I shrugged. “Okay. Your call.”
The waiter was hovering. We gave him our attention.
He smiled. He was bald, with a long, aquiline nose and a studied air of sincerity. He clasped his hands and looked from me to Kelly and then back again. “Good evening, gentlemen. Have you had a chance to look at the menus?”
“No,” I said. “Actually, if you could just give us a couple—”
“Can I ask a question?” Kelly’s black eyes were wide. He motioned for the waiter to bend down a bit, as if he were about to let us all in on a secret. The waiter did so. “Whad’ya got on the menu that’s not too pricey? You got maybe some hot dogs or macaroni and cheese? See, we’re kind of on a budget here tonight.”
The waiter’s eyebrows went up; his jaw went down. There was a moment of silence.
“He’s joking,” I said quickly.
Kelly sat back in his chair, hunching his shoulders, his chin on his chest, giggling.
“Ah,” the waiter said. An odd little grin twisted his lips. “Well, I’ll give you a moment to look at the menu.”
“I love doing that,” Kelly said after the waiter was gone.
I couldn’t help but smile. “I should be totally embarrassed, but I’m not.”
“That’s because you’re not like most of the people in Palm Springs. Since moving out here, I’ve discovered there are two types of people that live in this town. Rich and trash. There’s no middle.”
“Well, I wouldn’t go so far as to say trash…”
“Hey, where I’m from, trash is a compliment. In my hometown, the laundromat doubled as the local day-care center.”
I laughed, which seemed to encourage him. He leaned forward to tell me more.
“Halloween pumpkins had more teeth than the people in my family. My mother thought Hamburger Helper was one of the major food groups. My father said having more than one toothbrush in the house was a waste of money.”
I laughed out loud. A woman at the next table glanced my way.
“I thought you didn’t have parents,” I said.
He opened his menu. “They were foster parents.”
“So you grew up in a foster home?”
“Several. Hey, do you like squid?”
“Not really.”
“Me either. Eating squid in the desert just feels weird to me. Any kind of fish, actually. I mean, it’s a desert. So where do they get the fish?”
“Maybe they catch it up in the mountains and bring it down.”
“Squid?” He made a face at me. “Danny, there’s no squid in the San Jacinto Mountains.”
I laughed again. “I didn’t mean squid. I meant—”
“Hey, what did the fish say when he swam into the wall?”
I was grinning. “I don’t know.”
“Dam.”
It took me about ten seconds; then I laughed out loud again. Kelly was poker-faced, studying his menu.
“I think I’ll get the chicken,” he said.
“Get whatever you want. This is on me.”
He lifted one eye over his menu. “Why?”
“Because I asked you to dinner.”
“Okay, fine.” He looked back at the menu. “So the chicken looks good. Hey, what’s chicken teriyaki?”
“It’s Japanese—”
“No, you’re wrong. It’s the name of the world’s oldest living kamikaze pilot.” He gave me crazy eyes. “Get it? A chicken kamikaze pilot? You know what kamikaze pilots do, right?”
“Yes, I do,” I groaned. “Yes, I get it.”
His was on a roll, looking straight at me. “Okay. If fruit comes from a fruit tree, what kind of tree does a chicken come from?”
“I think this one might hurt,” I said.
“A poultry.”
“Oh, man, it hurt bad.”
He smiled, closing his menu. “I think I’ll get the fried chicken. Usually, I like to eat fried chicken with my fingers, but since we’re in a fancy restaurant, I’ll eat my fingers separately.”
The waiter had returned. I was laughing so hard, I couldn’t give him my order.
“He gets like this,” Kelly said, referring to me and shaking his head. “I think they’re gonna have to adjust his meds.”
The waiter gave an awkward little laugh.
“So I’ll start with the heirloom tomato salad with the shaved fennel,” Kelly said, his voice dropping into seriousness, “and then the Dijon-coated rack of lamb au jus with the sautéed forest mushrooms and glazed baby carrots.”
I looked over at him.
He shrugged. “It’s what I always get.”
I smiled, then ordered an iceberg wedge and the grilled chicken.
“Have you ever gone bungee jumping?” Kelly asked as the waiter was collecting our menus.
“No,” I replied. “Can’t say I ever—”
“Don’t bother,” Kelly said. “It’s like getting a blow job from your grandmother.”
I thought the waiter heard. He moved away quickly.
“Feels great,” Kelly continued, “but for God’s sake, don’t look down.”
I burst out laughing.
It went on like that for a while.
Eating our salads, he had me in stitches. “What came first, the chicken or the egg? Neither. The rooster.” One-liners like that. “What do you call a lesbian Eskimo? A Klondike.”
Here we were, in one of the most elegant restaurants in town, and he was talking about macaroni and cheese and lesbian Eskimos. Last time I’d been to this place, I’d sat between the owner of the gallery that was showing my work and a couple of his snooty customers. The gallery owner had hoped they’d commission a piece from me, but all night long, all they’d talked about was real estate. How the market had shot up, up, up here in the desert, and how there was new construction everywhere. But could the boom sustain itself? How long before everything went bust? I had been bored out of my mind. And no, neither of the two dead-beats ever commissioned a piece. Guess they’d been too busy buying up condos before the housing bubble burst.
But tonight…my cheeks were hurting from smiling so much.
Suddenly Kelly spotted a woman at the next table and pulled out his sketch pad. “Just a quick one,” he said.
He was scratching away with his pencil when the waiter brought our meals. He didn’t move, forcing the waiter to place the lamb in the middle of the table.
“Let me see,” I said.
“Almost done.”
When he slid the pad over to me, I marveled at what he had accomplished. He had captured her perfectly. Just a few squiggly lines—but there she was, with her oversize ears, the diagonal slash of a mouth, the slightly asymmetrical eyes.
“Brilliant,” I said. “You’ve got to let me see your sketches.”
“Someday.”
We ordered another bottle of wine.
“So tell me more about you,” I said. “Ten minutes of serious talk. Then you can go back to your jokes.”
“What do you want to know?”
“I don’t even know your last name.”
“Nelson.”
“Scandinavian?”
“I have no idea.”
“Well, you sure don’t look Scandinavian.”
“I think my birth parents were probably Italian.”
“Do you know your birth name?”
He shook his head. “No clue. Kelly was given to me by my first set of foster parents. Nelson was their last name. The state just let it stick.”
“Where were you born?”
“San Francisco.”
Another surprise. “San Francisco? The way you were talking, I thought you were going to say the hills of Alabama or something.”
“Hey, you can find trash anywhere.”
I smiled. “When were you put in a foster home?”
“When I was five.”
“So you remember your birth parents?”
“Not my father. My mother only a little. I have a bad memory.”
I h
ad a feeling he actually had a very good memory, but that there were things he wanted pretty badly to forget.
“And so you were never officially adopted?”
“Nope.”
“Why not?”
He sighed. “I think because my birth mother kept trying to get me back. But they never let me go back to her, because she was a drug addict. They just kept moving me from family to family.”
“What was the longest you stayed with any one family?”
“Five years. That was at the end, before I went off on my own.” He fixed me with his eyes and seemed, for the first time, to offer some real sincerity. “My last foster mother agreed to take care of me because she’d been forced to give up twin boys she’d given birth to when she was an unmarried teenager.”
“Oh, I see. So you kind of filled that emotional space for her.”
He looked sad. “I wish I’d been able to do that. She always missed those boys. They were hers, you know? And I wasn’t. Not really. And she always made sure to remind me that I wasn’t one of her darling twins.”
I looked across the table and saw a little flicker of something in his eyes. My heart went out to him. “That must have been hard,” I said.
He nodded, biting his lip. “She was always looking for her twins. Finally, she found out that the boys had been separated before they were adopted. One went to an Arab family, who named him Amal, and the other went to a Mexican family, who named him Juan. Then one day, she got a photo of Juan in the mail from the adoptive family, and she got all choked up. She showed me his picture and said, ‘I wish I had a photo of Amal as well.’ Well, I just looked at her and said, ‘But they’re twins, bitch. If you’ve seen Juan, you’ve seen Amal.’”
“Oh, man,” I groaned, realizing I’d been had.
Kelly let out a whoop of a laugh.
“You had me going there for a while,” I told him.
He poured himself some more wine. “You know, speaking of Alabama, do you know what they consider a bisexual down there?”
I rested my chin in my hand, my elbow on the table. “Tell me.”
“Someone who likes sheep and goats.”
I shook my head. “You can’t stay serious for long, can you?”
“Ten minutes were up.”
“No, they weren’t,” I said.
He laughed. “What’s so good about being serious?”
He had me there. Suddenly I realized how serious I’d become. How I’d stand at a bar with Randall and we’d talk about his breakup with Ike, or what I needed to do to get my work more noticed, or how Frank and I were putting new tile in the pool. When did we stop going out just to have a good time? When did we start being so serious? At home, Frank and I talked about his retirement plan, or how in a few more years he’d get a nice annuity. Should we buy a new place? Or should we just fix this one up? We really needed a new roof. Had I seen the new clay roof the neighbors had installed down the street? It was really nice. Had I seen how nice it was?
Sitting across from Kelly, I felt alive.
He made me laugh. Not only with his dumb jokes, but with his boyish enthusiasm for everything. His tomato salad was “out of this world.” His lamb was “the tastiest treat” he’d had in a long time. He even raved over the glazed baby carrots. “Here, try one,” he insisted, stabbing a carrot with his fork and presenting it to me across the table. I plucked the carrot off the tines and laughed at his exuberance.
“Tasty, huh?” he asked.
“Sure is,” I told him, locked onto his eyes.
He told me how, after turning eighteen, he’d left his foster family in San Francisco and taken the bus, just like me, to Los Angeles. He couldn’t stay in San Francisco, he explained. The city represented his old life, and he needed to start fresh. He had to get out of his hometown if he was going to start over and become something new. And so…one more thing he shared with that boy from East Hartford.
He told me about the jobs he’d found in bars, again just like me, though he’d never taken off his clothes and danced on a box. When I told him about that little fact of my history, Kelly grinned wide and asked if I had pictures. Of course, I did. I promised I’d show him sometime.
“Well, that encourages me,” he said, cutting his lamb.
“What does?”
“That you could go from being a stripper in a club to a big, famous artist.” He looked at me intently. “I don’t want to be a bartender all my life.”
I let the “big, famous artist” description pass by for the moment. My heart was jumping out of my chest at him. I wanted to fill him up with encouragement. I wanted to change his life, right there and then, right there at that very table. I wanted to jump-start his future for him, to send him off on his way to success, an accomplishment he would always trace back to this very moment, when I had said the words that changed his life.
“You just have to believe you can do it,” I told him.
He made a face. “I never went to college.”
I leaned in toward him. “Neither did I.”
He seemed to consider whether I was telling him the truth.
“I’m not bullshitting you. I barely got out of high school alive.”
“But you seem so…” He gestured as he tried to think of a word. “I don’t know. Educated.”
“Well, when I was very young, I liked school. I was a good student. But my high school years were…” My voice trailed off. How much should I tell? “I had a lot of distractions in high school,” I finally said. “But still, after a couple of years of this, I had a sense that I was missing out on something. So I started reading everything I could, even if it wasn’t assigned in class. I’d go to the library and take out the classics. Hawthorne. Mark Twain. Jane Austen. It was a way of occupying my mind.”
“But then why didn’t you go on to college?”
“My parents couldn’t afford it. Besides, I wanted to be an actor. So after high school, I took jobs at Bob’s Big Boy and Friendly’s Ice Cream to finance my trips into New York to audition.”
“Did you get any parts?”
“A few. Nothing much. And certainly nothing ever came of them.” Suddenly my life—usually just a string of broken dreams in my own mind—seemed like a trailblazing path to glory. “But you know, I never gave up. Oh, sure, yes, I gave up on the idea of being an actor, but only because I’d found something else. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew I’d find my way. I came close to giving up lots of times, but deep down, I always believed that I’d make it.”
That wasn’t entirely true. I was romanticizing quite a bit. I didn’t talk about the hustling, or the jobs waiting tables, or the key fact that for much of the time, I’d had Frank at my side, always cheering me on and paying the bills when I had no money. Right then, I didn’t want to think about Frank. The guilt would just kick in again, and I was having too much fun.
“Well, all that sounds great,” Kelly was saying, “but I don’t have your talent.”
I scowled. “That’s so not true. You have more talent than I do. I don’t sketch, remember. I take pictures with a camera, and then I digitize them.”
“Yeah, but that takes talent. A lot more than I have.”
“I’ve seen what you do. You’re good. When did you start sketching?”
He smirked. “When I saw Jackie O on the cover of a magazine.”
“Ah yes,” I said. “The cult of Jackie.”
“It just came over me. I felt like I had to draw her. Pretty soon my walls were covered not only with photos of her but my drawings of her as well.” He batted his long, beautiful eyelashes. “Jackie was a huge influence on my creativity.”
I smiled. Our waiter came by to check on us. After he left, I looked over at Kelly and said, “Draw him.”
“The waiter?” Kelly scrunched up his face, revealing his deep dimples. “He’s no Jackie O. He’s a tight ass.”
“So? Show me what you can do.”
He shrugged, then arched an eyebrow as he checked
out his subject from across the room. Finally, he nodded, took out his pad again, and began to sketch.
“We can leave it with the tip,” I said.
He was silent as he drew.
“Hey,” I said, racking my brain for a joke, determined to play his game. “Why do demons and ghouls hang out together?”
“Don’t talk to me when I’m drawing.”
“Oh.” I sat back in my chair. “Sorry.”
He finished. He held up the sketch so I could see. Another masterpiece. He’d nailed it perfectly. The round head, the long nose, the snooty expression.
“Fantastic,” I said.
“Everyone knows demons are a ghoul’s best friend.”
I laughed. “No fair. You know all the jokes.”
“It’s true. I long for the day someone can tell me a joke I haven’t heard.”
“I’ll keep trying.” I paused, long enough so that it would be significant. “That is, if you’ll let me.”
Our eyes held a moment; then he broke the gaze.
“Your Web site mentions a person named Frank,” Kelly said. “Who’s he?”
“Frank’s my husband,” I admitted.
“You’re married?”
I nodded. I couldn’t hold up my hand to show him the ring, because I’d taken it off. I always took it off when I went to the gym. The ring hurt sometimes when I did crossovers. But usually I slipped it back on after I showered. Tonight I had left it in my gym bag.
“We got married in Canada a couple years ago,” I said. “Not that it’s legal or anything down here.”
“But you must have a domestic partnership thing, too.”
“We do. Everything’s all taken care of that way. Frank is a teacher. He’s very organized. He’s very…serious.”
A smile barely revealed itself on Kelly’s lips.
“I don’t believe in marriage,” he said. “Oh, I mean, it’s great for people who want it. I just could never do it. I look at marriages like Donovan’s with Penelope Sue—”
I cut in. “Believe me, that’s not a marriage most people would ever want to emulate.”
He gave me a look. “I wasn’t going to say anything bad about it. In fact, I was going to say that was one of the few styles of marriage I could ever tolerate. Where there’s complete freedom and complete individuality.”
Object of Desire Page 19
