When Becky turned sixteen, Mom freaked. Her little angel now had ideas of her own. Becky was getting “too serious” with Chipper Paguni, Mom argued. She had quit dancing lessons and spent all her time with Chipper. I always believed that Mom’s demands that Becky drive her everywhere were part of a strategy to keep her close at hand. And I suspected Becky thought so, too. Hence their arguments.
But all that was not to say that Mom paid no attention to me. On the contrary. Becky might have been her favorite, but I received my share of Peggy Fortunato’s extravagant solicitude. My fourteenth birthday party, for example, had turned into a state occasion. Mom had been up at five, washing the floor, vacuuming the drapes, wrapping Hershey’s Kisses in blue tulle, setting—and then resetting—the table. Just so five of my friends, plus Nana and Aunt Patsy, could sit around drinking Kool-Aid and eating chocolate cake.
“Well,” Mom said, throwing her hands in the air, “if you don’t have any balloons for your birthday party, Danny, you’ll know who to blame. Not me!”
She disappeared down the hallway.
From the kitchen I could smell my cake baking—yellow Duncan Hines, my favorite. Peering around the corner, I spied the jar of chocolate frosting waiting on the table, and beside it a bag of M&M’s, with which Mom would spell out my name across the top of the cake. The candles had already been laid out and counted. Fourteen of them.
I was really too old for kiddie parties like this. I’d tried to protest, but Mom had insisted. Only with great effort had I been able to persuade her not to drag out the pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey game. Certainly next year there would be no birthday party like this. High school kids didn’t have parties with Hershey’s Kisses wrapped in tulle. Next year my birthday party would be very different.
That was, if I survived high school to make it that far.
I dialed a number on the beige phone mounted to the kitchen wall.
“Katie?”
“Danny?”
“What time are you coming? Come early, okay? We can hang out.”
The girl on the other end of the line sighed. “I can’t. My mom is taking me shopping.”
“Tell her you can’t go. You can’t be late to my party, Katie. My mom is already having a bird. You said you’d help us set up.”
“I know, but I’m going clothes shopping for school tomorrow.”
“Clothes shopping? You’re going to be wearing a uniform!”
Katie Reid, my closest friend since kindergarten. Short, chubby, with a blond Dorothy Hamill wedge cut. The worst thing about high school—worse than having to use a locker, worse than fearing the taunts of upperclassmen—was being separated from Katie. I was being sent one way, and Katie another. She was heading to St. Clare’s, the all-girl sister school to St. Francis Xavier. Unlike their male counterparts, whose only dress code was a collar shirt and a necktie of choice, the St. Clare girls wore white blouses and pleated plaid skirts. So what kind of clothes shopping could she possibly do?
“Shoes, socks, sweaters,” she told me, as if reading my mind. “And underwear.”
I suddenly became conscious of Chipper’s underpants bunched up near my armpit. “You can’t be late,” I told Katie again. “After this who knows when we’ll see each other again.”
“Don’t say that, Danny! We’ll see each other every week!”
I grunted. “I hate high school.”
“You haven’t even started it yet.”
“I know, but I still hate it.”
“Danny, I have to go. My mom is calling me.”
“Okay. Don’t be late.”
“Good-bye, Danny.”
I hung up the phone. The timer over the stove pinged.
“Cake’s done,” I called to my mother as I ran upstairs to my room, pulling Chipper’s underpants out of my armpit and stuffing them into my drawer. I threw myself onto my bed and lay there with my hands behind my head, staring up at the ceiling. On my wall were posters of Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman and Monty Python and the Holy Grail. On my floor was a pile of nearly one hundred record albums, which had tipped over, sending Andy Gibb, Hall & Oates, and Peter Frampton sliding across the orange shag carpet. Orange was my favorite color. I’d chosen it because no one ever picked orange.
The window was open, and there was a slight breeze moving the flimsy brown and white checked curtains. I must have fallen asleep, because the next thing I knew a car door was closing, and I could hear my aunt Patsy’s voice in the driveway.
I sat up, rubbed my eyes, and headed back downstairs.
Mom was propping an electric fan on the windowsill to cool off the room as Nana and Aunt Patsy came through the front door.
“Danny off the pickle boat,” Nana said when she saw me.
It was what she’d always called me. I had no idea what it meant, but ever since I could remember, Nana had been calling me “Danny off the pickle boat”—just before she’d grip my shoulders and leave a big, wet red kiss on my cheek. It was no different today. Her perfume, as ever, was heavy and spicy. Nana’s scent would often linger for hours after she left. Mom sometimes had to open a window.
Adele Mary Horgan Fortunato, better known, to me, anyway, as Nana. Stout and silly, a crazy little jingle perpetually on her lips. Danny off the pickle boat. Here comes Becky in her BVDs. Sing a song of six-packs and a pocket full of beer. Nana often made no sense at all, but she always made me smile.
Beside her stood Aunt Patsy. Her daughter. Dad’s older sister. Patricia Ann Fortunato. Never married. An old maid. And now Aunt Patsy had cancer. When Mom spoke of it to the neighbors, her voice always dropped to a whisper on the word. “Patsy has cancer. They had to take one breast and then part of another. It doesn’t look good.” And she’d make the sign of the cross.
Today Aunt Patsy looked very gray and drawn. She wore a bulky sweater even on hot days so that she could cover up her uneven chest. When she smiled at me, her teeth seemed too big for her face. “Happy birthday, honey,” she said. “Are you excited to be starting high school?”
“Yeah,” I lied, accepting the shirt box she was offering me, wrapped in green and blue paper. I knew what it was even without opening it. A white collar shirt from Sears. Probably a tie, too, for me to wear to school.
“Where’s Becky?” Nana was asking. “Beckadee, Beckadoo?”
“God only knows,” Mom said. “I can only hope she’s downtown, picking up the balloons I ordered for Danny’s party.”
“But her car’s still in the driveway,” Aunt Patsy observed.
“I know, so she must be off with Chipper. Maybe he’s driving her down.” Mom was unfolding a string of silver paper letters that spelled out HAPPY BIRTHDAY. “I haven’t seen her since this morning. I told her not to forget the balloons, and she’d better not! I’ll have her head!”
“Mom, please don’t pin up that HAPPY BIRTHDAY sign,” I said.
Mom looked at me as if I were mad. “Why not? It’s your birthday.”
“It’s dweebish.”
“You can’t have a birthday party without a HAPPY BIRTHDAY sign,” Mom declared.
“It’s for little kids, Mom.”
She sighed dramatically, folding the sign back up. “First, no pin the tail on the donkey. Next thing he won’t want a cake.”
“Where’s Becky?” Nana asked again.
We all looked over at her.
“Mommy, Peggy just told us,” Aunt Patsy said gently. I’d always thought it odd that a grown woman still called her mother “Mommy.” “Becky’s in town, getting the balloons for Danny’s party.”
“Oh,” Nana said. “That’s right.”
Nana had been getting forgetful. She sometimes confused my father with her late husband, Sebastian. Sometimes she repeated herself several times a day, asking the same questions over and over. Dad remembered his own grandmother, Nana’s mother, getting the same way. Eventually, they had to put her in the state hospital, where she died, crazy as a loon. I looked at Nana and felt very sad. I knew she was think
ing about her mother, about the state hospital. She wasn’t so forgetful that she’d forgotten about that. She knew what was happening. Nana caught me looking at her and seemed startled. Then she winked at me.
It was getting close to three o’clock. I wished that Katie had been able to come over earlier. I headed back upstairs and sat on my bed, my back against the wall.
“This might be the last time we see each other,” I’d said to Katie almost every day since the end of eighth grade.
She’d always scold me. “Stop saying that. It’s not like we’re moving away. We still live in the same town.”
Should I have asked Katie to be my girlfriend then? If she were my girlfriend, then we’d have a connection, something to really bind us together. I sensed it would be good insurance to have a girlfriend upon entering high school. It would offer some kind of protection, I suspected, but just what kind, I wasn’t sure.
And yet I hadn’t asked her. It would have seemed odd after all these years. She probably would have laughed at me. Now, sitting on my bed, I wished I had.
My eye caught movement outside the window.
Chipper Paguni was pulling into his driveway in his rebuilt, repainted gold metallic 1971 Mustang Mach 1, with the black stripe down the hood. I leaned forward to get a better view. The door on the driver’s side popped open, and Chipper emerged in a white T-shirt and shiny black parachute pants. I knew he wasn’t wearing underwear, and my cheeks flushed a little as the thought crossed my mind. I waited for the passenger’s side door to open and for Becky to get out, but nothing happened. Chipper paused to inspect something on the side of his precious car—a dent? a ding? a scratch?—then headed into the house.
I was scared.
Had he seen me out by the pond?
And what had Chipper thought when he couldn’t find his underwear?
It didn’t even cross my mind to wonder where Becky was.
PALM SPRINGS, CALIFORNIA
I headed up our walkway just as the sprinkler system kicked on, a small, insistent hiss under the bushes, a soft spray of mist across the dry purple night.
We weren’t meant to be here. Humans weren’t designed to live in deserts. But we did, anyway. We pumped in water and planted bougainvillea. We built swimming pools and golf courses and laid out vast stretches of grass. We put up shopping malls. We did it because we could. But that didn’t change the fact that we were not meant to be here.
In the air hung the fragrance of dry sage. I paused, looking up at the sky, a vast dome of indigo studded with thousands of stars. At night the desert’s stillness never lost its power to astonish me. A quarter of a million souls resided under that big sky, but at night I heard only the rustle of dried weeds. From somewhere far away came the crackly, impatient whine of a coyote.
Against the sky, the mountains ringing the valley were a slightly darker shade of purple. I stood there, trying to make out the line that separated mountain from sky. From eighty-five hundred feet above, the bright white eye of the tram winked at me. I took a deep breath, pulling the dry, clean desert air into my lungs. Then I let myself into the house, uncertain of what I might find.
“Frank?” I whispered.
The living room was dark. I flicked on a lamp, sending light spilling throughout the room, illuminating the sleek black-and-white tiled floor and the low-slung midcentury-modern furniture. On the wall hung two of my prints: a giclée of the Chocolate Mountains and a close-up of a sunflower, which Frank called his green daisy. They were images that suited our house, a classic Alexander built in 1955, a butterfly-roofed exemplar of rational design and modernist style, with its exposed beams and gabled spun-glass walls. Back in the day, these houses were built on the cheap, snapped up by postwar California’s tail-finned, consumer-happy middle class, eager to snare their own piece of a desert playground popularized by the Rat Pack and other Hollywood elite. Now original Alexander homes fetched millions. From every oblong window, the house offered stunning views of the mountains, and fifty years of stringent municipal policy had ensured that nothing was ever built too high to obscure that scenery. Very few moments in my life were more treasured than my early mornings out by the pool, sitting with my coffee and watching the reflection of a very pink dawn against the blue gray of the mountains.
I set my keys down on the table and stepped through the living room into the dining area. The hallway was dark. No light emanated from the doorway of the bedroom. Might they both have fallen asleep?
I turned and headed through the kitchen. Only then did I notice the light coming from the second bedroom, which we used as an office. I peered around the door.
“Frank?”
He was sitting at the desk, a pile of papers in front of him, his brow creased, his glasses at the end of his nose. He looked up at me.
“Danny. I didn’t hear you come in. How was happy hour?”
“The usual.” I gave him a confused look. “What are you doing in here?”
“Polishing up my syllabi for the start of classes.” He sighed, removing his glasses and rubbing his eyes. “I’ll stop if Randall wants to pull out the bed….”
“Randall isn’t here. I assume he’s tricking.”
Frank looked up at me and smiled. “Well, good for him.”
“Yeah. If it gets his mind off Ike.”
Frank nodded.
“But where’s Ollie?” I still couldn’t fathom why Frank was in here, poring over papers, when I’d expected to find him engaged in a very different sort of activity.
“He’s in the casita.” Frank had replaced his glasses and was once more looking down at his desk.
“The casita? What’s he doing out there? And why are you in here?”
He didn’t look up at me. “I really needed to get these syllabi done. I don’t want them hanging over me all weekend. And rather than having Ollie in the living room, watching television, where he’d distract me, I suggested he go out and watch whatever he wanted to in the casita and get comfortable there, and then, when you got home…”
I nodded, following his line of thought. “So you want me to go bring him in, then?”
Frank hesitated. He took his glasses off again and looked up at me.
“Danny, why don’t you just go out to him? I’m exhausted. I’m going to finish this one syllabus and then head in to bed.”
I made a face and folded my arms across my chest. “You don’t want to…do anything with him, like we planned?”
Frank smiled. “He came down for your birthday, Danny. And look, I’m so beat, I’d just end up sitting at the foot of the bed, watching the two of you.”
“That’s all you’ve done the last few times, anyway.”
That came out harsher than I wanted. Frank ignored it and looked back down at his papers. “Really, Danny, it’s fine. I’m exhausted. You go have fun. I’m honestly looking forward to sleeping a good solid nine hours.”
I just stood there in the doorway. There was silence.
“Frank,” I said finally. “It’s my birthday. I don’t want to spend the night with Ollie if it means I spend it without you.”
“That’s very sweet of you to say, baby.” He looked up and gave me a genuine smile. “But, of course, you want to spend the night with him. He has an ass you can bounce quarters off, remember?”
“I’m serious, Frank.”
“Oh, baby.”
He stood, placing his hands on my shoulders. We were nose to nose. Once, Frank had been a few inches taller than I, but no longer. Somewhere over the last two decades, he had settled, like the frame of a house. His joints had retracted; his bones had curled inward ever so slightly. I studied him now at close range, observing the dark circles under his eyes, the mosaic of brown spots etched across his high, shiny forehead.
“Are you really too tired?” I asked him.
He nodded. “You can’t disappoint him, baby. He drove all the way in from Sherman Oaks.”
I leaned in and kissed him lightly on the lips.
Fr
ank smiled. “We’ll take a drive up to Joshua Tree tomorrow, go for a hike.” He took my chin between his thumb and forefinger. “Just the two of us. Maybe we’ll even finally spot a bighorn sheep after all these years.”
“Frank—”
“Let me finish this syllabus, Danny. And leave a note in the kitchen for Randall, if he comes back at all, that all he has to do is pull out the bed here in the office. I’ve already put sheets on for him.”
He sat down at his desk again. I remained unmoving in the door frame, watching him.
“Go,” he said, not looking up at me. “Skedaddle. Have fun.”
I stood there for a moment longer, then turned away.
One of the wonderful things about properties in Palm Springs was the casita—the “little house” on the grounds, which could be used for guests. Ours had a Spanish tile roof and beige stucco walls, accessed by a zigzagging stone path through a garden of cacti and creeping rosemary. Passing the kidney bean–shaped swimming pool, I could see the blue glow of the television from the casita’s windows reflected on the water. I looked closely and caught a glimpse of Ollie through the sheer curtains, lying on the bed, shirtless and barefoot and in jeans, the remote in his hands. I think he was watching America’s Next Top Model. I wasn’t sure, because he snapped off the TV as soon as I walked in.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey,” I replied.
The California king bed was so massive that it took up nearly the whole casita. There was no room for any other furniture except the flat-screen television hanging on the opposite wall. A small bathroom and medium-sized walk-in closet completed the casita. “Perfect for in-laws,” our Realtor had said—or, in our case, our boy toy from L.A.
I leaned over the bed and gave Ollie a quick kiss on the lips.
Object of Desire Page 3