The Passionate Attention of an Interesting Man (6 page)

“For instance,” Lloyd continued, “Americans say ‘car’ or ‘truck.’ But you say ‘vehicle,’ as in ‘Step away from the...’ Or when you warned me not to ride with my friends and get arrested. Who would think of that but a cop?”

Tom was mulling it over.

“Besides,” Lloyd concluded, “you know how you love donuts and coffee.”

Tom didn’t react, so Lloyd tried this: he placed his right hand on Tom’s left shoulder, patted the muscle, and then said, “You can trust me, Tom.”

Tom nodded slightly.

“Log line,” Lloyd announced. “Cool, take-charge action hero opens a room of his house to a lively stranger, only to discover that opening up has its risks.”

Tom turned, walked to his closet, and pulled back the door, revealing three tour suits and one more elaborate one, presumably the dress uniform.

“I thought you’d been snooping,” Tom explained. “You saw this stuff and that was how you know.”

Lloyd was stunned. “Tom, I would
never
do that to you! Snooping is…It’s…But why didn’t you just tell me you were a cop?”

“It’s a sensitive issue. ‘Cause civilians don’t understand what it’s about, and they are apt to speak scornfully.”

Shutting the closet door, Tom went on, “My daddy was a cop. He raised four kids with encouragement for us, though he knew that kids are reckless by nature and yearned to punish the disobedience out of us. He was too rough on my sisters, I admit. But my brother and I could take it.”

“What would he do?”

“It’d be too extreme to talk of nowadays in our society of whiners. Going to show you something now.”

Tom led Lloyd through the house to the place that was always barred: his father’s old bedroom. Pausing just slightly in his thoughts, Tom then pushed in, taking Lloyd along with a hand on his arm.

The room was a double of Tom’s—the father of it, one might say. There was the same bureau and (empty) water jug, the same bedclothes, the same desk piled with books. Even the closet, when Tom opened it up to Lloyd, held the same uniforms.

“I’m as strict as my daddy was,” said Tom, turning to Lloyd as he gently shut the closet door. “Or I will be, when I have kids in tow. I know how to correct the wildness, ‘cause if you don’t they’ll end in trouble good.”

As he spoke, Tom moved slowly about the room, occasionally stopping to feel the surfaces and corners of its parts.

“You’ve heard me joke about my old pal Jake and his radical methods with a guy he likes. He needs a challenge from certain young
fellas. Wild ones, like. Takes them up like one of your fad hobbies, old Jake, to see how effective his disciplines will be on the different types. The secret thief. Or the jock, full of his sarcasms. Rowdy characters, to be sure.”

Looking over the books on the desk, Lloyd said, “Tom, I will not let you shock me with your crazy stories. I don’t think any of them are even…
Tom
! Here, these…these are…” Excited, Lloyd picked up one, a second, a third. “They’re your model railroading books!
This
is where you keep them? In your father’s room? But it was he who wouldn’t let you build a train set. Right?”

Tom didn’t say anything.

“Why are they here, Tom?”

“I don’t know,” Tom replied: and he really didn’t. Sitting on the bed, he motioned for Lloyd to join him, and, as Lloyd sat, Tom said, “My brother and I wanted a layout so much. It was the only time my daddy let us down, though I understand it now. And here’s you, with no daddy, in the orphanage. Yet you had a model railroad just the same. So who of us came out ahead?”

Lloyd kept it light and conversational: “Did you see the clip on television about the soldier who came home on leave from Iraq and dropped in on his little boy at school as a surprise? The boy was five or six, there in class with his schoolmates. He looks up and…there is his father. In full uniform, this is, and they haven’t seen each other in who knows how long. That’s an epoch to someone so young. And daddy’s right there, out of…magic, standing there in his…costume of valor, you might say. Smiling at his little boy. Who doesn’t smile back, or say anything, but just…goes straight to his dad. Right up to him with a…helpless joy. A kind of grownup resolve. And that soldier dad scoops him up in his arms so the boy can hold on to his protector. Just hold on to him there. It’s all that little boy knows about at that moment—his love for his dad and his certainty that his dad loves him just as much. That very much, right there. That much.”

After a bit, Tom asked, “What did the soldier look like? Dressed for war? Tough about it? A tall guy?”

“You know, I didn’t see him, really. I mean, he was there, but I…I got mesmerized by the intensity of the little boy. To be so
sure
of someone. So close to him. Father James used to visit us every night at lights out, going from bed to bed and asking about our day. Like, you know, How is the music coming along, or Sister says you’re making great progress. He meant well, but he really couldn’t tell us apart. He’d ask how my garden was doing. We’ll all be so grateful for those vegetables. But, no, Father, it’s
Lonnie’s
garden, and, besides, we all make fun of him, because guys don’t have gardens. And you, John Mary, did you finish your scrapbook on those movie stars? And we were like, That isn’t even Lonnie.
What
scrapbook?”

Lloyd stopped there, and Tom told him, very gently, “You’ve got no kick coming. They took care of you, at least. Some real-life parents don’t do that. I see it every day on the job.”

“I’m not kicking, Tom.”

“Good, then.”

They sat there for a while after that, watching the sun move shadows through the room as it set for the day.

Summer was ending, and for the
Portias it was off to being either Adults With Career Plans or Rich Wastrels.

“Can you picture Clark filling out his résumé?”
Annamarie asked the gang as they picked at a vast platter of tacos and toppings.

Clark pictured it: “Education: expensive but worthless. Job: vampire.”

“Now me,” said Junior. “Job: paid escort to the stars.”

It was one of the most crowded parties Lloyd had ever been to at Portia’s, with many guests he had never seen before. There were odd people, plain people, even old people: not a strictly Portia crowd. Lloyd wondered if, somehow or other, Portia’s parents had been permitted to fold their personal guest list into Portia’s; he kept having to be introduced to people with last names.

And then a total stranger got up in Lloyd’s face, in one of those “That’s right, I’m just going to do this you” actions. This man managed to be both effeminate and nondescript (a type, Lloyd had learned long before, that always meant trouble), and he materialized out of nowhere to push himself on Lloyd with “Yes, you’re the one who lives with that
magnificent
policeman!”

“I am?” said Lloyd, with a bland smile. He maintained a quota on conversations with troublemakers—zero for life—and he immediately started to amble off.

“Don’t you high-hat
me
, Miss Cute!” the man snarled, following Lloyd.

Lloyd continued to move away, his smile as fixed as a bayonet, so the man grabbed his arm.

“Scared of what you’ll hear, Dewdrop?” he murmured, right into Lloyd’s ear. “I have the address and attention of everyone who matters in this town.”

It was a remark designed to stop you, turn you back to hear more. A movie line, you might say: forcing the scene to continue. But Lloyd kept traveling. He caught sight of Junior all alone by the pool house and made him his goal as the man now started shouting behind Lloyd’s back.

“Wait till the other cops find out you’re boy friends! How they do love a queer romance!”

And Junior, grinning for scandal as Lloyd reached him, said, “What was that about, dude?”

Lloyd shrugged. “Who is that, anyway?”

“We call him Realtor Guy. He does the screenings for Portia’s dad’s buildings.”

“Nasty character,” Lloyd remarked.

“He never stays long.”

Whoever he was, he didn’t approach Lloyd again. It was easy to get lost in the crowd tonight—but Clark, that gleeful showboater, commanded the room with a spot of exhibition dancing, his swimsuit sagging below the decency level.

“It’s a contest!” he announced, though as usual no one troubled to establish any rules. Most of the younger guests took part, including Lloyd; somebody’s uncle was the judge. Junior won, and was quite agog. He even forgot to say, “It was bound to happen.”

Then Portia led Lloyd away from the others with a proprietary, confidential air. “Daddy just loves that you made Clark lose the camera,” she told him. “Looking out for the sanctity of the homestead.”

Amused, Lloyd said, “You told him about that?”

“Daddy’s favorite tells Daddy everything,” she replied, pulling Lloyd into the side room she used for sex. “There are no secrets from Daddy, and that is how he keeps his love close.”

“I like secrets,” said Lloyd, as she pulled off his Speedos. “They keep relationships pure. You and I have a very pure relationship, wouldn’t you say? Portia?”

She was getting out that rich brand of condom, waiting as he worked himself up for her. She wasn’t listening. Through the door, he could hear the party getting livelier, drunker.

“I would like to do a column about you, Portia,” he said, as she got her mouth on him for a long slow catch right to the base, looking up at his face all the while. A champ at this.

“Just on you, Portia,” he went on. “Would you like that? A…kind of…yes, salute to…a young woman of, I would say, great, great—”

“Don’t be tiresome, Lloyd,” she said, interrupting her incantatory navigations. “There’s nothing less fascinating than a summer toy at the end of the summer.”

Biking home well in advance of curfew, Lloyd went right into his room and booted up to knock off the outline for the novel he was always threatening to write. Maybe one about an orphan from nowhere who cracks a loop of moneyed don’tcares in a midwestern city. A summer toy. And this novel will be called
The Rules
: because he breaks them all and wins the girl and is respected and beloved and his novel makes a fortune. For once in his uneventful life. He passes a tart inspection by the girl’s derisive mother—a great scene!—to thrive as favored son-in-law, decisive and strong. No
equipment
at the pool, you hear? Camera, begone! No evidence, you see. Fly lightly through the world. And as time goes on the summer toy turns into a don’tcare himself, even as he fears the dark and the future.

“See, you’re right where you should be at this hour,” said Tom, looking in at the doorway, nude as usual. “Compliance,” he added. “Respect for others.”

“Tom, you are always joking in such weird ways.”

“Not joking now,” said Tom, and he went off down the hall.

No, wait, I have something here, Lloyd thought, developing his outline with picturesque incidentals. Writing all those columns taught Lloyd to give the reader the necessary data. When, where, who, and what does everyone look like? Young and pretty? And when are they lying? When aren’t they? Are they even real? It’s a dream, isn’t it? all that money and easy living and you at the edge of it, staring at the inside, tranquilizing worries with a fantasy. Father James told us orphans are chosen by God, to test the bounds of human compassion. Too bad we don’t test the bounds of social class. You know what class you are? You’re a tiresome summer toy who thought looks and charm would whisk you past the door guy. Cinderello makes a hit at the ball only to discover that Lloyd was weeping uncontrollably, even sobbing in great tortured helpings of surrender to the same old nameless fears, staring at himself in the mirror mounted along the top of the bureau, wiping his eyes with his sleeve. It was bound to happen: mapping around from job to job, four years short of forty, and you just aren’t going to make it ever, are you? Then he sees the reflection of Tom, staring at him from the doorway.

“What’s the matter?” asked Tom, in his brusque way, the nervy cock swinging as he comes closer, curious. Lloyd’s reddened face in the glass, too, wet sleeve, messed hair, reddened face. A little breakdown.

“I thought you’d gone to bed,” Lloyd got out, as he turned to face Tom.

“Let’s go,” Tom ordered, taking hold of Lloyd’s right arm.

“Don’t arrest me,” said Lloyd. Was that a jest?

Tom guided Lloyd through the house to Tom’s bathroom, washed Lloyd’s face and made him brush his teeth, then took Lloyd into the bedroom.

“Get stripped,” Tom told him. “Don’t like the feel of clothes in bed.”

“I’m thirsty.” Stalling, Lloyd?

Tom poured Lloyd a glass of water from his night jug. As Lloyd drank, Tom said, “F’you’re like this tonight, what’ll you be like at Christmas?”

Handing the glass back to Tom, Lloyd pulled off his clothes, saying, “Christmas isn’t the problem.”

“Scoot on in,” said Tom, pulling back the bedclothes. “You’ll be next to the wall.”

Tossing Lloyd a spare pillow from the closet and switching off the light, Tom joined Lloyd in bed and evened the covers over the two of them. Then, settling in, he said, “Okay. Want to tell me now?”