The Passionate Attention of an Interesting Man Read Free

her mood. “Up too late and seen it all,” she would say. “Needing to be soothed.” Cook would nod and make—from scratch—paper-thin slices with mushroom and basil. Or Portia would say, “Adventurous,” and the gang would get the works. Do you, too, want to live like this? was the question that Lloyd’s columns seemed to ask his readers. Would you happy in Portia’s world?
    Would Lloyd?
    And here’s an arresting surprise: these all but unsupervised young people had no contact with drugs of pleasure or with those who did. Names would come up: of kids who got into coke and stole from their friends and weren’t allowed at Portia’s any more. Clark would run a finger across his throat, and Junior would cry, “It was bound to happen!” as though drugging, thievery, and social ruin were sins that came as a set.
    In fact, these kids had a puritanical streak about almost every indulgence except sex. Lloyd discovered this at his very first pool party, when he entered the bathroom to find Junior’s swimsuit around his ankles and Portia sucking his cock. Backing out as suavely as possible, Lloyd brushed against Annamarie, who gently pushed him back into the room with a pianissimo “Am I late for the contest?” Then she pulled Lloyd’s Speedos down to make a twin with Portia.
    It was Lloyd’s theory that most women sucked you off as incompetently as possible in the hope that you would never ask for a repeat. In sex—according to Lloyd—women liked one act only:  having a marriage license. They seemed not to enjoy sex but rather to tolerate it in trade for certain privileges, such as childbirth and knowing the exact location of their husband second by second.
    Portia and Annamarie, then, were rare women, avid for sex and extremely good at it. In the progressive—or simply absentee—atmosphere that Portia’s parents created, there might be strictures about cell phones but not, apparently, about physical contact. Yet how fastidiously Annamarie slipped a non-lubricated condom onto Lloyd’s member—from where? he wondered—before she began. These kids had all the flaws of youth except recklessness. They really were golden: healthy and handsome and free of danger.
    And now Lloyd was giving them the fame of the county in his columns even as readers pestered the paper for more. E-mail commentary tripled, subscriptions jumped, professional loudmouths hectored the subject from pulpit and cable talk-show set. Lloyd himself began to entertain a crazy dream: either of the two girls—but preferably the auburn Portia—would fall for Lloyd, marry him, and save him from the vexatious day-to-day of slogging through life on the material expectations of an orphan.
    Lloyd knew it was crazy. Girls of Portia’s status didn’t marry men of unknown origin. Lloyd couldn’t even say whether or not he was single: he had escaped but never actually dissolved his early marriage.
    Yet Portia—and Annamarie, and a few of the others of their coterie—unmistakably found Lloyd attractive. He knew how that worked. Anyway, by the standards of the region Lloyd was a hotshot, so full of ideas and observations that he charmed almost everyone. He was careful to do this in a soft way, in order not to alarm or provoke. He never got into politics or religion—so often the same thing these days. And he never risked looking like a showboater. When Portia and Annamarie held one of their blowjob contests and, after sampling the contestants, declared Lloyd the winner, he never preened but rather let his features go blank, an ideal way to receive Clark’s “Fierce, bro!”
    And Lloyd knew how to avoid being drawn into the kids’ favorite sport, bickering. When Portia would prefer Lloyd to Clark on some pretext—as Portia loved to do—Lloyd would contrive to look skinny and futile, no man’s rival. Indeed, Lloyd would look on uninvolved as Portia and Clark merrily bayed at each other, to the play-by-play critique and footnoting of Annamarie and