The Passionate Attention of an Interesting Man (8 page)

BOOK: The Passionate Attention of an Interesting Man
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“Yes,
but
!” she went on. “Because I do have an edge in one respect, and…oh, is this the sauce? In a store jar? After Tom’s praise of this dish, I thought we’d be melting tomatoes all afternoon in mysterious herbs.”

“If it costs over six bucks,” said Lloyd, “it’s as good as homemade.”

“This is my Lucy edge,” she then said. “I don’t crowd him. Like…okay, here: inventing a girl. Let’s call her Sheila. I’ve always hated that name.
Right
, so Sheila texts Tom with ‘I called you seven times last night where were you why didn’t you and the flowers for my mother’s birthday, buster!’”

Lloyd laughed.

“And,” Lucy concluded, “that’s really not the girl for Tom, is it?”

“With that philosophy, I’ll bet you’ll prevail—no, let me”: because Lucy was about to check on her kids again. Lloyd looked out instead. Ella Kate, still working with the LEGOs, had moved into the living room and Evan was napping in Tom’s arms.

“They’re fine,” said Lloyd, coming back.

“Speaking of all that,” said Lucy, taking two smallish wicker baskets out of the typical children’s things bag, “how’s
your
romantic life, if I may ask?”

Lloyd paused.

“Tom says you’re one of those worldly guys. ‘European and classic’ was how he put it. He means ‘classy,’ of course. Still, if you’d rather not…”

“What are those, anyway?” Lloyd asked, looking at the baskets.

“We call them ‘luncheon kits.’ The children can’t do spaghetti, so these are…” Lucy opened one: a sandwich neatly wrapped in see-through, a bag of carrot sticks, a little carton of milk, a box of raisins. “It’s a trick to get them to eat healthy. I assign the sandwich, but they choose the rest, and that makes them feel grownup.”

“They’re delightful kids,” said Lloyd, inspecting the other basket, whose electives were celery sticks, sugarless lemonade, and almonds.

“Well.” She smiled, admitting the obvious. “They’re always at their best on a Tom Day. Their term. I’ve never known anyone who didn’t try to be at their best around Tom. I suspect because his disapproval is so—”

“Where’s the eats?” demanded Jake, abruptly popping in.

Lloyd held up fingers at Lucy.

“Oh, I’m the…translator?” To Jake, she said, “Ten minutes.”

As Jake returned to The Game, Lucy asked Lloyd, “That fast? Really? And is there something unhappy between you and Jake? Because he’s just a big goof, you know.”

Lloyd was sliding the dry spaghetti into the pot. “We’ll broil the fish sticks in that foil pan. And what
is
Tom’s disapproval, exactly?”

“Sheer damnation, trust me. Shall I open the box of…oh, good, no trans fat.”

Then the secret of Lloyd’s sauce: you plopped the cooked macaroni onto a bed of grated cheese, tossing it with olive oil and fresh-cracked peppercorns. But not
too
tossed, so the cheese could melt in clumps.

“Tom likes it crusty,” Lloyd explained.

Showing Lucy how to decorate the dish with the tomato sauce rather than saturate it, Lloyd said, “This way, you get a soupy business with the oil at the bottom. It’s a kind of dessert if you like to bread-dip.”

“Right. It looks wonderful,” said Lucy. “But isn’t this a little like a four-star restaurant offering the blue-plate special? After all, it’s just fish sticks and spaghetti.”

“That’s the point,” Lloyd replied, as he divvied up the meal into plates for the grownups. “It’s basic, but dependable.”

The food was served on those folding television tables that went out of fashion everywhere but the
midwest, where paper napkins are tucked into collars, where nobody mutes the sound during commercial breaks, and where Ella Kate announces, “Evan sometimes puts a carrot in his nose.”

 

 

Much later, when Tom got back from Lucy’s, he complimented Lloyd on making the afternoon “breezy.”

“Are you going to marry Lucy?” Lloyd asked, washing while Tom dried.

“Well, now, buddy, I just might. And I just might not, so there you are.”

“It’s captivating to see you with her. Because you’re so obviously a couple, yet you play it totally cooldown. None of those showboating bits proving your love, where you grab at each other making coo-coo noises.”

Tom snorted.

“Well,” said Lloyd, “some couples really get into that.”

“Don’t need to be in love to get married, though. You need to be in respect. Lucy’s the finest woman I know. Did you like her?”

“Very much. In the old days, she was called ‘a handsome woman.’ Not just for her looks, but her whole way of being. Her ease.”

“You were great with the kids. Hand me that towel, this one’s all…yes, that one.”

“You’re the guy who’s great with kids,” said Lloyd.

“I had a sterling example in my daddy, of course. But I heard a thing about you that I need to ask on right now. From old Jake. The realtor who’s selling Jake’s house for him? Seems he told Jake that you’re looking for a place of your own. All of a sudden. That true?”

“I…
what
? Why is Jake getting involved in—”

“No, hold on, no one’s indicting you yet. Jake’s set to give up his house and take an apartment, though I make it that your house is your family, and I was careful to explain that to my old Jake there. Selling your house is like selling your kinfolk. But would he listen? You’ve stopped washing.”

“Tom, is this another of your jokes?”

Tom looked at Lloyd as if gauging his honesty, an inquisitor reading soul.

“I asked if you were joking,” Lloyd repeated.

“The answer to that is no.”

“Then let’s use our heads, okay? I don’t have the money to move, first of all, and, second, when has Jake ever said anything that makes sense?”

“He’s only reporting what he heard,” said Tom, relinquishing the towel and turning off the faucet. “Since it’s intermission here. But why would the realtor guy invent such a tale?”


What
tale?”

“That you’re looking at places with an eye to move out of this house and leave me in the lurch and didn’t tell me.”


Oh
!” Lloyd cried. “Damn, I know who it is now!”

“Because for you to sneak out on me after—”

“Tom, for gosh sakes! You know me better than that!”

“Does a guy ever know anyone but family, really?”

Lloyd stared at Tom. Then he said, “It was at Portia’s. This realtor, who is a venomous little toad, started getting pushy with me at the pool party, and I fended him off. I stiffed him out, is what. So, for revenge, he’s gone fibbing to Jake. Hoping to create trouble between you and me. And Jake, helpful as always, passes it all straight to you.”

Tom turned the faucet back on, his features unreadable. “Wash,” he ordered.

Lloyd cleaned a dish silently, while Tom thought it over.

Finally, Tom said, “So there’s no underlying crime here? It’s disinformation?”

“It’s evil lies, and you should have known that as soon as you heard them!”

“Mad at me, huh?”

Lloyd took another dish, washing and fuming.

“I can’t investigate in good faith?” Tom asked.

“There’s nothing to investigate!”

“Well, that’s why you look into the matter, to—”

“Tom, sometimes you are too rough with me.”

“Hear about you wandering off to…got to punish you for your crimes, don’t I? So my daddy did, and so will I.”

“All right,” said Lloyd, putting the plate down. “Now it’s time, man, because you have caught me on just the right drink.” Turning to look directly at Tom, Lloyd went on, “What kind of punishment was it, exactly? You tell me here and now.”

Surprised at Lloyd’s intensity, Tom hesitated. Then: “It was just and effective, angry though you are.”

“Well, who
made
me angry?”

“Wash.”


No
.”

“Rebellious as always. You know what I’ll do about that.”

“This again,” Lloyd murmured.

“My daddy knew how to force rebellious kids to behave.”

Lloyd turned off the faucet.

“Would he strike you?” Lloyd asked.

“Worse,” Tom answered. That was all he would say.

In fact, Tom’s father never hurt his children. When very young, they got sharp reprimands, or timeouts fiercely initiated: to frighten rather than to pain. As teens, they got stern and then sterner warnings. And if these didn’t work, Tom’s father would take the culprit in his arms and hold him until he felt ashamed by the might of such disappointed trust.

 

 

Winter blew in, as usual, from the Arctic and Canada, and Lloyd knew he ought to buy a heavy coat. He was short of funds, however, even now that Tom had lowered his rent to one dollar a month. Fearful of slipping into plastic debt, Lloyd tried to pretend that going around in his Ralph Lauren September-light Polo jacket was dashing.

Tom commented on it one Saturday morning over coffee, and Lloyd evaded the subject by asking what Tom was giving Lucy for her birthday.

“A meatball shaper,” said Tom.

“What?”

“So she can make meatballs with your spaghetti recipe. And now, suddenly, the kids like it, too, though they get more spaghetti on their—”

“Tom, you cannot give your girl a meatball shaper for her birthday.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Girls like emotional presents
. Give her the shaper, sure. But on her birthday, you’ve got to address her heart.”

Tom grinned. “Okay, professor. For instance?”

“Have you got a photograph? A nice one?”

“Got a tasty shot of old Jake in his running shorts,” Tom replied, turning the newspaper over. “What a build on a guy, huh?”

“I meant of you and Lucy.”

Tom sat there for a bit, then laughed outright. “Boy, you are easy,” he said.

“Oh. I get it. Another of your crazy jokes. And I fell for it, so—”

“Yeah, but that’s her present? A snapshot?”

“In a beautiful frame accompanied by poetry.”

“Roses are red,” Tom began, “violets—”

“No, Tom. You quote from, like, Byron or Keats. ‘She walks in beauty like the night.’”

“Do what?”

Then Lloyd had an inspiration. “Why don’t you fix her a frame? You must have all the makings in the tool bay. And we can pick up some poetry online.”

Tom always did like making things in his father’s old workshop, so the two of them pulled a photograph from Tom’s souvenir box and took it into the garage, where Tom gathered materials like a high-school genius generating a science project. Metal. Glass. Cutting tools. “You like it plain or peanut?” Tom asked.

“Which means?”

“I can frame it in plain. Steady. Cool. You see this here? A sample.” Tom showed Lloyd. “Or the gold. Fake but shiny.”

“The genuine. Shiny stuff makes a great first impression, but it doesn’t last.”

Tom began then: measuring with a T-square, locking his subject in the vise, judging the cut.

“Gosh, Tom, you really know how this stuff goes.”

Working away in his Irish fisherman’s sweater, Tom said, “It’s cold out here. Where’s your sweater on?”

“Oh, I just…”

“You can wear one of mine.”

“I have sweaters, Tom.”

Tom put down the jigsaw and turned to Lloyd. “Go inside,” he said, “and come back wearing one. Go along, now. You don’t want me getting righteous on you.”

When Lloyd came back, in a navy-blue V-neck, Tom was soldering the frame bottom to one of the sides.

“Lucy will love this, Tom. It’s an honest-to-gosh love present.”

“‘To gosh’?” Tom echoed.

Lloyd shrugged. “Leftover orphanage stuff.”

Watching Tom securing the glass and photo inside the now finished frame, Lloyd said, “With that expertise, I’m amazed you never did raise up your own model railroad.”

Tom said nothing, so Lloyd went on. “We keep talking about doing it, but each time…because you…Still. We could just do it. Just start in and build a table in…” Careful, Lloyd. “In your dad’s room. Now that the…door is open to it. You said so yourself.”

For two minutes after that, Tom buffed the frame before saying, “What gauge would it be?”

“Absolutely HO.”

“I’m almost done here. You…you want to go looking at the trains in The Hardware next?”

“I would
love
that, Tom. I would
love
to look at the trains with you.”

Now Tom handed the framed photograph to Lloyd for inspection: Tom and Lucy happy at some street festival, his arm around her waist and the flicker of a smile at the pleasant absurdity of romance delighting her face.

BOOK: The Passionate Attention of an Interesting Man
8.98Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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