had little chance of being discovered. Sitting on the edge of my bed, I’d page through that scrapbook, looking at the beautiful men, studying their faces. Then I’d stand in front of my mirror, sometimes for hours at a time on a Sunday afternoon, and compare my features to theirs—because, after all, there was nothing else to do except go downstairs and get dragged into one of Mom’s schemes to find Becky. So I’d stay in my room, in front of my mirror, looking at myself, wondering if I was handsome. I was never sure.
I managed to lift my martini and take a sip. The potency of the alcohol seemed to steady me. I looked around at the men placing their orders. I was sure they found the bartender beautiful, too, yet they were not struck dumb. They went on laughing and talking to their friends. They thanked the bartender and seemed to have no particular urge to connect with his eyes. I couldn’t understand it. Could they not see the classic structure of his face? The way the golden light caught the dimples in his cheeks? The way the muscles of his back moved under his T-shirt? Why weren’t they standing in place, as I was, staring, mouths agape, mute?
“Danny.”
I turned abruptly.
“Thad just thanked you for introducing him to Randall,” Frank said.
“Oh,” I said and managed a smile. “I gather you all had a good time last weekend.”
“We did indeed.” Thad grinned. “It’s not often a couple of sixty-somethings score a young man on a Friday night.”
“I’m sure Randall will appreciate the description.” I glanced around the terrace. “Where is he, anyway?”
“I introduced him to a friend of mine,” Thad said. “I felt it wasn’t fair to keep him just for ourselves.”
I laughed. “How generous of you.”
Thad smiled, then turned his eye to Frank. “So, Professor, I’d like to know where you teach, what you teach, and who you teach.”
Frank took a sip of his wine. “College of the Desert, English literature and composition, and my students are a pretty good mix of college-age kids and older people returning to school.”
“A rewarding vocation, no?” asked Thad.
Frank nodded. “Yes. Usually.”
“My mother was a teacher,” Thad said. “My father died in World War II, and she supported four of us kids on her teacher’s salary. Wasn’t easy.”
I looked around at all the spun glass and marble. So Thad Urquhart hadn’t come from money. Maybe Jimmy had. But I suspected Thad had worked hard for all this, and I respected him more for that.
“Was it a hard adjustment moving out here, Danny?” Thad asked. “Leaving L.A., coming to Palm Springs?”
“Hard?” I shook my head. “I wouldn’t say it was hard. Excruciating, maybe. Horrendous and horrible. That gets closer to it than hard.”
“Oh, Danny,” Frank said, shaking his head.
Thad was laughing. “And why was it so excruciating?”
“Well, I was thirty-six. Practically everybody else out here was retired. All my friends were in L.A., and I missed the social life I had there.” I smiled. “But it was important that Frank and I be together full time again.”
We exchanged a look. Frank gave me a small smile in return.
“But now you love it?” Thad asked. “Tell me you love it now.”
“I love parts of it.” I took a sip of the vodka. It felt good going down, its magic spreading through my body, from my throat to my chest to my shoulders and down my arms to my fingertips. “I love the mountains. I love the feeling I get looking at them, being surrounded by them. I love hiking up to the peaks, exploring the canyons. And I love our house and our yard. I create really well out here. I’ve been far more productive out here than I ever was in L.A. And you sure can’t beat the weather—except maybe now, in the summer.”
“But at night…” Thad gestured around him. “These cool desert nights…”
I laughed. “It’s still ninety degrees at nine o’clock. That hardly counts as cool.”
“But it’s dry. Dry heat. Muggy summer nights back East are far worse,” Thad noted.
I conceded the point there. As a kid in Connecticut, I’d spent many a hot, humid night spread eagle on my bed, nothing covering me, not even a sheet, a big electric fan pointed directly at me. We never had air-conditioning. I’d lie there, facing the ceiling, tongue out, listening to my mother bang around in the kitchen downstairs at two thirty in the morning. After Becky disappeared, Mom never slept a full night through. She slept in odd patches of the day, like from ten to eleven in the morning and again from five to six in the afternoon, usually on the living-room couch. She rarely made dinner after Becky disappeared. Dad would bring home buckets of chicken from KFC or double cheeseburgers with extra fries from Wendy’s. How I remained skinny as a beanpole, I’ll never understand.
“But what parts of Palm Springs don’t you like, Danny?” Thad was asking. “You’ve described all its natural wonders. What about when you move indoors?”
I made a face. I didn’t know this man well enough to say what I really felt. Frank called me judgmental, and maybe I was. Yet parties like this one recycled the same fifty or so people, the same faces that appeared, issue after issue, in the local gay rag. There was the local radio “personality” who carried fake Louis Vuitton bags and billed herself as a Hollywood actress (she’d made a few commercials in the 1960s). There was the local impresario who produced bad—very bad—musical theater, starring such Love Boat veterans as Mary Ann Mobley and Ken Berry. There was the self-help guru who self-published her own books and then self-printed promotional postcards declaring they were “critically acclaimed.” Yes, if we counted all the self-reviews.
And all that was needed to get a good cross-section of the gay population here was to sign on to ManHunt or Adam4Adam. Very few GoodLookingRedheads or TallNiceGuys. Eighty percent of the Palm Springs profiles had names like CumEatMyMeat or DumpYrLoadNMe. One drive through the Warm Sands area at 2:00 a.m. was enough to catch dozens of crystal-meth heads sniffing around for sex like mangy dogs hunting through a trash heap for a meal.
“You’re being judgmental.”
I snapped my head toward Frank. He hadn’t actually said the words, but I’d heard them just the same. He was looking at me as Thad awaited my answer.
I smiled. “Let’s just say I haven’t made many friends here. Most of my friends come in from L.A. on the weekends, like Randall.”
Thad put his hand on my shoulder. “Well, I hope that will change. I hope you and Frank will come back soon to have dinner with Jimmy and me.”
“We’d like that,” Frank said.
I lifted my glass, and we all clinked.
“And you must let me look at your portfolio,” Thad said, a little grin playing with his lips. “Don’t you think a Danny Fortunato print would look good over the bar?”
“Hmm, now that you say it…” I smiled, but I dared not turn around to look where Thad was gesturing. I might see the bartender again, and I didn’t think I could bear it.
It was at that moment that I spotted Randall. He was approaching us, waving his hands like an excited teenage girl. I wondered if the man accompanying him might be the cause of his excitement.
“I was wondering when you’d get here,” Randall said, bestowing kisses all around. “Doesn’t Thad have a marvelous house?”
I nodded in agreement. My eyes were fixed on the man with him, a dark, well-muscled man of Middle Eastern background, with a short-clipped beard.
“Hassan,” Thad was saying, “these are two new friends of mine. Danny Fortunato is an artist, and Frank Wilson is a professor of English.”