Object of Desire
Authors: William J. Mann
Books by William J. Mann
Novels
THE MEN FROM THE BOYS
THE BIOGRAPH GIRL
WHERE THE BOYS ARE
ALL AMERICAN BOY
MEN WHO LOVE MEN
OBJECT OF DESIRE
Nonfiction
WISECRACKER: The Life and Times of William Haines
BEHIND THE SCREEN: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood, 1910â1969
EDGE OF MIDNIGHT: The Life of John Schlesinger
KATE: The Woman Who Was Hepburn
For Tim
T
he first time I saw him, he was nothing more than a face and a pair of hands. Not once did his eyes meet mine. Even as he took my order, his chin was already lifting to greet the man behind me. The first time I saw him, he did not see me.
It was a green night. The mountains were gray and the sand blowing in from the desert was yellow, but the night itself was so green, it was almost emerald. A mirage, I knew. A trick of the setting sun. On a green night, nothing was what it seemed.
“Do you know who he is?” I asked my friend Randall, my eyes fixed on the bartender.
“Who?”
“Him.”
Randall shook his head. “Never seen him before.”
“He's beautiful.”
“You think?”
With much reluctance did I turn my eyes away to focus on my friend. A green cast was coloring his face as the last slanting rays of the sun reflected against the mountains. Night was rushing in to fill up every corner of the bar's outdoor deck, and the busboys were busy lighting the lanterns that hung over our heads. Little flames leapt and hopped as if they were living, breathing creatures, and I was reminded, yet again, of the night my sister disappeared twenty-seven years before, the night when everything in my world changed, the night I came to understand that I would never grow up to be the man I had expected to be.
“He is
beautiful,
Randall,” I said, with conviction. “Absolutely beautiful.”
“Danny,” my friend replied, “I did not come out with you tonight to moon over beautiful bartenders.” He glowered at me, his face pinched and unhappy, as if he'd just bitten into a lemon.
I gave him a small smile. “I'm sorry,” I said. “I know you want to talk about Ike. Go ahead. I'm listening.”
He looked aghast. “I do
not
want to talk about Ike.”
“Okay, then, let's not talk about him.”
Randall huffed. “Why would I drive all the way out here to the desert if I wanted to ruin your birthday by talking about Ike?”
I managed a small smile. “It wouldn't ruin my birthday, Randall.”
He pouted. “Of course, it would. It ruined my entire
life.
” He raised his martini to me. “Happy birthday, Danny.”
I raised mine to him. “Thank you, Randall.”
My birthday. Ever since my teens, the day had felt awkward and peculiar, even inappropriate, fraught with memories tattered and terrible but sometimes freakishly funny as well. After the age of fourteenâthe age I turned on the day my sister disappearedâall birthday parties ceased in my house. I never blamed my parents for it. I never thought it unfair. Not until I was twenty did I have another birthday partyâgiven to me, in fact, by Randall, soon after I'd arrived in California. It felt odd, all that singing and merrymaking, not to mention the sex that went on after the party. I felt as if I was being unfaithfulânot to my sister, not to my parents, but to me, to the boy I'd left behind in Connecticut. The boy who had done everything he could but still had ultimately failed.
“Talk to me,” I said to Randall. “Talk to me about Ike.”
He frowned. “It's your
birthday,
Danny. We're out to have
fun
tonight. It's not often you and I get a chance to go out on our own. Usually, there's Frank with us andâ”
“And Ike,” I finished.
“And Ike.” Randall let out a long, dramatic sigh. “Oh, alack and alas. Our happy little foursome is no more.”
We were never a happy little foursome, but I didn't say that to Randall. Neither Frank nor I had ever cared all that much for Ike. I didn't say that, either. What I did do was glance back at the bar. I couldn't see the bartender anymore. It was too dark now. Besides, too many men had crowded around his station.
“Did I tell you he wants to take the dog?” Randall asked.
I returned my eyes to Randall's face. “You never liked that dog.”
“Still, we got it together. I paid for its shots.”
“Now you're being petty, Randall.”
“Well, what's
wrong
with being petty?
He's
the one who fell in love with someone else. Someone younger, someone more attractive. Now
that's
being petty.”
No, not petty. Cruel. Heartless. Inconvenient. Honest. All those things, maybe, but not petty. Yet none of it did I say to Randall.
Instead, I looked again for the bartender and spotted his face emerging for a moment from the crowd. “How can you say he's not beautiful?” I asked despite myself.
Randall snorted. “Please. They're a dime a dozen, those bartenders. He probably has a crystal meth habit.” He took another sip of his martini. “Well, what are you doing standing here if he fascinates you so much? Aren't you going to introduce yourself?”
“Maybe.”
Randall leaned in for the kill. “Make sure you tell him you're married. You know how pissed these boys get when you fail to mention that little detail.”
Instinctively, my thumb moved inside my palm to feel the titanium band around my left ring finger. Married. Yes, I supposed I was, even if California had yet to consider what Frank and I had done in Canada legal. But what did “married” mean, anywayâespecially here, on this green night in the middle of the desert? What did it mean after twenty yearsâthe last four of which had been a string of silent nights, the only sound the tapping of our computer keys, our faces bathed in the blue light of our monitors, each of us waiting for the other to call it a night so that the last one of us awake might be free to jack off, to find some fleeting, puny satisfaction with the boys of online porn?
I looked back over at the bar. All I could see was the top of his head. His thick, dark hair, the sharply cut sideburns. How very much I wanted to see his eyes.
“I know what you're thinking,” Randall said. “I should have defined my relationship with Ike the way you've defined yours with Frank. You can't lose someone if that's simply not part of the play-book. That's why you and Frank have held on all these years, despite all the boys who've come between you.” He knocked back the last of his martini. “How very
nice
for you.”
I smiled, eyes still averted. “Bitter doesn't become you, Randall.”
“I'm not bitter.”
That was debatable. Randall had always had big dreams, though they weren't anything like my big dreams. My dreams had always been about success; Randall's were about contentment. Once, just starting out in med school, he'd imagined he'd be a great surgeon; he'd ended up as a kids' orthodontist in Century City. Once, when we were young, he'd dreamed of finding a husband with whom he'd grow old. But the only thing that had happened was that Randall himself had grown old.
“I could never have been like you and Frank,” he was saying, shaking his head, as if he were reading my mind. “I could never have let Ike sleep around.”
I shrugged and finished my vodka.
Once, I had been in love with Randall. We had both been twenty years oldâslightly more than half our current ages. We'd been living in West Hollywood, in those exciting months when it first broke away from Los Angeles to become its own cityâthe first gay city in the world, we liked to say. It was difficult for me to remember the way Randall had looked back then. The eyes were the same, round like buttons and as blue as an August sky. But the glorious black hair had receded over the passing years, and the belly, once trim, had grown thick. I tried to picture him as he was, but I couldn't.
Not that it surprised me. So little of my months in California before Frank remained in my memory. All I could remember now with any real clarity were the Big Weenie hot-dog stands (
BIG WEENIES TASTE BETTER
) and the
NO FAGS
sign posted at Barney's Beanery. And the clubs. I remembered more about the clubs than anything else: the smell of piss and beer, the silver strobe lights, the music (Duran Duran, Cyndi Lauper, Yes). I think my strongest memory of those days was doing lines of coke behind the bar as “Owner of a Lonely Heart” played on the sound system.
But not much else remained in my brain from the time before Frank. I'd been a scared, insecure kid just off the bus. I'd lived with Randall in an apartment near Fairfax. I remembered a claw-foot bathtub, a ratty old couch, VHS tapes stacked against the wall almost to the ceiling. There'd been sex, a lot of sex, even though the plague was all around us then: sex with Randall, sex with Edgar, sex with Benny, sex with tons of others, usually on my waterbed, which one time sprang a leak.
But what could never fade from my memory of that time was the ambition, so tightly wound up inside me that it sometimes woke me in the middle of the night, bolting me upright, my hands clenched at my sides, causing me to scream out loud, waking the neighbors. I had traveled all the way across the country on a Peter Pan bus in order to be someone. I had failed back home, failed miserably, and so I had come west, like so many had before me.
To be someone.
And so I didâI became someone on top of a box in a club on Santa Monica Boulevard, wearing a pair of cowboy boots and a yellow thong, twisting my ass to Boy George and “Karma Chameleon.”
Oh, yes. A very long time ago.
On nights that were never green.
“I thought it would be
me
who found the lasting relationship,” Randall was saying, his voice low, his words beginning to slur from the vodka. “I thought it would be
me
who ended up living happily ever afterânot
you,
Danny. You were always so flighty. Always moving from one boy to the next.”
I lowered my gaze at him. “You'll
find
someone, Randall. You'll forget Ike, and you'll fall in love again. With someone who is
worthy
of you this time. Ike never was.”
This mellowed him a bit. “I'm just not sure how many more times I can go through it.” He looked so sad standing there. So sad and so old. “Falling in love is
hell,
” he said.
“You're crazy. Everyone wants to be in love.”
“Oh, sure, in the beginning.” Randall drew up his chin and looked defiantly at me with his blue eyes. “It's great to be in love in the beginningâwhen you're giddy and lovesick, and you think about the person all the time, and he thinks about you. You call each other nine, ten times a day. You wish you could be together all the time. You start to miss him even before you say good night. It's the most thrilling feeling in the world, being in love.” He paused for dramatic effect. “
In the beginning.
”
I laughed. “What you need is to get laid tonight.”
Randall scowled. “Oh, let's just get out of here and have some dinner.”
“I'm not hungry,” I lied.
“Well, we've got to eat.”
“Who says?”
Randall was looking past me, into the crowd. I followed his gaze. A slim, blond young man in blue jeans and a vintage Atari T-shirt.
“He's cute,” I said.
Randall's scowl only deepened. “Well, then it's
your
lucky night, Danny, because he's been looking at
you
ever since we got here.”
“How do you know that? Maybe he's been looking at you.”
Randall narrowed his eyes at me. “No, Danny. Let me give you a visual. Me, chubby and balding. You, muscles and a full head of hair. Need I say more?”
“You're too hard on yourself, Randall.”
“He's just a kid, anyway,” he said, shrugging. “Why would he look at old men like us?”
I laughed. “You forget that in Palm Springs, even turning forty-one still qualifies us as chicken.” I gestured with my drink. “Look around you.”
The place was, as usual, packed with fifty- to seventy-somethings. Distinguished-looking men mostly, men who had once been handsome, men who even now retained some awareness of how they should look, even if they were largely held together by buttons and cinched belts and oversize Tommy Bahama floral-print shirts. A noticeable few displayed the plumped lips and shiny foreheads of cosmetic surgery. But the ones who stood out most were the heirs of Liberace, scattered randomly throughout the crowd, wearing red velvet blazers and too much sweet cologne.
“Go ahead,” I urged Randall. “Go make a move on blondie over there.”
“Oh, please. He wants
you,
Danny. Don't you want a birthday fuck?”
I leveled my eyes at him. “For your information, I had already planned on going home to Frank tonight.”
“Oh, really? And will there be a trick waiting to sleep between you?”
“Tonight, my friend,” I told him, “it will be
you
who goes home with the trick.”
I took hold of Randall's arm and tugged. I owed him this one.
“What are you doing?” he asked, big-eyed.
“Come with me.”
I led him across the deck. The curly blond in the Atari T-shirt noticed our approach but continued talking with two older men, pretending he hadn't.
“Hello,” I said to the group. “I hate to interruptâ¦.”
“Well, we've been hoping you might do just that all night,” said one of the older men. “Or at least,
he
has.”
The man's eyes twinkled. He wore a black double-breasted blazer with a pink silk pocket puff. I assumed the “he” being referenced was blondie.
“Great,” I said. “Because I want to introduce you to my great friend Randall here. Randall Drew, prominent orthodontist of Century City, collector of East Asian artifacts, and all-around good guy, meet⦔ I gestured around at the three men.
“I'm Thad Urquhart,” said the man with the pink puff.
“Jimmy Carlisle,” said the second older man.
Our eyes turned to the young blondie.
“Jake Jones,” he said. If his eyes were still on me, I didn't know it. I kept mine elusive.
