Object of Desire (30 page)

I stopped walking again. “I don't know,” I admitted. “I don't know what he'd say about that.”

“I don't think he'd be happy.” Randall sighed. “Danny, the whole reason your nonmonogamy has worked for so long is that, deep down, Frank has always been number one in your heart.”

“Well, maybe I just got tired of never having that be reciprocal,” I grumbled.

“Oh, cut that out, Danny. Gregory Montague has been dead for a long time. Even if Frank did carry a torch for him all those years, about which you seem so certain, it was
you
he's always been devoted to,
you
he's loved for the past two decades.”

“I
know
that, Randall,” I said, becoming more annoyed by the second. “But I can't deny the way Kelly makes me feel. I feel
alive
again—for the first time in a very long while. When I'm with him, I feel
young.
With Frank, it's all about aches and pains and being too tired to do things.”

“He's jogging. He's trying.”

I made a face. Yes, Frank was jogging. And he always came back in red and panting, and completely dehydrated. I told him he ought to take a bottle of water with him on his runs, so he wouldn't dry out so much. I told him one of these days he'd pass out, and if that happened when he was running on the road, he could get hit by a car. I felt as if I was giving advice to my grandfather.

“Danny,” Randall was asking, “how does Kelly feel about
you
?”

“I don't know,” I admitted.

“You don't know?”

“He's resistant. I don't know why.”

“But of course you know why! Danny, once again, it's Frank! Of course Kelly would resist you. Who would want to fall in love with someone who already has a husband?”

I shook my head. “I wish it were that simple.”

“It
is
that simple! I can see it plainly. He's trying very hard not to fall in love with you.”

I wished that were so. I wished so much that Randall was right. But guys I liked never liked me back, not with the same passion. Why should I have expected it would be any different with Kelly?

Randall leveled his eyes at me. “Do you know what Kelly is for you, Danny?”

“What?”

“A midlife crisis.”

“Hey, you guys!” Kelly's voice suddenly cut through the mountain air at that very moment. He and Hassan were quite far ahead of us now on the trail, having been unaware that we'd stopped walking. “What's holding you slowpokes up?”

“We're coming,” I said and resumed walking. But I was steaming mad. I could feel my cheeks and neck burning. “How
dare
you?” I hissed at Randall from the corner of my mouth. “I tell you something really profound about how I'm feeling, and you trivialize it as a midlife crisis.”

“Danny, I don't mean to trivialize your feelings. But it would seem to me—”

“Stick to orthodontics, buddy,” I told him. “You stink at psychotherapy.”

I walked on ahead, catching up with Kelly and Hassan just as they reached the crest of the hill and an enormous vista of the valley below opened up before us.

“Wow,” Kelly gushed.

The desert floor stretched for miles across the lush greenery of the Coachella Valley towns and the arid sweep of tawny wasteland that ended at the Little San Bernardino Mountains some fifteen miles away.

“You see down there?” I asked Kelly, pointing off to my right. “You can get a tiny glimpse of the Salton Sea. Over there is Indio, and across the way, you can spot Desert Hot Springs.”

“And look!” Kelly said, his excitement apparent. “I can see the windmills. The ones north of Palm Springs by the 10.”

“Yeah, looks like a garden of them, doesn't it?”

“Yeah.” His eyes were soaking up the view. “It's so beautiful up here. You look down and you think of all the people down there, going about their jobs and their lives, and we're up here, looking down at them. Except that we can't see them, and they can't see us. But they're all down there.”

I smiled. “Yes, they are.”

“It's just so beautiful,” he said again.

I moved closer and slipped an arm around his waist. We stood there silent for a while. Randall and Hassan had moved on down the path, leaving us to ourselves. I tightened my hold around Kelly's waist.

“Are you going to take the class at CalArts?” I asked him.

“I can't afford it.”

“Then let me pay for it for you.”

He pulled away. “No. I can't let you do that.”

“I want to.”

He looked at me as if he didn't understand what I was saying. “Why,” he asked, “are you so nice to me?”

“Because I care about you.”

“
Why?
”

“Because you…you make me laugh. Because I like being with you.”

He smiled. “I like being with you, too.”

We were quiet, just looking at each other. I thought my heart was going to break out of my rib cage.

“So I'll call the guy at CalArts,” I said. “Let me arrange it for you.”

He was hesitant. He looked away.

“Okay?” I asked.

He looked back at me. “I just want to be clear that we are
friends.
Nothing more.”

That hurt, but I didn't let myself show it. “Fine,” I said. “I promise I'm not going to expect anything for helping you.”

Kelly looked at me again with that strange expression. “Why would someone like you care about someone like me?”

“We're not so different, baby.”

He looked back out across the valley. “Don't call me baby.”

“Sorry.”

“It's okay.”

We stood silently for a few more minutes. Then Kelly turned and kissed me. For the first time, he took the lead and kissed me. I responded hungrily, grabbing his head in my hands. We kissed for a long time, and the entire world got swallowed up in it, every sight and sound and emotion—until I heard the snap of a twig. We broke apart and turned to look.

For a moment, hope flickered inside me that the creature emerging from the woods might be a bighorn sheep. But instead, a small brown fawn came crunching through the leaves, coming to a stop about three yards away from us, its black, glassy eyes staring in wonder. For a moment nothing moved, not us, not the fawn, not the wind in the trees. Then a crow called, and the startled fawn bolted away on its fragile, tremulous legs.

T
he thing that troubled me most, even more than the fact that Dad had lost his job and that our house was up for sale, was the leather jacket I found hanging in Mom's closet. I couldn't stop thinking about it all day at school, wondering why she had bought it, and when she wore it, and who she wore it with.

Brother Pop was passing back our tests. He paused after handing me mine, his doughy hand splayed on my desk.

“You failed, Danny,” he said quietly. “Your grades are falling way off this year. I'd like you to start staying after school on Wednesdays for extra help.”

“I can't,” I said. “I have play practice on Wednesdays.”

“You won't be in the play if you can't bring your grades up.”

I panicked. I couldn't get kicked out of the play. I absolutely
couldn't.
I had landed the part of Mr. Brownlow, just as I'd been planning to do since last year. All summer long I'd practiced for that part. When I walked into the audition, I knew every line of the part. I didn't even need a script. Brother Connolly, the director, had been very impressed. He gave me the part right there on the spot. I was ecstatic.

Now there was a chance I'd lose the one bright spot in my miserable, dreary existence at St. Francis Xavier, and all because of Brother Pop and his fucking American lit class. The test had been on
The Scarlet Letter,
and while it was true I'd read only the Cliffs Notes, I thought I knew enough about stupid old Hester Prynne and that crazy reverend who'd fucked her to pass the thing. Clearly, I was wrong.

At lunch I slammed down my tray, almost upsetting my paper cup of Coke.

“What's eating your ass?” Troy asked.

I told him. Troy listened, nodding as he ate his bologna sandwich on white Wonder bread, which his maid had prepared for him.

“Well, looks like you're gonna have to actually start reading your books,” he said.

For a while, I'd tried to distance myself from Troy. I knew Chipper thought Troy was a big fag, and I didn't want him getting the same idea about me. But I hadn't seen much of Chipper lately—it was football season—and there really wasn't anybody else to sit with at lunch. Besides, I got horny a lot, and I liked the blow jobs Troy gave me in his car. A couple of months earlier, Troy had turned sixteen, which meant he could drive legally now. So he gave me rides to and from school, happily putting an end to my schlepping home on foot. So I realized pretty quickly that I couldn't completely discard Troy as a friend. And, perhaps most important, he was still pretty useful to Mom.

In the last few weeks, Troy had taken us all over the place, from New York to Boston to New Hampshire. And just a couple of days previous, we'd driven up to see the Rubberman again, who told us the “bitch” with Bruno was indeed Becky. But he didn't dare let her or anyone else know that we were looking for them. We'd have to get to Becky by ourselves. Problem was, every time the Rubberman found out exactly where Bruno had gone, he'd skipped on to somewhere else. Mom began to worry that Bruno had begun to suspect that someone was looking for him and was determined not to be caught.

The Rubberman had admitted she might be right. “He may have a sense someone's after him,” he told us, still in the same chair, still smoking like a fiend, looking even more frail than before. This time, however, the television was dark; in fact, all the power in his little house seemed shut off. “And I'll bet he knows it has something to do with his bitch.”

Mom no longer recoiled when she heard Becky described as such. “I just don't want him thinking I'm bringing the heat down on him,” she said. “Then he'll go on the lam.”

“Did you bring me my communication fee?” the Rubberman rasped. “I need to pay my electric bill.”

“Yes,” Mom said, handing him another envelope of cash.

The Rubberman took it and peered inside. “All right. I'll send word through a couple of guys that we could maybe make a deal with Bruno that would prove beneficial for him. But like I said, lady, money talks. You understand that.”

“I do,” Mom said. “And Bruno needs to know he'll get a lot of dough in exchange for Becky.”

I frowned. Just where that “dough” would be coming from was not obvious to me. Dad was out of work, fired for showing up drunk too many times. Father McKenna had taken pity and given him a part-time job as a handyman at the church. But even though Dad had told Mom that he'd quit drinking, I'd seen the empty bottles in the basement, and I still smelled whisky on his breath. I knew it was only a matter of time before he lost this job as well. Meanwhile, the brothers of St. Francis Xavier had deferred my tuition for a year, though they couldn't promise anything indefinite.

Faced with all this financial uncertainty, Mom had decided to sell the house. Dad made no protest; he knew his part-time job wouldn't cover the mortgage payments. I think Mom also hoped that we might make a little money in the sale—money she could use in her hunt for Becky.

It had now been a little over a year since my sister had disappeared. My fifteenth birthday had come and gone without comment. It was, after all, the anniversary of Becky's disappearance, too, and that, quite understandably, took precedence. Mom had sobbed from morning to night. Sitting up on my bed in my room, watching
Doctor Who
, I imagined I was explaining the story line to my little boy, Joey. “The Doctor is actually the
fourth
doctor,” I told Joey, “having been regenerated into existence after the third doctor contracted radiation poisoning on the planet Metebelis 3.” I liked imagining Joey in my room, safe from all the chaos downstairs. “Don't worry,” I told the boy. “You don't have to go down there.” I would keep him safe, and that made me glad.

But as engrossing as we both found the Doctor's search for the Key to Time, I couldn't forget that it was still my birthday.

I was continually drawn back to that day a year ago, the party with the cake and the M&M's and the friends I no longer had. I remembered what I had seen that morning at the pond, and I knew I could never reveal it. What importance did the memory hold, anyway? That Becky disappeared an hour or so later than what the official report claimed? What possible good would it do to know that little nugget of information?

Of course, the thing that worried Mom most about selling the house was that Becky might come back and find us gone and not know where we were. She might escape from Bruno and make her way back to our house, only to discover a different family living there. Whoever bought the house, Mom insisted, would need to have our new number and address, and would need to keep a sign posted on the door at all times. Without such conditions, Mom said, she wouldn't agree to the sale.

Just where we'd live after the house sold, however, was unclear; Father McKenna assured us he'd help us find something. But the decision to put the house on the market did make one aspect of Mom's life easier: Nana was placed in a nursing home. It broke my heart the day we dropped her off there. We packed up her clothes filling two little suitcases. She sat in the backseat of the car with me, Mom and Dad up front. “Where are we going?” she kept asking, and Dad kept telling her that we'd found her a good place to live, a place where she'd be happy, where she'd be taken care of, and where she'd have many, many friends. But all she'd say in response was, “Where are we going?” And when we finally got there, the place depressed the hell out of me. Old people in wheelchairs sat in the lobby, their necks crooked, their eyes staring vacantly. We didn't even get to see Nana's room. Two nurse's aides greeted us, one taking Nana, the other taking her suitcases. The last thing I heard was Nana asking them, “Can you take me home?” I think even Mom cried a little bit on the way back in the car.

I was thinking about Nana in that place, and I was worrying about having to drop out of the play, so I never even unwrapped the Ring Ding I had bought for lunch. I just sat there, staring off into the cafeteria. Troy noticed.

“You gotta eat something,” he said. “You still have geometry class to get through.”

“I'm not hungry.”

“Do you want pizza? I'm going to go get a slice. I'll get you one if you want.”

“No, thanks.”

He shrugged and headed off to the cashier.

My eyes spied his book bag. I knew what he kept inside. I knew exactly in which inside pocket he kept his pot. If I was going to do this, I had to act fast. I made sure Troy was far enough away, then I pulled a plastic Baggie out of my pocket. I'd stuffed it in there this morning. Quick as a flash, I yanked Troy's book bag off the chair and got it onto the floor, and in almost the same motion, I unzipped the top. It was a good thing no one sat with us at lunch to see what I was doing. Inside the book bag, my hand felt for the interior zipper and pulled it open. Gripping the bag of pot, hidden by the tabletop, I shook about half of it into my own Baggie. Then I replaced it, zipped up, and returned the bookbag to the chair.

Troy was such a stoner that even if he noticed he had less pot than he had this morning, he'd probably just chalk it up to having smoked a doob and forgotten about it. I'd performed this little sleight of hand before; I knew I could get away with it. I didn't really consider it stealing. Troy always shared his pot with me. I could smoke as much of it as I wanted. I was just taking my share now, instead of waiting until after school. Besides, he was a rich kid with a prodigious allowance. I didn't know where he got his pot, but I knew he didn't have any trouble paying for it. It wasn't like I was taking it from some poor kid who had to save his pennies to buy his weekly dime bag.

I finally ate my Ring Ding just as the bell sounded for my next class. Riding the wave of a sugar buzz—I'd washed the Ring Ding down with Coca-Cola—I made it through geometry, chemistry, and French. And then the last bell of the day rang, and we all scrambled to our lockers. I told Troy to wait for me, that I'd meet him at his car in fifteen minutes; there was something I had to do first.

Out on the field, the football team was in their helmets, shoulder pads, and cleats, gathering for their afternoon practice. They were either running in place or doing push-ups on the grass. I gripped the chain-link fence with my fingers and called across the field. “Hey, Paguni!” I knew it wasn't cool to call the football players by their first names in public. “Hey, Paguni! Come here!”

Chipper lifted his helmeted head and came jogging over to me. The sight made me very happy indeed. I'd been to every one of his games this year, just as I'd promised. It hadn't been a good season; the team had yet to win a single game. Chipper mostly sat on the bench, but the couple times he'd been called in to play, I'd rushed out of the bleachers and come to the fence, just as I had right now, calling, “Go, Paguni!” One time I'd seen a flash of his white teeth from inside his helmet when he heard the words, and that had thrilled me. To think that I, Danny Fortunato, had encouraged Chipper Paguni. There was nothing like the feeling. Nothing at all.

I think I love you. Isn't that what life is made of? Though it worries me to say, I've never felt this way.

“What's going on?” Chipper asked as he reached the other side of the fence.

“Is your car unlocked?”

“Yeah.”

“I got you something.”

He pulled in closer to the fence. The chin of the helmet actually dinged against the chain-link. “Shut up,” he said. “Don't say anything else.”

“Okay, okay. Nobody heard.”

“Just put it way down under the seat mat.”

“Will do.”

I could see his eyes moving like brown spotlights within the helmet. “Sure you don't want me to pay you?”

“No. It's cool.”

“Why are you so nice to me, man?”

I shrugged. “'Cause you're nice to me.”

“Whatever. Come over later.”

“I will.”

He ran back to the team, and I headed out to the parking lot, where Troy was waiting for me. But first I stopped at Chipper's car and slipped the bag of pot under the mat in the front seat. I couldn't wait for tonight, when I could sit on Chipper's red shag floor, our feet stretched out and toes touching. The shades would be drawn, and it would be all dark, and we'd smoke and get really high, and then he'd ask me to walk on his back again. Lately he'd been taking off his shirt when I did it. He said it was better that way. I'd walk on his naked back, his tight, hard shoulder muscles flexing, and I'd have the biggest boner in my pants I'd ever got. I think he knew. How could he not see it?

“You wanta come over?” Troy asked as I slid into his car.

“No, we can just go to my house. Mom is out with Warren today. Dad's at the church. Nobody will be home.”

“Where's your Mom going with Warren?”

Troy was bugging me. I didn't like how much he knew about Mom and her crazy schemes.

“I don't know,” I told him. “Going to various biker hangouts, asking about Becky. What else does she do with her life?”

We rode in silence. When we got home, the real estate agent—Dad's old secretary, Phyllis, in fact—was just finishing showing the house to a young couple. The woman was pregnant. It felt odd to think of a new family living there.

“Tell your mom these folks are
very
interested,” Phyllis whispered to me, the smell of her orange hard candy on her breath.

Troy and I flopped down on the couch and switched on the TV. I flicked through the channels until I found a rerun of
Gilligan's Island.
It was the one where Mrs. Howell dreams she's Cinderella. I had always liked that one. Troy was rolling a joint. He didn't seem to notice any pot was missing from the bag. I told him to hurry, that I didn't know when Mom would come walking in. We had the Lysol can ready.