Object of Desire

by William J. Mann

Genres: LGBT Gay

Synopsis

Danny Fortunato, once the hottest go-go boy in West Hollywood, finds himself in the midst of a midlife crisis when he meets a gorgeous young man who inspires within in him hope and passion, forcing him to question his choices, his past, and his love for his partner, Frank.

Release date: July 1, 2009

Publisher: Kensington

Print pages: 432

Sample

The first time I saw him, he was nothing more than a face and a pair of hands. Not once did his eyes meet mine. Even as he took my order, his chin was already lifting to greet the man behind me. The first time I saw him, he did not see me.

It was a green night. The mountains were gray and the sand blowing in from the desert was yellow, but the night itself was so green, it was almost emerald. A mirage, I knew. A trick of the setting sun. On a green night, nothing was what it seemed.

“Do you know who he is?” I asked my friend Randall, my eyes fixed on the bartender.

“Who?”

“Him.”

Randall shook his head. “Never seen him before.”

“He’s beautiful.”

“You think?”

With much reluctance did I turn my eyes away to focus on my friend. A green cast was coloring his face as the last slanting rays of the sun reflected against the mountains. Night was rushing in to fill up every corner of the bar’s outdoor deck, and the busboys were busy lighting the lanterns that hung over our heads. Little flames leapt and hopped as if they were living, breathing creatures, and I was reminded, yet again, of the night my sister disappeared twenty-seven years before, the night when everything in my world changed, the night I came to understand that I would never grow up to be the man I had expected to be.

“He is beautiful, Randall,” I said, with conviction. “Absolutely beautiful.”

“Danny,” my friend replied, “I did not come out with you tonight to moon over beautiful bartenders.” He glowered at me, his face pinched and unhappy, as if he’d just bitten into a lemon.

I gave him a small smile. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I know you want to talk about Ike. Go ahead. I’m listening.”

He looked aghast. “I do not want to talk about Ike.”

“Okay, then, let’s not talk about him.”

Randall huffed. “Why would I drive all the way out here to the desert if I wanted to ruin your birthday by talking about Ike?”

I managed a small smile. “It wouldn’t ruin my birthday, Randall.”

He pouted. “Of course, it would. It ruined my entire life.” He raised his martini to me. “Happy birthday, Danny.”

I raised mine to him. “Thank you, Randall.”

My birthday. Ever since my teens, the day had felt awkward and peculiar, even inappropriate, fraught with memories tattered and terrible but sometimes freakishly funny as well. After the age of fourteen—the age I turned on the day my sister disappeared—all birthday parties ceased in my house. I never blamed my parents for it. I never thought it unfair. Not until I was twenty did I have another birthday party—given to me, in fact, by Randall, soon after I’d arrived in California. It felt odd, all that singing and merrymaking, not to mention the sex that went on after the party. I felt as if I was being unfaithful—not to my sister, not to my parents, but to me, to the boy I’d left behind in Connecticut. The boy who had done everything he could but still had ultimately failed.

“Talk to me,” I said to Randall. “Talk to me about Ike.”

He frowned. “It’s your birthday, Danny. We’re out to have fun tonight. It’s not often you and I get a chance to go out on our own. Usually, there’s Frank with us and—”

“And Ike,” I finished.

“And Ike.” Randall let out a long, dramatic sigh. “Oh, alack and alas. Our happy little foursome is no more.”

We were never a happy little foursome, but I didn’t say that to Randall. Neither Frank nor I had ever cared all that much for Ike. I didn’t say that, either. What I did do was glance back at the bar. I couldn’t see the bartender anymore. It was too dark now. Besides, too many men had crowded around his station.

“Did I tell you he wants to take the dog?” Randall asked.

I returned my eyes to Randall’s face. “You never liked that dog.”

“Still, we got it together. I paid for its shots.”

“Now you’re being petty, Randall.”

“Well, what’s wrong with being petty? He’s the one who fell in love with someone else. Someone younger, someone more attractive. Now that’s being petty.”

No, not petty. Cruel. Heartless. Inconvenient. Honest. All those things, maybe, but not petty. Yet none of it did I say to Randall.

Instead, I looked again for the bartender and spotted his face emerging for a moment from the crowd. “How can you say he’s not beautiful?” I asked despite myself.

Randall snorted. “Please. They’re a dime a dozen, those bartenders. He probably has a crystal meth habit.” He took another sip of his martini. “Well, what are you doing standing here if he fascinates you so much? Aren’t you going to introduce yourself?”

“Maybe.”

Randall leaned in for the kill. “Make sure you tell him you’re married. You know how pissed these boys get when you fail to mention that little detail.”

Instinctively, my thumb moved inside my palm to feel the titanium band around my left ring finger. Married. Yes, I supposed I was, even if California had yet to consider what Frank and I had done in Canada legal. But what did “married” mean, anyway—especially here, on this green night in the middle of the desert? What did it mean after twenty years—the last four of which had been a string of silent nights, the only sound the tapping of our computer keys, our faces bathed in the blue light of our monitors, each of us waiting for the other to call it a night so that the last one of us awake might be free to jack off, to find some fleeting, puny satisfaction with the boys of online porn?

I looked back over at the bar. All I could see was the top of his head. His thick, dark hair, the sharply cut sideburns. How very much I wanted to see his eyes.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Randall said. “I should have defined my relationship with Ike the way you’ve defined yours with Frank. You can’t lose someone if that’s simply not part of the play-book. That’s why you and Frank have held on all these years, despite all the boys who’ve come between you.” He knocked back the last of his martini. “How very nice for you.”

I smiled, eyes still averted. “Bitter doesn’t become you, Randall.”

“I’m not bitter.”

That was debatable. Randall had always had big dreams, though they weren’t anything like my big dreams. My dreams had always been about success; Randall’s were about contentment. Once, just starting out in med school, he’d imagined he’d be a great surgeon; he’d ended up as a kids’ orthodontist in Century City. Once, when we were young, he’d dreamed of finding a husband with whom he’d grow old. But the only thing that had happened was that Randall himself had grown old.

“I could never have been like you and Frank,” he was saying, shaking his head, as if he were reading my mind. “I could never have let Ike sleep around.”

I shrugged and finished my vodka.

Once, I had been in love with Randall. We had both been twenty years old—slightly more than half our current ages. We’d been living in West Hollywood, in those exciting months when it first broke away from Los Angeles to become its own city—the first gay city in the world, we liked to say. It was difficult for me to remember the way Randall had looked back then. The eyes were the same, round like buttons and as blue as an August sky. But the glorious black hair had receded over the passing years, and the belly, once trim, had grown thick. I tried to picture him as he was, but I couldn’t.

Not that it surprised me. So little of my months in California before Frank remained in my memory. All I could remember now with any real clarity were the Big Weenie hot-dog stands (BIG WEENIES TASTE BETTER) and the NO FAGS sign posted at Barney’s Beanery. And the clubs. I remembered more about the clubs than anything else: the smell of piss and beer, the silver strobe lights, the music (Duran Duran, Cyndi Lauper, Yes). I think my strongest memory of those days was doing lines of coke behind the bar as “Owner of a Lonely Heart” played on the sound system.

But not much else remained in my brain from the time before Frank. I’d been a scared, insecure kid just off the bus. I’d lived with Randall in an apartment near Fairfax. I remembered a claw-foot bathtub, a ratty old couch, VHS tapes stacked against the wall almost to the ceiling. There’d been sex, a lot of sex, even though the plague was all around us then: sex with Randall, sex with Edgar, sex with Benny, sex with tons of others, usually on my waterbed, which one time sprang a leak.

But what could never fade from my memory of that time was the ambition, so tightly wound up inside me that it sometimes woke me in the middle of the night, bolting me upright, my hands clenched at my sides, causing me to scream out loud, waking the neighbors. I had traveled all the way across the country on a Peter Pan bus in order to be someone. I had failed back home, failed miserably, and so I had come west, like so many had before me. To be someone. And so I did—I became someone on top of a box in a club on Santa Monica Boulevard, wearing a pair of cowboy boots and a yellow thong, twisting my ass to Boy George and “Karma Chameleon.”

Oh, yes. A very long time ago.

On nights that were never green.

“I thought it would be me who found the lasting relationship,” Randall was saying, his voice low, his words beginning to slur from the vodka. “I thought it would be me who ended up living happily ever after—not you, Danny. You were always so flighty. Always moving from one boy to the next.”

I lowered my gaze at him. “You’ll find someone, Randall. You’ll forget Ike, and you’ll fall in love again. With someone who is worthy of you this time. Ike never was.”

This mellowed him a bit. “I’m just not sure how many more times I can go through it.” He looked so sad standing there. So sad and so old. “Falling in love is hell,” he said.

“You’re crazy. Everyone wants to be in love.”

“Oh, sure, in the beginning.” Randall drew up his chin and looked defiantly at me with his blue eyes. “It’s great to be in love in the beginning—when you’re giddy and lovesick, and you think about the person all the time, and he thinks about you. You call each other nine, ten times a day. You wish you could be together all the time. You start to miss him even before you say good night. It’s the most thrilling feeling in the world, being in love.” He paused for dramatic effect. “In the beginning.”

I laughed. “What you need is to get laid tonight.”

Randall scowled. “Oh, let’s just get out of here and have some dinner.”

“I’m not hungry,” I lied.

“Well, we’ve got to eat.”

“Who says?”

Randall was looking past me, into the crowd. I followed his gaze. A slim, blond young man in blue jeans and a vintage Atari T-shirt.

“He’s cute,” I said.

Randall’s scowl only deepened. “Well, then it’s your lucky night, Danny, because he’s been looking at you ever since we got here.”

“How do you know that? Maybe he’s been looking at you.”

Randall narrowed his eyes at me. “No, Danny. Let me give you a visual. Me, chubby and balding. You, muscles and a full head of hair. Need I say more?”

“You’re too hard on yourself, Randall.”

“He’s just a kid, anyway,” he said, shrugging. “Why would he look at old men like us?”

I laughed. “You forget that in Palm Springs, even turning forty-one still qualifies us as chicken.” I gestured with my drink. “Look around you.”

The place was, as usual, packed with fifty- to seventy-somethings. Distinguished-looking men mostly, men who had once been handsome, men who even now retained some awareness of how they should look, even if they were largely held together by buttons and cinched belts and oversize Tommy Bahama floral-print shirts. A noticeable few displayed the plumped lips and shiny foreheads of cosmetic surgery. But the ones who stood out most were the heirs of Liberace, scattered randomly throughout the crowd, wearing red velvet blazers and too much sweet cologne.

“Go ahead,” I urged Randall. “Go make a move on blondie over there.”

“Oh, please. He wants you, Danny. Don’t you want a birthday fuck?”

I leveled my eyes at him. “For your information, I had already planned on going home to Frank tonight.”

“Oh, really? And will there be a trick waiting to sleep between you?”

“Tonight, my friend,” I told him, “it will be you who goes home with the trick.”

I took hold of Randall’s arm and tugged. I owed him this one.

“What are you doing?” he asked, big-eyed.

“Come with me.”

I led him across the deck. The curly blond in the Atari T-shirt noticed our approach but continued talking with two older men, pretending he hadn’t.

“Hello,” I said to the group. “I hate to interrupt….”

“Well, we’ve been hoping you might do just that all night,” said one of the older men. “Or at least, he has.”

The man’s eyes twinkled. He wore a black double-breasted blazer with a pink silk pocket puff. I assumed the “he” being referenced was blondie.

“Great,” I said. “Because I want to introduce you to my great friend Randall here. Randall Drew, prominent orthodontist of Century City, collector of East Asian artifacts, and all-around good guy, meet…” I gestured around at the three men.

“I’m Thad Urquhart,” said the man with the pink puff.

“Jimmy Carlisle,” said the second older man.

Our eyes turned to the young blondie.

“Jake Jones,” he said. If his eyes were still on me, I didn’t know it. I kept mine elusive.

Randall was shaking each of their hands, leaving Jake for last. “I’m sorry for my bold friend,” he was telling them. “I hope we didn’t intrude.”

“Not at all,” said Thad Urquhart, apparently the spokesman for the group. “We enjoy meeting new people, don’t we, Jake?”

Jake didn’t reply. And I refused to look at him to see his expression.

“But we didn’t get your name,” Thad said to me.

“Call me Ishmael,” I told them, and before anyone could stop me, I lifted my hand in a gesture of farewell and shouldered my way back into the crowd.

Randall was on his own now.

And I was on my way back to the bar.

Friday night happy hour was always packed, and this night was no exception. A crush of men clustered around the bar, waiting for drinks. It was easy to understand why the line at this station was longer than any of the others. Apparently, much of the crowd agreed with my assessment of the bartender’s beauty.

He was young, perhaps very young, but with none of the childish insignificance of Jake Jones. He moved with a determined concentration, mixing drinks with an intense, uncanny focus. Not once did I see his lips, full and pink, stretch into a smile. From his black tank top protruded lean, muscled arms, their lower halves covered with soft dark fuzz. A cleft indented his chin. His hair, almost black, was artfully messy; his cheeks were covered with carefully clipped dark whiskers. At the very base of his neck, a small tattoo of an eagle spread its indigo wings.

But what I couldn’t see—and longed for—were his eyes.

“Danny Fortunato?”

I turned. A man was approaching me, a short, slight man of maybe fifty-five. A toothy, eager smile seemed to precede him.

“You are Danny Fortunato, right?”

“Yes,” I said, studying him. I didn’t know his face.

“That’s what I thought,” the man was saying, extending his hand. “I’m a huge fan. I’m staying at one of the resorts in Warm Sands, and the innkeeper told me you often come to happy hour on Fridays. I was hoping I’d bump into you, and well, here you are.” His smile extended, revealing more teeth. “I’m a huge fan.”

I shook his hand. “Thank you.”

“I just saw the cover of Palm Springs Life.” His face was reddening. “I’m an artist, too, though certainly not of your caliber….” He was still pumping my hand. “I’m not anywhere as good as you are. I’ve bought several of your prints, in particular the whole series you did for Disneyland. That was amazing! Hollywood classic!”

“Thank you,” I said again.

“Do you still sell your prints in retail? Or is it all now just by commission?”

I wanted to get away, get to the bar, discover the eyes I wanted to see. But this man wouldn’t let go of my hand. He was gripping it so hard, I was losing feeling in it.

“Mostly commission now, yes,” I told him, hoping the conversation would end there. “Hotel chains and restaurants…you know, that sort of thing.”

“Oh, if only I could ever get to that point,” he said, “when I’d be well known and well regarded enough to get commissions and just live off those, and not have to crank out so many prints—and you’re so much younger than I am!” He sighed, drawing in closer. “I do mostly giclée prints myself. They’re sold in a few galleries in L.A. How did you ever get a commission with Disney?”

“An old friend works for them,” I said, moving my fingers deliberately. He finally let go of his grip. I rubbed my hand.

“Connections!” he crowed, nodding. “That’s what I need. But maybe what I really need is your talent!” He laughed, a loud, honking sound. “I really am a fan. Your work is so, so powerful. The print of the Malibu coast with the sun setting—gorgeous!”

And then he literally shivered. Stood there, wrapped his arms around himself, and shook back and forth. I wanted to laugh out loud. That particular print was a joke as far as I was concerned. Sunsets were the cheap and easy way to make a buck. And in the last year, they’d made me a lot of bucks. More bucks than I’d ever made in my whole life. Not bad for a guy who’d never gone to art school, whose higher education consisted of a few part-time community college classes. But what did I need a degree for? I’d take a picture of a sunset, fix it up in Photoshop, and soon prints of it were hanging in doctors’ offices and model units of condo developments. They weren’t art. They were commodities. Which was fine with me. They served a purpose. They made me some money. They just didn’t deserve shivers.

I knew that I was being ungrateful. The man was paying me a compliment, and that was kind of him. I appreciated the recognition. I’d spent too many years driving the smoggy streets of L.A. between auditions not to enjoy my successful second life as a digital illustrator. I had come to L.A. to be someone, after all, and finally I was—even if it had taken almost two decades to get there. My work was featured on the cover of magazines. A gallery in downtown Palm Springs had given me a show. I was somebody—even if it was somebody I’d never expected to be.

“Are you working on anything new?” the man asked.

“A few things.”

“Can’t say for who?”

I shook my head.

“Did I read somewhere that Bette Midler commissioned a piece?”

“Sorry,” I said. “Can’t divulge.”

“I knew it! Bette Midler! How exciting is that!”

Now, in fact, Bette Midler had never commissioned a piece from me. But if this man wanted to think so…

I supposed I should have asked him more about his work, or at least asked his name. But just at that moment I saw an opening at the bar. The boy I’d been looking at all night was finally idle, gazing up from under his long dark lashes at the television screen that soundlessly played a video by Mary J. Blige. He wouldn’t be idle for long.

“I’ve got to go,” I said hastily. “It was nice meeting you.”

“Oh, it was pure joy,” the man said, his face reddening, his lips spreading, his teeth glinting in the overhead light. “I’ll keep an eye out for more of your work!”

He grabbed my hand once more to give it another hard, hearty pump.

As I feared, that tiny delay meant someone else managed to sidle up to the bar before I could. Quickly, I positioned myself next in line.

Looking back now, I can no longer say for sure what was going through my head that night. After everything that has happened since, it’s hard to recall exactly. I’m certain I wasn’t hoping to trick with him that night. I had my plan with Frank. I was certainly not going to disrupt that. Probably all I was hoping for was a chance to speak to him—no, even that wasn’t necessary. I think all I wanted to do was see his eyes. That was the extent of it. That night, the first time I saw him, my only goal was to see his eyes.

If I saw his eyes, that would mean he had seen me.

There was a boy in eighth grade, during that last halcyon year before my sister disappeared, whose name was Scott Wood. Scott had long, curly dark hair and a mole on the side of his cheek. He was the most beautiful boy I had ever seen in my entire thirteen years, and all the girls seemed to think so, too. Scott played basketball and hockey and was a huge fan of the Eagles. He’d doodled their logo all over his paper bag–covered schoolbooks and was always singing “Plenty of room at the Hotel California” to himself. Scott had stayed back in fourth grade, so he was a more mature fourteen, with a downy, dark mustache on his upper lip. When Scott walked into a room, everyone turned, even our teacher, Miss Waterhouse, a stick of a lady who might have been twenty-nine or forty-nine, so bland and gray were her face and her hands.

Did Miss Waterhouse think about Scott the way I did? Did she hump her mattress at night the way I did, squeezing her eyes together to imagine Scott running around the basketball court or laughing in the caf? Did she go out and buy the Eagles’ Hotel California album and play it over and over, imagining it was Scott singing to her: “How they dance in the courtyard, sweet summer sweat. Some dance to remember, some dance to forget…”

When I sat behind Scott in class, I’d watch the way his thighs moved in his tight polyester pants. He’d idly twirl one of his dark curls around his finger, and I’d sit there, mesmerized. Once, at recess, he removed his shirt while playing basketball, and I stopped playing jump rope with my friend Katie and just sat on the asphalt, watching him. I didn’t understand it fully, this fascination I had with him, with the way his back muscles moved when he shot the basketball toward the hoop.

Scott moved away after eighth grade; I never saw him again. But he stayed in my memory. Many nights I’d lie in bed at night, listening to my mother cry for my sister downstairs, and I’d rewrite my past, imagining how I might have become friends with Scott. I might have shown him my comic book collection; maybe he collected, too. Or maybe I should’ve learned as much as I could have about the Eagles and started talking about them one day. He would have thought I was cool, and then we could have hung out. But it didn’t work out that way. Instead, whenever Scott turned around in his seat to pass me a test or a handout, my throat would tighten and no words would form. I don’t think he even saw me. I was completely off his radar screen. I think, even now, if someone said my name to him, he wouldn’t remember that we had ever been classmates.

It was my turn at the bar.

“Hi,” I said.

The bartender turned to face me.

Was it the dimness of the light? The sun had fully set by now, and the patio was lit only by the flickering lanterns. A greenish darkness had settled over the whole place, cheating me of a full glimpse of the bartender’s eyes.

“Grey Goose martini,” I said. “Up, with a twist.”

He nodded and turned away.

The line behind me was growing again. I’d have to act fast. I felt my heart start to quicken.

His back was to me as he shook the martini. I watched as the wings of his eagle tattoo stretched and retracted on his neck.

“Did you say olives?” he asked over his shoulder.

“Yeah, that’s fine, great,” I said. My brain had no control over my words. “No, actually, I said a—”

But he was already plopping the olives into my glass. He looked up at me.

And I saw them.

His eyes.

Dark, like black mirrors. Behind them burned an intensity that was both fierce and brittle, and barely contained. Some might look into those eyes and call them crazy. But all I saw reflected in them was myself.

“It’s okay,” I said. “Olives are great.”

And then his eyes were gone. I paid him, leaving an enormous tip, and once again missed the opportunity to speak to him. I should have turned the mistake about the olives into a joke. I should have been witty and flirty, and asked him his name. I knew how to play the game. Hell, I was an expert at it. Or at least, I had been, once. The zit-faced kid from eighth grade had blossomed into Danny the Stripper, the boy who drew in customers all down Santa Monica Boulevard, the boy in the yellow thong who shook his ass and flashed his jewels and at the end of the night routinely plucked tens and twenties out of his bulge. But I wasn’t wearing a thong anymore. Instead, I was forty-one years old, standing now on the other side of the divide, just one of the anonymous faces in the crowd, waving their cash. Whatever I once might have had, this boy behind the bar didn’t know about it. I had come, I supposed, full circle.

It was time for dinner. Looking around for Randall, I couldn’t spot him. Had he gone home with Jake Jones? I tried not to be envious. I stood off to the side, sipping my vodka, watching the crowd.

The night was no longer green. It was black. And I was hungry—hungrier than I had been in a very long time. On a black night, all illusions disappeared. Everything was real. And I could no longer deny how hungry I really was.

Twenty-Seven Years Earlier

If it weren’t for Chipper Paguni’s underpants, I would have turned around, hurried back along the path, and told my mother that my mission had been a failure. I hadn’t wanted to make the trip at all, so fearful was I of the poison ivy that grew along the path to the pond. The ordeal I’d gone through in the seventh grade, when I’d scratched the skin along the entire length of both legs until it was red and bleeding, had left me forever terrified of that vicious weed. But when I spotted the underpants ahead of me, a bright white pair of Fruit of the Looms shimmering in the midday sun, I knew I had to go on.

A twig snapped. My eyes darted to the left, where a crumpled pair of black parachute pants had been dropped among a patch of ferns. I took another few steps along the path and discovered a trail of discarded clothing. Reebok sneakers. White socks. A lacy pink bra dangling from a wispy branch of a young maple tree.

Another snap. I paused, sucking in my breath. And then, a voice.

“Come on, Becky.”

It was Chipper’s voice, somewhere up ahead in the woods, low and unemotional.

“Come on,” he said again.

I crouched behind a tall fern. As I did, my knees cracked. Mom was convinced I suffered from a calcium deficiency, and made me drink ten glasses of milk a day. Now I feared my knees had given me away. I held my breath. But around me only a heavy, humid silence filled the woods, broken now and then by the noisy squawk of a blue jay somewhere above me in the trees.

Finally I heard a splash. And then another.

Parting the fronds of the fern ever so carefully, I peered out over the water. Languid dragonflies hovered above the murky green surface. Ripples were just now lapping at the muddy shore, where a pair of brand-new Sergio Valente blue jeans, with the red stitching on the pockets, was rapidly turning wet and brown. I could imagine just how pissed Mom would be when she saw that.

Suddenly the surface of the pond was broken. Becky emerged from the depths, shaking her long, dark hair and sending cascades of droplets from side to side. In an instant Chipper popped up in the water in front of her, his glistening back momentarily obliterating my sister from my view.

They were kissing. My eyes grew wide as I crouched in my hiding place, keeping as still as I could. I watched as Chipper maneuvered Becky through the water toward the old wooden dock that jutted into the pond in a triangle. Lifting her up by her armpits, he sat her along the edge. For a moment I glimpsed my sister’s breasts, larger than those of most girls her age, with hard pink nipples that stood up like pencil erasers. I felt my face flush. I watched as Chipper now gripped the dock and hoisted himself up, the muscles in his broad back tensing, his small white buttocks knocking me back onto my heels.

It was my fourteenth birthday. Tomorrow I’d start my first day of high school. All summer long the prospect of my new school had been all I could think about, and as the day had grown nearer, I’d become more and more anxious. When my father, trying to be helpful, had asked me just what it was about high school that frightened me so much, all I could offer was the fact that I’d have to use a locker. I’d spent nine years at St. John’s Elementary School, from kindergarten to eighth grade, and I’d always kept my books and papers in a simple, top-lifting desk. Now there would be a code to remember—and a series of clicks to listen for—and I’d have to stand next to some kid I didn’t know who’d surely had a locker in his public junior high and would look at me as if I were a dweeb. So Dad had gone out to Sears and bought a combination lock for me to practice on. I’d mastered the lock quickly enough, but still my fear didn’t go away.

Behind the fern, I started to shake. I sat on the damp earth and tried to catch my breath. The day was hot and getting hotter. The chattering of the jays had been joined by a chorus of summer beetles, their shrill drone common on scorchers such as this one.

“Come on, Becky,” Chipper was cajoling, and I peered through the fronds as he leaned forward over my sister.

Like my sister, Chipper Paguni was going into his junior year. All last year and the year before, I’d watched him from my bedroom window, emerging from the house across the street and heading down to the bus stop at precisely 6:45 a.m. Usually Chipper wore shiny black parachute pants and an untucked white collar shirt. His book bag would be slung over his shoulder. I imagined that rolled up inside the book bag was the necktie that was required by Chipper’s all-male Catholic high school. The tie remained unworn and unknotted until the last possible moment, when the bus pulled into the school parking lot.

Now I would be joining Chipper at that same school, wearing my own tie as I trooped in for my first day tomorrow morning as a geeky, green freshman. I had heard the stories of how the upperclassmen taunted the new boys. St. Francis Xavier was a hotbed of testosterone. Its slogan, “Be a man,” was enshrined over its front doors and embodied by its strutting, title-holding football team. This year, as a defensive linebacker, Chipper would probably see his first real action on the field, and I’d be required to sit in the bleachers and cheer him on. It was called school spirit. Whether Chipper would turn out to be a tormentor or a friend remained to be seen. I was hoping that his interest in Becky would work in my favor. But one could never count on such things.

Holding my breath, I watched as Chipper’s white buttocks rose in the air from on top of my sister.

I leaned in for a better view, but as I did so, my knees cracked again. I let the fronds swing shut but too late. I heard Becky ask, “What was that?”

My armpits suddenly poured sweat. Then I heard a splash.

I bolted. But not before, without even thinking about it, I snatched up Chipper’s underpants in my hand.

I was stuffing them up my shirt as I came skidding back into the house, the screen door slamming behind me. Suddenly my mother was two inches from my face, her hair wrapped around huge orange curlers.

“Did you find your sister?”

“No.”

“Mother Mary! One simple favor I ask of her and she disappears on me!”

I knew it wasn’t one simple favor. It was more like five or six or thirty. Ever since Becky had gotten her driver’s license three months ago, she’d been forced to act as Mom’s personal chauffeur, driving her to the grocery store, to the hairdresser, to the Wednesday night meetings of the Rosary Altar Society. That was the whole reason Dad had bought that used mustard-colored Vega, so that Becky could drive Mom around on her errands, freeing him from the chore. See, Mom didn’t know how to drive a car. “In my day,” she explained whenever someone expressed surprise at the fact, “not every lady got her driver’s license.” The truth was, Mom didn’t do well with technology, whether it was driving a car or adjusting the antenna on top of the television set or resetting the clock after a power outage. All those things she left up to my father. Once, when I was eight, Dad had tried to teach Mom how to drive. She’d stepped on the gas instead of the brake and charged straight over the sidewalk into Flo Armstrong’s peony garden, tires spitting soil. Never again did Mom get behind the wheel.

Margaret Joan Cronin Fortunato, better known as Peggy. Five feet four, big hands like a man’s, and breasts so large they sometimes made her seem as if she’d topple over frontward. It was easy to see where Becky got her measurements.

“She’ll remember,” I said, assuring my mother of my sister’s promise as I pulled off my muddy sneakers on the mat inside the front door. “The party’s not until four o’clock.”

“Well, it’s already twelve thirty and—Danny! Look at that mud! Were you at the pond? I told you not to go up there. Do you want to get poison ivy again?”

“I wasn’t at the pond,” I said quickly.

“Well, if you were looking for Becky, you should have gone to the pond. You know she’s always sneaking up there.”

I just sighed as my mother made the sign of the cross. She always did this when she was anxious, which meant she was crossing herself a couple hundred times a day. Ever since Becky had turned sixteen, Mom had been even more anxious, it seemed. She’d always doted on Becky. Becky was her little angel, whose annual dancing school recitals had always reduced my mother to a puddle of tears. “Isn’t she the most beautiful child ever?” she’d repeat over and over to herself, watching Becky pirouette on the stage. Mom always went easier on Becky than she did on me; on snow days when school was canceled, Becky got to sleep in, but I had to get up and shovel the driveway. “Because you are the boy,” Mom would say, and boys shoveled driveways and cut the grass and raked the leaves. Becky just dried the dishes after dinner. I didn’t think it was a fair balance.

When Becky turned sixteen, Mom freaked. Her little angel now had ideas of her own. Becky was getting “too serious” with Chipper Paguni, Mom argued. She had quit dancing lessons and spent all her time with Chipper. I always believed that Mom’s demands that Becky drive her everywhere were part of a strategy to keep her close at hand. And I suspected Becky thought so, too. Hence their arguments.

But all that was not to say that Mom paid no attention to me. On the contrary. Becky might have been her favorite, but I received my share of Peggy Fortunato’s extravagant solicitude. My fourteenth birthday party, for example, had turned into a state occasion. Mom had been up at five, washing the floor, vacuuming the drapes, wrapping Hershey’s Kisses in blue tulle, setting—and then resetting—the table. Just so five of my friends, plus Nana and Aunt Patsy, could sit around drinking Kool-Aid and eating chocolate cake.

“Well,” Mom said, throwing her hands in the air, “if you don’t have any balloons for your birthday party, Danny, you’ll know who to blame. Not me!”

She disappeared down the hallway.

From the kitchen I could smell my cake baking—yellow Duncan Hines, my favorite. Peering around the corner, I spied the jar of chocolate frosting waiting on the table, and beside it a bag of M&M’s, with which Mom would spell out my name across the top of the cake. The candles had already been laid out and counted. Fourteen of them.

I was really too old for kiddie parties like this. I’d tried to protest, but Mom had insisted. Only with great effort had I been able to persuade her not to drag out the pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey game. Certainly next year there would be no birthday party like this. High school kids didn’t have parties with Hershey’s Kisses wrapped in tulle. Next year my birthday party would be very different.

That was, if I survived high school to make it that far.

I dialed a number on the beige phone mounted to the kitchen wall.

“Katie?”

“Danny?”

“What time are you coming? Come early, okay? We can hang out.”

The girl on the other end of the line sighed. “I can’t. My mom is taking me shopping.”

“Tell her you can’t go. You can’t be late to my party, Katie. My mom is already having a bird. You said you’d help us set up.”

“I know, but I’m going clothes shopping for school tomorrow.”

“Clothes shopping? You’re going to be wearing a uniform!”

Katie Reid, my closest friend since kindergarten. Short, chubby, with a blond Dorothy Hamill wedge cut. The worst thing about high school—worse than having to use a locker, worse than fearing the taunts of upperclassmen—was being separated from Katie. I was being sent one way, and Katie another. She was heading to St. Clare’s, the all-girl sister school to St. Francis Xavier. Unlike their male counterparts, whose only dress code was a collar shirt and a necktie of choice, the St. Clare girls wore white blouses and pleated plaid skirts. So what kind of clothes shopping could she possibly do?

“Shoes, socks, sweaters,” she told me, as if reading my mind. “And underwear.”

I suddenly became conscious of Chipper’s underpants bunched up near my armpit. “You can’t be late,” I told Katie again. “After this who knows when we’ll see each other again.”

“Don’t say that, Danny! We’ll see each other every week!”

I grunted. “I hate high school.”

“You haven’t even started it yet.”

“I know, but I still hate it.”

“Danny, I have to go. My mom is calling me.”

“Okay. Don’t be late.”

“Good-bye, Danny.”

I hung up the phone. The timer over the stove pinged.

“Cake’s done,” I called to my mother as I ran upstairs to my room, pulling Chipper’s underpants out of my armpit and stuffing them into my drawer. I threw myself onto my bed and lay there with my hands behind my head, staring up at the ceiling. On my wall were posters of Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman and Monty Python and the Holy Grail. On my floor was a pile of nearly one hundred record albums, which had tipped over, sending Andy Gibb, Hall & Oates, and Peter Frampton sliding across the orange shag carpet. Orange was my favorite color. I’d chosen it because no one ever picked orange.

The window was open, and there was a slight breeze moving the flimsy brown and white checked curtains. I must have fallen asleep, because the next thing I knew a car door was closing, and I could hear my aunt Patsy’s voice in the driveway.

I sat up, rubbed my eyes, and headed back downstairs.

Mom was propping an electric fan on the windowsill to cool off the room as Nana and Aunt Patsy came through the front door.

“Danny off the pickle boat,” Nana said when she saw me.

It was what she’d always called me. I had no idea what it meant, but ever since I could remember, Nana had been calling me “Danny off the pickle boat”—just before she’d grip my shoulders and leave a big, wet red kiss on my cheek. It was no different today. Her perfume, as ever, was heavy and spicy. Nana’s scent would often linger for hours after she left. Mom sometimes had to open a window.

Adele Mary Horgan Fortunato, better known, to me, anyway, as Nana. Stout and silly, a crazy little jingle perpetually on her lips. Danny off the pickle boat. Here comes Becky in her BVDs. Sing a song of six-packs and a pocket full of beer. Nana often made no sense at all, but she always made me smile.

Beside her stood Aunt Patsy. Her daughter. Dad’s older sister. Patricia Ann Fortunato. Never married. An old maid. And now Aunt Patsy had cancer. When Mom spoke of it to the neighbors, her voice always dropped to a whisper on the word. “Patsy has cancer. They had to take one breast and then part of another. It doesn’t look good.” And she’d make the sign of the cross.

Today Aunt Patsy looked very gray and drawn. She wore a bulky sweater even on hot days so that she could cover up her uneven chest. When she smiled at me, her teeth seemed too big for her face. “Happy birthday, honey,” she said. “Are you excited to be starting high school?”

“Yeah,” I lied, accepting the shirt box she was offering me, wrapped in green and blue paper. I knew what it was even without opening it. A white collar shirt from Sears. Probably a tie, too, for me to wear to school.

“Where’s Becky?” Nana was asking. “Beckadee, Beckadoo?”

“God only knows,” Mom said. “I can only hope she’s downtown, picking up the balloons I ordered for Danny’s party.”

“But her car’s still in the driveway,” Aunt Patsy observed.

“I know, so she must be off with Chipper. Maybe he’s driving her down.” Mom was unfolding a string of silver paper letters that spelled out HAPPY BIRTHDAY. “I haven’t seen her since this morning. I told her not to forget the balloons, and she’d better not! I’ll have her head!”
. . .