The house looked the same. My picture was long gone from the collection in the hall. There were twice as many photos of the girls there now. College pictures mostly. There was a new refrigerator. Mostly the same magnets. The spring on the screen door was still broken from when I opened it a little too fast about five years ago—six years ago. The day Mary Ellen made me move my stuff out of the basement. The divorce was final ten years ago.
When I rang the front door bell, it was the first time in all those years and it felt odd. Perhaps that was it. Usually, because I call first and they can hear my car, the girls meet me at the door before I can get to it. On Saturdays and one Sunday every month. Not nearly enough, but it was the way Mary Ellen wanted it. They grew like the stop-action photography of flowers I’ve seen. Then, one by one, they weren’t there. First Susie. Then Sarah. Next year it’ll be Matty, and then there’ll be no reason to come here again.
Mary Ellen opened the door with a sweet smile on her face, and I was reminded right off how I ended up in all of this mess before I was ready. She’s a sweetheart, still.
She just said, “Hello,” and stood aside. But I noticed something right then. There was a difference.
She had called and asked me to come over. She ‘had some things she wanted to talk about.’ With Mary Ellen that usually means money, but I was not behind on the child support payments, so I didn’t think that was the matter.
Mary Ellen disappeared, and I suddenly found myself sitting alone at the kitchen table again, in the same old chair, listening to Herb Daniels mow his lawn. It was even the same mower. I could tell by the sound of the motor. Every summer Saturday morning at seven, Herb Daniels mowed his lawn. But this was October and it was the middle of a Saturday afternoon. I suppose that was a difference too.
When she finally came back, Mary Ellen was moving a bit slower than when she left. She was clearly having second thoughts. That was Mary Ellen. Always second thoughts. She bit her lip. Took a breath. Then smiled again. A slightly embarrassed smile.
She said, “I just don’t know what to do about it.” And then dropped the print-outs on the table.
She has one grey hair, or actually it’s several all in one place above her right temple, and they curl through the orange-red. She’s had that since—I don’t know—at least since we were in Prague together, eighteen years ago. I know that because I wrote a silly poem about it then. She was just turned thirty-four. That little spark of grey seemed like silver to me then. She cried over it. Not the poem. The gray hair. But I always thought she was the prettiest woman I ever saw. I guess I still do.
She frowned. “Why are you looking like that? The freckles?” She brushed a hand at her hair. “You always used to look at the freckles that way. There’re more of them now. All divided by wrinkles. They multiply faster that way. You couldn’t even begin to count them.”
I reminded her. “Four hundred and ninety-six.”
A smiled flashed and disappeared. “So you’ve said. But I want you to read this now.”
She pushed the print-outs at me.
The first sentence was a grabber.
‘I can’t be with you tonight. Mom will be home. Her boyfriend is out of town. Call me after Drama. I’ll wait by the bike-rack.’
I stopped reading and took a lungful of air and set the sheets of paper down in a neat pile again. I did not want to be reading this kind of thing. Not now. Maybe never.
I asked, “Where is this from?”
Mary Ellen took a guilty breath. “Her computer. They’re all e-mails she sent in the past month—since school started. She forgot to close the connection when she ran out to the game last week. I snooped. I printed out all the emails to Eric for the last six weeks—don’t look at me like that. She’s my responsibility. She is not an adult. I’m responsible for her care and I have the right to know what she’s up to. She’s gotten very secretive lately. It was pretty obvious she was up to something. And Eric is eighteen. He’s an adult. And I think he’s taking advantage of her.”
I do not know just how I was looking at her. I’m sorry to say my first words were not comforting.
“Is she on the pill?”
Mary Ellen straightened in her chair. Any sweetness in her face was gone. It was not the first question she expected. I had no clue what she expected.
“Apparently so. That’s another matter. I don’t know how she’s gotten them. The school system is so fucked-up these days she might have gotten them from the school nurse. Who knows? They’re not allowed to tell parents. Can you imagine!”
I tried to think. I could not remember Mary Ellen using the term ‘fucked’ in all my memory. Either she was changing in her old age or else she was more upset about this than she was when she decided to divorce me.
I decided on the direct and positive approach.
“There is no magic to the number eighteen. Especially with girls. I will testify to that. What would you like me to do?”
She looked incredulous. She can do incredulous better than anyone I know. “You’re asking me! What do you think you should do? Do something! I’ve talked to her. Oh, it was more than a talk. I’ll tell you. I talked to her last Saturday night. She ran out and didn’t come back until Sunday afternoon. I called all of her friends. Even Eric’s parents. But he was gone too. I don’t know where they went. But I can tell you this. His father is a jerk. All his father said to me was that he’d given his son a box of condoms. He said that! Can you imagine that kind of mind? And when she came home on Sunday and I asked her where she’d been she said, ’Fucking Eric.’ That’s what she said. Just like that, ‘Fucking Eric!’ And then ran to her room.”
I held up my hand, wanting to find some sense in the words that were flashing through my brain. She didn’t wait.
She stood and leaned over the table at me. “I want you to talk to her. She listens to you. I want you to reason with her. She’ll be home from soccer in half an hour. I want you to talk to her then.”
Funny thing. Sex is a funny thing. Very humorous if considered at the right moment. Usually afterwards.
When I was seventeen I was on the high school football team. Fall semester, 1974. I wasn’t very good, but the team wasn’t very good, so it didn’t show. And it was like some sort of parody of such things. There were girls in the school who would have sex with almost any player who made the team. I ended up losing my virginity with Sherry Castleman. A natural blonde. I was the fourth player on her list. But I didn’t know that at the time. I thought I had discovered the greatest secret of the universe. Everything that had ever mattered to me before that moment was suddenly meaningless. Then I went to see her the following Sunday afternoon after the game. I was a block away from her house when I saw her with my friend Justin Parker. They were on the swings in her back yard, holding hands as they went back and forth.
The next question in my mind was this: had my daughter taken advantage of Eric What’s-His-Name? But then I thought about Eric’s father. And I thought about my father. I could imagine what my father would have said. And then I was pretty sure that it was Eric who had been doing the taking, and I knew I was going to meet Eric’s father sometime very soon. That took all of about sixty seconds.
I said, “Alright. Can you give me Eric’s address?”
She said, “What are you going to do?”
I said, “I don’t know. I think I’d like to find out a little more about all this. I want to talk to Matty first.”
She said, “Just don’t do anything stupid.”
That was a phrase I knew well. I’m branded with it. She was still leaning over the table. I could see right down her blouse. She saw my eyes and stood straight.
I said, “Who, me?”
She smiled. Not sweet, but a smile. This was disconcerting at that particular moment. She said, “I think that’s what I told you that day you quit your job at the high school. So, I guess I shouldn’t say that
now, should I?”
She had. I’d forgotten. I said, “You have a better memory than I do.”
She raised her eyebrows at that, “I don’t think so. I think you remember every bit of it. You’re a bleeping elephant.”
I shrugged. That might have been more true once. “I wish that was so. If I don’t write it down now, I forget everything. I think it’s some kind of psychological self-protection. The older I get. It lets me sleep at night after all the stupid things I’ve done.”
She nodded at that and sat down again and twisted her fingers together.
She said, “Are you writing again, then?”
I said, “Yes.”
She said, “Good.” She found another way to twist her fingers together as she spoke. “You know, I hate to admit this, but you were right.”
This was a shock. I might have exaggerated the look on my face a bit. “About what?”
“About that. I should have let you write more. You were always in a better mood after you’d been writing. And about schools. About the system. You know I thought you were always going off the deep end with your complaints about everything. But you were right. I’ve started to hate teaching. I really started feeling it last year. It’s all process now. It’s all about product. How many pass. Not how many fail. It’s not about good information, or fact, or truth, or learning to learn or any of that . . . You know I had to drop George Eliot from my reading list. You told me once how much you liked George Eliot. Remember? You were the first guy I ever dated who had actually read George Eliot. Now I can't even teach Middlemarch. Think about that! . . . You warned me twenty years ago. I didn’t believe you. Now it’s done. We’re there.”
There wasn’t much for me to say to that.
I said, “I’m sorry.”
She was not nearly finished. “What I CAN teach is a sad little story about a peasant girl in Guatemala. Imagine! ME! Trying to teach sixteen-year-old middle class American high school students who have no idea yet where their own culture comes from, the relevance of a story about a young girl who has less than nothing—remember!” She leaned in closer, her eyes directly on mine. I always loved her eyes. “No one teaches history like you used to, but you quit!” She held up a finger of accusation in my face. “Kids who don’t care where the words they use come from." She sat back again. "Kids who throw their lunch away for a bag of chips and a cigarette. I have to teach middle class American kids about life in a dirt poor, mostly illiterate country, as observed by a Harvard educated pseudo-intellectual—some author who spent a couple of non-profit foundation-paid years slumming with illiterate Guatemalan peasants and thinks she can make believe she understands the daily existence of a little girl who’ll never be able to get on a jet plane when she’s tired of it all and escape the pleasures of ringworm and malaria, or rape on an empty stomach.”
I held up my hand again.
“Take a breath.”
Her whole body shook.
“Don’t tell me that. That’s what you always said when I got angry. But you don’t know! That’s one of the better books. Given the subject matter of some of the others, it’s no wonder they think screwing around at sixteen is just fine.”
I looked at the clock on the wall. I had to survive another fifteen or twenty minutes before Matty would be home. I had to change the subject.
“So who’s your new boyfriend?”
This straightened her right up, but she barely paused.
“New boyfriend! Hell. He’s only the second boyfriend I’ve had in ten years. Ten, not so bleeping, years. And you know about that other loser. You don’t know this one. His name is Carl. He’s a good guy. He’s nice. His major fault is that he plays bridge. You know I hate bridge.”
I tried to get cute. “Well, you do have the troubled waters.”
Her eyes closed with exasperation. “Don’t. . . Sarah tells me, when she called you last week there was someone there. Do you have a girlfriend?”
It is a fact that I cannot tell the girls anything that they don’t tell their mother.
“Yes.”
“What’s her name?”
“Des. Desiree Perry. She’s from California.”
“California. Where did you meet her?”
The third degree had begun. I never did ask Mary Ellen one-tenth the questions she always asked me. Why did she want to know about Des, when I had no interest in Carl?
But I told her. “In a bar.”
“A bar?”
“At the bar, sort of.”
“You’re being cute again. Were you in court for something? Did you have an accident? Is she a lawyer?”
This process was amazing to me, even after all these years.
“Yes. She’s a lawyer. But we met in a bar.”
“Oh, John. You can do better than that.”
“It’s okay. It wasn’t like that.”
“You spend too much time in bars.”
“I don’t have a TV”
“So it’s my fault you spend so much time in bars. It’s because I take every dime you’ve got and you can’t afford a TV.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“It’s what you think.”
I tried to change the subject again.
“Why aren’t you interested in my new job? Sarah told you about that, didn’t she?”
Mary Ellen sighed with the hopelessness of it all.
“Because it’s with Connie. It’s just another dead end. I don’t know why you want to work for Connie.”
But then my inquisition was over. We both heard the keys in the lock. Matty was at the door.
10. In the third place
In the second place, I didn’t want to be doing this in the first place. It was Connie’s idea.
True, I had suggested the hook-up with a couple of the local speakers’ bureaus. The pay for bodyguards to protect ‘personalities’ is quite a bit higher than keeping an eye on a building that can’t move, or on the toys in an office of some securities firm. Connie likes securities firms because the fee is better and it’s steady. But that’s not nearly as good as it is for rock bands, even if it is better than watching the geological patterns on a slab of marble in a lobby somewhere at three in the morning.
But standing watch in a securities firm is too much like my last job, shuffling papers in an insurance office. I find it boring enough to make me want to be fixing computer printers that are jammed. I have a knack for unjamming printers after all the manuscripts I’ve printed out through the years. And that was what I was doing when a seventy-five-year-old lady came into Osgood Options and attacked the President of the company with her recently deceased husband’s best carpentry tools.
No real harm done. She was holding the chisel the wrong way, though it did ruin his $1000 suit. But the President was conflicted. Should he be grateful I kept the grandma from adding a dado to his forehead or angry that I had been distracted while trying to help his secretary get her work done? After the fact, the $100 printer was working, and the secretary was more grateful than he was.
Actually, when I’d pushed Connie to pick up more bodyguard work, I was thinking about ex-politicians that no longer rated a police detail or famous authors weary of carnivorous fans. I can handle that. But Pradeep Panhwar was a different cup of tea.
Mr. Panhwar was not a very tall man. I have known Pakistani women who are taller. As targets go, he would be easy to shield when he wasn’t on the podium. I figured that a more likely scenario was a bomb of some sort. Bombs are popular sport in the Middle East, and this was disquieting. Bombs do not discriminate. Then again, I could think of a dozen other ways to kill the man, and I wasn’t even trying very hard.
My job was to stay ahead of him. Burley had his back. Burley moves faster than I do and so that way I wouldn’t be playing catch-up.
There was just the two of us with Mr. Panhwar in between. Panhwar’s head kept bobbing out to loo
k around me to see where I was headed. This amused Burley no end when he retold the story later on and did the pantomime.
My primary tool on this job was to move unexpectedly. After a bit of argument with our client, who was fastidious and in need of a shower, we went directly from the airport to Graham Hall, where he was scheduled to give a lecture about two hours later, and set Mr. Panhwar up in the green room with his suitcases. He washed in the bathroom there with me at the door. Then I got his picks off a menu and I ordered up a spread of Chinese food from Kowloon.
Funny thing, he actually asked who was paying for the food. I told him it would be on his bill and he was visibly unhappy with that as well.
He seemed like a sour fellow from the start, but I suppose if you have to live in fear of your life 24 hours a day it can take a toll. I had read that his wife had been murdered the year before. His kids are all off in England at a private school. I thought he was alone.
Figuring our client would not appreciate the quantity I tend to eat or the smell of the sweet and sour pork, I ate my own dinner out of his sight in the hall. Burley strolled around the conference center and kept an eye on the doors until it was his turn to eat.
At one point, after Mr. Panhwar had finished a non-stop series of phone calls, he came to the door.
“Is there a place I can smoke?”
I told him, “I’d tell you to just open a window if there was one. They don’t allow smoking in public buildings here anymore. But I’d smoke anyway if I were you. To hell with them.”
He smiled at that. The first smile I had seen on his face.
“To hell with them,” he repeated as he went back into the room. A few minutes later he came back.
“Do you want one? They’re made in India and they’re very good. Not tasteless like American cigarettes.”
He had that right. That’s one reason I had given it up. The other was when they went over three dollars a pack, which was a long time ago.
“No. I quit. Thanks.”
John Finn Page 9