

She counted, too, assessing Lloyd with “Seven, my fine fellow of the night. The first four were quite grand, too. Junior dribbles. Clark’s way the most, but he always makes such a commotion.”

Lloyd scarcely heard, panting in his comedown, but he did mark her smiling at him in that fashionable Portia way. The perfect hostess, securing comfort for her guests. Another petit four, Lord Misbegot?

They rested, side by side. The usual. Then she told him, “The final scene is where we get our suits back on, race out, and crash into the pool. That way, we don’t smell of sex.”

“But they must know what—"

She gently laid a finger on his lips. Hush. “It’s good form.” A half-smile. “We keep it light.”

In the event, none of the others said anything to them, though Annamarie came running up to fling herself into the water by Portia’s side. As always, by eleven o’clock or so the outer social loops had given way and gone home, leaving just the two girls, the two boys, and Lloyd.

Playing Truth or Dare, they gave the first question to Clark. He asked Lloyd whom of his own gender he’d have sex with. “I wouldn’t,” Lloyd answered.

Clark insisted. “You have to pick at least one.”

“You should ask me that,” Junior put in. “I have a short list all worked out. First, that smiley Fox News guy with the horn rims. Second—”

“Jennifer Anniston!” said Annamarie.

“And Gwyneth
Paltrow!” said Portia.

“I want to hear from Lloyd,” said Clark, with his mischievous face on. “A movie star? An athlete?”

Lloyd said nothing.

“Come on, Lloyd,” Junior urged him. “
Bisex is the utter mode. Everybody’s doing it!”

“I won’t tell your girl friend,” said Clark, “if you won’t tell mine.”

So saying, Clark jumped up to pull something out from behind one of the chaises longues—a Canon camcorder, total zoom, top of the line. As he hefted it to his shoulder, Lloyd came toward him with “Clark! Take it away!
Now
!”

“Clark, how
dare
you?” cried Annamarie, as Lloyd, with a sense of mission the others had never seen on him before, separated Clark from the camera, telling him, “That thing goes outside or you are a guy in big trouble!”

Portia was shaking her head. “You beast, Clark! Wait till I tell Daddy!”

“Clark hopes to create a lovely video greeting card,” said Clark, as Lloyd escorted him with extreme prejudice down the length of the pool to the coat room, “only to discover that his art is unappreciated. What are you,” he added to Lloyd as they traveled, “a hall monitor? I hear they have them in public schools.”

“Out!”

The other three were on their feet, cheering. “It was bound to happen,” Junior told the girls.

“Daddy always warns me about equipment in the house,” Portia was saying. “That’s how he puts it, but you know Daddy.
Equipment
. He just will not have it, my dears.” To Lloyd, now returning from the coat room and the confiscation of the camera, she added, “Daddy will be so pleased with you, Lloyd.”

Checking his watch, Lloyd said, “I have to go.”

“Not now!”

Lloyd pulled out his second copyrighted smile, the rueful boyish one. In the movie, it prompts someone to tousle your hair.

“Why so early, dude?” asked Junior while Lloyd kissed the girls goodbye.

“It’s not early, and on my bike it’s fifteen minutes door to door.”

“If you wait for the chauffeur run,” said Annamarie, “we’ll drop you first.”

“Charles can get the car out on two minutes’ warning,” Portia added.

They always say that. But then it turns out that Charles may not be on duty that night, or the car is in the shop, and suddenly the world is made of too many incongruent agendas at war with one other.

“I’ve got a brother,” said Lloyd, who could fable his way into or out of virtually anything. “He runs the house and he’s strict with me. It’s a midnight curfew.”

“Yeah, Cinderello!” cried Clark, from across the pool. He hadn’t rejoined the gang after his defeat with the video camera. Sulking. “Better get on your wheels and pedal away, huh?”

If I were to vanish tomorrow, would they even notice? Remember that guy from the paper? Whatever happened to him, anyone?

Tom had a habit of looking in on Lloyd before turning in. Lloyd figured that Tom was checking to see if Lloyd had respected the house rules. In fact, Tom was making sure that Lloyd was safe at home; or Tom would worry. Lloyd doesn’t know this yet.

Most usually, Lloyd would be working at his computer or reading in the armchair when Tom showed up, toweling off after the extra shower he would take just before lights out. He said he loved the feel of a scrubbed-clean body against the sheets. Lloyd wasn’t used to men so blunt about showing skin, and he was amused when Tom would cross the room and stand next to him, looking over Lloyd’s shoulder at the Word screen as if teasing Lloyd with his manhood. Was Tom testing Lloyd in some way? Just joking around on the cutting edge? Or was he simply a natural, innocent of social cautions?

One night, Tom came by after Lloyd had gone to bed, as always leaving the door ajar and the hall light on. Seeing Tom hulking in the doorway, Lloyd sat up and startled him with “Tom, have you ever thought of building a model railroad yourself?”

“That’s a sizable order,” said Tom, coming over to Lloyd. “It’s years of work and a hell of money to spend. All that for a big toy?”

“Okay, Tom.”

“No, wait,” as Tom moved closer. “It’d be the works, sure. Lovely stuff. Nice for Lucy’s kids to see, off at summer camp now just, but you’ll meet them in September. Ella Kate and Evan, sharp little guys. But the time for trains is past. I’m too big.”

“I’m not too old for trains, Tom. And I’m older than you are.”

“Yeah?” said Tom, sitting on the edge of the bed. “How old?”

“I thought we could…well, lay in some lumber and build a table. And then, bit by bit…and you’ve got that beautiful workspace in the garage.”