Object of Desire

by William J. Mann

  “Danny?”

  I turned.

  Frank was in the doorway.

  “Everything okay?”

  “Yes,” I said softly.

  “Come to bed,” he whispered.

  I waited a few moments, still staring down at the photo; then I replaced it on the wall and followed Frank into our room.

  EAST HARTFORD

  It was the last day of my freshman year. I had made it. I had made it through an entire year at that hated place. Brother Pop stood in front of my last class of the day, admonishing us all to spend our summers as good Christian young men. I heard snickering from the back row. A straw wrapper shot past my ear. Then the bell rang.

  “Thank God that’s over,” Troy said as we headed down the hill on our walk home.

  “Two and a half months of freedom!” I shouted.

  Since it was our last day, we’d been permitted to doff the shirts and ties for once. I’d worn a T-shirt emblazoned with the enormous face of Deborah Harry. Troy’s shirt read THE KNACK in big white letters. Free of books, we bolted down the hill as fast as we could run.

  “Pussy,” Troy called, “I’ll beat your ass!”

  “Oh, no, you won’t!”

  I was a fast runner. There wasn’t an athletic bone in my body, but I could probably outrun an elk. I arrived at the crossroads a full thirty seconds before Troy did. I stuck my tongue out at him.

  “Don’t stick that tongue out unless you plan on using it,” Troy said.

  I smirked. “That’s for later.”

  Ever since that day at his house, we’d been sucking each other off whenever we had the chance. Once we even did it in the stalls of the boys’ room at school, during rehearsals for the school play. The two months of rehearsing for that play were the best time of the whole year. We’d put on How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying in conjunction with the girls at St. Clare’s. Katie and the Theresas were in the chorus, too, but time had moved on, and we weren’t really friends anymore. I hung out only with Troy. The play was the one extracurricular school activity I’d participated in all year, and I’d only signed up at the last minute because Troy had encouraged me.

  Boy, was I glad he had. I’d loved, loved, loved opening night, made up with all that pancake and rushing out from behind the wings into the glare of the spotlights. I loved singing as loudly as I could, no matter if I was off-key. I loved parading around in costume in front of all those people in the auditorium, the smell of wood polish and floor wax filling my nostrils. Then and there, I’d decided that I wanted to be an actor. Next year, I’d vowed, I’d land a real part in the play. They were doing Oliver! next year, and even though the leads always went to juniors and seniors, I hoped I could snag a few lines in some small role. Already I’d checked out the play from the school library and decided I would try out for Mr. Brownlow, the guy who adopts Oliver. Mr. Brownlow didn’t have to sing anything, which was good, because my singing voice was shit, but he had a whole mess of lines. I couldn’t wait. Maybe even Mom and Dad would come this time.

  “I got some really smooth weed,” Troy was telling me, slightly out of breath.

  “Excellento!”

  I couldn’t wait to get to Troy’s house. I knew the routine. We’d say hello to the maid, grab a Coke from the refrigerator, then head upstairs to his room. We’d smoke a doobie and then start sucking face, which quickly moved to sucking cock. I no longer cared what it meant. So what if I was bisexual? David Bowie was, too, and David Bowie was very cool. And in an article I’d read in a Rolling Stone magazine that I found at Troy’s house, Elton John said everyone was a little bit bisexual.

  Everyone.

  We were getting ready to cross the street when a gold Mustang Mach 1 pulled up alongside of us.

  “Yo, Danny,” Chipper said, leaning out the window. He was wearing a white T-shirt, and I noticed the way his bicep splayed against the car door. “You want a ride?”

  “I’m going over to Troy’s,” I told him.

  Chipper’s eyes moved over to my friend. I didn’t think Chipper liked Troy all that much. He never said anything about him, but sometimes when he saw us together, he kind of made a face. But Chipper had kept good on his promise to watch out for me. A few months ago, he’d had to intercede once again when he saw a bunch of idiots picking on me; he’d told them he’d crack their skulls together if he caught them being assholes to me ever again. After that, the harassment dropped into low key. The occasional paper airplane still bounced off my head, but word got around that I was friends with Chipper Paguni, and most of the kids backed off.

  Friends with Chipper Paguni. That made me very pleased indeed.

  Chipper moved his eyes back to me. “I can give you a ride to his house if you want,” he said.

  “Cool,” I said, and we hopped into the car, Troy in back, me up front.

  Once again, Aersomith was on the eight-track. Chipper lit up a cigarette as he steered the car back onto the road.

  “So how’s your mother?” he asked.

  “Well, you know, the same.”

  He exhaled smoke. “Oh yeah, I do. She had some FBI guy come over and talk to me. Did you know that?”

  “No.”

  “Man, my parents flipped. I mean, the fucking FBI!”

  “What did they want?”

  He took another drag on his cigarette, then let it out. “Same old shit. When did I last see Becky? Was I sure I’d never heard from her since? All that crap.”

  I shook my head. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. I mean, your mom’s just never gonna give up, huh?”

  “No.”

  I looked out the window. It had been almost ten months now since Becky had disappeared, but Mom still got up every morning and went to her desk in the living room, like it was a job. She’d review her notes, pore over police reports, make phone calls. I knew she’d gone to the FBI, even if I was unaware that they’d paid a call on Chipper. Mom had had Bud the taxi driver haul her all the way down to the FBI office in New Haven. Armed with maps and signed statements from that guy Warren and his biker friends, she’d reported how a girl matching Becky’s description had been seen on Cape Cod in the company of a biker known as Bruno. Bruno was “one mean son of a bitch,” Warren had told Mom, and was part of a New England motorcycle gang. And since it would appear that Bruno had taken Becky across state lines, the responsibility of locating her now fell to the FBI. The agents had listened to her story politely and promised to look into it.

  I didn’t know if Mom was aware that they’d gone to see Chipper. She didn’t talk much about her investigations these days, since they were the source of major tension between her and Dad. Some real doozies of fights had taken place lately. There was so much crying and so much shouting in our house that Father McKenna, the pastor of our church, suggested that Mom and Dad talk to a counselor. He found one for them, a lady named Dr. Page, and they went a few times. Once, they even dragged me along. “This affects you, too, Danny,” Mom had insisted.

  Dr. Page’s office was downtown in one of those new, modern medical arts buildings with skylights and fake rubber tree plants. She wore hardly any makeup and said very little, just sat there and nodded as Mom ranted and raved. Dad would try to say a few words; then Mom would shout over him, and he’d sigh and retreat into silence. Dr. Page asked me how I felt about my sister being missing, and I told her I didn’t know. Mom told me to stop being so stubborn. “He misses her terribly,” she said. “You can see it. They were very close.”

  Dr. Page did explain that if Becky had been kidnapped, she might be suffering from something called Stockholm syndrome. She told us that a few years before, four hostages had been taken by bank robbers in Sweden, and eventually they became so brainwashed, so entranced with their captors, they didn’t want to leave them. “Kind of like Patty Hearst,” I said. Dr. Page smiled wide at me and replied, “Exactly, Danny.” I felt proud of myself that I could contribute to the discussion.

  But the visits
to Dr. Page didn’t end the strife between Mom and Dad. Dad thought Mom should just trust that the police were doing everything they could to find Becky. Mom disagreed, vehemently.

  “The police!” she shrieked. “The fucking East Hartford police!” She had started swearing a lot. No one was surprised by it anymore. “I expected a hell of a lot more than what they’ve been doing. I expected helicopters with searchlights! I expected an all-points national bulletin!”

  “Peggy, what the hell does that mean?” Dad asked.

  “I don’t know,” Mom said. “But I expected it. And you should have, too! Becky is your daughter, too! You don’t care about her like I do!”

  I heard Dad slam the door and head down into the basement. He’d been going down there a lot in the last few months.

  I was upstairs, listening. In this, I sided with Mom. Peter Guthrie, the detective in charge of finding Becky, just didn’t get it. To him, Becky was just a picture on a xeroxed sheet stuck to a telephone pole. He didn’t wake up from a sound sleep like Mom did, screaming that Becky was being raped in some abandoned warehouse. I’d hear her scream out in the middle of the night, and I’d lie there in bed, desperate and distressed, unable to bear the idea of my mother in such pain. When I was a boy and I’d get sick in the middle of the night, Mom had always been there with a bucket and cold damp cloth for my forehead. But there was nothing I could do for her in return. I hated the police for not making my mother’s pain go away. They didn’t even want to take her phone calls anymore.

  “Don’t tell me to trust the police!” Mom shouted from the top of the basement stairs down at my father. “That goddamn Guthrie didn’t even take fingerprints from Becky’s room until three weeks ago! He keeps telling me she’s a runaway, that she’ll come home when she’s ready. He says I should just accept that! My Becky! A runaway! There’s no reason in the world that she would’ve run away from home!”

  Mom seemed to have forgotten the fights she and Becky had had in those last few weeks. They had fought over stupid stuff, like Becky being pissed at being Mom’s personal chauffeur, and bigger stuff, like Mom insisting Chipper was a bad influence. But if Becky had run away, she would’ve come home sooner or later. I mean, she was just sixteen years old—okay, seventeen soon. But a teenage girl couldn’t just leave home and get a job somewhere and start a new life.

  Could she?

  My whole freshman year in high school was now complete—and the whole time, Becky had been gone. It felt so strange. I mean, all last summer Becky had known how nervous I was and how unready I was to leave St. John’s and all my friends. And she’d say, “Oh, Danny, don’t be such a dweeb.” It seemed so bizarre that she wasn’t around now to look at me with that face she always gave me—the one that was so superior and condescending—and say, “Didn’t I tell you that you’d get through it okay?”

  That was when I started to agree with Mom. If Becky had run away, she’d have been home by now. She must have been kidnapped. It was the only explanation for why she’d been gone so long. And of all the leads that had come in, only Warren and his biker friends had ever come through with any kind of real description of Becky. Only Warren, out of all the leads we’d gotten, had mentioned the crescent moon birthmark on her arm. Dad countered that the descriptions of Becky that had been distributed everywhere had contained that bit of information, so it wasn’t like Warren was telling us something he couldn’t have known otherwise. Still, Mom was convinced he was the real deal.

  I felt sad, sitting there in Becky’s seat in Chipper’s car, listening to Becky’s favorite band. I remembered the cardboard fort we’d built in the giant maple tree in our yard when she was ten and I was eight. We’d sit up there on the branches and read comic books all day. I’d read Green Lantern, and she’d read Betty and Veronica. Mom would come out, pretending not to know where we were, and call our names. We’d giggle behind the pages of our comics. It all seemed so long ago now.

  “Take this left up there,” Troy said from the backseat, indicating his street.

  Chipper grunted in reply.

  He’d worn jeans to school. I’d thought about doing the same but wondered if that would be pushing the “dress down” rules too far. Chipper didn’t worry about things like that. He just did what he wanted. I looked over at him, at his denim legs in the leather bucket seat. There was something about his thighs that made it hard for me to breathe. His legs really filled out his jeans. When I wore jeans, they just hung on me. I was such a beanpole, but Chipper worked out. He wasn’t as big as a lot of the football players were, but you could see just by looking at him that he was strong. I wished I’d gotten to see Chipper play this year, but back during football season, Mom had never let me go out of the house except to go to school. It was right after Becky had disappeared, and she was paranoid that someone would snatch me, too. Now she didn’t seem to notice when I was home or not, so consumed was she in her search.

  I could see Troy’s house up ahead. Suddenly I didn’t want to get out of the car and leave Chipper. Without even thinking about it, I turned to him and blurted, “Do you want to come with us and smoke some pot?”

  I knew Chipper liked marijuana. He’d admitted to smoking it with Becky. Of course, it wasn’t my pot to offer. I didn’t dare look around to see Troy’s face.

  Chipper stopped the car in front of the house. “You guys got pot?”

  I nodded. “Yeah, up in Troy’s room.”

  Chipper looked into the backseat.

  “If you’re thinking of being a narc,” Troy said to him icily, “I will just deny it. There’s no way to prove it.”

  “I could get kicked off the team,” Chipper said. “I almost did once already.” His eyes returned to me. Big brown eyes, which I fell into, headfirst. “So you guys gotta swear you’ll never tell.”

  “Never!” I promised.

  “Man, I’m not a narc,” Troy told him.

  The maid called a cheery greeting as the three of us clomped up the stairs. Only I responded, as usual.

  With the door safely locked behind us, Chipper stood examining the plastic Corvette and the glow-in-the-dark skull as Troy lit the bong. We’d been using a bong lately. It was much more cool and far more effective than just passing around a joint. I’d never asked Troy where and how he got his pot. So much of his world was still a mystery to me. He was a year older than I was, having stayed back in fourth grade, but still, fifteen-year-old kids with their own personal drug dealers? There was so much that I never knew about. Before Becky’s disappearance, I’d lived such a sheltered life.

  “Good stuff,” Chipper pronounced, taking a hit and passing the bong to me. “Very smooth.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed, though I didn’t know the difference between smooth marijuana and what? Rough marijuana?

  We sat there, getting increasingly stoned, listening to the Patti Smith Group’s Easter album. Troy was up on his bed, where, if Chipper hadn’t been around, I would have been next to him. And by this point, we probably would have been sucking face. But instead, I was in the beanbag chair with Chipper, pressing my left thigh up against his right. I could sense that Troy was a little pissed that I wasn’t up on the bed with him.

  “Good tunes, man,” Chipper was saying, taking another hit, then singing along. “Because the night belongs to lovers, because the night belongs to us…”

  The warmth of his leg against mine felt incredible. I was getting hard. I could actually feel my cock moving in my pants.

  Okay, so I could no longer deny why I’d stolen Chipper’s underwear, why lately I’d begun to masturbate as I pressed the soft white cotton briefs to my face. I was bisexual. I liked guys and girls. Troy had taught me how to jerk off. Now I was obsessed with doing it. Sometimes I shot four or five loads a day, and usually Chipper’s underpants were somewhere close by—though I made sure never to get them stained.

  “Mmm,” Chipper was moaning. He rested his head against the wall behind us and closed his eyes. Suddenly my heart was thudding in my chest
. Did pot make boys horny? Was what I had done with Troy possible with Chipper?

  The thought was staggering. I moved my hand so that it rested against Chipper’s thigh. He didn’t stir.

  “Danny.”

  I looked over at Troy on the bed.

  “Do you want to stay over for supper? The maid is making pot roast.”

  I didn’t reply.

  “But I think there’s only enough for you,” Troy said.

  Still I said nothing. I just pressed the back of my hand into Chipper’s thigh.

  He opened his eyes. “Shit,” he said all of a sudden.

  “What?” I asked.

  Chipper looked around, narrowing his eyes at the glowing red numerals of Troy’s digital clock. “Shit, it’s almost four o’clock. I gotta get home.”

  He stood up. I did so as well.

  “You don’t have to go, too, do you, Danny?” Troy asked. “Don’t you want to stay for supper?”

  I looked at him. He was sitting on his bed in exactly the way he always sat when I sat next to him, his legs stretched out in front of him. I thought of his smelly penis and red pubic hair, hidden behind the crotch of his green parachute pants. I was revolted.

  “I should go with Chipper,” I said, “since he lives just across the street from me.”

  “Well then, come on, man,” Chipper said. “We gotta hustle.” He flung open Troy’s door and bolted from the room. He didn’t offer any thanks for the weed. I thought he should’ve. But at the moment I just wanted to get away from Troy, too, as fast and as far as possible. I followed Chipper without saying another word to Troy.

  The maid called good-bye from the kitchen. This time I didn’t answer.

  We hopped into the Mach 1. “Damn, that’s one mighty fine buzz,” Chipper said as he started the ignition. He turned to me and smiled. “You’re all right, you know that, Danny? You are fucking all right.”

  I nearly burst into tears, I was so happy.

  Chipper screeched out onto the road, blasting all the way down Burnside Avenue. I loved the sound of the Mach 1. The rumble of the engine, the squeal of the tires. All the way home I rode with a raging hard-on in my pants.