Object of Desire

by William J. Mann

  “We cannot refuse,” Hassan declared. “To decline dinner would be an affront.”

  I nodded. The three of us pulled out our chairs to sit, Randall in the middle. Unfolding my white linen napkin, I settled it in my lap.

  That was when I looked up and saw him.

  “Danny,” Randall said, leaning in to me, seeing him at the same time, “isn’t that—”

  “Kelly,” I said.

  Randall looked at me. “You know his name? The bartender from happy hour?”

  I couldn’t speak. Kelly. Was he working here now, at the Parker? He wore a black sweater over a blue collared shirt, hiding his exquisite arms. For once he didn’t seem confident and controlled, the master of his surroundings. Rather, he seemed adrift, unsure, at a loss as to what to do. Awkwardly, he stood there at the side of the table, shifting his weight from one leg to the other, glancing around at those of us who were seated. I assumed he was waiting to take our drink orders.

  But then, from across the table, Donovan spoke—and changed my life forever.

  “Kelly,” he said, “why don’t you sit over there, next to Danny?”

  I felt the blood drain from my face.

  “Do you two know each other?” Donovan asked.

  Kelly looked at me. It was the first time his beautiful dark eyes had ever fully turned to look at me. It was the first time, I was certain, that he had ever seen me.

  “No,” I managed to say.

  He extended his hand. “I’m Kelly,” he said.

  “Danny.” I took his hand briefly. Our eyes held for the slenderest of moments. Then he sat down to my left.

  I couldn’t say a word. In my lap I clasped my hands to keep them from trembling. I didn’t dare lift my water glass to my lips, because I feared I’d spill its contents. When the waiter came to ask us what we wanted to drink, my throat was so tight I just said, “The same,” indicating I’d have what Randall had just ordered, a Ketel One martini, up, with three olives. Kelly ordered a Sauza margarita with salt. I realized that tonight, somebody would be making him a drink for a change.

  Around the table, conversation was bubbling from chair to chair. I heard voices, including Penelope Sue’s syrupy Texas drawl, but I couldn’t see past my plate. Carefully, I forked some radicchio into my mouth. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Kelly wasn’t saying much to anyone, and he was eating just as slowly as I was. Neither of us looked at the other. My mind was like a box with the lid taped shut.

  “Aren’t you going to talk to him?” Randall asked under his breath.

  “Shut up,” I replied in the same way.

  I took a deep breath and let my eyes move around the table. Donovan was deep in conversation with his redheaded boy toy. Penelope Sue was talking to the woman to her right, making sweeping gestures with her hands, her big collagen lips flapping like a duck’s. The rest of the guests were all unknown to me. Everyone was chatting away. Only Kelly and I were silent. Finally, I let my gaze sweep past him. It was almost as if he had been waiting for me to do so. Our eyes caught, and he lifted his eyebrows at me.

  He lifted his eyebrows.

  My heart sped up all at once, and I quickly looked away.

  Had he just—flirted—with me?

  No, no, I told myself. Don’t be absurd. He wasn’t flirting. He just raised his eyebrows. That was all. Just a simple acknowledgment. It’s what one does when eyes meet. It’s just a silent hello. No, not even a hello, not really. It’s just an acknowledgment.

  Still, it was more than I’d ever gotten from him when I’d seen him behind the bar.

  “Talk to him,” Randall was urging again, his lips not moving.

  “Shut up,” I repeated.

  Randall looked at me oddly. “What has come over you, Danny?”

  I said nothing. I was still. Completely frozen.

  Across the table my eyes were drawn to a heavyset woman who had stopped by to pay court to Donovan and Penelope Sue. She was complimenting Donovan’s jacket and gushing over Penelope Sue’s hair. There were smiles all around, and a couple of air kisses deposited somewhere northeast of Donovan’s forehead. And as the woman departed, I saw Penelope Sue roll her eyes.

  At my left, Kelly broke into laughter.

  I couldn’t help but turn. His black eyes caught mine.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  I couldn’t say anything. He laughed again.

  My voice surprised me. “Care to share the joke?” I managed to ask.

  He shook his head. “No. I shouldn’t even be here, let alone laughing at your friends.”

  “They’re not really my friends,” I told him.

  He lifted an eyebrow at me. “You’re not a fop?”

  “Fop?”

  “Friend of Penelope?”

  I smiled slightly. “Not really. I doubt she even remembers my name.”

  “Well, she does that all the time,” he said.

  “Does what?”

  Kelly looked across the table at her to make sure we weren’t being overheard. Then he leaned into me, our shoulders nearly touching. I felt as if I were on fire.

  “She rolls her eyes,” Kelly said. “Did you see it?”

  I nodded.

  “People pay her a compliment, and she rolls her eyes.” He shook his head. “I was sitting here, waiting for it, because I’ve seen her do it before. And then, bang, she rolls on cue.” He laughed again.

  “Why does she do that?”

  “Because that’s what rich people do. They roll their eyes. They cannot abide sincerity in any form. Everything must have a degree of irony, or they can’t filter it.” He paused. “Sorry. Don’t mean to offend you if you’re rich.”

  “I’m not.”

  He narrowed his eyes as if to study me. “Then why are you here?”

  “I’m an old friend of Donovan’s. From way back.”

  He gave a small laugh. “Oh.” He averted his eyes. “Same here.”

  That was when it hit. That was when I figured out their connection.

  Kelly had been one of Donovan’s boys. Donovan had had him—had had him, done him, discarded him—long before I’d ever laid eyes on him. Of course, he had. I should have known he had.

  Damn Donovan Hunt.

  We fell into an awkward silence. The waiter placed our drinks in front of us. I took a sip immediately. Kelly did the same.

  “I’m fascinated by rich people,” he said finally. If he hadn’t spoken again, I’m not sure I would have had the courage to restart our conversation. I turned to face him and watched his mouth as he talked. “How they act. How they talk. How they behave.”

  “You sound like an anthropologist,” I said.

  He smiled, a broad, childlike grin that pushed up his cheeks and showed off his dimples. “That would be fun, wouldn’t it? To go on an expedition among the rich. To chart out their movements and their habits like Jane Goodall did for apes.”

  “It might be amusing,” I conceded.

  “It would make a fabulous documentary for the BBC. I could crouch down behind their sofas and observe them in their parlors, being snooty to their butlers and rolling their eyes behind their friends’ backs.” He laughed out loud, a sharp, quick sound. I sensed he often amused himself in this way, chuckling at his own imagined scenarios.

  I wanted to keep the dialogue going, to say something he would find witty. “Maybe you could secretly videotape their mating habits at the country clubs of Bel Air,” I suggested. “Or go under-cover at a posh prep school back East.”

  “Like Miss Porter’s,” he said. He seemed to like my comment, and I was relieved. “Jackie Bouvier went to Miss Porter’s, you know. I love Jackie. Adore her. That’s who I wanted to be when I grew up, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis.”

  I smiled, relaxing a little into the conversation. “I wouldn’t think you’d be old enough to remember her.”

  “Please. Everybody knows Jackie O. She’s the patron saint of America. I worship her. I was a teenager when she died, and it was
a terrible blow to me. I was depressed for months. You see, when I was ten, I had wallpapered my room with pictures of her.”

  I laughed. “I suppose that gave your parents a clue.”

  He looked at me. “A clue about what?”

  “Oh, maybe that you were, I don’t know…gay?”

  His face was blank. “I didn’t have parents,” he said.

  I wasn’t prepared for that answer. I had no response.

  But it didn’t matter, because suddenly the waiter was between us, asking for our orders. I hadn’t yet looked at my menu. Kelly, clearly more familiar with the restaurant’s offerings, ordered the prime rib. I imagined Donovan had taken him here often. I glanced fast at the choices on the menu and asked for the broiled duck.

  Someone was standing now, making a toast to Donovan and his movie. We all lifted our drinks and offered the requisite clinks and a chorus of “Hear! Hear!” From my right, Randall was leaning into me, his breath on my neck.

  “You seem to have broken the ice,” he said.

  “Shut up,” I whispered yet again.

  It was vital that Kelly did not hear, vital that he not know that I’d ever noticed him before tonight. Why that was so vital, I wasn’t yet sure. I had no sense, not then, of what he might mean to me, or what I might want from him. All I knew was that his nearness bewitched me, that the very heat of him left me dizzy. I needed to find my balance. I did not want Kelly to view me as yet another of those men who lined up around his bar, waiting to woo, to flirt, to pay homage to him as the most beautiful man ever to walk the face of the planet. Oh yes, I was enthralled, way over my head, and even then I knew that much—which was the reason I struggled to maintain a semblance of power. Kelly could not be allowed to grasp the depth of my fascination for him.

  It was completely absurd. I knew nothing about this young man who sat beside me—only that he had a temper and a checkered employment history. Oh yes—and I knew that he was beautiful. I knew that all too well. He was as gorgeous as the men I’d once kept hidden in my secret scrapbook, to whom I’d turn on bleak Sunday afternoons, when the rain beat against my windows and my mother paced the floor downstairs, yelling into the phone at some police detective or some newspaper reporter or some crank who’d called to say he’d spotted Becky at Disney World. Paging through my scrapbook, I could push all of that far away. I’d stare into the eyes of Rick Springfield and Rex Smith and Richard Gere, marveling at the shape of their chins, the curl of their eyelashes. My body would fill up with a terrible ache, a hard, desolate longing to know how they smelled, how they tasted, how their bodies would feel pressed up against mine. But sitting there on my bed, my scrapbook in my lap, I felt certain that I’d never find out, that such beauty as theirs would remain forever elusive to me, always just out of reach.

  And Kelly was even more beautiful than any of them.

  For weeks I’d watched him. No, not just watched. I’d hungered for him. I’d stood, immobile, watching him work. My mind had been a blank. Kelly was no casual trick, the kind I’d spot in a bar and take home, sometimes sharing with Frank and sometimes not. Kelly didn’t stimulate my thoughts; he shut them down. When I looked at him, I became mute. My mind ceased. I was again a thirteen-year-old boy, sitting behind Scott Wood in eighth grade, praying that he’d turn around and notice me. But he never did. The hard, cold fact of my life was that nobody I had ever really wanted had ever really wanted me.

  And that included Frank, a fact with which I’d had to live for twenty years.

  Sitting there next to Kelly, I inhaled his sweet cologne, getting high on it. I watched him make indentations along the tablecloth with his fork. My scalp began to tingle. He was more effeminate than I’d imagined. No, not effeminate. That wasn’t the word. He was animated—which surprised me, given how severe and taciturn he’d always seemed behind the bar. He was animated and expressive and forthright—like a kid, I realized. And I found him, up close, to be even more fascinating than I had from afar.

  He was looking at me when I turned my face toward him. He smiled and once again raised his eyebrows.

  He was flirting with me.

  My brain couldn’t wrap itself around the thought. I had to be mistaken. He was just bored. He didn’t like these parties filled with rich people. He probably hadn’t wanted to come. But for some reason, he had felt obligated to do so. I wanted to ask him what he owed Donovan Hunt—what he’d gotten when Donovan had broken it off with him. Was it a car, a Rolex, a Prada suit? Clearly, it had ended well, for Donovan didn’t routinely include his discarded boys at intimate gatherings such as this. But another part of me didn’t want to know the details. I didn’t want to think too long about Kelly in Donovan’s arms.

  How crazy was this? There I was, being jealous over a guy I’d just met, whose last name I didn’t even know, with whom I’d exchanged no more than a handful of sentences. What was going on here? Why was I feeling this way? Well might Randall ask what had come over me. I had no idea.

  Our meals were served. “Any good?” Kelly asked.

  “Pretty tasty,” I told him.

  “I do love eating out,” he said, gesturing to the waiter to bring him another margarita. “It’s one of my favorite things to do.”

  “Mine too,” I said, and I wasn’t lying. Frank said we ate out far too often for our budget, arguing that we’d save thousands every year if we ate home more. No doubt he was correct about that. Dinners out in Palm Springs were rarely less than a hundred dollars per couple. But I hated to cook, and so did Frank, and so we ended up eating in restaurants four, five, sometimes six times a week. “Maybe it’s because I rarely ate out as a kid,” I mused, as much to myself as to Kelly. “It still feels like a great, big, happy occasion whenever I go into a restaurant.”

  “Me too!” Kelly declared. “I can be miserable all day, but the moment I walk into a restaurant, I cheer right up.”

  I smiled. “So you didn’t go out to eat a lot as a kid, either?”

  He shook his head. “Never. Hardly even McDonald’s. Let me tell you. I was dirt poor. Not just poor. Dirt poor.”

  My heart swelled like a blowfish in my chest. It always did for working-class boys. “Well, I wouldn’t call my family dirt poor,” I said, “but we certainly had our struggles.”

  Kelly seemed to be lost in thought, a forkful of steak suspended in midair. I waited for a comment, but none was forthcoming. His eyes seemed far, far away, a small smile playing with the corners of his mouth. Finally, he looked over at me, as if he’d just had a brilliant idea.

  “What if,” he said, “all of a sudden that lady over there stood up and took out an Uzi and started mowing all of us down?” His eyes were wide and black and shining. “Do you think you’d be quick enough to make it under the table?”

  The question was wild, unexpected, and I laughed awkwardly. I stuttered for a few moments, trying to think of a response. “I’m not sure the table would be adequate protection from an Uzi,” I said finally.

  He laughed in that sharp, sudden way of his. “I’m always on the alert for stuff like that.” He took a sip of his drink. “Hope I didn’t freak you out. Don’t worry. I’m not a psycho. I just like thinking of weird things.”

  I looked at him. Should his question have set bells ringing in my head? Should it have made me wary of him? Should it have made me wonder what went on in the mind of this beautiful young man?

  Well, it didn’t. It was, to me, a question a kid would have asked, a kid who hadn’t yet conditioned himself to say only certain things in certain company. A kid who still took chances, who lived life as it came, who hadn’t given up on possibilities and dreams. A kid who gave in to his impulses, who lived for spontaneity and incongruity. No, the question didn’t make me wary. It only made me like Kelly even more.

  When we finished our meals and the waiter came and cleared away our plates, Kelly reached around to his back pocket and produced a small spiral-bound tablet. He flipped it open and, with a felt-tip marker, began to draw. It w
as bizarre behavior, no doubt about that; a man across from us lifted an eyebrow in a curious glance. But I said nothing; I just watched Kelly draw. The waiter came around to fill our coffees and ask if we wanted dessert. I demurred, as did Randall and Hassan, but Kelly made no reply. He was hunched over the table, absorbed in his task. I watched his hands—in particular, the sexy line of fine dark hair along the edges. Once again, I wanted to lean down and lick it.

  “May I ask what you’re doing?” I finally ventured, my voice tight.

  He gave me one eye. I saw myself reflected in its blackness.

  “When I see something that intrigues me,” he explained, “I just have to draw it, right then and there, no matter where I am.” He held up the tablet so that only I could see. It was a sketch of a woman—of Penelope Sue, I realized—and she was rolling her eyes. “Didn’t you see?” he whispered. “She did it again. She rolled her eyes when someone came up to her. And I just had to draw it.”

  “You’re quite good,” I told him honestly. With just a few deft strokes, he had caricatured her brilliantly.

  He suddenly seemed embarrassed. He flipped the tablet shut and stuck it back into his pocket. “I don’t usually show anyone my drawings,” he said.

  I felt honored. “Well, thanks for showing me.”

  He was standing. “Donovan,” he called across the table, “thanks for dinner. I have to go. Bartending at Blame it on Midnight now.”

  “Okay, babe.” Donovan blew a kiss. “Thanks for coming. Good to see you.”

  Kelly made no other good-byes to anyone at the table. He looked down at me. “What was your name again?” he asked.

  “Danny. Danny Fortunato.”

  “Good meeting you, Danny.”

  “Yeah.” I was suddenly desperate to keep him from leaving. “Listen, I’m an artist. I’d love to see more of your sketches—”

  “What kind of an artist?”

  “A photographer-illustrator. I produce digital lithographic prints.”