Object of Desire. William J. Mann

pacing around the apartment, imagining what I might have said and how Frank might have responded. But I hated approaching people. I really did. With the exception of that night running after Frank, I never came on to guys at the bar. I was too nervous. It was odd, really, that I could get up on a box and shake my ass in front of hundreds of slobbering queens. But one-on-one, face-to-face, I was chickenshit.

      I also hadn’t done a line of coke today.

      “Go, Danny,” Randall urged.

      I steeled myself. I turned around and walked across the courtyard. Frank was again pointing out a name to his friend. Halfway there, I wimped out and hurried back over to Randall.

      He glared at me. “Okay, Danny, you’ve given me no choice.”

      “What? What are you going to do?”

      Before I had the chance to stop him, Randall was marching over to Frank and his friend.

      “Hello,” he called. “So sorry to interrupt.”

      The two of them lifted their eyes to look at him.

      “I’d like to introduce you to my great friend Danny here,” Randall said, waving at me to come join them. “Danny Fortunato, up-and-coming actor, soon-to-be gigantic star, collector of rare and vintage first editions, and all-around good guy, meet…”

      My face was burning. Rare and vintage first editions? What the hell was he talking about?

      “Gregory Montague,” said the older man in the seersucker suit.

      Frank’s eyes were on me.

      “Frank Wilson,” he said.

      “We’ve met,” I said softly, still several feet away.

      He made a face, signaling he didn’t remember me. Of course not. Why would someone like him remember someone like me? This was a big fucking mistake.

      “Maybe you don’t recall Danny,” Randall was saying, “because he’s wearing clothes.”

      I saw Gregory Montague’s eyebrows lift on that statement. Suddenly I felt certain he was Frank’s lover. Oh, man, was this ever a mistake!

      “Oh, right,” Frank was saying. “That club on Santa Monica Boulevard…”

      I laughed, inching just a bit closer. “Yeah, I’m a dancer there.”

      “Just temporarily,” Randall said. “Danny is simply mastering his stage presence. You’ll see. He’ll be a big star a year from now.”

      “I see already,” Gregory Montague said. A smile played with his lips as he reached inside his jacket and withdrew his wallet. Opening it, he handed me a card. “I’m an agent. Give me a call sometime.”

      The spark I saw in Montague’s eye was the same spark I had seen in dozens of the “clients” Edgar found for me. Montague figured me to be a hooker—or else an actor so desperate, I’d sleep with anyone who called himself an agent. And maybe I was. I felt dirty as I took his card. I caught a glimpse of Frank watching me. No spark in his eye. Whether Montague was his lover or not, Frank knew what was going on. He understood the exchange.

      “Well, you must come back and see Danny perform sometime,” Randall was saying, directing his words at Frank.

      I was so humiliated. I just turned away.

      “We will,” said Gregory Montague.

      But Frank said nothing.

      I couldn’t get away from them fast enough.

      “That was horrible!” I shrieked when we were back on the street.

      “I’ll say,” Randall agreed as we quickly made our way down Hollywood Boulevard. “Here I was, doing all the introductions, and oh-so-fancy Mr. Gregory Montague never even once asked my name.”

      “It was a mistake to go over to them. A big mistake!”

      “Hey, maybe he’s a real agent,” Randall said. “Maybe he can help you.”

      I spun on him. “All it did was make me look like a tramp in front of Frank.”

      “Oh, Danny. At least he knows where he can find you.”

      I stood in front of him, not letting him pass. “Don’t you see? He isn’t interested in me! Twice now I’ve made a fool of myself in front of him! He has known where to find me all along and has never come by. Why would he come now—especially when his boyfriend, or whoever the fuck that was, thinks I’m some piece of boy trash he can get into bed with the promise of a part?”

      “Hey, maybe it’ll be a good part,” Randall said.

      “Fuck you,” I said, turning away, folding my arms across my chest. “And what was all that bullshit about ‘rare and vintage editions’?”

      “You collect comic books,” he said dryly. “I had to pretend you had some culture, since you certainly weren’t showing any earlier, on our little trip to Grauman’s.”

      “Fuck you,” I said again.

      There was a moistness to the air now, almost as if it might rain.

      “I should never approach a guy I’m interested in,” I announced. “No guy that I’ve ever liked has ever gone for me. It’s a fact of my existence.”

      “That’s not true, Danny. You’ve had lots of boyfriends.”

      “But they came after me! It’s a very real distinction, Randall. If a guy approaches me, it’s one thing. But when I approach a guy, if I really like a guy, it never works out. As soon as I make a move, it’s over.”

      “I think you’re acting crazy.”

      We walked in silence for a while. The day got darker. Rain seemed a very real possibility. When rain loomed in Los Angeles, everyone got a sense of foreboding—like some dark disaster was about to erupt and ruin all our lives. Back East, it could rain in the morning and again at night, and in between the sun could shine, and no one would give it much thought one way or the other. But in Los Angeles when the skies got dark, the threat of rain was an unspoken terror that left everyone anxious and unsettled.

      Rain. Yes, I was scared of the rain.

      There was a day when I was sixteen. It was early spring, and it was raining really hard, pouring really, and my mother and I were walking under a pier on New York’s West Side. The stink of the Hudson River was burning my nose. We’d gotten a tip that Becky might be living there, and we were walking up to homeless people huddled in the shadows, rainwater dripping down from the planks above, and Mom would aim her flashlight right in their faces. Some would yell, some would curse, and others said nothing. I kept apologizing for my mother and her flashlight. By the time we got back to our car, we were drenched and freezing.

      Yes, I was terrified of the threat of rain.

      Up ahead, the Asian prostitute had stopped to talk with one of her colleagues. A dark-haired girl with slumped shoulders, not much older than I was, in a red satin miniskirt and pink vinyl boots. I paused as we neared them. Randall watched as I walked over to the girl and looked her directly in the face. Then, satisfied, I returned to him, and we resumed our walk down the street. Neither of us said a word.

      Certain old habits, I had come to accept, would never go away.