I conceded the point there. As a kid in Connecticut, I’d spent many a hot, humid night spread eagle on my bed, nothing covering me, not even a sheet, a big electric fan pointed directly at me. We never had air-conditioning. I’d lie there, facing the ceiling, tongue out, listening to my mother bang around in the kitchen downstairs at two thirty in the morning. After Becky disappeared, Mom never slept a full night through. She slept in odd patches of the day, like from ten to eleven in the morning and again from five to six in the afternoon, usually on the living-room couch. She rarely made dinner after Becky disappeared. Dad would bring home buckets of chicken from KFC or double cheeseburgers with extra fries from Wendy’s. How I remained skinny as a beanpole, I’ll never understand.
“But what parts of Palm Springs don’t you like, Danny?” Thad was asking. “You’ve described all its natural wonders. What about when you move indoors?”
I made a face. I didn’t know this man well enough to say what I really felt. Frank called me judgmental, and maybe I was. Yet parties like this one recycled the same fifty or so people, the same faces that appeared, issue after issue, in the local gay rag. There was the local radio “personality” who carried fake Louis Vuitton bags and billed herself as a Hollywood actress (she’d made a few commercials in the 1960s). There was the local impresario who produced bad—very bad—musical theater, starring such Love Boat veterans as Mary Ann Mobley and Ken Berry. There was the self-help guru who self-published her own books and then self-printed promotional postcards declaring they were “critically acclaimed.” Yes, if we counted all the self-reviews.
And all that was needed to get a good cross-section of the gay population here was to sign on to ManHunt or Adam4Adam. Very few GoodLookingRedheads or TallNiceGuys. Eighty percent of the Palm Springs profiles had names like CumEatMyMeat or DumpYrLoadNMe. One drive through the Warm Sands area at 2:00 a.m. was enough to catch dozens of crystal-meth heads sniffing around for sex like mangy dogs hunting through a trash heap for a meal.
“You’re being judgmental.”
I snapped my head toward Frank. He hadn’t actually said the words, but I’d heard them just the same. He was looking at me as Thad awaited my answer.
I smiled. “Let’s just say I haven’t made many friends here. Most of my friends come in from L.A. on the weekends, like Randall.”
Thad put his hand on my shoulder. “Well, I hope that will change. I hope you and Frank will come back soon to have dinner with Jimmy and me.”
“We’d like that,” Frank said.
I lifted my glass, and we all clinked.
“And you must let me look at your portfolio,” Thad said, a little grin playing with his lips. “Don’t you think a Danny Fortunato print would look good over the bar?”
“Hmm, now that you say it…” I smiled, but I dared not turn around to look where Thad was gesturing. I might see the bartender again, and I didn’t think I could bear it.
It was at that moment that I spotted Randall. He was approaching us, waving his hands like an excited teenage girl. I wondered if the man accompanying him might be the cause of his excitement.
“I was wondering when you’d get here,” Randall said, bestowing kisses all around. “Doesn’t Thad have a marvelous house?”
I nodded in agreement. My eyes were fixed on the man with him, a dark, well-muscled man of Middle Eastern background, with a short-clipped beard.
“Hassan,” Thad was saying, “these are two new friends of mine. Danny Fortunato is an artist, and Frank Wilson is a professor of English.”
“I am pleased to meet you,” Hassan said, with an accent I couldn’t quite place. He shook Frank’s hand, then mine.
“Hassan is a photographer,” Randall told us, and I could see that he was smitten. “That’s his work on the wall over there.”
“Yes,” Thad said, gesturing across the room to a large black-and-white photograph of a naked man, only half visible, against a stark concrete wall. “It’s a self-portrait. Taken in Baghdad before the fall of Saddam.”
“Are you Iraqi?” Frank asked.
Hassan nodded. “I was born in Basra and lived many years in Baghdad. My family was not religious, and we did well for a time.” He smiled tightly. “For a time.”
“Hassan was explaining to me that he doesn’t take portraits of people to flatter them,” Randall said. “He looks at a person and sees the quality that most defines them, and he takes a picture of that.”
“Oh?” I looked over at the photo on the wall. Hassan had a beautiful body, and he had photographed himself quite provocatively. “And what quality is captured in that picture, might I ask?”
Hassan turned his dark eyes to me. “Faith,” he said simply.
“Faith? But I thought you said you weren’t religious.”
“Faith need not be about religion,” he said. “It is faith that has defined me from infancy. Faith in my own destiny, faith that I would go where I needed to go. That I would make it from there to here.”
“Fascinating, isn’t it?” Randall gushed.
Smitten indeed.
“Go ahead,” Randall was saying, nudging Hassan. “Tell them what you see when you look at me. The quality you say defines me.”
“Hope,” Hassan said plainly.
I sneered. “Clearly, you’ve just met.”
The photographer’s eyes hardened. “It is when I just meet a person that I see most clearly.”
Randall smirked. “My very good and dear friend Danny is being sarcastic, because I’ve been a bit, well, pessimistic of late.”
“That doesn’t mean you are not hopeful at your core.” Hassan looked from Randall back to me. “At his core, would you say he was hopeful?”
My mind flashed back many years. A night at Randall’s house in West Hollywood. A horrible night. It was raining miserably, and there was a leak in the ceiling, and water was pooling in the kitchen. And Randall sat on his couch, his eyes unblinking. “Positive,” he said over and over again. “The test came back positive.”
“What are we going to do?” I asked, the “we” uttered by instinct. I was terrified.
Randall didn’t answer right away, but finally he just shrugged. “Just go on living,” he said. “I guess we just go on living.”
Just go on living.
“Yeah,” I admitted to Hassan. “Hope is a good word for Randall.”
“And me?” Frank ventured. “If you were to take a picture of me, what would you be photographing?”
Hassan turned to face him. “Gravity,” he said, without a pause.
“Gravity?” I asked.
“Yes. Do you disagree?”
Frank was looking at me.
“No,” I said. “Once again, you’ve hit the nail on its head.” I smiled. “Just don’t do me, okay? I don’t think I want to know.”
“Well,” Thad said, “I’m sure it would be talent or beauty or artistry or something like that.” He was such a good host. “Now, my friends, I must go and mingle. Do enjoy yourselves. Wander around anywhere you like. Have as much to drink as you like. Enjoy this beautiful desert night.”
We all nodded as he moved off into the crowd, embracing and kissing the next group of people. The four of us stood awkwardly for a moment.
“Oh, go ahead,” I finally said. “Tell me what you see in me, Hassan.”
He hesitated. “No, I think when someone is reluctant, it’s best not to.”
Now I was curious. “No, really. Go ahead. I was just kidding.”
“Yeah,” Randall said. “What do you see in Danny?”
Frank looked at me uncomfortably over his wineglass as the photographer trained his gaze on me. This time there was no quick pronouncement. He started to say something, then stopped.
“What is it?” I asked. “I feel like I’m with a fortune-teller who doesn’t want to give me bad news.”
“I don’t see anything,” Hassan said finally.
I smiled. “So finally someone has stumped you, huh?”
Hassan shook his head. “No. I mean I see nothing. If I took a picture of you, I would be taking a picture of emptiness.”
I had no reply to that.
“Well,” Frank said, moving in to defend me, placing his arm around my shoulders, “you’re wrong about that, Hassan. Danny is hardly empty. He has tremendous passion and great talent—”
“I am sure that he does,” Hassan said. “I did not mean to offend. But you asked me what I saw. And when I look at you, my friend, I see a great aching emptiness. Something that is missing. Something that you are always looking for but have never found. If I took a picture of you, that is what would come through on the image.”
“Well,” I said, trying to lighten the mood, “then maybe I ought to stick to getting my shots done at Olan Mills.”
We all smiled.
“Please,” Hassan said, “you will not take offense at my words?”
“No,” I assured him. “No offense.”
But I lied.
I wanted to get away from them. From all of them. From this entire party of powdered and perfumed peacocks. Friends in Los Angeles had told me I’d never make it big, really big, as an artist until I learned to schmooze. But I hated schmoozing. Hated smiling at people I didn’t know, making small talk with people I didn’t want to talk with, being charming to a room full of phonies when all I really wanted to do was hang out at home, on my couch, the remote control in my hand, flipping back and forth between reruns of Doctor Who and the E! True Hollywood Story.
But smile I did, and small talk I did engage in, as we moved in and among the crowd, getting kissed by Ruta Lee and clucked over by queens. I did my best. At least forty percent of the assemblage would leave that night with my card in their pockets. As Thad dragged me from one of his friends to another, I kept smiling and shaking hands, popping breath mints repeatedly into my mouth. Soon enough, I needed another drink, and Jimmy, Thad’s less gregarious lover, was dispatched for a refill. I was glad for that, not wanting to approach the bar again myself.
And then, midway through the night, a murmur rippled through the crowd. Donovan and Penelope Sue Hunt had arrived at the front door. Everyone stopped their conversations, whipped their eyes away from their companions, and turned to see.
“Well,” Randall purred in my ear, “if it ain’t your old boyfriend.”
“Donovan,” I breathed.
Long before he’d married Penelope Sue, Donovan had carried the torch for me. He was so rich that labels like gay or straight were simply nuisances. Absurd categorizations. Someone as wealthy as Donovan Hunt didn’t need to declare one way or the other—though, given the number of beautiful boys he always had on his payroll, his preferences were obvious to everyone. Penelope Sue, at least a decade older than her husband, didn’t seem to care one way or another, provided he was on her arm at every function. Tonight she looked her usual shining self, with her big copper hair piled up on top of her head and bright pink lipstick smeared across her face as bold as Joan Crawford had ever worn, outlining and emphasizing her collagen-injected lips. Donovan, at her side, was as tall and handsome as ever, not a fleck of gray at his temples, his cheeks flushed with Juvéderm, wearing a shiny black Prada suit and enormous green Versace sunglasses.
“What’s with the shades?” I whispered to Randall.
He looked at me mischievously. “You mean you haven’t heard what happened to Donovan?”
I shook my head. Truth was, I didn’t care what happened to Donovan Hunt, even if everyone else seemed to live vicariously through him. Even at forty-five, Donovan remained the golden boy of the desert, a Peter Pan who refused to grow up, whose toys included a Jaguar; a Bentley; a private jet; homes in the desert, Maui, Highland Park (an exclusive suburb of Dallas), and Nantucket. Some of those homes Penelope Sue shared. Others she most decidedly did not.
“One of his boys beat him up,” Randall told me, almost mirthfully. “Stole a bunch of money and credit cards. Donovan had to go to the premiere of his latest picture wearing makeup and dark glasses to hide the bruises.” He gave me a look. “Or so I was told.” He snickered. “Guess they’re not all healed yet.”
Thad and Jimmy and a gaggle of others had hurried to embrace the newcomers, bestowing kisses and uttering exclamations of undying love. A few in the crowd around us had returned to their conversations, but most eyes remained fixed on the spectacle that was Penelope Sue and Donovan.
“Which boy did this dastardly deed?” I asked Randall.
“Not sure. I know it wasn’t the boy from New York.”
“Then it was the Mexican boy,” I said.
Randall shook his head. “Oh, no, not Victor. He’s a sweetie! He’d never do such a thing. I think this was a new boy, one that none of us had ever met.”
I sighed. I was tired of trying to keep track of Donovan’s boys. The topic bored me—or rather, I wanted it to bore me. But the truth was, I was dying to hear about Donovan being beaten up. In detail.
Randall didn’t have much to tell, however. “I just heard that he got beaten up right before the premiere, and he wouldn’t take off his sunglasses, even in the theater.”
“Now, boys,” Frank scolded us, easing in. “Don’t be so gleeful.”
“Gleeful?” I asked. “About Donovan getting beaten up? Us?”
“Say what you want about Donovan, but he’s made some good movies in the last couple of years,” Frank said. “He’s using that money he made in the eighties for good purpose now. Few studios would commit to making films like he does. I read a fantastic review of this latest one a few days ago in the Times. No matter what you think about him, Donovan really gets behind some worthwhile filmmakers.”
I grunted. I knew I was being unfair to Donovan. He really wasn’t so bad, and it was true that he was making some good, gay-positive films. I guess he’d made so much money from Bruce and Chuck that he had no idea what to spend it on. Once, years ago, he’d offered to spend it on me. He’d told me if I left Frank, he’d make me a star. He’d finance a movie that I could both star in and direct. It was quite the offer, and I believed he was serious. After all, he’d argued, Frank was going nowhere, but he, Donovan Hunt—one of the biggest independent producers in Hollywood—could do anything he wanted, including make a movie star out of a failed kid from East Hartford, Connecticut. I thought about it overnight, lying there beside Frank, listening to him snore. The next day I went to Donovan and said no thanks.
But our paths continued to cross, especially after Donovan married Penelope Sue and bought a huge estate in nearby Rancho Mirage. Frank and I got invited to every party he threw, with Randall often tagging along. And yet in all that time, his wife had barely spoken three words to me. Even now, I doubted she would recognize me on the street.
“Donovan’s last party was pretty fabulous, you have to admit that,” Randall was saying, both of us still watching him as he crossed the parlor with Penelope Sue to the bar. “I mean, come on, the champagne fountain. The prime rib. The bubble-butted waiters wearing aprons and nothing else…”
I turned on him sharply. “Don’t forget that was the party where you met Ike.”
That shut Randall up. He frowned and went off in search of Hassan.
Suddenly Thad Urquhart was at my elbow. “Danny,” he was saying, “I want to introduce you to two very important people.”
Before I had a chance to say anything, he had my forearm in a firm grip. I turned to Frank for help, but he just smiled and held up his hands. “Tell them I said hello,” he said, winking. “I’ve got to make a visit to the boys’ room.”
“Thanks a lot,” I grumbled as Thad tugged me toward the bar.
Penelope Sue was sipping a glass of white wine as we approached her. Donovan wasn’t drinking. Thad practically pushed me in front of them. “Darlings,” he said, “you have to meet my latest discovery, Danny For—”
He was quickly cut off by Donovan. “No need to sing the praises of Danny Fortunato to me, Thaddeus,” he said. “I’ve been singing them myself
for more than a decade.” He bent forward to embrace me. “How are you, angel puss?”
“Just ducky,” I told him. “What’s with the glasses?”
“An eye infection,” he said blithely. “Penelope, have you ever seen Danny’s art? You need to commission a few pieces.”
She smiled. Nothing more. No extended hand, no hello. But I was treated to the sight of that thick, broadly painted pink lipstick curling upward. Not everyone got that much from Penelope Sue. Then she turned to greet someone else.
Donovan was moving away himself, another set of hands eager to touch his shoulder or his arm, hoping some of his wealth and privilege might rub off. But before he was gone completely, he turned back to me. “Danny,” he said, “you and Frank must come next week to Cinémas Palme d’Or. It’s the desert premiere of my movie, and there’s a party afterward at the Parker. You must come!”
I nodded. He smiled, blew a kiss, and was gone.
“So you know Donovan Hunt,” Thad said.
“An old friend,” I replied dryly.
His eyebrows lifted knowingly. “A small world, isn’t it?”
“When you’re gay, very small,” I said. “Not that I’m saying Donovan is gay…”
Thad laughed. “I’d imagine a boy as good-looking as you must have gotten to know quite a few people on your way up.”
It was my turn to laugh. “There’s one person I don’t know, Thad, and I was hoping maybe you could help me with that.”
“Of course,” he said. “Who do you want to meet next?”
“I’m not sure I want to meet him,” I said. “Maybe just know his name.”
Thad looked at me strangely.
“Your bartender,” I said.
A smile slowly stretched across his face. “Ah yes,” he said. “Kelly.”
“Kelly?”
Thad nodded. “A sweet boy but—”
“But what?”
He laughed. “No buts. He’s a sweet boy.”
Our eyes moved over to watch him behind the bar. He was shaking a martini, the muscles in his lean arms taut.
“I noticed him at happy hour last Friday night,” I said.
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