Lawnboy (22 page)

“I
said
I apologize.”

“Well—” I gazed up at the weather instruments—thermometer, barometer, rainfall gauge—over the desk. “I just hope I never have to see that walleyed shrew ever again.”

I turned. My whole body went cold. There she was, standing before me with shining forehead. A manic smile spiked her face.

“Better go,” I said, then hung up.

She passed her key across the desk.

“How much of that did you hear?” I said, too shocked to be polite.

“I’ve seen just about as much as I need to see, thank you.”

My tongue felt frozen in my mouth. “Is something the matter?”

Her jaw clenched, then relaxed. She seemed oddly relieved, as if I’d delivered what she’d truly wanted. “I said, thank you. I’ll fax your entry by the end of the week.” And with that, she turned and left through the door.

I held onto the edges of the desk, immobilized. My hands were trembling, wet. My toes felt icy inside my socks. Once a few minutes had passed I walked up the stairs to Hector’s room.

“Open up,” I said.

“What’s the matter?”

“I think I really fucked something up.”

The door opened, and he led me to the couch. I was beside myself, mixing things up, halting, recasting my sentences. All the while Hector lounged on his side in a red union suit unbuttoned to his stomach, absently rubbing his crotch, his chest. A lazy, half-smile settled on his face.

“Get over it,” he said finally.

“What?”

“She’s not going to run us out of business, and if Peter wants to believe that, that’s his problem.”

“But he needed this to work out, and I had to open my great big mouth.”

“Listen to yourself,” he said with some irritation.

“What?”

“Why are you so freaked out?”

I exhaled through my nose.

“He should have been working the desk,” he said, “and you know it. Why was he letting Little Miss Travel Editor walk all over you?”

“So—”

“So he could absolve himself of responsibility if something went wrong, okay? I’m tired of watching you running yourself down like that. Here,” he said, flinging something onto my lap. His grin was sly, complicated. “Enough of that horseshit. I’ve been cleaning up. Look what I found.”

A dog-eared magazine lay across my knees. Beneath its title—
Man’s Favorite Sport!
—two dark-haired men, stripped to their waists, lay embracing on an unmade bed, open mouths locked together. In the corner, within a yellow starburst, appeared the words: XXX Rated, Non Violent Explicit Pictorals—Adults Only.

Something frigid pooled inside my stomach.

“Look inside,” he coaxed.

My face flushed with blood. I wouldn’t look at him.

“Come
on.
”

I finally flipped open the magazine. On the first page, the older guy, a big, muscular lug with stubbled jaw, sucked the dick of the younger, a weasly type with tattoos and a ruddy dick. On the next page their roles were reversed. On the next the older, now in a ribbed sleeveless jersey, was crouching on his hands and knees, face to the floor, reaching back for the kid to plow him. The shoot might have taken place in some Long Island motel room, the dark paneling, macrame wall hangings, and leopard bedspread adding a cheesy kind of authenticity to the scene. I imagined a nuclear plant humming across the street, steam billowing out over a glassy bay, a dead fluke floating on its surface.

It wasn’t long before Hector was seated next to me, knee pressing into mine. I didn’t know whether to inch away or to lean my weight into him. I went with the latter. Heat swarmed in my groin. “What were you doing with this?”

He shrugged. “Doesn’t everyone have a little stash?”

My chest hammered. If I were only at ease, I would have enjoyed this. It wasn’t like I’d never looked at this stuff before. But it was different to be looking at it with Hector beside me.

“Now that’s some killer porno.”

He couldn’t have been more casual. He might have been some old man showing off his fishing gear.

“I mean, look—not a pretty boy or a gym rat in the bunch. See that mussed-up hair, that little scab on his back?”

I nodded.

“These new photographers, this slick shit—they would have airbrushed that out. And that’s why the new porno sucks.”

The magazine’s narrative continued. On the fourth spread a skinny young guy in a brown UPS uniform barged in, to the amusement of the two guys on the bed. I paged forward, absolutely immersed. Someone might have been speaking directly into my ear: a murmur, a whisper. And then it occurred to me that the visitor was none other than Hector himself.

I was absolutely speechless.

His knee ground deeper into my leg.

“What the—Oh God!”

“Well,” he said, a little sheepish, flustered. He pressed his fist to his mouth. “Are you surprised?”

I gazed at his torso, the ropy, idiosyncratic dick. That smile—oddly complicated, disarming. His image shivered with life. It was hard to connect the Hector beside me to the Hector in the magazine.

“You never told me about this,” I said finally.

“Yes, I did.”

“Did not. You never said a word.”

He wagged his head. “If you only yanked your head out of the clouds—”

I shouldn’t have been at all surprised. But it did surprise me, and I couldn’t help but wonder why he’d kept it from me. Some things you don’t forget.

It turned out that Hector, twenty years old, had moved out to San Francisco to stay with a trick he’d met on the 21st Street Beach. It didn’t take long to realize that the trick was full of hot air, that he already had a boyfriend, and Hector was out on the streets, with five dollars in his pocket. He’d wandered into a bar in the Tenderloin, where he was approached by a middle-aged man with a pocked face. “I’ll give you a place,” he said, “if you say yes to some pictures. Naked, I mean.” Desperate, he went home with the guy, who, to his astonishment, led him to a room of his own. But the guy had big plans for Hector. Within weeks he was appearing in two videos a week, and was making enough as a hustler to live in North Beach, in his own two-bedroom apartment, with enough hibiscus and bougainvillea to remind him of his mother’s yard in Hialeah.

My left eyelid pulsed. I’d seen him once before, maybe many times. Wasn’t he Al Parker’s partner in the video I’d once watched at the arcade?

I paged ahead, entranced. All that brightness and heat, all those urgings toward—
Come here,
they said.
Come with us.

Hector laughed, testing my vision, moving his palm before my eyes.

Then footsteps down the hall.

“Shit,”
I whispered.

“What’s the matter?”

“Is it Peter? It’s Peter, isn’t it? Shit, fuck.”

We sat in absolute stillness, listening. Coins fell; a soda can knocked, tunneled through the machine. A ziptop stripped, then mouth to metal. Fizzing.

“Guess not,” I said, rubbing my face with my palms.

“Easy.” Hector clamped his fingers around my wrist. “Easy.”

***

I waited till I was alone.

I dug down deeper in my bed, relaxing.

What other feeling could measure up? What other thing could smash me apart so beautifully, thoroughly? I might have already pulled the needle from my vein, drawing it out, waiting for its effects, heat seeping into my muscles. Once I said yes to it, that was that—loneliness, fear, death, loss: all of it gone, running off into a wilderness. I was solitary, myself, a pure, driven thing. No past, no future. I imagined lying over him, holding onto his hands, tongue working, eating up a trench from his belly to his throat. His skin tasted of salt water, leaves. His dick pressed upward into my chest, grinding.

Why else was he showing me his pictures?

I couldn’t help but laugh sometimes.

I wandered into the bathroom, wet washcloth to my face, breathing. I glanced up at myself in the mirror. My bottom lip, fat, ticking; my face, older, paler, harsher than I’d expected.

Seventeen: slouched beneath the dark palms, waiting for William to walk across the lawn.

My hand wandered through the curling hairs of my belly. I cradled my dick, testing its weight, heft, fullness. I felt my stomach again. The skin was hot. Groping higher: something swollen, tender. A hardness. Scab? Blister? I kept pressing, probing it with my fingers.

***

“Did you see this?” Peter asked.

We were standing behind the front desk, 7:07 a.m. Peter fumbled through the rack of incoming mail, gestures animated, jerky. I smelled the coffee on his breath. He behaved like he’d been up and around for hours.

In my hands I held the fax from Fulvia Diaz.

While most renovations wipe out the past, Peter Sarshik’s King Cole Motel serves as an homage to Clem Thornton’s former Boca Palms showplace. Not only have the odd details been lovingly restored (stucco friezes of gladioli and water jets, starfish, seaweed etched into plate glass), but there’s enough decay in evidence—e.g., rust stains around the pool, sulfurous tap water—to make it all seem
real.
Check out the pastel disks of the walkways. Check out the aerodynamic design of the Nurmi wing (tell yourself it isn’t moving a million miles an hour). Have a blended drink at the pool bar. And be sure to introduce yourself to Evan, the handsome, affable desk clerk.

“I mean, she really got it,” Peter said.

Could she have mixed something up? What stucco friezes? What seaweed etched into plate glass?

“This’ll help us. I
know
this’ll help us.”

I gazed out at the browning papyrus through the window. The light outside was glassy, overcast. She had to have mixed something up. “I thought I’d pissed her off.”

His eyes hazed over. “You never told me that.”

I read through the fax again. At least she’d called me handsome. “Did you have sex with her or something?”

“Funny.”

“Well—”

“I mean, she mentioned your name. I thought you’d be thrilled.”

I yawned, shrugged. “I’m thrilled.”

The truth was I hadn’t been getting enough sleep to care very much about some travel editor’s opinion. I lay in bed, wide awake, four, five in the morning, thinking about Hector.

He looked at me strangely. “I’m going outside to work on the storage room. I’ve been on a roll. Call me if you need me.”

I stared outside at the gleaming inadequacies. The pocked leaves of the aurelia. The yellow mineral stains on the walls, fan-shaped from the sprinklers.
Some
-one had to have had sex with her. Not two minutes after Peter’s departure the phone rang. I lunged for it, alarmed. “King Cole, how may I help you?”

“Peter?”

Silence, breathing. A woman.
Holly.

“Listen, I thought it would be nice if you came over Friday night. I mean, Ory’s going to be with my sister, and I thought we’d grill some shrimp. We’ll have a nice quiet night together. How’s that?”

A lump in my throat. I cradled the handset, frozen, until I was able to breathe again. “Sure,” I said finally, “I’d like that.”

Silence again. In the background, Ory chattering about box turtles. “Do you have a cold?”

“No.”

“Good. I’ll see you Friday, then.”

My head tingled darkly. I hung up the phone, rapt, listening to Hector’s bare, perfect feet on the floor above me.

The swelling still hadn’t subsided.

I kept telling myself not to panic. How many times had I acquired a cold, rash, or virus only to watch it fade, to learn it was just what it was, not a harbinger of something larger. It was life: one got sick, then healthy. Sick, then healthy. Who could even pass through a single hour without battling all kinds of imperceptible threats? Cooling systems, doorknobs, mosquitoes, standing water—all of them birthing pools for potential hazard. If only I
saw
what was happening, saw how efficiently my body was burning, fending them off, I’d have much better things to think about. Instead, I’d willed myself indomitable. I’d gotten to the point where I’d
refused
to get sick, where I actually believed I’d acquired the ability to purge illness from my system, if only to prove to myself that I was well.

Didn’t I have a little swelling once before? Didn’t I think it was something greater, before it passed on to nothingness?

Once I’d welcomed the first signs of a cold. Sickness was a tent, a house, a warm dark blanket wrapped around my aching bones. Game shows droned on the TV. Palms blurred through the windows. Ursula wandered in and out of my room, cool hand to my scalp, passing me a cup of broth or pineapple Jell-O. She liked these times as much as I did, her worries focused to a single point. There was nothing else in the world: no Sid, no Peter, only
her
care and
my
sickness. Compassion, an absence of complication. We were never any closer than this.

It would never be so simple again.

When my worrying had gotten out of hand, I decided to approach Hector. I stood outside his apartment door, walked away, then back again. Would he think I was needy? Were my visits too obvious, or frequent? I stood there, paralyzed, mouth sour, listening to him puttering with some papers. Finally, I knocked.

I said, “Could I show you something?”

He nodded. He was standing, thick arms folded, looking at the snapshots he’d just tacked up above his desk. On the top, Julia, his mother, standing before the exploding Mount St. Helens—her smile huge, red, lipsticked—volcanic ash clinging to her shoulders. Beneath her, two men on a beach—shirtless, muscular, eyes flashing with laughter—arms wrapped tightly around each other. Beneath them, a young black man—almost pretty—with solemn blue eyes and beaded necklace, squatting before the great globe of the Unisphere in Flushing Meadows Park.

“Who’re they?” I said, pointing to the couple.

“Don and Miguel.”

“They’re adorable.”

He nodded. He passed through the stack of snapshots, assembled them with a rubber band, placed them in a drawer.

“I mean, they’re not kids, but they’re really, really handsome.”