The Passionate Attention of an Interesting Man (7 page)

Abashed, Lloyd buried his face in his pillow and husked out a no.

“Rebellious as ever,” said Tom. “No one gets to sympathize with me,
no
sir!”

There followed a silence, apparently an eloquent one, for Lloyd saw Tom watching him as if listening.

Finally, his voice muffled in the pillow, Lloyd got out, “I’m a flop, Tom.”

“What at?”

Changing the subject, Lloyd asked, “How come you always finish off the day here? Why do you never sleep over with Lucy?”

“Don’t like to rest in someone else’s bed.”

“Wouldn’t she like you to stay over?”

“Course. All women like you to stay over.”

“Are you going to marry her, Tom?”

“Wasn’t this about you, pal?”

After a bit, Lloyd said, “Yes, Tom. Except.” And left it at that.

“Something else,” said Tom. “Would you be willing to teach Lucy your recipe for that dinner with the fish sticks and spaghetti? Her sauce isn’t the way I like.”

“Sure, Tom.”

“Thought I’d have her over next time my old Jake’s here for a game. She doesn’t care for his ways any more than you do, but he’s my oldest buddy, so everyone can just get used to him. And meanwhile, you could make that dish while Lucy watches.”

Turning around to face the world again, Lloyd said, “I’d be glad to. I’d like to meet her.”

“You going to tell me a secret? Why do you still always agree when I ask for something? After all this time! You aren’t hardly rebellious at all is the truth. Lucy, too. But everyone else gives me arguments all the day long, whether they’re on my side or no. Right. And now, buddy boy…” Shifting his weight to look hard at Lloyd, Tom asked, “You going to trust me enough to say why you were losing it in your room before?”

“I don’t want to, Tom.”

“Well, anyway…Been thinking about this a bit.” Tom rested his hand on Lloyd’s head, waggled it a bit, then said, “What would you say to setting up our own model railroad? One of those fancy layouts, with all the things we’ve talked about.”

Lloyd abruptly turned to Tom, grasping his hand as he took it off Lloyd’s head. “I would
love
that, Tom! We could build a table and start constructing the thing step by step! I bet we could have a start-up oval, the first bits of a town, and a mountain and tunnel in days!”

In the light from the hallway, Lloyd could see silent Tom grinning.

“Although,” Lloyd went on, “where would we put it? That empty room by the back door? What do you call that?”

“That’s the porch. Or it was going to be, for summer afternoons with lemonade and children’s funny little questions when they try to get smarter. It was my daddy’s project, but he was always too busy, and then…”

Silence.

“Couldn’t build a train set there, anyway. The carpet throws up tiny textile germs, get into the wheels and track lines. Jam the whole system up.”

Another silence. Lloyd coughed.

“Tell you what—I’ve been thinking of opening up my daddy’s room. He liked a solid wood floor, without a frill, as you
maybe noticed. We could move the furniture out and build the table there. Guess it’s time, anyway. Finally.”

“Wow.”

“You’ve probably noticed that big department store downtown, quick by City Hall. With the turret, like a castle? It’s an official landmark, makes us all proud and teary-eyed. O’Connor and Deal’s Hardware and Trade. Been there forever with that lovely title. Folks just call it ‘The Hardware.’ Well, sir, that is the place in all the territory for model railroading—parts, kits, a whole section just on locomotives. They even hire out a specialist to advise you if you have wiring problems or the like. Least, they used to. One of the last places of the kind, I believe. We could take a look at what they’ve got, make some plans. Organization. Discussion. When I was a kid, we called it ‘looking at the trains in The Hardware.’ My daddy would take us, though he disapproved. He knew how hungry we were to know of it.”

“Tom,” said Lloyd, “you must be one amazing cop.”

“The hell you say,” answered Tom, agreeably.

They fell silent again, and then they went to sleep.

From that night on, Lloyd and Tom bunked next to each other in Tom’s bed: chaste as icons on a desktop but close, close. Lloyd continued to excite commentary from the Portias when, about half after eleven o’clock, he would take leave of them to bike home for his curfew.

So the summer toy was still playing with the rich kids. He shouldn’t have been; where is his pride? But he found them charming, irresistibly so. He liked the swimming and the food. He liked feeling that he had found a niche among the young and beautiful: an orphan finds a niche but seldom in this world. Then, too, knowing a variety of people gives one writing material. But Lloyd was always glad to get back to his own address, to the look of amused suspicion on Tom’s face when Lloyd walked in and “What misdemeanors did you and those friends get into tonight?” The two would take turns brushing their teeth in the mirror of Tom’s bathroom, and Tom would tease Lloyd. “If Jake was here,” he might say, “I guess he would know just what to do with a certain handsome fellow I know.”

And Lloyd would reply, “Tom, not again!”

“Jake’s a devil,” Tom chuckles, taking the toothbrush from Lloyd and washing it for him, because he says Lloyd doesn’t do a thorough job, and you don’t want any fleas getting into the bristles.

“A devil?” Lloyd echoed. “Jake’s a demented clown whom you defend simply because you went to Sunday school together.” Moving into the bedroom. “Or whatever it was.”

“Jake’s a solid man,” says Tom, pulling down the bedcovers. “Those in trouble can turn to the Jakes of this world, and no others.”

“I wouldn’t turn to Jake,” says Lloyd, sliding over to the wall side of the bed.

And Tom says, “You’re going to turn to me.”

Lloyd was in his room writing his next column for the paper when Lucy and her kids arrived. The column, another look at courtship rituals in Lloyd’s gym, was going too well for him to break off, though he would have liked to collect the moment when Tom greeted his girl. Gruffly affectionate? Deeply enamored? A fleeting kiss and a grin, romance in business casual?

When Lloyd finally came out, six-year-old Ella Kate and four-year-old Evan were following Tom around to tell him things. It was clearly their habit whenever they saw Tom, and he just as clearly enjoyed giving them attention. Interestingly, he didn’t adopt the distant yes-yes grownup response to children, but actually listened to them. He even drew them out, no matter what the topic. When Evan described a dream he had, Tom gave him so much ego-gratification dialogue on it that Evan immediately began to tell of another dream.

“He’s making it up!” Ella Kate cried. She wasn’t resentful: she just liked announcing things.

Immediately after the introductions, Lloyd palmed a quarter and extended both fists to Ella Kate. Manipulating the coin from hand to hand, he then told her, “Guess where it is and it’s yours.”

She guessed wrong.

“How about you, young man?” Lloyd asked Evan, an avid witness to all this.

Evan guessed wrong, too.

Tom and Lucy were looking on.

“There’s a trick to it.” Lloyd showed them: “First, you juggle it back and forth, very obviously. See? Then you appear to make a final transfer…and…watch how I push my left fist against my right while opening my right hand up. See that? And I’m staring down at my right fist as if accidentally giving my strategy away. But it’s all a hoax.”

Lloyd opened the empty right fist to show them.

“Now, who wants to try it?”

Then Jake came in with “Those kids again!”

Tom laughed. He thought everything Jake did was the height of drollery, even Jake’s heading right to the living-room couch to watch nonsense on the television (with the volume off), as if trying to will the pre-game to start.

But then Jake had to give up the couch, because Lloyd decided to host
The Ella Kate and Evan Show
, featuring Ella Kate and Evan’s guests, Tom, Lucy, and Jake.

“No way,” Jake growled, glaring from a chair.

“It’s a television talk show!” Ella Kate announced.

“What do we talk about?” asked Evan, who was going to make his broadcast debut still holding his glass of tomato juice.

“The topic is school,” said Lucy.

Ella Kate and Evan settled on the couch, and Ella Kate launched the talk with “First grade can be all so gloomy at times.”

“What’s gloomy about it?” Jake rasped.

“No heckling from the studio audience,” said Lloyd.

“Yeah? Well, then,
you
say how first grade is gloomy!”

“Evan,” Lucy put in, “why don’t you tell us about your school experiences.”

“I go to Gymble,” said Evan, in the tone you use for “I’m getting my bachelor’s degree at Yale University.”

“
Gymble isn’t school,” Ella Kate announced to the studio audience. “All they do is have playtime and get a lot of treats.”

“It is, too, school,” said Evan, getting worried.

“School is where they teach you to read and write. They don’t teach anything at Gymble.”

“Yes, they
did
tell us,” Evan insisted. Then he had to be comforted till it was time for Tom and Jake’s program. Off went the kids to the porch to play with the LEGO bricks that Tom kept for these occasions. Ella Kate announced that she was building “Miss Parsnip’s School for Young Brides.” Evan worked on an airplane. With Tom and Jake parked on the couch in the rapt yet uproarious state in which their kind takes in The Game, Lloyd and Lucy headed into the kitchen so he could show her how to make fish sticks and spaghetti the way Tom liked it.

Now Lucy. Lloyd had greatly wondered what sort of woman could suit the redoubtable Tom, and from the moment Lloyd set eyes on her he was thinking, Of course. Attractive but not in a showy way. Smart. Spirited, too, but soft. A woman with a lot of smiling content but not one to argue over nothing just to test the response. Happy and distinctive. When she disagreed with Tom, she didn’t try to topple him. She simply disagreed.

Portia and Lucy: discuss. Money makes the difference. It has spoiled Portia by freeing her. She’ll never be a single mom with two kids and a day job, like Lucy. Portia doesn’t know how to finesse a budget vexed with hidden costs, such as a dentist emergency or a school field trip. Portia points at what she needs and it is given to her. She can make strategic mistakes without paying for them the rest of her days; she doesn’t pay beyond this Thursday.

But Lucy has a magic: she knows what everything is. Portia’s men are boys who dance in Speedos. Lucy, only a few years older, has found in Tom the ideal nesting partner, because duty, in Tom, creates devotion. Aside from his work, there will be nothing in all the life of Tom but his family, as provider, source of strength, and redeemer.

Lucy said as much to Lloyd as they got the dinner things out. “Tom has his controlling side, of course,” she admitted. “But he’s awesome in the dependable department.”

Washing a lemon, Lloyd answered, “You must have had a father like Tom. Girls who called a good man Daddy want a good man for a husband.”

As Lloyd tossed the lemon in the air juggler-style, Lucy said, “Don’t think they’re easy to come by, either.” Examining the plastic crock of grated parmesan, she asked, “Where do you get this?”

“Across the avenue, at that fancy-Dan mall. The grocery stocks gourmet items, but they’re mixed in with everything else, like a secret message. The fresh stuff is right next to the package brands, but it’s there.”

In the living room, then two men cheered some play as Lucy gave the cheese an inquisitive shake. She nodded at Lloyd: you notice things, my friend. That I respect.

That’s what she was thinking. What she
said
was “Tom is still young. Little more than a boy, really. He seems so certain about everything, but he’s had very little experience in living his life. One moment, as we hold that thought…”

Lucy stepped out of the kitchen to check on her kids. They were still on the porch making their LEGO models.

“Back again,” she went on, returning, while Lloyd set a large pot of water to boil. “My point is that a young man can surprise you. He can swear by his job this year and change it the next. He can light out of the state. He can fall in love.”

“Right, the well-known ‘king of the world’ syndrome. He becomes enriched…empowered…I need another e…enlightened.”

“Well done,” said Lucy, of Lloyd’s nimble wording. And “May I?” she asked, extending a hand to the bottle of olive oil that he pulled out of the pantry.

Lloyd gave it to her.

“The good stuff?” she asked.

“You can’t cheat on the oil,” Lloyd told her. “Even Tom would taste it.”

“Do you think,” Lucy asked, looking at Lloyd meaningfully, “that Tom will…let’s say…undergo that ‘king of the world’ syndrome?”

“I don’t know,” said Lloyd, simply and honestly.