Читать книгу Object of Desire - William J. Mann - Страница 11

I woke early and spent the morning working. Ollie had slipped out sometime during the night, leaving a note, and I felt bad that I hadn’t been able to say good-bye. I figured I’d call him later and thank him for coming down. Just for the heck of it, I lit the candle he had given me and took a photo of it, just as a little wisp of smoke rose upward from the glass. I brought the image up on my computer and changed the color to a bright pink. Then I changed it to yellow. Then I dragged it to the trash.

Randall staggered home then and convinced Frank and me to go out for coffee. It was Saturday morning, after all, and the local java hangout would be packed. On the ride over, I got the scoop on the night before. As it turned out, Randall hadn’t slept with the young blondie Jake Jones. Instead, he’d had a three-way—with the sixtyish Thad Urquhart and his lover, fiftyish Jimmy Carlisle.

“It was far, far better to go with a couple of experienced pros,” Randall told us as we settled into chairs in the courtyard, “who knew what they were doing, who were actually good at it, than go with some eager young tyro who would just lay back and make you do all the work.”

Both Frank and I laughed out loud. All around us, shirtless men with hairy, distended bellies were sunning themselves, their poodles and Welsh terriers sniffing through the grass. A coterie of boys, probably from WeHo, sat under a tree, sipping lattes and laughing in that high-pitched way coteries of young gay boys always did. The sun was high over our heads, the mountains sparkling gold and copper behind us. In another hour it would be too hot to sit out here, the sun beating down with all its late summer power, sending us scurrying inside like desert rats exposed to the light by overturning a rock.

“Admit it, Randall,” Frank said, “this Jake kid just wasn’t going to put out. Otherwise, you would’ve been all over him.”

“I’m tired of kids,” Randall sniffed, aiming the straw of his mocha freeze at his lips. “All week long my practice is full of them. Screaming, bratty kids who don’t want me poking in their mouths. I don’t need that when I date as well.” He paused for emphasis. “I want a man.”

He’d been saying exactly that for as long as I’d known him, and that was a long time. Boys had never served Randall well, starting with me. Ike was thirty-one, and since Randall was ten years older, I supposed he still counted as a boy.

“He was cute, though. I’ll give him that,” Randall said, day-dreamy.

“Jake, you mean,” I clarified.

Randall nodded. “You saw him, Danny. Didn’t you think so?”

Randall seemed to have conveniently forgotten his idea that Jake had been cruising me last night, and I certainly wasn’t going to bring it up now. I just shrugged. “He was all right, I guess. I don’t usually go for blonds.”

Randall nodded. “That’s because you’re blond. We always want what we aren’t. What we don’t have.”

We were silent on that, sipping our iced drinks in the sun, seeming to ruminate on the wisdom of his words, or maybe their absurdity. My eyes wandered over to the boys under the tree. They were goofing around, tickling each other. I couldn’t help but smile.

“I think I know Thad Urquhart,” Frank said after a bit, stroking the bristles on his chin. He hadn’t shaved this morning, and I noticed how very white his whiskers looked in the sunlight. “The name is very familiar.”

“He’s a big real estate guy,” Randall said. “You should see his house. Gorgeous! Right at the foot of the mountain in Las Palmas. He’s on the city council, too. A real mover and shaker in town.”

The Palm Springs City Council was almost entirely gay, and the mayor was gay, too. The latest estimate was that 60 percent of the population was homo. Anecdotal evidence suggested it could even be higher than that. You couldn’t go to a restaurant anywhere in town without seeing several tables full of queens, and sometimes a scattering of dykes. I remembered when Randall and I, all those years ago, had celebrated West Hollywood’s independence. A city all our own, we’d declared. Now it was almost commonplace. Palm Springs was even gayer than WeHo now, it seemed.

“Anyway,” Randall was saying, “Thad and Jimmy are giving a party next weekend, and I want you guys to come with me.”

I raised my eyebrows. “You’re coming back to the desert again next weekend?”

Randall smiled. “If it’s okay with you guys.”

“Of course, Randall,” Frank said. “You know you’re always welcome.”

“I don’t know about that,” I said, smiling over at my husband. “I might be getting a little tired of all his whoring around.”

“Listen, Danny, I’m only coming back for you,” said Randall.

“Me?”

“When I told Thad who you were, he was dying to meet you. He’s a fan of your work.” Randall smiled. “I told him a couple of your prints would look simply marvelous over his dining-room table. And this guy has the moola to pay you whatever you want.”

“I suppose he’s in with the whole Donovan and Penelope Sue crowd,” I said.

Randall nodded. “He mentioned their names a couple of times.”

“All the big fags here do. If Donovan and Penelope Sue Hunt have accepted you, you’ve arrived,” I noted.

Palm Springs, for all its charms, was the proverbial little pond with lots of big fish. The elite was made up of people who spent their time raising money for charities and then giving themselves awards for doing so. The desert’s charities were flush with cash, and that was a wonderful thing—except that sometimes all the self-congratulation became a little wearying. Every season there were more than a dozen black-tie award ceremonies, where the elite rose in unison for one long standing ovation after another. Since moving to Palm Springs, I’d discovered just how much rich people liked to cheer for themselves.

And sometimes they were very rich, like Donovan and Penelope Sue Hunt. Penelope Sue was Texas oil money, and her first husband had been head of Columbia or Sony, or something like that. She’d gotten a lot of money—and I mean a lot—in the settlement. Donovan had his own money, too, mostly family money, but he’d made quite a bit producing some big blockbusters in the late 1980s, lots of whiz-bang action flicks starring Bruce Willis or Chuck Norris, before turning over a new leaf about ten years ago and funding only serious independent pictures.

Most of the money in Palm Springs came from entertainment-related fields, or else it came from real estate. There was very little old money in Palm Springs. Donovan Hunt, with his connections back East, was a rare exception. Most of the movers and shakers here had come from L.A. or San Francisco, where they’d decided at some point that the big ponds there were too crowded with too many other big fish, and so they’d leapt over to a smaller pond, where they’d have more room to swim. And to raise money. And to receive standing ovations. Except in this case the pond was actually a desert, and the desert was built on the scurrying backs of desert rats, like Frank, who had never received a standing ovation, except for the time he was named Teacher of the Year back in Inglewood about fifteen years earlier.

Frank was born here—well, not here, not in Palm Springs, but in Beaumont, a working-class town thirty miles to the west on the 10. His father had owned a small apple orchard in the 1940s, back in the day when Beaumont was called “the land of the big red apple” because of its orchard industry. But then, during the cold war, Lockheed had opened a rocket test site just to the south of the town, spilling toxic chemicals into local streams, which Frank’s father believed eventually destroyed his orchard. One year the trees simply failed to produce fruit; the next year they were all dead. Frank’s father had to declare bankruptcy. There were no charity fund-raisers to help Frank and his family.

So they moved to Los Angeles, where Frank’s dad got a job at a factory and saved enough money to send Frank to Cal State L.A., where he got his bachelor’s as an English teacher. When I met him, he was teaching at a high school in Inglewood. Ten years later, after getting his master’s, he accepted his current job at the College of the Desert, because he had vowed to himself on the day his family had packed up and left their orchard in Beaumont that someday he’d return to the area. And Frank Wilson was a man who took his vows seriously.

I looked over at him, his face lit by the sun, the mountains reflected in his sunglasses. How he loved it here. When Frank was a boy, his father used to take him out of the cool orchard valley and drive along the dusty road into Palm Springs (Interstate 10 had yet to be built). They’d cheer on the sports car races along the airport tarmac, gravel flying every which way, and then they’d head over to the Saddle and Sirloin for hamburgers, keeping an eye out for Frank Sinatra or Bob Hope or Gene Autry. As a boy, Frank had thought Palm Springs was the most glamorous spot on the planet. “I’d look up at those mountains,” he told me, “and in my mind’s eye, I’d see Indians hiding behind the rocks, popping up now and then to shoot their arrows, and posses of cowboys riding in across the valley.”

My eyes followed the uneven crest of the mountain range in front of me, the subtle transition from brown to purple to gold to blue. The ridges and the canyons, the granite outcrops suddenly jutting into the sky, the serpentine trails worn down by generations of men and coyotes and bighorn sheep. In two thousand years these mountains had never changed. They still looked the same as they had when Frank had come here as a boy, omniscient and indestructible. They still offered the same awesome views once marveled over by pioneers in covered wagons and Elizabeth Taylor in a Cadillac convertible. It was the city around them that had become different. The old dusty roads and the arid valleys studded with cacti and red ocotillo had been replaced with three-lane highways and Fatburger drive-ins, marble mansions and golf courses, man-made lakes and rainbow-hued gay bars. Yet those sturdy granite sentinels enclosing the valley seemed to temper the excess, to contain the ostentation, like stone-faced colossi charged with keeping the peace.

I hadn’t always shared Frank’s love of the desert. On my first trips out here, for casual weekends of sex and drugs, I’d thought the mountains looked dead. They weren’t like the hills of New England, where I’d grown up, lush and rolling and green. Palm Springs might be fun for lazy lounging around swimming pools, or drinking martinis at Lucite bars, or for dancing shirtless at the White Party, allowing yourself to be passed among a hundred different boys in the course of an hour. But beyond that, I’d seen little of value, just Canadian snowbirds in wide-brimmed hats and Bermuda shorts and ticky-tacky T-shirt shops along the palm tree–lined main drive.

All that changed the morning Frank first took me hiking, insisting we get up early and pack a breakfast of trail mix and chocolate chip cookies and oversize canteens of water. Up into Tahquitz Canyon we trudged, deep into the folds of the mountains, where I saw not death but teeming life. The purple lupine and the yellow brittlebush, the beavertail cactus with pink buds, the apricot mallow, the bright orange mariposa lily. And everywhere blue lizards skittering and white-headed woodpeckers clattering. In the sky sharp-shinned hawks soared in great, swooping arcs. Our goal, however, was always to spot that most elusive of all creatures, venerated by the Indians: the bighorn sheep, with its massive curved horns and fleecy white rump. Yet not once in all our time hiking in the mountains—which from that day forward became considerable—did we spot one of the bighorns. Still, I trusted that they were there, pausing to sip from the same stream we waded through as the waterfall crashed behind us.

Ten years had passed since Frank had moved to Palm Springs full time. At first, I came out only on weekends, not wanting to leave L.A., not willing to abandon my dream of making it as an actor. But a decade of walk-on parts and missed opportunities—not to mention a decade of working as a waiter, as a cabbie, and as a housepainter—was wearing thin. The biggest jobs I ever landed were a commercial for Gravy Train dog food and a non-speaking recurring role as a clerk on Matlock. And so, on a whim, I started to take photographs. Faces of friends, the Hollywood sign, palm trees in a windstorm. Then, equally on a whim, I began scanning the photos into my computer. With Photoshop, I altered them, outlined them, fragmented them, turned them into mosaics. No rhyme or reason existed to what I was doing. I was just playing around. When I printed a few of these manipulated photographs, I showed them to a friend who ran a gift shop in Beverly Hills, and she asked me if she could put them on greeting cards. I laughed, but I agreed—and the cards actually sold. I actually made some money. Not a lot, but enough to make me think maybe I could make more if I got serious. And so, four years ago, I moved out here full time, so I could take pictures and play with them on my computer. So I could, finally, become someone. An artist, they say.

What did it mean to be an artist? Did it mean the tortured screams of Jackson Pollock, splattering his paint everywhere? Did it mean Vincent van Gogh cutting off his ear? Did it mean agonizing over your work, pulling out your hair as you tried desperately to express yourself? These were the questions I wondered about as I signed up for a summer photography class at CalArts. There I encountered a woman who considered herself a very serious artist. Her name was Thelma, and she had been an abused child and a battered wife and had spent a few years in a mental hospital. All her work, she told us, was channeled from those experiences. Her photographs of open mouths and dead birds contrasted strikingly to my sunflowers and Marilyn Monroe impersonators. “A searing indictment of the male hegemony of modern life,” our teacher called one of Thelma’s photos. About mine, she said, “Nice matte finish.”

I accepted my limitations. “I’m no artist,” I told the teacher. “I just want to make things that look nice.”

Only Frank seemed to get it. “Danny,” he said, looking at one of my sunflower shots, stripped of its yellows and pumped up with green, “that is probably the craziest-looking flower I’ve ever seen, but I sure as hell can’t stop looking at it.” It had hung ever since over our mantel. Frank had dubbed it his “green daisy.”

But an artist? No, I wasn’t an artist, even though Frank insisted I was. He’d always been very sure of that point. I made art; ergo, I was an artist. I just laughed. Now Becky—she might have become an artist. She’d had the passion. She’d had the talent. I remembered the easel that had stood in our backyard—

“Danny.”

My thoughts shattered, like glass through which a rock had been thrown. My eyes darted away from the mountains and onto Frank’s face.

“You seemed far, far away,” he said.

“I’m sorry.” I rubbed my forehead. It was damp with sweat from the sun. “I was…thinking.”

Frank nodded. Twenty years we’d been together. He knew how often I got lost in thought. And he knew where those thoughts usually led. No matter what I began thinking about, they often seemed to come back to one thing. He smiled gently.

I was fortunate to have him. Many men would gladly have traded places with me, sitting there in studied contentment, sipping my coffee with my partner of many years, watching the sunlight dance against the mountains. Frank knew me better than anyone alive, and more than anyone, he had been there for me. For two decades, Frank had believed in me, encouraged me, supported me—even when I was at my nadir, convinced I was a failure. Frank had never bought that line, and consequently, he’d kept me from buying it completely, either. So what if I knew, deep down, that Frank’s heart had never been fully mine? What did that matter? He had never left me wanting. Many men indeed would have made the trade.

But not, I suspected, those boys across the way, the ones giggling and wrestling each other in the grass. They wouldn’t want to switch places with me. After this, they’d probably go back to their guest resort and fuck in the pool. And then maybe they’d do a line of coke or a hit of E. Tonight they’d dance their asses off at Hunters, and tomorrow they’d head back to West Hollywood, sated and satisfied and happy. No, those boys wouldn’t make the trade. The question was, would I?

I looked from them back over to Frank, and then to Randall, who had pulled off his shirt and stretched out on the grass. His face was turned up at the sun. Frank and Randall. The two people who knew me best in the entire world, who understood what my birthday made me think of every year. I looked down at Randall in the grass, the hair on his fleshy torso glistening with perspiration. I knew he shouldn’t get too much sun, that it could affect his meds. But not once in more than a decade of living with HIV had Randall developed any opportunistic infection. His T cells remained high, and his daily regimen of pills and potions had rendered the virus undetectable in his body.

Still, I asked, “Do you have sunblock on?”

“It’s just for a few minutes,” Randall said to me, eyes closed.

We stayed that way for a while more, three silent men occasionally distracted by the laughter drifting across the grass from the boys under the tree. I slurped up the last of my iced cappuccino, making a noise, the way a kid would do.

“Don’t you think we ought to get moving?” I whispered, leaning in toward Frank. “I don’t want it to get too hot in Joshua Tree to go hiking.”

Frank’s eyelids flickered. “Danny, you know, it might be too hot at that. Maybe we should plan to do it another day.”

“If we leave now,” I argued, “it won’t be too hot. It’s not as hot up in the high desert as it is down here.”

“Yes, but you know, I’m kind of tired today.” Frank’s eyes were making an appeal to me. “I’m afraid I’d be a drag on you….”

“Frank,” I said, the annoyance tightening my throat. “You said last night we would go hiking for my birthday. Just you and me. Maybe we’d even finally see a bighorn sheep. Those were your words.”

“I’m sorry, baby. If you really want to go, we’ll go.”

I turned away from him. “No. Forget it if you’re too tired.”

We sat in silence for a moment.

“I’d go with you, Danny,” Randall said, sitting up and pulling his shirt back on, “but I should be heading back to L.A.”

I said nothing. I didn’t want to go hiking with Randall. I wanted to go with Frank. I stared at Randall and wondered if—as so often happened—he was reading my mind. If he, too, was remembering what he’d said to me two decades ago, standing in the bar on Santa Monica Boulevard. Frank had just asked me to move in with him.

“I just want you to think long and hard about this, Danny,” Randall had said then. “When you’re thirty, he’ll be forty-four. When you’re forty, he’ll be fifty-four. When you’re fifty…”

It hadn’t mattered at thirty. But now, at forty-one…

It was at that very moment that I looked up, and coming through the courtyard toward us was Jake Jones. His blond hair seemed to glow in the sun, and the flip-flops he wore, barely visible under his long, loose jeans, slapped the pavement in a regular beat as he walked. He seemed in that moment the personification of youth. The lightness to his step. The indifference of his shoulders. He noticed us.

Or rather, he noticed me.

“Hey, Ishmael,” he said, approaching. I couldn’t tell if he was being ironic or if he really thought that was my name. “Why’d you disappear so fast last night?”

He came to a stop barely a foot from where I was sitting. My eyes were level with his crotch. A black belt with silver studs was half visible from under his semi-tucked white T-shirt, and green checkered boxer shorts bunched up over the waist of his jeans. From the corner of my eye, I could see both Frank and Randall watching our encounter, Frank with curiosity, Randall with envy. Jake had walked right past the two of them and straight up to me. I lifted my eyes to meet the youngster’s and smiled.

“Because,” I said, “my boyfriend, Frank, was waiting for me at home.” I gestured with my head toward Frank.

Jake’s eyes turned to look. “Hi,” he said, unflappable. “I’m Jake.”

“Good to meet you, Jake,” Frank said.

He spoke the way fathers do when meeting their sons’ friends. The two of them shook hands.

From behind us came a small voice. “Hi, Jake,” Randall offered.

The boy finally turned, lifting an eyebrow in my poor, forgotten friend’s direction. “Oh, hey,” he said. “Did you and Thad and Jimmy go out to dinner last night after I left the bar?”

“We…um…we ate something back at their house,” Randall replied.

I smiled despite myself. They ate something, all right. Frank caught my smile, and our eyes met. He chuckled. It broke the tension between us.

“Well,” Jake was saying, returning his attention to me, “it was good seeing you again, Ishmael.” And then in front of my boyfriend, he took my phone off the table, where I had placed it, and entered his number. “Just in case you ever have a party and want to invite me,” he said, handing the phone back to me. “Good meeting you,” he said to Frank. To Randall, he said nothing more, just disappeared inside the café.

“What’s up with the Ishmael?” Frank asked.

“A silly joke,” I said.

“He’s cute,” Frank noted.

Randall was standing now, brushing off his shorts. “Thad and Jimmy told me to watch out for him. They have done so much for him. They’ve let him live with them for a while, and they’ve helped him get a couple of jobs….”

“And what’s their problem with him?” I asked. “Is it that he accepts their help but refuses to put out?”

Randall didn’t reply. I had my answer.

“Well,” Frank said, “I think it’s obvious he’d put out for Danny, since he gave him his number.”

“Danny isn’t interested,” I said.

Randall snorted. “Thad says he’s a scared little twenty-one-year-old who pretends he’s seen it all and done it all. He’s got a chip on his shoulder the size of Nevada. He might be cute, but Thad assured me I was better off staying far, far away from him.” He gave me a pair of very big eyes. “And I’d suggest the same thing to you, Danny.”

I saluted him.

It was time to go. The sun was becoming unbearable. My armpits were wet, and I could feel the bridge of my nose starting to burn. It was time for us humans to retreat into our air-conditioned hiding places and not emerge again until after sunset, when we might wade into our pools or sit under the misters on our decks, gazing up into the purple sky.

“You know,” Frank said as we walked to the car, his joints stiff from sitting so long, “maybe I ought to start jogging. I’ll get up early in the morning, before it gets too hot.”

I gave him a look. “Jogging?”

He nodded. “Yeah. I’m out of shape. I’ll firm up a bit, and then we can go hiking again.”

“It’s okay, Frank.”

He stopped walking and looked at me. Randall was ahead of us, rolling down the windows of the car and running the air conditioner full blast so the interior could cool off. I held Frank’s eyes. In many ways they barely resembled the eyes I had known for so long. The lashes had gone gray, and the whites of his eyes were perpetually bloodshot. But the color of his eyes had never changed. They were still as green as they’d been that night on Santa Monica Boulevard when I’d run out of the bar, chasing after him, worried I’d never see this beautiful, mysterious stranger again.

“Danny,” Frank said, and he was holding my gaze as tenderly as he ever had. “You know that when I look at the mountains, I see Becky, too.”

I managed a smile but said nothing. As always, Frank understood.

Yes, Becky was always there—not just in the mountains, but in everything I saw, everything I heard, everything I felt—and Frank, dear Frank, knew this. That was the way it always was this time of year, when August turned into September, when the late summer sun was at its peak, and lesson plans were being made, and schools were opening their doors, and parents worried about sending their children off into the world, and young boys did their best to pretend that they were brave.