Object of Desire

by William J. Mann

  The two of them lifted their eyes to look at him.

  “I’d like to introduce you to my great friend Danny here,” Randall said, waving at me to come join them. “Danny Fortunato, up-and-coming actor, soon-to-be gigantic star, collector of rare and vintage first editions, and all-around good guy, meet…”

  My face was burning. Rare and vintage first editions? What the hell was he talking about?

  “Gregory Montague,” said the older man in the seersucker suit.

  Frank’s eyes were on me.

  “Frank Wilson,” he said.

  “We’ve met,” I said softly, still several feet away.

  He made a face, signaling he didn’t remember me. Of course not. Why would someone like him remember someone like me? This was a big fucking mistake.

  “Maybe you don’t recall Danny,” Randall was saying, “because he’s wearing clothes.”

  I saw Gregory Montague’s eyebrows lift on that statement. Suddenly I felt certain he was Frank’s lover. Oh, man, was this ever a mistake!

  “Oh, right,” Frank was saying. “That club on Santa Monica Boulevard…”

  I laughed, inching just a bit closer. “Yeah, I’m a dancer there.”

  “Just temporarily,” Randall said. “Danny is simply mastering his stage presence. You’ll see. He’ll be a big star a year from now.”

  “I see already,” Gregory Montague said. A smile played with his lips as he reached inside his jacket and withdrew his wallet. Opening it, he handed me a card. “I’m an agent. Give me a call sometime.”

  The spark I saw in Montague’s eye was the same spark I had seen in dozens of the “clients” Edgar found for me. Montague figured me to be a hooker—or else an actor so desperate, I’d sleep with anyone who called himself an agent. And maybe I was. I felt dirty as I took his card. I caught a glimpse of Frank watching me. No spark in his eye. Whether Montague was his lover or not, Frank knew what was going on. He understood the exchange.

  “Well, you must come back and see Danny perform sometime,” Randall was saying, directing his words at Frank.

  I was so humiliated. I just turned away.

  “We will,” said Gregory Montague.

  But Frank said nothing.

  I couldn’t get away from them fast enough.

  “That was horrible!” I shrieked when we were back on the street.

  “I’ll say,” Randall agreed as we quickly made our way down Hollywood Boulevard. “Here I was, doing all the introductions, and oh-so-fancy Mr. Gregory Montague never even once asked my name.”

  “It was a mistake to go over to them. A big mistake!”

  “Hey, maybe he’s a real agent,” Randall said. “Maybe he can help you.”

  I spun on him. “All it did was make me look like a tramp in front of Frank.”

  “Oh, Danny. At least he knows where he can find you.”

  I stood in front of him, not letting him pass. “Don’t you see? He isn’t interested in me! Twice now I’ve made a fool of myself in front of him! He has known where to find me all along and has never come by. Why would he come now—especially when his boyfriend, or whoever the fuck that was, thinks I’m some piece of boy trash he can get into bed with the promise of a part?”

  “Hey, maybe it’ll be a good part,” Randall said.

  “Fuck you,” I said, turning away, folding my arms across my chest. “And what was all that bullshit about ‘rare and vintage editions’?”

  “You collect comic books,” he said dryly. “I had to pretend you had some culture, since you certainly weren’t showing any earlier, on our little trip to Grauman’s.”

  “Fuck you,” I said again.

  There was a moistness to the air now, almost as if it might rain.

  “I should never approach a guy I’m interested in,” I announced. “No guy that I’ve ever liked has ever gone for me. It’s a fact of my existence.”

  “That’s not true, Danny. You’ve had lots of boyfriends.”

  “But they came after me! It’s a very real distinction, Randall. If a guy approaches me, it’s one thing. But when I approach a guy, if I really like a guy, it never works out. As soon as I make a move, it’s over.”

  “I think you’re acting crazy.”

  We walked in silence for a while. The day got darker. Rain seemed a very real possibility. When rain loomed in Los Angeles, everyone got a sense of foreboding—like some dark disaster was about to erupt and ruin all our lives. Back East, it could rain in the morning and again at night, and in between the sun could shine, and no one would give it much thought one way or the other. But in Los Angeles when the skies got dark, the threat of rain was an unspoken terror that left everyone anxious and unsettled.

  Rain. Yes, I was scared of the rain.

  There was a day when I was sixteen. It was early spring, and it was raining really hard, pouring really, and my mother and I were walking under a pier on New York’s West Side. The stink of the Hudson River was burning my nose. We’d gotten a tip that Becky might be living there, and we were walking up to homeless people huddled in the shadows, rainwater dripping down from the planks above, and Mom would aim her flashlight right in their faces. Some would yell, some would curse, and others said nothing. I kept apologizing for my mother and her flashlight. By the time we got back to our car, we were drenched and freezing.

  Yes, I was terrified of the threat of rain.

  Up ahead, the Asian prostitute had stopped to talk with one of her colleagues. A dark-haired girl with slumped shoulders, not much older than I was, in a red satin miniskirt and pink vinyl boots. I paused as we neared them. Randall watched as I walked over to the girl and looked her directly in the face. Then, satisfied, I returned to him, and we resumed our walk down the street. Neither of us said a word.

  Certain old habits, I had come to accept, would never go away.

  EAST HARTFORD

  “I’ve got your sister tied up in my basement,” the boy in front of me whispered as he turned around in his seat to pass me a test.

  Oh, how I hated school. Just as I thought I would. I missed Katie and the Theresas terribly. At St. John’s, they had formed a protective barrier around me, keeping me safe from too much interaction with the other boys, the boys who played basketball and made lewd comments about the way Jaclyn Smith’s breasts bounced on Charlie’s Angels. It was best that I kept my distance from them, because if they saw how different I was, how essentially unlike them I was in every way, there might be trouble. But here at St. Francis Xavier, there were no girls to protect me. Just me, and the rest of the boys.

  Becky’s disappearance had proved to be endlessly amusing to these good Catholic young men. Taped to my locker one day, I found a crude drawing of a girl hanging from a tree, with the caption SAVE ME, BIG BROTHER scrawled in purple crayon. It didn’t seem to matter that I was the little brother, or that there was nothing—nothing!—I could do to save her, not even if I found the guts to tell my parents that I had seen her that day at the pond, skinny-dipping with Chipper Paguni. Ripping the drawing off my locker, I heard snickers from the boys behind me. I didn’t give them the satisfaction of a reaction.

  Just like now, looking at the smirking cretin sitting in front of me. Despite his taunt, I kept my face absolutely stoic. He laughed. Turning around to pass the test to the kid behind me, an elastic band suddenly bounced off the side of my head.

  Oh, how I hated school.

  “All right, boys,” said Brother Finnerty. “You have twenty-five minutes to take the test. Begin…now.”

  The classroom smelled of pencil shavings and mimeograph ink. I took a deep breath and looked at the first exercise. Of course, I’d ace this test. It was language and composition, and for the past eight years, the nuns at St. John’s had drilled into me the difference between nouns and verbs and how to diagram sentences and how to build paragraphs. It was the kind of old-fashioned schooling the boys from the public schools hadn’t gotten. I finished the entire test in nine minutes flat. Then I sat back in m
y chair, clasped my hands in front of me, and looked up at the clock over Brother’s desk. How slowly the hands turned, how much sixty seconds could feel like a lifetime.

  Even as the bell rang, some of the dumb-ass kids were still struggling to finish their tests, but Brother was insisting he collect them all.

  “I noticed you finished first, Danny,” he said to me as he walked past my desk. Brother Finnerty was a heavyset man, maybe thirty, with a doughy pink face. He was wrapped in the long, flowing brown robes of a monk. “You sure you checked all your work?”

  I nodded, gathering my books to head out to lunch.

  “I wonder if I could have a moment of your time, Danny,” Brother said.

  I looked at him as the other boys filed out of the classroom.

  “Might I impose on you to befriend a young man who has started classes just today?” Brother asked, not looking at me, straightening the test papers on his desk. “He comes from a very good family. His father’s a vice president at Connecticut Bank and Trust, but he’s had a hard time of things lately. He could use a good friend, and I think you might be an excellent choice.”

  I said nothing. Brother finished organizing the papers and looked up at me. There was a certain twinkle in his small blue eyes.

  “You’ve had a tragedy in your family, and so has he.” Brother Finnerty gave me a wan smile. “His mother died last year. He’s had difficulty dealing with her death, which is why he’s started school late. Maybe you and he—”

  “Becky’s not dead,” I said, parroting the phrase my mother used over and over with friends, neighbors, policemen, newspaper reporters. “We’ll find her. She’ll come home.”

  “Of course.” Brother gave me another smile, broader this time. “But still, you might be able to empathize a bit with his family trauma, what they’ve been through. His name is Troy Kitchens. He’ll be in the cafeteria. May I point him out to you? Perhaps you could sit with each other and eat your lunches together.”

  No doubt Brother had noticed that since school had started three weeks ago, I always sat alone at lunchtime. I was a loner. I was even excused from having to participate in intramural sports this year, due to the fact that Mom wanted me home every day right after school. That was one good thing to come out of Becky’s disappearance: I didn’t have to play sports. It meant that I made the acquaintance of very few classmates, however, which was fine by me. So this idea of making a new friend sounded pretty doubtful. The guys at St. Francis Xavier had certainly not proven themselves to be friend material. I had given up, in fact, on ever having friends again. Katie and the Theresas were in their own world at their own school. I rarely heard from them. I had become resigned to spending the next four years on my own. I looked at Brother Finnerty and gave him a noncommittal shrug.

  “I would appreciate it if you gave him a chance, Danny,” he said. “I know you’ll like each other. Troy is a very smart boy, just as you are.” He dropped an arm around my shoulders as he led me toward the door. “I’m sure you’ll be great friends.”

  It was not good for me to be seen in the hallway with Brother Finnerty’s arm around my shoulders. The boys called him Brother Pop—short for Poppin’ Fresh, the annoying little doughboy of television commercials, who was always giggling when ladies poked his gut. Brother shared a certain white, fleshy quality with the doughboy, even if his laugh wasn’t nearly as high pitched, but rather deep throated and raspy, as if in the privacy of the brothers’ quarters, he smoked too many packs of cigarettes. As the heavy, robed arm came down around my shoulders, I even thought I caught a whiff of tobacco smoke. I shuddered. It was too late to get away from him now. Walking out into the corridor, I could feel my face redden as every last one of my classmates seemed to turn in unison and stare at me getting cozy with Brother Pop.

  The corridor always smelled of a mix of Lemon Pledge and ham-and-cheese sandwiches, especially when the boys were at their lockers, digging through their books and sweaty gym clothes for the paper-bag lunches their mothers had packed for them. They glanced over their shoulders with suspicion as Brother Pop led me to the caf.

  “Do you need to stop and get your lunch?” he asked, dangerously close to my ear.

  I shook my head. I didn’t bring a lunch to school. Back at St. John’s, Mom had always made a sandwich for me to take, peanut butter and jelly or liverwurst, carefully trimming the soft brown crust from the Wonder Bread. But now it went without saying that she had more important things to do with her time, like going over police reports or reading through tips that came in the mail or making phone calls to people she didn’t know. Now I bought my lunch with the five dollars Dad gave me at the start of every week, and it was nearly always the same: a plate of SpaghettiOs, a bag of State Line potato chips, and a Coke, totaling ninety-five cents. Five dollars actually got me through the week with a quarter to spare, so on Fridays I splurged and got a cheeseburger.

  We entered the caf to the sound of trays slamming and soda machines fizzing. Up ahead a boy sat alone at a table, with his back to us. I knew it was Troy Kitchens even before Brother Pop pointed him out to me. He was slouched in his chair, his feet propped up on the table in front of him, his ankles crossed. He had long red hair and wore aviator glasses tinted blue. Shiny avocado-colored parachute pants were topped by a white, neatly pressed shirt and a wide, Windsor-knotted blue and white striped tie. Brother Pop and I walked up to the table and stood at Troy’s side, looking down.

  “Troy,” Brother said.

  The kid didn’t budge.

  “Troy, this is Danny Fortunato. The young man I told you about. I thought the two of you might have lunch together.”

  “Makes no difference to me,” Troy said, still not looking up at us.

  Brother gestured for me to go get my lunch. I did, deciding at the last minute to ditch the SpaghettiOs for a cheeseburger even though it wasn’t Friday. Somehow it just seemed the right thing to do. Carrying the tray back to the table, careful not to spill my paper cup of Coke, I saw that Brother Pop had left. I sat down opposite Troy Kitchens.

  “Not eating anything?” I asked.

  “Food here sucks.” He lifted his head an inch or so to peer over at what I was eating. “Prefab hamburger. Probably not a whole lot of meat going on in that thing.”

  The caf’s burgers did taste rubbery. I just shrugged.

  We sat in silence for about ten minutes. I finished my lunch and was sipping the last of my Coke through the straw, making that slurping sound, when he spoke again.

  “So your sister got killed, huh?”

  “No. She just went missing.” I set my empty cup on the table. “Who told you she got killed?”

  “The fat monk.”

  “Brother Pop?”

  “His name is irrelevant to me. I never bothered to learn it because I don’t intend on staying in this shit-hole school.”

  “Well, she’s not dead,” I said. “She went missing right before school started. The cops have looked everywhere for her. They’ve followed up like a million leads, but none of them have gone anywhere. It’s like she just vanished into thin air.”

  Troy shrugged. “You oughta just accept the fact that she’s dead, then.”

  “Why?” I was feeling indignant. “There’s no evidence she’s dead.”

  “No evidence she’s alive, either.”

  I didn’t respond.

  “These assholes think I can’t accept the fact that my mother died,” Troy told me, finally putting his feet on the floor and leaning over toward me across the table. “They’re fucked up. Of course, I can accept it. I was in the next room the night she blew her head off with my father’s gun. I went inside and saw the gray, gooey guts of her brain dripping down the wall. So I’ve accepted the fact that she’s dead. She’s dead and she’s not coming back and so I’ve just got to move on.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said in a small voice.

  “About what?”

  “Your mother.”

  He scowled. “Why are you sorry? Y
ou didn’t pull the trigger. She did.”

  “I just mean—”

  “I don’t care what you meant. I don’t need Brother Fat Ass finding me a little friend. I’m not staying in this lousy excuse for a school. I’m gonna move in with my older brother in New York City. I just gotta convince my father to let me go.”

  He put his head down on his arms as if he were going to sleep. His eyes remained hidden behind his tinted glasses. I looked at the skin on his arms and neck. It was very pale, with lots of brown and orange freckles. His hair was greasy, as if it hadn’t been washed in several days.

  There was nothing more to say. I sat back in my chair and waited for the bell to ring. If Brother Pop asked, I’d tell him that Troy Kitchens wasn’t looking for a friend.

  But for the rest of the day, the image of Troy’s mother’s brains dripping down the wall stayed with me. I guessed that was a hell of a lot worse than anything I was going through.

  After the last bell, I dropped my books into my duffel bag and made my way outside, heading past the line of yellow school buses spewing their stinky white exhaust. I didn’t ride the bus home. I could have—my parents thought I did, in fact—but after the first few rides, with paper airplanes continuously bouncing off the side of my head, I decided walking the mile and a half between school and home wasn’t really so difficult. The buses would rattle by as I trudged down the street, my duffel bag slung over my shoulder, and a couple of boys usually stuck their heads out of the narrow windows that opened sideways and yelled, “Faggot!” It was just par for the course by now. I barely heard them anymore.

  I wasn’t sure why I was singled out for abuse. It wasn’t Becky: her disappearance was merely something they had on me, a strategy, a course of action they could pursue, rather than a cause. I think their antipathy had more to do with the attitude I seemed to project: that I was different, maybe even better, than they were. I never said as much; in fact, I never said a word. I never raised my hand in class, speaking only if called on. I never started conversations in the corridor or in the cafeteria. I never laughed at any of the dumb jokes my classmates made—and it pissed them off. “Silent Dan” they called me. They hated what my silence implied. That I was on to their silly games, their stupid boy tricks, the hopelessness of their futures. They hated me because I was going to be somebody, and they weren’t. I was going to be a politician or an author or a famous movie actor. They were going to punch time cards or work as mechanics or become alcoholics. I’d have hated me, too, if I had been them.