He made a face like he’d eaten something sour. “What’s that?”
“Different kinds of plants and flowers. It’s cool. I think you’ll like it.”
“Flowers. You still trying to get in my drawers, huh, Martin?”
I threw a pillow at him. He was so full of himself. But I was relieved he could make jokes about it. It had been a few days since he approached me in the shower. It hadn’t come up again, and I didn’t want things to be weird between us.
“Yeah, okay,” he said. “Let’s go see these flowers of yours.”
A little while later, we were strolling through the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in our Sunday best, like some Norman Rockwell version of the happy gay couple, if Norm was into that sort of thing, and if we were a couple. Regardless, Andre looked good in a formfitting T-shirt and jeans. The kid could pull off a pair of jeans like no one else. He’d also taken to wearing one of my straw fedoras. He said it looked gangsta.
Andre was like a hummingbird flitting from plant to plant, poking everything and remarking on what it looked like to him. He especially liked the rainbow eucalyptus, one of my favorites as well. I told him how I used to come here with my grandfather. How he liked the orchids best. I’d painted so many of those damn orchids. I kind of missed it, though, mainly because I missed him.
“Are you like that painter who puts lady business in flowers?” Andre asked me.
I laughed at the way he said it. “Georgia O’Keefe? I read somewhere she wasn’t trying to paint lady business, that’s just what people saw.”
“Yeah right. She was a total perv.”
I teased him, “Think about it, Andre, if you’re seeing genitals in flowers, then maybe you’re the pervert.”
He pulled the hat down over his eyes, embarrassed, then lifted it again. He placed one finger to his chin, as if deep in thought, and said, “I’d let you draw my junk if you wanted.”
I couldn’t keep the smile off my face. “That’s very generous of you.”
“Not in a flower, though. Maybe like a cactus. A really big one.” His two hands seized the air in front of his pelvis, as if he were holding something basketball-sized. He stroked it. “Like that. You feel me?”
I laughed. “Yeah, I get it. You’re proud of your junk.”
He smiled. “If you’ve got it, flaunt it.” We continued on, and he was quiet for a spell. Then he said, “Why don’t you have a boyfriend, Martin?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know.” I’d dated enough guys, hot ones too, but I always lost interest because their personalities fell flat. Or they revealed some fatal flaw. Like this one guy littered all the time. Just threw trash wherever he happened to be, even after I said something about it. It irritated the shit out of me and suddenly he wasn’t that attractive to me anymore.
“Maybe I’m too picky,” I said. “Maybe I’m looking for someone who doesn’t exist.”
“Huh,” he said. The word meant something I’d yet to decipher, but I promised myself I would. “Well, what’s your type?” he asked me.
You, just a few years older.
“I don’t know. I don’t think I have a type.”
“Black, white, Asian, Spanish….”
“All of the above.” I was discriminating aesthetically, but not according to ethnicity. I liked to taste all the colors of the rainbow. In fact, the men I’d dated were all very different. That was really the only thing they had in common.
“Okay, then,” he continued, “would you rather get with Michael Sam or Harry Potter?”
Harry Potter? Did he think I was a pedophile? “You mean Daniel Radcliffe? I don’t think he’s gay.”
“Doesn’t matter. Which one?”
“Well, if you’d called him Daniel Radcliffe, I could have maybe imagined it, but now all I’m thinking about is Harry Potter, who’s like, twelve, so I’ll go with Michael Sam.”
“That TV guy with the white hair and squinty eyes or George Clooney?”
“Anderson Cooper? Didn’t George Clooney get married… to a woman?”
“Just answer the question, Martin.”
