Object of Desire

by William J. Mann

  “Of course, it tastes as good,” Becky said, shoveling some into her mouth.

  Nana and Mom were walking around, picking up dirty paper plates and cups. Aunt Patsy struggled to her feet and began placing the candles in my birthday cake.

  “Do we have to sing?” Becky asked, rolling her eyes.

  “Yes, of course, we have to sing,” Mom told her. “It is your brother’s birthday! We sing on birthdays, Miss Smarty-pants!”

  Becky just sighed.

  Dad lit the candles with his lighter. There were thirteen of them, stuck in between the M&M’s that spelled out my name. As everyone—minus Becky—launched into a heartfelt chorus of “Happy Birthday,” I couldn’t quite believe I was now a teenager. Thirteen felt so old, so mature.

  “And many morrrrrrre,” Nana trilled at the end.

  Mom was kissing my cheek hard, with a lot of exaggerated noise. “Happy birthday, honey!” she cooed.

  “Happy birthday, Danny,” Aunt Patsy said, smiling over at me.

  “Happy birthday, son,” Dad said, dropping a hand onto my shoulder.

  I turned to look at Becky.

  “Happy birthday,” she said, without a lot of enthusiasm.

  Mom passed a piece of cake to each of us. The adults ate theirs standing up, except for Aunt Patsy, who sat in her own folding chair. Becky and I were alone at the picnic table.

  “So now that you’re a teenager,” my sister said in between forkfuls of cake, “you should start thinking about what you want to do with your life.”

  “What do you mean, with my life?”

  “You know. Like what are you going to be?”

  I was puzzled. “You mean like when I grow up?”

  “Exactly, Professor.”

  I hadn’t really thought about it. When I was a little kid, I’d liked the dogs and cats in the neighborhood, and I’d said I wanted to be a veterinarian. Then, for a while, like in second grade, I’d thought being a fireman might be cool. But Mom had me promise not to be a fireman, because, she said, she’d worry too much about me. For a while I’d thought about being an astronaut, but I thought that was just Desmond talking; I’d never really been all that keen about getting stuck inside a space capsule and shot out into orbit. After that, nothing else had ever come to me.

  “You’ll be in high school next year,” Becky said, “and by the time you’re a sophomore, which is what I am now, you should really make a decision.”

  “How come?”

  “Because that’s when you start thinking about colleges.”

  “Are you going away to college?” I asked her.

  “Of course, I am. Do you think I want to stay in East Hartford all my life?”

  “Why not?”

  She made a face. “You are so pathetic, Danny. You really want to live in this crummy town for the rest of your life?”

  “I like this town,” I said.

  She scrunched up her face even more.

  “I guess I’ll be a business guy or something,” I told her. “Maybe a real estate agent like Dad. I’ll build a big house in that cornfield behind us, and I’ll put in an inground pool so you and Mom and Dad and Katie and all my friends can come over and use it.”

  Becky laughed. “That’s your dream? That’s what you want to be? How pathetic. You think I’ll still be around to come in your pool? Well, think again, Danny.”

  “Why? Where are you going?”

  “I don’t know yet. But I’m going somewhere.” She leaned in close to me. “I’m going to be an artist. And being an artist means you have to be willing to do things differently than everybody else. Chipper understands that.”

  “Is he going to be an artist, too?”

  “No. Well, maybe. If he can get away from his father, who only wants him to play football.” Becky shuddered; then she smiled, exhibiting a row of perfectly white teeth unmarred by any butter or corn kernels. “You watch. Whatever Chipper does, he’s going to be very successful. We’ll live in a big penthouse somewhere, like in Manhattan or Boston.”

  “Cool,” I said.

  Nana was behind us, collecting our empty plates.

  “Beckadee, Beckadoo,” she said in her singsongy voice.

  “You know what, Nana?” Becky asked. “Danny says he wants to build a house in that cornfield over there so he can live next to Mom and Dad all his life.”

  “That’s a nice thought,” Nana said.

  Becky laughed. “I think it’s foolish.”

  Nana smiled as her hand patted my head. “The man who is a fool none of the time is a fool all of the time,” she said, one of her sayings.

  I, of course, had no idea what she meant.

  Later, I wandered off into the cornfield. Most of the stalks were broken now, their fruit harvested, their leaves turning brown. I could envision a very nice house rising up from this field, a house where I could live, where I could be an adult. I’d have a room just for my comic books, arranged and catalogued on shelves, and another that housed a giant television and pillows strewn all over the floor. I imagined the house and the pool and the parties I’d have, with Mom and Dad and Nana and Aunt Patsy and all my friends being there. Maybe I’d even have a son by then. Imagining my future like that made all those worries about high school seem very far away, indeed. I didn’t need to be afraid, I told myself.

  Everything was going to turn out just fine.

  PALM SPRINGS

  The day was orange. Even though the sky was blue, and the hospital shone starkly in white and chrome, the day itself was so orange, it seemed that everything around me had caught on fire, and I was living in its reflection. Thankfully, Randall and Hassan were with me. I couldn’t have gotten through any of this without them.

  “Is it time?” I asked.

  Randall nodded. “We’re all set to go.”

  I turned and looked at Frank. He looked so handsome, so at peace. I knelt down and kissed his cheek.

  “You ready to go home, baby?” I asked.

  He gripped my hand tightly. “More than ready,” he replied.

  I beamed.

  Pushing the wheelchair toward the elevator, I bid good-bye to all the nurses and thanked them for all their good care. Frank blew them kisses. Behind us, Randall and Hassan each carried a vase of flowers, the only two of the dozens that Frank had received that we weren’t leaving for other patients to enjoy. One vase was filled with the latest spray of green daisies that I’d had arranged to be delivered every day for the entire week of Frank’s hospitalization. The other bouquet was from my father, a collection of yellow lilies, white roses and baby’s breath that bore a card reading LOVE DAD AND ANGELA.

  I’d called him to tell him about Frank’s heart attack, and Dad had seemed genuinely concerned, asking me if I wanted him to fly out. I said no, but his offer meant more to me than he could possibly realize. Or maybe, in fact, he did know how much it meant. Maybe that was why he’d offered.

  “After seven days of hospital food,” Frank was saying as I wheeled him down the corridor, “I’m actually looking forward to Danny’s cooking.”

  “Watch it,” I warned, “or I might lose control of this wheelchair, and it’ll go flying straight through that window at the end of the hall.”

  “We’re cooking tonight,” Randall told us as I maneuvered Frank into the elevator. “Hassan and I are making a very healthy meal of leafy greens and vegetables.”

  “I’m going to miss my ice cream,” Frank said, pouting.

  I hit the L button for lobby, and the doors slid shut. “Listen, mister,” I told him, “you had three arteries clogged up. No more ice cream. No more red meat.”

  “And always lots and lots of water,” Hassan reminded him.

  “Indeed,” I echoed.

  It had been dehydration that had left Frank unable to call for help. He’d slipped into a state of unconsciousness as he lay there in his chair all night and most of the morning. The heart attack itself was not severe; if not for the dehydration from running three miles on a
wickedly hot day without any water, he might have been able to even drive himself to the hospital.

  The pain had come, Frank told me later, during his run. He’d thought he was suffering from heartburn, so he’d sat down in his chair when he got back home, kicking off his shoes, intending to rest for a moment. He’d been dizzy and light-headed, and in a few moments, he had passed out, with only the dimmest awareness of his condition.

  “I wasn’t entirely out of it,” he told me. “I’d go in and out of consciousness. I knew I needed to get up, but I couldn’t. I just couldn’t move.”

  He’d had the sensation of falling, he told me. “It was a lot of work not to fall down the rabbit hole,” he explained after the operation, when he was able to sit up in his hospital bed. His doctors told us he’d come through the bypass surgery with flying colors. “What kept me going,” Frank insisted, “was the memory of your phone call, Danny.”

  He was referring to the call I’d made from the cemetery in Connecticut. He’d gotten the message when he’d come in from his run, right before he’d sat down in his chair and passed out. “I’m done here,” I’d told Frank. “I’m coming home.”

  “That’s why I hung on,” Frank said, looking over at me with green eyes that seemed rekindled, sharper than they had been in a very long time. “Part of me wanted to slip away. It would have been easier than to keep hanging on. It was very, very tempting. But you were coming home. I kept telling myself, ‘Don’t go anywhere. Danny’s coming home.’”

  I had cried when he told me the story, pressing his hand to my lips, kissing his palm. Now I reached down and squeezed his hand again. With a chime, the elevator doors opened onto the lobby. The orange sunlight of the day streamed in.

  Randall hurried on ahead to bring the car around to meet us. We waited for him just past the front doors. I watched Frank’s eyes flicker up to take in the mountains, awash in vermillion. As always, his mountains restored him. He smiled.

  Randall’s SUV rolled up in front of us. “Here, I’ll help Frank get in on this side,” Randall said, hurrying around to take the wheelchair from me. “You put the flowers in the back.”

  Hassan had already opened the hatch and was placing my father’s bouquet inside. I slid the green daisies in next to it.

  “You have been quite the inspiration,” Hassan said to me.

  I looked at him. “What do you mean?”

  “I watched you as you tended to Frank over the last week. And what I saw changed not only how I saw you, Danny, but how I saw myself.”

  I lifted an eye to make sure Frank was okay as he got out of the wheelchair and took his seat on the passenger’s side of the car. Randall was holding him securely. I returned my attention to Hassan.

  “What change are you talking about?” I asked.

  “I saw a man no longer in conflict, no longer grieving for something that is missing. Rather, I saw a man in love.”

  I smiled. “So is that what you would be photographing, then, if you photographed me? Love?”

  “Nothing so simple as that. I would be photographing love and commitment and determination and promise. And success. I think success most of all.”

  I laughed. “It’s not a word I’ve ever used to describe myself.”

  “With Penelope Sue’s commission, you might start using it more.” His dark eyes sparkled. “Danny, I cannot begin to thank you for your generosity in that regard.”

  “Oh, please.” I shrugged. “I’m just a hack photographer. My art comes in when I get the images onto the computer. You’re the real shutterbug. So it made sense for you to take the photos of Penelope and Donovan. Then I can do my thing digitally.”

  “I have not done collaborations before. I am looking forward to it.”

  “As am I.”

  Hassan smiled. “To share the money with me is most magnanimous on your part.”

  I winked at him. “We need to stick together if we’re going to get what we can out of the fat cats.”

  He laughed and slammed the hatch shut.

  We were starting to head around to the other side of the car when I stopped him. “But what did you mean when you said that you’d changed your view of yourself?”

  Hassan’s voice dropped to a whisper. “You remember my doubts, no?”

  I nodded.

  “Danny, I come from a culture where a man does not love another man like this. Certainly not a man who has a virus in his body that might take him away before his time. But then I witnessed you sitting on the edge of Frank’s hospital bed, holding his hand, willing him to live. I realized then that love knows no boundaries, abides by no rules. Yes, it sometimes becomes confused, sidetracked. But I watched you sitting there, and I saw on your face that you knew your journey with Frank was not over. That in many ways, it was just beginning, or perhaps it was starting over. I saw that, and I was not afraid anymore to admit that I loved Randall.”

  “What are you two whispering about back here?” Randall said, suddenly poking his head around the side of the car.

  “You,” I told him.

  Randall smirked. “All good things, I’m sure.”

  “I was just saying that your Halloween costume was actually your secret fetish, that you dress up as Cher in the privacy of your room all the time.” I winked at Hassan. “I figured he should know the truth.”

  Randall grinned. “See, that’s the problem when you’ve known someone for as long as I’ve known Danny. They learn all your secrets.”

  We got in the car. Frank was in the front seat, next to Randall, his eyes wide as we headed out of the parking lot and down Indian Canyon. A water bottle sat next to him, and every few minutes he took a sip. It was a bright day, glorious. The mountains off to our right looked like papier-mâché, folded in various and intricate patterns. Frank couldn’t take his eyes off them. I had the feeling that at some point during his crisis, he’d feared he’d never see his mountains again.

  I had my own rush of emotions somersaulting in my head. Gratitude, most of all, that Frank was coming home. It felt incredibly generous, more than I could have, or should have, expected. And yet there was a certain odd sadness, too: an ache for a boy I had known for so long, a boy who had finally and permanently gone away. I had liked him well enough, even if he’d been riddled with fear and diffidence and uncertainty, traits that had sometimes made him hard to live with. But he’d been young and cute and occasionally rather witty, and he could often be a lot of fun to have around. But finally, in the end, all his anxiety, all his self-doubt, had proven too much, both for him and for me, and so he had gone away. I would miss him. But he had to go.

  “The desert has been very good to you,” Hassan had once told me. Indeed it had. Suddenly I forgave the place all the little faults I had found so egregious before. I reached forward in my seat and stroked the back of Frank’s hair.

  Hassan was right about another thing, too. My journey with Frank was not yet over. Might there even be a second twenty years ahead of us? I couldn’t know, of course. The doctors had said Frank’s bypass had given him the heart of a thirty-year-old, but there were no guarantees in life. I’d come to understand that pretty well. My father had said something in our last phone conversation about making friends with ambiguity. That was what he’d finally managed to do, he’d explained: he’d decided that in some strange way not knowing what had happened to Becky was a terrible kind of gift, one that allowed him to open his heart for whatever might come his way in life, and to surrender any lingering need for control. “I just wish your mother had been able to see that,” he’d said, and his voice had broken a bit.

  I continued to stroke Frank’s hair. Making room for ambiguity, I understood, was the only way to live. Frank and I might have twenty more years together; we might have only today. I didn’t expect the old passion to suddenly rematerialize, but I understood that the magic that had remained was special and fulfilling in its own way. And might there still be more to come? Could we dare to expect more? After having reached the top
of the mountain and begun our careful descent down the other side, might there still be more?

  Suddenly Frank’s voice broke the silence in the car.

  “Drive to the end of Ramon,” he said.

  Randall looked over at him. “The end of Ramon? Why?”

  “Please,” Frank urged.

  I smiled, sitting back in my seat. I knew why. The end of Ramon Road was the closest one could get to the mountains by car. Before we got him home and settled him in his chair, fussing over him and placing his feet up on a stool, Frank wanted to see the mountains up close. I was certain now that in his semiconscious state, he had thought of those mountains, those sentinels of his existence ever since he’d been a small boy, and vowed he’d see them again, that he’d stand in their shadow and climb them, that he’d breathe the sharp, clear air of their peaks.

  “Pull over here,” Frank said, indicating the dusty turnaround at the end of the road. “I’ll only be a minute.”

  “I’ll go with him,” I said. “You two wait here in the car.”

  I opened my door and hurried around to the passenger side, where I took Frank’s arm just as he stepped out onto the cracking earth. He was already looking up into the mountains, as if he expected to see something there.

  “Okay, Sir Edmund Hillary,” I joked. “You’re not thinking of going for a hike, are you?” I shut the car door behind him. “Because maybe we ought to wait a while before doing that much exercise, don’t you think?”

  His eyes were searching along the sheer brown side of the mountain. “Just want to look,” he said. “Just want to see what there is to see.”

  I stood close to him, snaking an arm around his waist, both to stabilize him and to feel him near me. We stood there, holding each other, looking at the dramatic granite outcrops. A steep trail had been cut into the side of the mountain, zigzagging on itself before curving around to the other side of the cliff. A few scattered cacti clung precariously to the edges, while yellow brittlebush crept up the mountain flanks. I watched as Frank’s eyes lifted higher and higher, his chin rising in the air. I followed his gaze, and as I did so, the intuition that had led him down this road became apparent to me.