When Taylor divulged that he had slept with Dan after just having coffee, Aria couldn’t help but tell him a joke. “You want to know why gay men have sex so much faster and so much more often than straight men?” Not pausing for him to answer, she went on. “Because the only thing standing between a man and sex is a woman.” She laughed out loud.
Taylor’s laughter rose up to meet hers. “That’s a good one,” he said.
Dan had driven Taylor to his house in upper Laurel Canyon in his powder blue, convertible Bentley. Taylor had never seen a place like it in all his life. He tried to act unimpressed so as to not give Dan the upper hand. But underneath the impression he was trying to give, it took his breath away. The modern design of the house opened up on an infinity pool with an uninhibited jetliner view. A metal spiral staircase swirled up through the air. When Taylor walked into the kitchen, he stood in disbelief that it boasted two ovens instead of one. The countertops were made of glittering white quartz. And all through the house were relics from old movie sets. Many of them related to Audrey Hepburn.
Dan had disappeared into the bathroom to use a douche bulb before inviting Taylor to take his clothes off and join him to fuck bareback in the steam shower. In truth, Dan had liked it more than Taylor did. He was already smitten with the new lover he had found in Taylor. Taylor did it more to guarantee himself a dram of security with Dan as well as to secure himself a position of power over him. Something about it felt like a protective measure, except that protection worked both ways. If he could secure Dan’s attachment, he would have some measure of safety and control over with Dan himself. He could also use Dan and his wealth as a kind of shield protecting him from the world. The fact that Dan had traveled the road of being gay and of making a success out of himself in the world long before Taylor had made Taylor feel less vulnerable. In order to fuel Dan’s interest, Taylor had declined to stay the night, but promised to see him again and took off on foot before the sun had begun to sink below the horizon.
When Aria and Taylor finished eating, they parted ways. Having spotted a donut shop, Taylor decided to go in to ask if they had any day-old goods they might be willing to part with before he went to the nearest gas station in order to elicit spare change from the customers. Aria went back to the car lot. On her way there, a thought crossed her mind. If someone had managed to sneak into the lot to put items on the car, that meant they were probably watching to see when she and Taylor left. So, the surest way of finding out who the person was would be to fake that she was leaving and make a stake-out in the woods to watch over the car.
On the first day that Aria faked leaving the lot, only to hide out and watch over it, no one came. She regretted having wasted a day that she could have spent out finding food. But curiosity drove her back to her hiding place the next day. The sunset had turned the clouds a violent fuchsia. The trees had become soft silhouettes against it. Having sat so long waiting, Aria’s mind wandered to some imaginary landscape in which it could entertain itself, until movement in the car lot arrested her attention. She squinted in an attempt to see more clearly and could not believe her eyes. The man who was jogging toward the Land Cruiser, a bag of items in his hands, was none other than the man who had been tending the little market by the church. Overwhelmed with dizziness, she watched him line the items up across the hood of the car.
The man ran back even quicker than he had come. Aria was frozen in the shock of a million contradictory emotions. She raced toward the car, collecting the items before anyone else could lay their eyes upon them, and sat in the potpourri of her dismay.
Aria was embarrassed. She felt ashamed that he had discovered things about her life that she never wanted him to know. She was embarrassed that she hadn’t known someone was following her the last time she had seen him. Aria hated that because of his generosity, it felt like she owed him something. But despite that shame and imagined indebtedness, she also imagined that if he had discovered these things about her and had continued to come back, he must not have rejected her for them. This confused her more than anything else, but it also made the fondness she already felt for him grow. No one had ever done something for her in secret, because giving her something had always been a ploy to get something in return.
When Taylor came back later that night, bouncing with excitement that he had managed to procure over $35 from his efforts standing on a curbside with a cardboard sign, Aria said nothing. She listened to him talk, giving the impression that she was listening when half of her was not. She was fighting with her burgeoning feelings for the mystery man. Her wishes and fears ran through the
