Object of Desire Page 2

  I shook his hand. “Thank you.”

  “I just saw the cover of Palm Springs Life.” His face was reddening. “I’m an artist, too, though certainly not of your caliber….” He was still pumping my hand. “I’m not anywhere as good as you are. I’ve bought several of your prints, in particular the whole series you did for Disneyland. That was amazing! Hollywood classic!”

  “Thank you,” I said again.

  “Do you still sell your prints in retail? Or is it all now just by commission?”

  I wanted to get away, get to the bar, discover the eyes I wanted to see. But this man wouldn’t let go of my hand. He was gripping it so hard, I was losing feeling in it.

  “Mostly commission now, yes,” I told him, hoping the conversation would end there. “Hotel chains and restaurants…you know, that sort of thing.”

  “Oh, if only I could ever get to that point,” he said, “when I’d be well known and well regarded enough to get commissions and just live off those, and not have to crank out so many prints—and you’re so much younger than I am!” He sighed, drawing in closer. “I do mostly giclée prints myself. They’re sold in a few galleries in L.A. How did you ever get a commission with Disney?”

  “An old friend works for them,” I said, moving my fingers deliberately. He finally let go of his grip. I rubbed my hand.

  “Connections!” he crowed, nodding. “That’s what I need. But maybe what I really need is your talent!” He laughed, a loud, honking sound. “I really am a fan. Your work is so, so powerful. The print of the Malibu coast with the sun setting—gorgeous!”

  And then he literally shivered. Stood there, wrapped his arms around himself, and shook back and forth. I wanted to laugh out loud. That particular print was a joke as far as I was concerned. Sunsets were the cheap and easy way to make a buck. And in the last year, they’d made me a lot of bucks. More bucks than I’d ever made in my whole life. Not bad for a guy who’d never gone to art school, whose higher education consisted of a few part-time community college classes. But what did I need a degree for? I’d take a picture of a sunset, fix it up in Photoshop, and soon prints of it were hanging in doctors’ offices and model units of condo developments. They weren’t art. They were commodities. Which was fine with me. They served a purpose. They made me some money. They just didn’t deserve shivers.

  I knew that I was being ungrateful. The man was paying me a compliment, and that was kind of him. I appreciated the recognition. I’d spent too many years driving the smoggy streets of L.A. between auditions not to enjoy my successful second life as a digital illustrator. I had come to L.A. to be someone, after all, and finally I was—even if it had taken almost two decades to get there. My work was featured on the cover of magazines. A gallery in downtown Palm Springs had given me a show. I was somebody—even if it was somebody I’d never expected to be.

  “Are you working on anything new?” the man asked.

  “A few things.”

  “Can’t say for who?”

  I shook my head.

  “Did I read somewhere that Bette Midler commissioned a piece?”

  “Sorry,” I said. “Can’t divulge.”

  “I knew it! Bette Midler! How exciting is that!”

  Now, in fact, Bette Midler had never commissioned a piece from me. But if this man wanted to think so…

  I supposed I should have asked him more about his work, or at least asked his name. But just at that moment I saw an opening at the bar. The boy I’d been looking at all night was finally idle, gazing up from under his long dark lashes at the television screen that soundlessly played a video by Mary J. Blige. He wouldn’t be idle for long.

  “I’ve got to go,” I said hastily. “It was nice meeting you.”

  “Oh, it was pure joy,” the man said, his face reddening, his lips spreading, his teeth glinting in the overhead light. “I’ll keep an eye out for more of your work!”

  He grabbed my hand once more to give it another hard, hearty pump.

  As I feared, that tiny delay meant someone else managed to sidle up to the bar before I could. Quickly, I positioned myself next in line.

  Looking back now, I can no longer say for sure what was going through my head that night. After everything that has happened since, it’s hard to recall exactly. I’m certain I wasn’t hoping to trick with him that night. I had my plan with Frank. I was certainly not going to disrupt that. Probably all I was hoping for was a chance to speak to him—no, even that wasn’t necessary. I think all I wanted to do was see his eyes. That was the extent of it. That night, the first time I saw him, my only goal was to see his eyes.

  If I saw his eyes, that would mean he had seen me.

  There was a boy in eighth grade, during that last halcyon year before my sister disappeared, whose name was Scott Wood. Scott had long, curly dark hair and a mole on the side of his cheek. He was the most beautiful boy I had ever seen in my entire thirteen years, and all the girls seemed to think so, too. Scott played basketball and hockey and was a huge fan of the Eagles. He’d doodled their logo all over his paper bag–covered schoolbooks and was always singing “Plenty of room at the Hotel California” to himself. Scott had stayed back in fourth grade, so he was a more mature fourteen, with a downy, dark mustache on his upper lip. When Scott walked into a room, everyone turned, even our teacher, Miss Waterhouse, a stick of a lady who might have been twenty-nine or forty-nine, so bland and gray were her face and her hands.

  Did Miss Waterhouse think about Scott the way I did? Did she hump her mattress at night the way I did, squeezing her eyes together to imagine Scott running around the basketball court or laughing in the caf? Did she go out and buy the Eagles’ Hotel California album and play it over and over, imagining it was Scott singing to her: “How they dance in the courtyard, sweet summer sweat. Some dance to remember, some dance to forget…”

  When I sat behind Scott in class, I’d watch the way his thighs moved in his tight polyester pants. He’d idly twirl one of his dark curls around his finger, and I’d sit there, mesmerized. Once, at recess, he removed his shirt while playing basketball, and I stopped playing jump rope with my friend Katie and just sat on the asphalt, watching him. I didn’t understand it fully, this fascination I had with him, with the way his back muscles moved when he shot the basketball toward the hoop.

  Scott moved away after eighth grade; I never saw him again. But he stayed in my memory. Many nights I’d lie in bed at night, listening to my mother cry for my sister downstairs, and I’d rewrite my past, imagining how I might have become friends with Scott. I might have shown him my comic book collection; maybe he collected, too. Or maybe I should’ve learned as much as I could have about the Eagles and started talking about them one day. He would have thought I was cool, and then we could have hung out. But it didn’t work out that way. Instead, whenever Scott turned around in his seat to pass me a test or a handout, my throat would tighten and no words would form. I don’t think he even saw me. I was completely off his radar screen. I think, even now, if someone said my name to him, he wouldn’t remember that we had ever been classmates.

  It was my turn at the bar.

  “Hi,” I said.

  The bartender turned to face me.

  Was it the dimness of the light? The sun had fully set by now, and the patio was lit only by the flickering lanterns. A greenish darkness had settled over the whole place, cheating me of a full glimpse of the bartender’s eyes.

  “Grey Goose martini,” I said. “Up, with a twist.”

  He nodded and turned away.

  The line behind me was growing again. I’d have to act fast. I felt my heart start to quicken.

  His back was to me as he shook the martini. I watched as the wings of his eagle tattoo stretched and retracted on his neck.

  “Did you say olives?” he asked over his shoulder.

  “Yeah, that’s fine, great,” I said. My brain had no control over my words. “No, actually, I said a—”

  But he was already plopping the oli
ves into my glass. He looked up at me.

  And I saw them.

  His eyes.

  Dark, like black mirrors. Behind them burned an intensity that was both fierce and brittle, and barely contained. Some might look into those eyes and call them crazy. But all I saw reflected in them was myself.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “Olives are great.”

  And then his eyes were gone. I paid him, leaving an enormous tip, and once again missed the opportunity to speak to him. I should have turned the mistake about the olives into a joke. I should have been witty and flirty, and asked him his name. I knew how to play the game. Hell, I was an expert at it. Or at least, I had been, once. The zit-faced kid from eighth grade had blossomed into Danny the Stripper, the boy who drew in customers all down Santa Monica Boulevard, the boy in the yellow thong who shook his ass and flashed his jewels and at the end of the night routinely plucked tens and twenties out of his bulge. But I wasn’t wearing a thong anymore. Instead, I was forty-one years old, standing now on the other side of the divide, just one of the anonymous faces in the crowd, waving their cash. Whatever I once might have had, this boy behind the bar didn’t know about it. I had come, I supposed, full circle.

  It was time for dinner. Looking around for Randall, I couldn’t spot him. Had he gone home with Jake Jones? I tried not to be envious. I stood off to the side, sipping my vodka, watching the crowd.

  The night was no longer green. It was black. And I was hungry—hungrier than I had been in a very long time. On a black night, all illusions disappeared. Everything was real. And I could no longer deny how hungry I really was.

  EAST HARTFORD, CONNECTICUT

  Twenty-Seven Years Earlier

  If it weren’t for Chipper Paguni’s underpants, I would have turned around, hurried back along the path, and told my mother that my mission had been a failure. I hadn’t wanted to make the trip at all, so fearful was I of the poison ivy that grew along the path to the pond. The ordeal I’d gone through in the seventh grade, when I’d scratched the skin along the entire length of both legs until it was red and bleeding, had left me forever terrified of that vicious weed. But when I spotted the underpants ahead of me, a bright white pair of Fruit of the Looms shimmering in the midday sun, I knew I had to go on.

  A twig snapped. My eyes darted to the left, where a crumpled pair of black parachute pants had been dropped among a patch of ferns. I took another few steps along the path and discovered a trail of discarded clothing. Reebok sneakers. White socks. A lacy pink bra dangling from a wispy branch of a young maple tree.

  Another snap. I paused, sucking in my breath. And then, a voice.

  “Come on, Becky.”

  It was Chipper’s voice, somewhere up ahead in the woods, low and unemotional.

  “Come on,” he said again.

  I crouched behind a tall fern. As I did, my knees cracked. Mom was convinced I suffered from a calcium deficiency, and made me drink ten glasses of milk a day. Now I feared my knees had given me away. I held my breath. But around me only a heavy, humid silence filled the woods, broken now and then by the noisy squawk of a blue jay somewhere above me in the trees.

  Finally I heard a splash. And then another.

  Parting the fronds of the fern ever so carefully, I peered out over the water. Languid dragonflies hovered above the murky green surface. Ripples were just now lapping at the muddy shore, where a pair of brand-new Sergio Valente blue jeans, with the red stitching on the pockets, was rapidly turning wet and brown. I could imagine just how pissed Mom would be when she saw that.

  Suddenly the surface of the pond was broken. Becky emerged from the depths, shaking her long, dark hair and sending cascades of droplets from side to side. In an instant Chipper popped up in the water in front of her, his glistening back momentarily obliterating my sister from my view.

  They were kissing. My eyes grew wide as I crouched in my hiding place, keeping as still as I could. I watched as Chipper maneuvered Becky through the water toward the old wooden dock that jutted into the pond in a triangle. Lifting her up by her armpits, he sat her along the edge. For a moment I glimpsed my sister’s breasts, larger than those of most girls her age, with hard pink nipples that stood up like pencil erasers. I felt my face flush. I watched as Chipper now gripped the dock and hoisted himself up, the muscles in his broad back tensing, his small white buttocks knocking me back onto my heels.

  It was my fourteenth birthday. Tomorrow I’d start my first day of high school. All summer long the prospect of my new school had been all I could think about, and as the day had grown nearer, I’d become more and more anxious. When my father, trying to be helpful, had asked me just what it was about high school that frightened me so much, all I could offer was the fact that I’d have to use a locker. I’d spent nine years at St. John’s Elementary School, from kindergarten to eighth grade, and I’d always kept my books and papers in a simple, top-lifting desk. Now there would be a code to remember—and a series of clicks to listen for—and I’d have to stand next to some kid I didn’t know who’d surely had a locker in his public junior high and would look at me as if I were a dweeb. So Dad had gone out to Sears and bought a combination lock for me to practice on. I’d mastered the lock quickly enough, but still my fear didn’t go away.

  Behind the fern, I started to shake. I sat on the damp earth and tried to catch my breath. The day was hot and getting hotter. The chattering of the jays had been joined by a chorus of summer beetles, their shrill drone common on scorchers such as this one.

  “Come on, Becky,” Chipper was cajoling, and I peered through the fronds as he leaned forward over my sister.

  Like my sister, Chipper Paguni was going into his junior year. All last year and the year before, I’d watched him from my bedroom window, emerging from the house across the street and heading down to the bus stop at precisely 6:45 a.m. Usually Chipper wore shiny black parachute pants and an untucked white collar shirt. His book bag would be slung over his shoulder. I imagined that rolled up inside the book bag was the necktie that was required by Chipper’s all-male Catholic high school. The tie remained unworn and unknotted until the last possible moment, when the bus pulled into the school parking lot.

  Now I would be joining Chipper at that same school, wearing my own tie as I trooped in for my first day tomorrow morning as a geeky, green freshman. I had heard the stories of how the upperclassmen taunted the new boys. St. Francis Xavier was a hotbed of testosterone. Its slogan, “Be a man,” was enshrined over its front doors and embodied by its strutting, title-holding football team. This year, as a defensive linebacker, Chipper would probably see his first real action on the field, and I’d be required to sit in the bleachers and cheer him on. It was called school spirit. Whether Chipper would turn out to be a tormentor or a friend remained to be seen. I was hoping that his interest in Becky would work in my favor. But one could never count on such things.

  Holding my breath, I watched as Chipper’s white buttocks rose in the air from on top of my sister.

  I leaned in for a better view, but as I did so, my knees cracked again. I let the fronds swing shut but too late. I heard Becky ask, “What was that?”

  My armpits suddenly poured sweat. Then I heard a splash.

  I bolted. But not before, without even thinking about it, I snatched up Chipper’s underpants in my hand.

  I was stuffing them up my shirt as I came skidding back into the house, the screen door slamming behind me. Suddenly my mother was two inches from my face, her hair wrapped around huge orange curlers.

  “Did you find your sister?”

  “No.”

  “Mother Mary! One simple favor I ask of her and she disappears on me!”

  I knew it wasn’t one simple favor. It was more like five or six or thirty. Ever since Becky had gotten her driver’s license three months ago, she’d been forced to act as Mom’s personal chauffeur, driving her to the grocery store, to the hairdresser, to the Wednesday night meetings of the Rosary Altar Society. That was the w
hole reason Dad had bought that used mustard-colored Vega, so that Becky could drive Mom around on her errands, freeing him from the chore. See, Mom didn’t know how to drive a car. “In my day,” she explained whenever someone expressed surprise at the fact, “not every lady got her driver’s license.” The truth was, Mom didn’t do well with technology, whether it was driving a car or adjusting the antenna on top of the television set or resetting the clock after a power outage. All those things she left up to my father. Once, when I was eight, Dad had tried to teach Mom how to drive. She’d stepped on the gas instead of the brake and charged straight over the sidewalk into Flo Armstrong’s peony garden, tires spitting soil. Never again did Mom get behind the wheel.

  Margaret Joan Cronin Fortunato, better known as Peggy. Five feet four, big hands like a man’s, and breasts so large they sometimes made her seem as if she’d topple over frontward. It was easy to see where Becky got her measurements.

  “She’ll remember,” I said, assuring my mother of my sister’s promise as I pulled off my muddy sneakers on the mat inside the front door. “The party’s not until four o’clock.”

  “Well, it’s already twelve thirty and—Danny! Look at that mud! Were you at the pond? I told you not to go up there. Do you want to get poison ivy again?”

  “I wasn’t at the pond,” I said quickly.

  “Well, if you were looking for Becky, you should have gone to the pond. You know she’s always sneaking up there.”

  I just sighed as my mother made the sign of the cross. She always did this when she was anxious, which meant she was crossing herself a couple hundred times a day. Ever since Becky had turned sixteen, Mom had been even more anxious, it seemed. She’d always doted on Becky. Becky was her little angel, whose annual dancing school recitals had always reduced my mother to a puddle of tears. “Isn’t she the most beautiful child ever?” she’d repeat over and over to herself, watching Becky pirouette on the stage. Mom always went easier on Becky than she did on me; on snow days when school was canceled, Becky got to sleep in, but I had to get up and shovel the driveway. “Because you are the boy,” Mom would say, and boys shoveled driveways and cut the grass and raked the leaves. Becky just dried the dishes after dinner. I didn’t think it was a fair balance.