by J. G Hayes
“Hot as a mother today, huh?”
“Yeah,” Danny answered.
“I was just heading out to Castle Island for my little lunch break; thought I’d come by and say hi.” Billy rested his behind against the front wrought-iron fence.
Castle Island hadn’t been an island in over a hundred years, since the quarter-mile causeway had been built connecting it to the mainland. Now it was a promenade surrounding an ancient grassy-lawned stone fort on the edge of the harbor where people walked, jogged, Rollerbladed, fished, and laid in the sun gobbling hot dogs and soft-serve ice cream from Sullivan’s.
Danny was overwhelmed by Billy’s friendliness. He looked up at him to meet his eyes and saw Billy staring at his neck. Billy immediately looked away.
The tie! You idiot—he sees the tie, sticking out of your collar!
“Yeah, it’s a hot one, all right,” Billy said.
Danny’s mouth worked. Nothing came out but a gurgle. His heart started pumping wildly. Like clockwork, he knew his face was crimsoning. Billy met his eyes again at the strange noise Danny had made.
“Ahh … you okay there, Bert?” Billy asked in a purposely goofy Kermit the Frog imitation.
Billy seemed able, with just a smile, to cut through the heaviest disasters. It was impossible not to melt in the light of his ways.
“No, but I hope to be soon,” Danny laughed. Billy laughed too and then punched Danny lightly on the shoulder.
“Come up and see me at the store, okay?”
Billy’s lean was casual, but the back of his soft eyes seemed to be smeared with urgency.
“Ahh … yeah! Yeah, I’ll come up tomorrow. For lunch,” Danny said, surprised at the broadness of his own smile. “I usually take lunch at eleven-thirty.”
“Good deal,” Billy said, nodding his head. He kept his eyes on Danny’s. Danny didn’t look away. He didn’t know if he could, even if he wanted to. Then Billy smiled, as if some kind of question had been answered. He again punched Danny lightly. “See ya then.”
Billy strolled to his huge old Chevy parked ten feet away. The big dented door creaked loudly as he opened it and slipped in. He put on a pair of sunglasses that had been resting on the dashboard, then drove off with two fingers out the window making the peace sign.
Danny didn’t go back in that day; the need didn’t seem as great. The light-blueness of Billy seemed a flower he would pull out and sniff throughout the afternoon.
When Mr. Palmer came by at 4:00, he stumbled on a piece of scrap wood out front.
Me and Billy would never stumble, Danny thought.
“I can’t believe they didn’t clean up their mess yet,” he said, turning back and looking down at what had tripped him. “You got a truck?”
“Ahh … no,” Danny said. “My brother does though. Ahh … how come?”
“Well, there’ll be an extra fifty bucks in your check this week if you clear this shit outta here by Friday,” Mr. Palmer said. “It messes up the whole place.”
Business must be really good, Danny thought.
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll try to do it tonight.”
“Any sign of the guy today? The architect?”
Danny stiffened. He touched the rolled-up tie in his pocket just to make sure it wasn’t hanging out.
“Ahh … no.” He paused. “Why? Is he … what’s he due back or something?”
“Oh, I have no idea,” Mr. Palmer said. He turned and looked at Danny.
THAT NIGHT DANNY DREAMED he was wandering through The Architect’s house. It was very early morning in his dream. The sun was just beginning to pour through the windows as it lifted itself over the cerulean ocean, the same color as Billy’s eyes. Danny found himself in the kitchen of The Architect’s house, opening the double-door aluminum refrigerator. Where the eggs should have been, in little cups scooped out on the door, instead were shining Christmas lights, the old-fashioned, big-bulbed kind. As Danny watched they lit up, brilliantly. Danny gasped, then woke. He sat up. The desire in him to go back into the house flared up, almost blinding him. He thought of Billy, and getting his lunch at McGillicuddy’s, and a struggle began. He could almost hear a bell ring. He writhed over onto his stomach as if he were wrestling. Then he felt it, silky against his stomach and thigh.
All he was wearing under his race car sheets and plaid quilt was the red tie, wrapped around his hard waist like a belt. He would’ve worn it around his neck but George might have seen it in the morning when he got up. Danny sat up and squinted at his alarm clock. It was twenty-five minutes before seven. Too early to get up but too late to go back to sleep. George was already gone. He reached down and rubbed the dangling part of the tie against his stiff penis. He groaned lowly at the sensation. When he came he moaned, “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.”
HE MOVED THE LADDER over to the last window on the third floor front around 11:00. He’d been struggling all morning with his desire. But he was winning. When he got to the top of the ladder he saw through the window his gray T-shirt on the floor beside The Architect’s drafting table, as if it had been taken prisoner. In his panic at hearing Billy’s car door slam yesterday he’d left it there.
Well, that ended that. He had to go back in, now. If The Architect came home abruptly, if the woman returned for … for anything, a doctor’s appointment, a needed phone number—
Once inside, he took his boots off, but not his socks. He had to wait, again, for the breathless thrill to pass. He walked over to the drafting table. He picked up his shirt. He brought it to his face. It still smelled like him, but there was an additional aroma to it, a whiff of this place that had seeped in overnight. Danny thought this was how he might smell in the future.
There was a yellow Post-it note on the table he hadn’t seen yesterday. DON’T FORGET MELANSON PLANS, written in printed, blue-inked letters.
“Yeah, don’t fuckin’ forget,” Danny mumbled.
He sat down in the leather chair. It was warm from the sun and seemed to wrap itself around him, welcoming him. He placed his arms on the armrests. He rolled back a bit on its wheels, then forward toward the computer, at the same time that a US Airways Metrojet, carrying The Architect, was landing half a mile away at Logan International Airport.
Danny began idly flicking through the neon pages of the black metal Rolodex next to the computer. It seemed every listing ended in the words “group” or “associates.” Or listed a company whose name reminded Danny of Greek battles he’d studied in junior-high history. Jane Dunhill, Vision Group Architects; R. Klemp Associates; Timothy Winston, Zylaces Corporation. No one was listed individually—people didn’t seem to be people alone, but physical embodiments of mysterious, majestic forces behind them, like nervous priests speaking for an uncertain but all-powerful God.
He closed the Rolodex and sat back in the chair. Danny fantasized about bringing in one of his own designs—he’d shown no one, ever— and leaving it here on The Architect’s desk. The Architect would be astounded. Impressed. Whose work is this? This is… . It’s fantastic! He’d be astonished when he learned this was a kid’s work, a kid who’d never had one minute of drafting lessons or architecture school.
So, where are you going in September?
No—he wouldn’t say that. These people turned nouns into verbs. I’ll be summering on Nantucket …
Where will you be collegeing in September?
Nowhere.
Don’t be ridiculous; you have to.
I didn’t get in anywhere.
They didn’t know how talented you are. How could they know? I know people. Let me make some calls.
Well, there’s this other problem, see: money.
Let me take care of that for you. Come here. Kiss me—
Danny shook his head. The Architect’s smiling face faded, but not before it became Billy’s.
Danny held his fingers over the computer, pretending to type. He wondered if The Architect ever worked up here late at night. Of course he did. He tried to see him, the moon
spilling into the room like music. Danny wondered what The Architect wore on those occasions. A robe, white as the moonlight. Or boxers, silky expensive ones that gave you shivers just to slide them on. Or maybe just white briefs, like Danny—tight against the smooth, warm thighs—
Danny’s eyes shifted.
He turned his head and looked toward the end of the room, to the open door. Through the door were stairs. Going down. To the bedroom.
As he slipped down the noiseless carpeted stairway, Danny tried to remember if his heart had ever pounded this crazily. The stairs turned a stained-glass-windowed corner, then came to a maroon-walled rest at a hall. Beside him was a door, half-open. The hall was sunny but the room through the gaping doorway was dark. He pushed open the door with his fingers. It was the bedroom.
“I’ll be right back,” he told the empty room.
He found the next flight, descended the stairs into an orange-walled front parlor, and made his way into the kitchen, which took up the entire back of the house. The floor was tiled with black-and-white stone. A vast oven, bigger than those in the neighborhood pizza parlor Danny went to, sat in the middle of the room like a landlocked ship. Dozens of dull pots and pans hung from wooden rafters, and the entire back wall was a honeycomb-like wine rack. Danny counted one row of bottles across, then a row down, and multiplied. There were over 2,000 bottles of wine in the kitchen.
The refrigerator wasn’t where it had been in his dream. It was stainless steel and double-doored. He looked around. A maroon sweater was draped over one of the four chairs surrounding the butcher-block table. Another yellow Post-it note glowed on the table, beside some magazines Danny had never heard of. He leaned closer to the note. The writing was different from the note in the design room.
Peter—
You’re such an asshole for what you said on the phone.
The note was unsigned. “Asshole” was underlined with two quick thick strokes. Danny was impervious to any unrelated stimuli at this point; it could’ve been a shopping list for the effect it had on him.
With a burst he began opening cabinets and pulling out drawers, taking a mindless inventory of everything he saw. There seemed to be an endless amount of things to put on food—rosemary balsamic vinegar of Modena, Thai peanut butter paste, extra virgin first cold-pressed olive oil—but no food itself. He marveled at the unique weirdness of people—their decision to put rolls of unopened paper towels in a drawer marked BREAD.
He finally walked over to the refrigerator and swung open the double doors while The Architect stepped into a cab, brushing the crumbs from his in-flight meal off his salmon-colored tie.
There were no Christmas lights inside the refrigerator, nor any egg-holding trays. Maybe they didn’t make them like that anymore. A sigh blew out from him, and Danny realized it was one of relief. The left side of the refrigerator was the freezer. Three skinny Lean Cuisine boxes were stuck-stacked frozen one on top of the other, and a mountain of small geometrically-correct ice cubes spilled from a fertile black hole at the rear. The refrigerator’s other side contained three jugs of spring water, a wilting head of celery, and a tippy, nearly empty pint of light cream. He grabbed one of the jugs of water, took off the blue plastic cap, and guzzled from the mouth of it. Then he shut the doors and slipped back upstairs, his step and eyes full of purpose.
His heart was pounding hard again as he stepped inside the bedroom. It was about half the size of the design room. The bed was huge and seemed to float above the hardwood floors and Oriental rug. Like the drafting table upstairs, the bed sat in the middle of the room. Four-posted, with a mustard-colored canvas canopy on top, it looked a hundred years old. Unlike Danny’s at home, this bed was made, and tasseled pillows, seven of them of different sizes and colors, rested at the head. The room smelled of the slightly rotting flowers that sat in a round zinc vase on a nightstand beside the bed. Danny fingered one of the bedposts while he stared at the bed, wondering what dramas were played out here. Beyond the bed an antique table with a Tiffany lamp on top of it looked out a window. Beyond that a double archway led into another area. Danny could see a raised tub with large powder blue tiles around it. He stepped through the archway and took a step up. Here was a Jacuzzi, in a gleaming-fixtured bathroom bigger than Danny’s bedroom. A tube of whitening toothpaste with its cap off gleamed on the pedestal sink. Off one side of the bathroom was an open area, thickly carpeted, with mirrored closets on two opposite walls. Danny felt a tightness in his stomach. The dressing area.
He took off his clothes in the bathroom, watching himself in the mirror as his long-sleeved jersey, then his white T-shirt, slid over his head. He unbuttoned his white painter’s pants. He didn’t even have to unzip them; they fell over his thirty-inch waist to the bathroom floor with a slight rumpling sound. He stepped out of them one leg at a time, then kicked them away. He leaned one hand on the silky cornflower blue wallpaper and pried off one sweaty sock, then the other. As he tossed them away he saw that they were mismatched.
It was midday and the traffic coming back from the airport was minimal.
Danny walked into the dressing area with a pounding heart. He wiped his wet hands against the back of his white briefs. He stood in the center of the room. Without turning his head, he could see the back of himself in the mirrors on the closet doors behind him. He slipped his thumbs into the waistband of his briefs. Keeping an eye on his backside, as if he were watching someone else, he lowered the briefs down slowly. Then he bent down as he stepped out of them. He brought them to his forehead and wiped away his sweat. Then he dropped them to the floor. A pennant on the wall before him, above the closets, said HARVARD SQUASH CLUB. Danny thought this was like racquetball, except you wore all white. He slung his right arm through the odorless air, paddling an imaginary ball with an imaginary racquet. Yet he felt phony as he did it, as if he were acting for an audience.
Danny turned around slowly, examining the person in the mirror. He studied each curve and limb of the white body, how everything moved together in such seamless architectural harmony. Then he faced the mirror again. He started at the feet, then raised his eyes upward, slowly. When his eyes met the eyes in the mirror he couldn’t look away. His breath was coming in chops and his hands began trembling.
He opened the closet door in front of him, then shut it immediately at the sight of the blouses and career suits, the army of flats and heels in tight rows on the closet floor awaiting marching orders. He turned around and pulled open the other closet’s doors. A smell of cedar gushed out as if to greet him. He heard himself gasp. His blistered, sunburned hand moved slowly, reverently closer, then ran itself down the richness of suits, dress shirts, ties, pants, and summer jerseys, enough of the latter to outfit an entire golf course by the sea.
He pulled out the darkest suit from the dozen or so hanging there, and laid it reverently upon a ladder-back chair with an oval seat that was resting in the corner.
Two lines of built-in wooden drawers rose from floor to ceiling at the closet’s end. Danny swallowed hard. He looked around, found the light switches he was looking for at the room’s far end, then flicked them up. A runway row of recessed lights burst to life from the ceiling. Their brightness made him jump. He was young enough that his body looked even better under the harsh lighting. He marveled at how the white flesh was shining in its reflected smoothness in one place, then became thick with black hair only inches away. He wondered how the hair on The Architect’s body arranged itself. In his mind’s eye Danny saw a plan for a male body drawn up on paper similar to the thick sheets on the drafting table upstairs, denoting exactly where each hair should be placed, how long it must be, and whether straight, or tight with spiraled curls.
He turned back to the drawers and eased the middle one open, pulling on the pewter rosebud fixture. It slid exactly open on noiseless rollers. A dozen or more pair of black socks were arranged as precisely as cloned fruit in a box. Danny lifted a pair, rubbing the material between his fingers. Then he put them on.
He opened three more drawers—of silk handkerchiefs, white athletic socks, and a shining array of cufflinks—before he found the underwear drawers. The white T-shirts were a brand Danny had never heard of, but they looked like any other white T-shirts, crewnecked and size Men’s Large. They seemed to be a little softer than what Danny was used to. There were two drawers for underpants, one filled with silk and cotton boxers, the other with white briefs, size 34, not folded, but spread out face up. He ran his fingers along the elastic waistband of one before taking it out of the drawer. He opened them up to put them on, then realized he couldn’t get dressed without taking a shower first. He never put on clean clothes—even his painting rags—before taking a shower. A thousand inner groans at what he was doing all fell away to the power that was driving him on. He pulled off the dark socks and laid them, with the white briefs, tenderly upon the dark suit on the chair. He walked back into the bathroom, his erection divining the way.
He turned the water on and ran his hand under the spray, which is why he didn’t hear the car pull up out front, or its door slamming. There was no “H” or “C” on the black steel tap that jutted arrogantly out of the blue-tiled shower stall. He couldn’t get the temperature right. When he heard the rapping on one of the front windows, and a voice, blurred by the water, he jumped so much that he banged his head on the shower door. Something that felt to him like liquid ice shot through his head.
Someone!
For the rest of his life he always marveled at how quickly he moved then. He couldn’t get the water to turn off for what seemed a minute, but later he realized it was probably only seconds, albeit the longest of his life. He pulled on his painter’s pants first, shoving his briefs and T-shirt and socks into his ample back pockets. He pulled on his jersey and saw the gooseflesh on his stomach. He stampeded into the dressing area. He put The Architect’s briefs back into the T-shirt drawer with the T-shirt, but had no time to correct his mistake. The Architect’s socks he left on. He pounded up the third-floor stairs, his breath ahead of him. He stopped at the entrance to the design room, paralyzed by the sight of a pair of hands descending the ladder outside. The afternoon sun pouring through the windows blinded him. He grabbed yesterday’s T-shirt from beside The Architect’s black leather chair, then ran across the room and stepped into his boots. He slid open the window and crawled out, grabbing onto the wobbling ladder. He pulled the window down, then the screen. The screen came all the way down, and it did click into place when it reached the bottom. Danny grabbed onto both edges of the ladder.