Read Online Object of Desire by William J. Mann - Free Book Online

white his whiskers looked in the sunlight. “The name is very familiar.”
    â€œHe’s a big real estate guy,” Randall said. “You should see his house. Gorgeous! Right at the foot of the mountain in Las Palmas. He’s on the city council, too. A real mover and shaker in town.”
    The Palm Springs City Council was almost entirely gay, and the mayor was gay, too. The latest estimate was that 60 percent of the population was homo. Anecdotal evidence suggested it could even be higher than that. You couldn’t go to a restaurant anywhere in town without seeing several tables full of queens, and sometimes a scattering of dykes. I remembered when Randall and I, all those years ago, had celebrated West Hollywood’s independence. A city all our own, we’d declared. Now it was almost commonplace. Palm Springs was even gayer than WeHo now, it seemed.
    â€œAnyway,” Randall was saying, “Thad and Jimmy are giving a party next weekend, and I want you guys to come with me.”
    I raised my eyebrows. “You’re coming back to the desert again next weekend?”
    Randall smiled. “If it’s okay with you guys.”
    â€œOf course, Randall,” Frank said. “You know you’re always welcome.”
    â€œI don’t know about that,” I said, smiling over at my husband. “I might be getting a little tired of all his whoring around.”
    â€œListen, Danny, I’m only coming back for you,” said Randall.
    â€œMe?”
    â€œWhen I told Thad who you were, he was dying to meet you. He’s a fan of your work.” Randall smiled. “I told him a couple of your prints would look simply marvelous over his dining-room table. And this guy has the moola to pay you whatever you want.”
    â€œI suppose he’s in with the whole Donovan and Penelope Sue crowd,” I said.
    Randall nodded. “He mentioned their names a couple of times.”
    â€œAll the big fags here do. If Donovan and Penelope Sue Hunt have accepted you, you’ve arrived,” I noted.
    Palm Springs, for all its charms, was the proverbial little pond with lots of big fish. The elite was made up of people who spent their time raising money for charities and then giving themselves awards for doing so. The desert’s charities were flush with cash, and that was a wonderful thing—except that sometimes all the self-congratulation became a little wearying. Every season there were more than a dozen black-tie award ceremonies, where the elite rose in unison for one long standing ovation after another. Since moving to Palm Springs, I’d discovered just how much rich people liked to cheer for themselves.
    And sometimes they were very rich, like Donovan and Penelope Sue Hunt. Penelope Sue was Texas oil money, and her first husband had been head of Columbia or Sony, or something like that. She’d gotten a lot of money—and I mean a lot —in the settlement. Donovan had his own money, too, mostly family money, but he’d made quite a bit producing some big blockbusters in the late 1980s, lots of whiz-bang action flicks starring Bruce Willis or Chuck Norris, before turning over a new leaf about ten years ago and funding only serious independent pictures.
    Most of the money in Palm Springs came from entertainment-related fields, or else it came from real estate. There was very little old money in Palm Springs. Donovan Hunt, with his connections back East, was a rare exception. Most of the movers and shakers here had come from L.A. or San Francisco, where they’d decided at some point that the big ponds there were too crowded with too many other big fish, and so they’d leapt over to a smaller pond, where they’d have more room to swim. And to raise money. And to receive standing ovations. Except in this case the pond was actually a desert, and the desert was built on the scurrying backs of desert rats, like Frank, who had never received a