Object of Desire

by William J. Mann

  “Kelly,” I blurted out.

  Donovan looked at me oddly for several seconds. “Kelly?” he finally repeated.

  “Yes.”

  “Kelly…Nelson?”

  I nodded.

  He laughed. “You want to talk about Kelly?”

  “We’ve been…seeing each other.”

  Donovan made a face as if I were speaking a language he didn’t understand.

  “L-look,” I stammered, “I don’t know what kind of relationship you had with him, and I don’t mean to pry. But I can’t really talk to anyone else about this…”

  “About what?”

  “About how I’m feeling about him.”

  “About Kelly?”

  “Yes!”

  Donovan looked at me intently for a moment, then threw his head back and laughed loudly. Not a mean laugh, just one that seemed genuinely amused.

  “What?” I asked. “What is so funny?”

  “Danny Fortunato,” Donovan said, composing himself, “are you in love with Kelly Nelson?”

  I swallowed. “Yes. Yes, I am.”

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “You’re the only person I know who really knows him,” I said. “And I know that if someone isn’t worth it, you don’t keep them in your life. So Kelly was obviously worth it, since you had him to your party at the Parker.” I paused. “And I saw him here tonight, too.”

  Donovan stood and walked over to the window. “Yes,” he said. “He’s worth it.”

  “Well, I can’t figure him out.” I sighed, feeling foolish. “I’ve been trying to help him, but he’s so hard to reach. And I can’t figure out how he feels about me. He seems to want me, but then he…”

  “Did you get him into bed?” Donovan asked, not turning around to look at me.

  “If you can call it that.”

  Donovan turned, a small smile on his lips. “Then you got more than I did.”

  I looked at him. “Did you…fall in love with him, too?”

  He sighed. “I wouldn’t go that far. But I was fascinated. I met him in L.A. He was working at the Abbey. One night I saw him get into a fight with the manager, and he got fired. I suggested he move out here. I hoped…” His voice trailed off.

  “You hoped what?”

  “That something might blossom between us. But it never did, though I sure as hell tried. He wasn’t interested in all the sparkly things other boys are interested in. He wouldn’t let me buy him a damn thing.”

  “Didn’t you get him that old Mercedes he drives?”

  “Nope. He bought that himself with money he saved.” Donovan sighed. “God, he’s beautiful.”

  I nodded. “Don’t I know that all too well.”

  “Funny what beauty does to a man,” Donovan said, moving back toward me now, lifting a bottle of brandy from his desk and pouring two snifters. He handed one to me. “I’ve kept him in my life chiefly because of his beauty, but also because—and this I will grant you, Danny—there is something rather special about him, down deep.” He smiled. “It all rather reminds me of the way I felt for you, Danny, all those years ago.”

  “Oh, come on,” I said as we toasted each other and sipped the brandy. It tasted good. Warm and thick and sweet.

  Donovan shook his head, smiling as he looked at me. “You’ve never trusted your own appeal, have you?” he asked. “I could never understand that. I still can’t. You were the hottest boy in West Hollywood in those days. Everyone wanted you.”

  “I was not and, no, they didn’t.”

  He smiled. “Perhaps that was part of your appeal. You were oblivious to it.”

  “I wasn’t oblivious. I was just realistic. Any twenty-year-old boy who gets up and shakes his ass in a thong is going to get a crowd of horny older men wanting him.”

  “But I didn’t know you then,” Donovan said. “Remember I only met you after you gave all that up, and after you’d hooked up with Frank.” He made a face. “To my eternal regret.”

  “Oh, Donovan,” I said.

  “I’m being totally serious. I know I can come on strong. I know I can be a real smooth talker. But I liked you, Danny. I liked you a lot.”

  I was touched. “Thank you, Donovan.”

  “And now here we are. To think, all those years I hoped that I might be the one who could break you and Frank up. But no. Along comes a drifter like Kelly Nelson to succeed where I failed.”

  I said nothing, just shook my head.

  “Is it true, then, Danny?” Donovan asked. “You really would leave Frank if Kelly seemed available to you?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted.

  He laughed. “I should be furious. I should throw you out of my house right now.” He poured himself some more brandy without offering me a refill. “I mean, all these years I’ve allowed myself to believe that the only reason you turned me down was because what you shared with Frank was so special, so profound, so rare. I contented myself that, in the face of such a profound love, even I—Donovan Hunt—stood no chance.” He shrugged. “I could live with that. But to think that you might so easily give up that special and profound love for a measly little trifle like Kelly Nelson—”

  “Kelly is not a trifle!” I actually took a step forward in my defense of him. “Maybe you didn’t take the time, Donovan, to really see him for what he is. Kelly is a smart, talented person who—”

  “Oh, come on, Danny. He’s a wanderer. A vagabond.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe I like vagabonds.”

  “Maybe you just wish you’d been one a little longer than you were.” He smirked. “You know, you’re shattering all my illusions tonight, Danny. Here I was, envying you—”

  I laughed out loud. “You envied me? Donovan, for Christ’s sake, my whole house could practically fit inside this study. I drive a beat-up 1999 Jeep Wrangler. And when was the last time you had to worry about paying your monthly bills?”

  Donovan’s eyes popped with such sudden fury that they startled me. “As if money is worth envying! When was the last time you, Mr. Danny Fortunato, felt like a fraud?”

  “Oh, many times,” I assured him.

  “Then you’re being even more foolish.” Donovan got up close in my face. “Every morning, Danny, you wake up and look into the eyes of a man who loves you. A man with whom you have spent twenty years of your life. Whose eyes do I look into? My wife’s? A woman who, when I married her, understood this was going to be a union of convenience, but who has nonetheless come to hate me, more and more each day, with every fiber of her being.” He paused. “Maybe, you say, I could look into the eyes of my revolving series of boyfriends? Boys who come to me not for who I am, but for what I can give them. The truth is, Danny, I look into no one’s eyes. No one’s! Imagine for a moment what it’s like to go through life without ever being able to look someone in the eyes and know those eyes are looking back at you.”

  I didn’t know how to respond. I just let out a sigh and leaned back against Donovan’s desk, the empty snifter in my hand.

  “Hang on a second, Danny,” Donovan said, moving toward the door. “Just wait here a moment, okay?”

  I nodded. He went out, back into the party, probably to check on the wife who hated him or the boy who was hoping to get something from him. I set the snifter down on the desk and covered my face with my hands.

  In a few moments I heard the door open again. I uncovered my face, intending to apologize to Donovan, and I saw Kelly standing there instead.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “Donovan said you wanted to see me.”

  I stared at him. He was so beautiful, he took my breath away.

  “No,” I managed to say. “I didn’t say that.”

  “Then I’ll leave.”

  “No!” I moved forward, my arm outstretched. “Don’t go.”

  Kelly’s black eyes burned into my own. “He also said that we needed to figure out what was going on between us.”

  “Would that I could,” I
said.

  “Well, if you have nothing to say, then I’m heading back to the party.”

  “Wait.” I looked at him. “I know I’ve been unfair, asking you to love me. I had no right, being married and all.”

  He just gave me those eyes.

  “It’s just that—I can’t be sure if you resist me because of Frank, or because you simply don’t feel for me what I feel for you.”

  Kelly sneered. “You’re too much, you know that? You’re crazy.”

  “Why am I crazy?”

  He took a step toward me. “You go through life letting people love you but you don’t see it. You just don’t see it!”

  He was angry. I reached out to touch him but he pulled away.

  “What’s wrong with you, Danny? Why are you so fucking blind? Did Mommy not love you enough?”

  “Okay,” I said. “Stop there.”

  “No, I won’t! You asked me when we first met if I’d ever been in love. I didn’t know. You said I would have known if I had been.” His eyes shone over at me. “Well, now I know! Now I know I have been.”

  Whether he made the first move or it came from me, I didn’t know. But somehow, we came together. Our arms encircled each other. We kissed. It was a good kiss, like the one on the mountain. We could have been anywhere, been anyone. It was only with tremendous effort that I forced myself to remember where we were, and that Donovan could come striding back through the door at any time.

  “We shouldn’t,” I murmured. “Not here.”

  “I think he wanted this to happen,” Kelly said.

  I looked at him. “Do you?”

  He hesitated, then nodded slowly.

  I gripped his hand and led him through the door at the back of the room. Donovan’s bedroom. A California king–size bed sat on a pedestal, the only major piece of furniture in the stark, spare white room. Kicking the door shut with my foot, I maneuvered Kelly toward the bed, where we fell down on our sides, kissing all the time. My erection threatened to pierce my underwear as my world tumbled over itself. Everything I had longed for was coming true. Nothing would ever be the same again.

  I peeled off his shirt, kissing his neck. Unbuckling his belt, I slid off his pants, kissing his inner thigh as I did so. I was determined to make love to him the way I’d always wanted to, slowly and affectionately at first, building to a crescendo. I would banish all his fears, penetrate his heart and his soul. I straddled him now, still dressed in my silly gypsy costume, my one earring dangling above his face as I pinned his hands down with my own. The rings on my fingers sparkled in the light.

  “You are so beautiful,” I told him.

  His black eyes reflected my face.

  I lowered my lips to his chest. Hundreds of tiny kisses rained down on his torso, sprinkling his stomach and ending at his belly button, which I filled up with my tongue.

  “There is so little time,” I said. “It’s running out. So little time.”

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “Let’s go away,” I said. “You and me. Go away.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know. Somewhere.”

  “You’d leave Frank? For me?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  I kissed his side, fluttering my lips into his pit, over his shoulder, down his inner arm….

  And then I stopped.

  I saw it.

  I saw what the sparseness of our previous intimacy had prevented me from seeing before.

  The birthmark.

  The birthmark shaped like a crescent moon.

  Like…

  Becky’s.

  No.

  More like Mom’s.

  The birthmark that had linked Mom to her daughter forever, and forever excluded me from their special bond.

  For several seconds, I just sat there, unmoving, straddling Kelly’s chest, my erection shriveling in my pants.

  “Danny?”

  I got off the bed in a quick, jerky movement.

  “Danny, what’s wrong?”

  I stood at the far side of the room, not looking at him.

  What was I thinking?

  “Danny, what’s wrong?”

  There is so little time.

  An avalanche of images. That girl dancing in the bar in Yonkers, New York. Sitting on Troy’s bed, smoking weed. Riding on the back of Lenny’s motorcycle. Mom pulling me into her and telling me she would love me if only I could find Becky. And finally Becky and Chipper swimming in the pond.

  “Your mother,” I managed to say in a low, slow voice, still unable to look at him. “Your birth mother…”

  “What?”

  “Your birth mother!” I shouted, turning now to face him at last. “You said you remembered her a little!”

  He sat up on the bed, looking like a frightened little child in his underpants. “What are you talking about?”

  “Just answer me! What do you remember about your birth mother?”

  “You’re freaking me out,” Kelly said, swinging his legs off the bed and pulling on his pants. “I knew we shouldn’t have tried this. I knew it would ruin everything.”

  “Kelly, listen to me! Trust me! Just for a minute! What do you remember about your birth mother? Please tell me! And no jokes this time.”

  He was buckling his belt. “I hardly remember anything about her!” he shouted back at me. “I was five years old the last time I saw her.”

  “But you said she tried to get you back a number of times.”

  “Yes, but I never saw her again.” He clearly resented talking about this. “She was a drug addict. They were never going to let me go back to her. Why are you asking me all this shit?”

  “What did she look like?”

  “I don’t know…She had dark hair…”

  “Would you recognize a picture of her?”

  “No! I was five years old!”

  “What was her name?”

  He didn’t want to answer, but he did. “Ann,” he said.

  “Dear God.”

  “Danny, what the fuck is going on?”

  “Where was she from?”

  “I told you. I was born in San Francisco.”

  “I mean originally. Where was your mother from originally?”

  “I don’t know.” There was just the slightest pause. “Back East somewhere. That’s all I know.”

  Back East somewhere.

  “And your father?” I asked, my voice cracking.

  “I don’t know. My mother wasn’t married to him when she had me.”

  The information was rushing at me like lava from a volcano, and it was all I could do to keep from falling under. “And your birthday…” I was struggling to do the math in my head. “You were born in April, right? And you’re twenty-six now?”

  “I’m getting out of here,” Kelly said. “Did you and Donovan do some coke or something? Because you are acting so weird, Danny, and it’s freaking me out!”

  The math figured perfectly.

  I couldn’t speak. I just stood there, staring at Kelly.

  And I realized the dark eyes looking back at me weren’t his.

  They belonged to Chipper Paguni.

  EAST HARTFORD

  My old friend Katie was applying the gray whiskers to my face for the dress rehearsal for Oliver! With so much time having passed, we hardly knew what to talk about. If we weren’t both in the same play—I as Mr. Brownlow and she as part of the makeup crew—we’d probably have sat there in silence. We talked about Brother Connolly and the lighting crew and the costumes. Anything but the old days, those ancient times at St. John’s. That would have been childish and silly. We were different people now, practically adults, sophomores in our prestigious school play. There was only one reference made to what used to be as Katie carefully applied the whiskers to the epoxy on my cheeks. She asked softly, “Did you ever find any clue to what happened to Becky?”

  “No,” I told her.

  All those escapades, all those explorations of motorcycle bars a
nd strip clubs, and it boiled down to one word.

  No.

  I didn’t know if Mom and Dad would come to the see the play. Dad had made vague assurances that he would, and promised he’d convince Mom to come along, too. But Dad had a tendency to get drunk on Saturday nights and be hung over through the next afternoon, which severely dimmed the chances that he’d show up for either the Saturday night presentation or the Sunday matinee. So I didn’t feel I could hold him to it. Mom, of course, I’d never even asked. I knew better than to bother Mom with stuff as trivial as school plays. So I just left a flyer for the show secured to the refrigerator with a magnet—one of the Becky magnets, with her photo and a number to call. On the flyer for the play, I’d highlighted my name in yellow among the cast. I hoped Mom or Dad would see it, take the hint, and come.

  But all that really mattered was that Chipper would be there.

  “I went to every one of your games,” I reminded him. “You owe me this.”

  Chipper had grunted. “I can’t believe I have to go see a faggot-ass play,” he’d said, but I could tell he was really glad to do it. We had been sitting in his room, on his shag carpet, leaning against opposite walls, the soles of our bare feet pressed together. I must have grown in the past year, because when we’d first started sitting this way, my legs hadn’t reached far enough to touch his. Now I’d watched as Chipper’s black eyes danced and his face lit up with a smile. “I’m gonna stand up when you come out on the stage,” he said, “and yell, ‘Go Fortunato!’ the way you used to yell for me at my games.”

  It was good to see Chipper smile when he mentioned his games. The season had ended with him barely having played, and his team not winning a single game. His dreams of being a big senior-class hero had evaporated. He’d never got Mary Kay Suwicki or anybody else to be his girlfriend, either, so he rode out his last, anticlimactic months in high school hanging out with me, smoking pot in his room, listening to Aerosmith, playing footsie, and sometimes letting me walk on his back. I was content. I knew Chipper wasn’t bisexual like I was. So this was the best deal I was going to get.

  Sometimes I’d glance over at our old house across the street and watch the family that had moved in there. A mother, a father, a girl, and a boy. Just like we had been. The girl was younger and the boy was older, but otherwise, it was the same setup. The boy was a towhead like me; the girl dark like Becky. The mother even had big tits like Mom. I didn’t hate those people for taking our house. They seemed to belong there, better than we had, at least at the end. When I watched the boy shoot basketballs into the net they’d installed over the garage door, I felt nothing, really. It was a place I didn’t recognize anymore. I couldn’t even remember living there—at least not before Becky disappeared. That part of my life, all those years leading up to my fourteenth birthday, seemed gone, almost as if they had never really happened at all.