The Pool Boy Read online

  “I’m just saying that most people wouldn’t like to be around me for inviting Katz here without your permission and all the other shit that I’ve done.”

  “You have so many good qualities. You have your whole life ahead of you. You’ll make mistakes and learn from those mistakes. I promise. As for you inviting Katz here…I’ll give you time to think about that on your own. Something tells me you already know the answer to your wrongdoing.”

  “Yes,” he whispered, and nodded.

  “Then off you go…to your pool or gym, to your bedroom, or wherever you’d like to go on the estate. You’re not a stupid little boy. In fact, you’re brilliant. Wise and creative, exciting and fun. My beloved pool boy this summer.”

  “And that’s why you like me?”

  “Yes,” I smiled at him as he started to walk away. “I suppose so.”

  * * * *

  After he left, I sat there realizing that I had fallen in love with him. Shame on me. How ridiculous. How insane. Wasn’t I too old for him? Perhaps. Fourteen years older. But that didn’t matter to me anymore. It honestly didn’t. My mind kept slipping in and out of reality. I tried to rationalize my position and addiction to him. The pool boy had become harmful to me, an instrument of suicide, mind-altering.

  I picked up the manuscript in front, but couldn’t concentrate on it. I kept thinking of Tacoma swimming, diving into the deep end of the pool, sunbathing…everything he had accomplished that summer, up to that point. And eventually, more under my breath than out loud, I whispered, “You can’t function without him, Robert. Learn how to cope. You must. You might be in love with him, but you have to learn to function. Find some normalcy. Normalcy.”

  * * * *

  The end of August slipped into reach. I touched it, but it would soon slip away.

  Chapter 54: Football

  August 20. Near midnight. The pool boy slept. I checked on him, cracking his unlocked door open. He lightly snored, like a child; wheezed some. I stood watching the shadow of his stomach rise and fall, wondered exactly what his dreams entailed: lush jungles with a striking, well-built Tarzan swinging from tree to tree in the Congo’s green canopies; a war-torn older man named Ahab who insisted on battling a giant fish; a mere student in gym class, playing touch football on an October field with his hand cupped ever so closely to a bulky center’s spread legs and bottom, ready and willing to make the pass of his high school football career, eventually having his shirtless team score a touchdown; or…

  I was sure he had spine-tingling dreams that only pool boys have in the darkest hours of the night. How marvelous those sleeping, young men dream with their sleek stomachs and closed eyes. Dreams that only older men wish for, desire, and crave, but never have.

  I left Tacoma to those distant and dreamy worlds, pulled his door closed, sealing him into night until dawn, when I could see him again. Thereafter, I walked down the hall softly, listened to the wind outside strum up a few harmonious bars of night music: cicadas in the nearby woods, croaking frogs, a hooting owl, and the lake’s waves. There was an expected storm moving in, nothing shocking, just expected, and I wondered when it would finally come, crashing through West End with thunder and lightning and a tempestuous wind.

  Once in my bedroom, I undressed, listened to the house creak the way a house is supposed to creak in the middle of the night after being a hundred-plus years old. I washed my hands and face at the sink in my en suite, and slid between silk sheets where I demanded dreams like the pool boy’s, which never happened.

  Perhaps, I did not know where my own dreams would carry me. But I did desire them to whisk me away to:

  …some white, porcelain shower (somewhat similar to the pool boy’s own private bath) where the pool boy could be waiting for me, both of us freshly muddied from an obnoxious game of touch football in a nearby field. I wanted nothing less than to straddle him from behind, both of us still naked and muddy, the shower being our field, the shower’s spray feeling like a warm evening rain. I wanted to cup my dirty palms between his opened legs, wrists caressing his hairy and dangling testicles, the pool boy’s slim back next to my breath and lips, and ask, “Ready?” And he would answer, “Yeah, Robert…I’m ready.” And the dream would turn into something familiar and endless as I would gently kiss his spine, call out numbers and hike a football to no one special and feel erotically clean and different and fulfilled. Orange soap dripped from the pool boy’s rounded pecs and tight nipples as…

  * * * *

  The thunderstorm. I heard it in my sleep. Bumping in the night. An orchestra in the backdrop of my mind. It passed quickly, calming and rather silent. Harmless sounds. Nothingness. A few rumbles in the darkness. Enchanting sounds. Nothing shocking. It passed quickly. Rumbles. Bumping in the night. A harmless thing. Calming. Silent. Forgotten as quickly as it arrived. Harmless sounds. It passed quickly. Darkness. Departed.

  Chapter 55: Burglary

  I awoke in the middle of the night to footsteps and commotion in the house. I sat straight up in bed, blinked once, twice, and three times. My heart beat painfully within the tomb of my chest. Startled and half out of my mind, I listened to someone break into the house downstairs; a burglar intruding my abode. I heard clacking and clicking at the rear door in the kitchen, and footsteps across the marble floor in the foyer and at the bottom of the stairwell between the first and second floors. Whoever was inside the house was not at all quiet and believed that no one was home. The burglar was noisy and intrusive and…

  I couldn’t just sit in bed and wait for someone to save or protect me. There was a phone in the room. I quietly climbed out of bed, rushed to it, and dialed 911. After two rings a female operator picked up and said in a rather husky voice: “West End 911. What is the address of your emergency, please?”

  I rattled off the address with rushed air escaping my lungs.

  “Residence or business?”

  “Residence.”

  “The name please?”

  “Fine…Robert Fine.” I spelled my last name. “F-I-N-E.”

  “And what is your emergency?”

  “There’s a burglar in my house…First floor…I think they’re in the kitchen, to the rear of the house.”

  The rest was a blur. The female operator repeated my information, but I couldn’t recall what she had said. Because I panicked, I eventually hung up the phone and moved over to a tiny row of Armistead Maupin books where I kept a Colt .45 hidden. I slipped hardback copies of Babycakes, Tales of the City, and Maybe the Moon from the shelf and set them aside. The shiny silver box hidden in the hole was illuminated in the semi-moonlight. I slid the silver box toward me, opened it, and released the Colt from its foam housing, ready for some badass business, if it had to come to that.

  It was Katz downstairs, had to be Katz. He was returning for simple revenge because of our feud by the pool. Katz was foolish enough to come back into the lake house and attempt to harm me. His short, two-day stay had ended in mayhem and he wanted to get even. I pissed him off with the photographs of his sexual romp with Tacoma and threatening to blackmail him. Katz had come back for vengeance, an eye for an eye, violence and danger…perhaps even murder. I didn’t doubt that he was downstairs in the kitchen, breaking and entering. It couldn’t have been anyone else. No way.

  Noises still flooded the lake house: creaks and groans of various octaves; boards waking in the night; cupboards yawning. The burglar was probably finding numerous things of value to steal downstairs, placing all of them inside a leather satchel or cotton bag, ready to flee with my valuables.

  Colt in hand, I slowly moved to the bedroom door and walked out into the hallway. Boards creaked behind me. I swiftly spun around at the sound and pointed the barrel of the .45 at the pool boy’s chest, near his heart. “Jesus Christ,” I whispered.

  He stood directly behind me in nothing more than a pair of Boxer Joe’s. He looked pale and shocked, drew his arms above his head in surrender. Panic covered his face and he murmured in a whisper, “What
the fuck, Robert? Are you going to shoot me?”

  With both hands still on the Colt, I lowered the muzzle from the boy’s chiseled and bare chest and pointed it at the floor. “There’s someone in the house. I’ve already called the police.”

  He lowered his arms and followed me down the hallway to the top of the stairs where clattering echoed.

  Once there, he whispered, “Who is it?”

  “How the hell should I know? A burglar, of course.”

  We looked down into the darkness of the stairwell. There was someone down there; we both saw this. I heard the pool boy leave out a girlish gasp. He sounded terrified.

  A shadow appeared at the bottom of the stairwell. It was slim and narrow, the shape of a human. Its hair was brushed brown and the person had medium-sized shoulders. Their feet hit the first few steps with ease, managed another two. Weight creaked the stairwell’s boards, startling the pool boy behind me, who squeaked like a mouse, terror-ridden. Fear also mounted in me as the burglar closed in on the second floor, closer and closer.

  From behind me I listened to the pool boy’s breathing intensify. His chest was glued to my back, pumping blood and air, and his breath brushed against my neck. He whispered into my ear, “Shoot, Robert. Shoot. Whoever it is. We’re going to die if you don’t.”

  I had never used the gun for an emergency until that night. I only owned the weapon because it came with the house. When moving in, I had accidentally found it buried under the floorboards in the living room and took it to the West End Police Department to have it investigated for its history, and the name of its prior owner. The Colt didn’t have a history, or proprietor. And since the former owners of the lake house were deceased, I ended up registering the Colt in my name and kept it.

  The gun wobbled in my hands as the intruder became closer and closer on the stairwell. I didn’t shoot, but did call out a warning, “I have a gun! Stop or I’ll shoot!” I saw a better view of the burglar now than when he or she stood at the bottom of the stairwell: red hair, pale face, Botox-fresh eyes, collagen-plump lips, superstar qualities that allowed her to be charming and beautiful and famous looking.

  I was just about to call out the intruder’s name when the gun slipped out of my palms and clacked against the top step of the stairwell. It fired the loudest bang! I had ever heard in my life. Yellow-gold-silver-white light filled the stairs like a flare. The sound shattered the night. The burglar let out a feminine scream at the top of her lungs as the pool boy jumped behind me. Tacoma knocked his forehead against the back of my head, which almost caused the both of us to tumble down the stairwell. Had it not been for the banister to my left, which I grasped, we would have broken our necks.

  Rosemary Dublin’s familiar voice called out, “Dear God! Dear God, Robert, what are you doing? What’s going on? You’re trying to kill me! Don’t shoot me! Do not shoot me! I’m just here for a visit! For Christ’s sake put the gun down!”

  I found the light switch at the top of the stairs, flipped it on, and saw Rose near the bottom, stark white in the face, shivering from head to toe. I called down to her, “Rose, what are you doing here?”

  The pool boy had fallen to the floor at one point during the chaos, but now stood. I heard him yell out, “Silver! It’s Danielle Silver!” His arms and hands wrapped around my middle, thrilled. Eventually he loosened his grip from me and stood at my right side.

  Rose called up the stairs, “You almost killed me, Robert! How dare you! I’ve lost two years of my life over this!”

  I had almost killed her. There was a bullet hole in the wall just seven inches behind her bountiful head of hair. I blushed, semi-smiled, and called down, “I’m sorry, Rose. Terribly sorry. I thought you were a burglar. I was only defending the pool boy and me.”

  She didn’t have time to answer me. An officer of the law arrived on site. Upon his entrance, he spread his legs, held his handgun in both palms directly in front of him, also aimed it at Rose, and called out, “West End Police! Nobody move!”

  “Dear Lord,” Rose cried and fainted. She rolled down the four steps she had managed to climb in the semi-darkness.

  “Oh my God,” the pool boy quipped at my side.

  I called out at the top of the stairs to the lawman, “She’s my friend from Chicago! She’s not a burglar! In fact, she has a key to this place.”

  I walked down the stairs and met the cop and Rose at the bottom. I fell to Rose’s side and placed her head on my lap, waved a hand in front of her face, attempting to bring her to. “It’s okay,” I said to the officer above me. “Everything’s fine. False alarm. There’s no emergency here. Rose came for an unexpected visit. She has her own key and must have used it, but she was quite noisy. I thought she was a burglar.” I then called up to the pool boy, “Tacoma, can you please help me with Danielle?”

  He scampered down the stairs and sat down next to a Sleeping Beauty-like Rose Dublin and started caressing her fine auburn-red hair with short strokes.

  I told the cop, “Thank you so much for coming and checking up on us, but really, this has just been a misunderstanding. Sorry to take up your time.”

  The police officer scampered away.

  Rose started to come to: groggy, shaking her head, blinking.

  Chapter 56: Coming To

  After the officer left, I said, “Tacoma, please take Rose into the sitting-room. I’m going to fetch a cold compress for her.”

  Tacoma carried Rose to a chiffon and silk settee that I had purchased in France some years before and placed her down.

  In the meantime, I bolted into the downstairs bathroom, fetched a hand cloth, soaked the cotton with chilled water, and then rushed back to Rose’s side.

  After applying the cotton square to her forehead, I asked Tacoma, “Is it possible for you to carry her up to the spare bedroom where Katz slept? She’ll be safe there for the night. I’ll sleep in the chair at her side in case she wakes and wonders where she’s at.”

  “Yes, I can do that.”

  “Thank you, Tacoma. I’m sorry about all of this ugliness.”

  “This is all very exciting for me. One giant circus this evening. I actually love it. Plus, I’m in the presence of Danielle Silver.”

  “Yes, I suppose so. It has been a circus. Can you carry her up now?”

  “Of course.”

  “And be careful. She’s more of a queen than the two of us put together.”

  He laughed at my statement, slipping a hand behind Rose’s back and one underneath her legs. He rested her head on one of his shoulders and gently lifted her as if she were a feather, or he Hercules. He carried her upstairs, as he said he would, carefully and without error, to the spare bedroom, where she would sleep the night away, unharmed.

  * * * *

  She came to around seven o’clock the next morning like Dorothy from Oz, batted her eyes open and closed, whispered, “Where am I? What happened?”

  “Rose?” I asked from the high-backed reading chair next to her queen-sized bed. I’d had the world’s most horrendous night and was barely able to move.

  “What happened last night, Robert?”

  “Everything and nothing, my dear.” I pushed a cotton blanket away and moved to her side, sat down next to her on the bed. “You took a fall last night at the bottom of the stairwell. Nothing major, of course. You fainted. The pool boy, Tacoma, carried you up here to my spare bedroom.”

  She leaned up and kissed my left cheek, hugged me, and shared a satisfied smile. “I stopped by for tea. You know how I love my tea, darling. I have to be in Chicago by two this afternoon.” Panic rose in her voice. She looked at her bare wrist for a diamond watch but found nothing but tanned skin from her spring along the Mediterranean. Then she looked to her left and right for an available clock. “What time is it?”

  I patted her left shoulder and consoled her. “You’ll make it, Rose. It’s only seven o’clock in the morning. That leaves you plenty of time to catch your flight.”

  Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly
, Marilyn Monroe…the classic actresses all came to mind as I looked down at her in the bed, listening to her instruct me, “Share every detail with me prior to me fainting last night, Robert. Was I drinking? Did someone pop a drug into one of my drinks? Was my blood sugar too low again? You know that sometimes happens to me.”

  I couldn’t possibly tell her all the details of the previous night’s events. It was too embarrassing. The thought of accidentally shooting her was eye-rolling on its own. I couldn’t even begin to explain that I thought her to be some burglar trespassing on private property and had called the police on her. Instead, I simply told her, “You took a little tumble. It was all just a little mishap. Nothing serious, of course. Everyone is safe and well. No worries. You just needed to sleep it off.”

  “Good to know. I trust you with my life, Robert Fine. I think you already know that.”

  I chuckled.

  She chuckled.

  We cheek-kissed.

  As for almost shooting her; she never found out.

  Chapter 57: Opinion

  She couldn’t stay long; Rose never did. We shared breakfast—eggs, crispy bacon, toast, bagels—out in the West Garden with the pool boy. We talked about my newest paperback novel on the shelves, Unlimited Luxuries, and its rising sales. We talked about the lake, Rose’s upcoming trip to Chicago to visit her family, the Navy, the pool boy’s life in Beverly Hills, shopping for purses in Madrid, Rose’s obsession with Andy Warhol, and many other topics that interested the three of us.

  Rose sat admiring the pool boy and seemed to adore his brown eyes and dimples and his military cut. If I didn’t know any better, I would have said she had a slight crush on him and wanted to pop away with him and travel the world. She smiled at him far too often, and attempted to seduce him with a sinful look of need and joy. On more than one occasion I kicked her leg under the table, and coughed, causing her to jump, and pulling her attention away from Tacoma. Rose immediately turned her glance to me, which said, I’m only playing with him. He’s spectacular. I simply love his dimples.