by Bill Alive
I tried to admire this new guy’s natural curlage. Unfortunately, also unlike the Turcots, his hair status suggested he could maybe use a shower.
When he saw me, his eyes lit up. He scuttled over till he was so close to me that his shin hit the bench. This was officially too close. Normally, I avoid the word pungent, but my shower theory was certainly confirmed.
Instead of talking, though, he ostentatiously looked away. Like the room was packed, and he’d just happened to stand there.
“Hey,” I said.
“Isn’t Roger a lucky man?” he burst out, with explosive enthusiasm. He nodded at Mrs. Turcot, who was bent over yet another rosary. “She’s such a loving, submissive wife.”
“Um,” I said. “Cool.” I tried to remember the last time I’d heard the word ‘submissive’. Ugh, did he mean, like, bondage? Maybe they weren’t so super religious.
I flicked Mrs. Turcot a nervous glance, but she just kept clacking the beads like she couldn’t hear us. That was getting creepy.
The dude jerked his arms, waving with energetic spurts and only half-looking at me, like he was leading some seminar. “So many wives today are the diametric opposite,” he intoned. This from a dude couldn’t be more than twenty-five. “Just the other day, I was making a delivery, and right on her front lawn, in a beach chair, a woman was lying exposed, flirting with a strange man who was definitely not her husband.”
“Um, exposed?” I said. “Like…”
The dude nodded with vigor. “Sleeveless shirt. Low neck. Shorts riding high up her thigh. I assure you, there was very little left to the imagination.”
I wondered what kind of imagination he was working with.
Actually, I was starting to wonder whether this conversation was really happening. It’s like when some old World War II vet starts ranting about the ‘damn Japs,’ and you keep waiting for him to start cracking up and be like, “Hahaha, I so got you!” Or maybe the Sanity Police to jump out and drag him away.
I looked to Theodore, hoping he might absorb some of this crazy energy, but he was checking his phone. Of course he was.
And now the dude was staring at me, expectant.
“Maybe the strange guy was her husband?” I offered.
His eyes gleamed. “I know them, it absolutely was not. In fact, her husband came right out. The pizza guy paramour ran away, like the coward he was, and her real husband gave her the castigation she deserved.” He was getting so excited, his voice was slipping back to a normal Not-Forty-Yet range. “He was like, ‘You slut!’” He rolled the word with a feverish savor. “‘I ever catch you cheating on me, I’ll kill you! You hear me? I am so serious, Vanessa—”
“Vanessa?” I blurted. “Hold up, you mean Vanessa Kimm?”
The dude goggled in surprise.
From the rosary factory, Mrs. Turcot finally spoke. “That’s enough, Kelsey.”
“Kelsey?” I said. “Holy smoke! You’re the milk guy! You’re the Kelsey they were fighting about!”
My stomach coiled into a knot of jealous pain. Was this the Kelsey that Vanessa had been defensive about? Could she possibly be into this wispy dude?
Kelsey’s expansive energy contracted. He glared down with suspicion … and hope. “You know Vanessa?” he snapped. “What did she say about me?”
My stomach uncoiled … ah, blessed relief. I knew that tone, so very very well. There was no way Vanessa had the slightest interest in this creep.
Then I realized the whole point of his story. She did have a secret lover after all. Some random pizza guy.
I deflated.
But then … a sudden anger surged within me, hot and defiant.
Damn it, Vanessa, I thought, we are SO DONE. I can’t even get away from you in this super-spiritual meeting! Except, watch me! I’m going to do exactly that! I’m going to get so much spiritual affirmation I’ll never need to hit up another hot vending machine as long as I live!
“Here’s Roger,” Mrs. Turcot said. “And Yvette.”
Roger bustled in from the bedroom hallway, and he beamed on me with a beatific glow of welcome. Warmth surged in my chest. I felt safe, accepted, and utterly enough.
For at least two whole seconds.
Then I saw the woman behind him.
And I forgot Roger existed.
Chapter 17
Yes, Yvette was hot.
But not like Vanessa. Vanessa was always cranked up to 11, blasting every bit of energy she had into Attack and Fascinate.
Yvette was the complete opposite, the shy, wholesome Girl Next Door who’d never even guess her own beauty.
Technically, she wore the same sweater-skirt outfit as Mrs. Turcot, but Yvette made it look good. She had the whole sweater-sleeve-too-long-over-my-wrists-curling-the-cuff-in-my-fingers thing going on, which is so mysteriously vulnerable and sexy.
Her hair swept back from her smooth open forehead in a blonde so light it was almost albino. She had to be at least twenty, but she wore two pigtails, pinned with sparkly barrettes, which made her look crazy girlish and young.
Our eyes met, and her large light eyes were so intense, so present. She gave me a shy smile…
Okay, hold up. It occurs to me that you might be like, “Pete, are you ever going to stop drooling over these random women? This is stressing me out! When do we get back to innocent people dying violent deaths? WHAT IF NOTHING ELSE TERRIBLE HAPPENS???”
Yeah, right. I wish.
Trust me. That’s not going to be a problem.
But, in the moment, I’d certainly forgotten about murders myself. Not to mention the whole spirituality thing. My new mission was plain and simple: get this girl’s number. No matter what.
Hey, come on! I could tell she was super nice! If you’d been there, you would understand. I hope.
Roger smiled around at everyone, his eyes crinkling behind his smart-guy engineer glasses. He made a non-apology for keeping us waiting, then gravely asked us to settle in for the Reading. (Yes, the word sounded capitalized.)
I waited the extra milliseconds to see where Yvette would land. I was hoping for the couch, but she seemed to follow invisible lines of force, like repelling magnets, into a chair where no one could accidentally touch her. I still snagged the couch corner beside her, though, so, major win.
I had hoped we might kick off with some communal chat, but everyone went quiet. Roger opened this huge thick hardback, like a volume of the encyclopedia.
“Tonight I’d like to start with St. Fulminius of Paris,” he said. His voice had gone all teacherish, or maybe a guru leading a webinar. “He was a holy Abbot who fought as a young man in the First Crusade, then realized he had a vocation to the priesthood. At first he ignored his call, took a wife, and became a prosperous merchant. But when a storm destroyed his ships, and he lost all his worldly possessions, he finally decided to pursue a life of holiness. He went off to become a monk, leaving his wife and fifteen children.”
Fifteen children?? I thought. Did he send back any child support?
But Mrs. Turcot and Kelsey murmured with approval, and Yvette nodded hard, staring with concentration like a medical student on her first day of class.
I felt like I must have missed something. Hadn’t the dude abandoned his wife and kids? I’d never really hung out with Catholics (unless you counted Mark, but he never talked about it). But with their whole “no divorce” thing, I’d have thought they’d be the one group of people who wouldn’t be cool with Dad ditching the brood to go find himself. It creeped me out.
But everyone just nodded, and Roger kept reading…
Pretty soon, it was all about “detachment” and “the snares of the flesh” and the “annihilating all desires save the desire for God.” I guess if you only caught every fourth word, it might sound a little like when Buddhists talk about detachment. But the Buddhists I’d heard never sounded this pissed off.
After a few grinding paragraphs, I just gave up and watched Yvette. My chest was seriously all a-flutter, like this wa
s my first crush or something. I tried to catch her eye, but no luck, she was riveted.
Then Roger broke his monotone to comment. “The pleasures of the flesh,” he said. “Let me read that part again. ‘We must beware in particular the pleasures of the flesh, and most dangerous of all, the marital act.’”
There was a pregnant silence.
“Wait, is that sex?” I said.
I wasn’t trying to be a jackass! I really wasn’t sure.
The silence deepened, and my fellow gurees seemed to shrink away from me. Roger snapped me a glare of serious peevage. I flinched — I hadn’t known he had it in him.
“Yes,” he said curtly. “But ‘marital act’ is much more appropriate.”
“Ah,” I said, and tried to look suitably chastened.
Roger seemed satisfied, and he went back to reading. I wondered who’d ever come up with the term ‘marital act’ … obviously some couple who had frequent and super amazing sex.
If you tried to guess the default meaning of ‘marital act’ from my parents’ marriage, you’d have to go with something like “coordinating schedules” or “arguing over the budget.”
Meanwhile, the reading was heating up to PG-13, if not R, once you knew the vocabulary. For someone who wanted to avoid the pleasures of the flesh, Fulminius sure had a lot to say about them.
I started to feel squirmy, with this middle-aged guy reading page after page about the temptations of sex, all with Yvette radiating beside me. But she didn’t even blush.
Finally it petered out into a rant about pleasure in general, and Roger stopped again to ad lib. At first, he just riffed on our “feel-good society,” but he started to heat up too, until he was griping about how everyone was so “unable to face life” they were “zoning out” on antidepressants.
“What kind of blissed-out society are we creating?” he demanded. “And it’s not like those meds are free!”
I frowned. Bitching about the price of antidepressants? Really?
Kelsey chimed in. “Maybe it’s a good thing the Chinese are going to invade.”
There was a comfortable round of laughter. Not like, Ha ha, Kelsey, stupid joke, but like, Ha ha, maybe you’re right, and that’s definitely one way the next couple years could play out.
An icy chill shivered across my back. What was wrong with these people?
That’s like the worst, when you’re hanging with a new group and they all seem cool and then someone lets that little ‘joke’ slip, like, “Kitten burgers later?” And with that casual group laugh, it’s over.
Unless you can talk yourself out of it. They can’t be that crazy, right?
Sad to say, I’m pretty good at this part.
For instance, if you hang out with the Valley Visions crowd for long enough, you do get some people who talk like they’re seriously expecting the oceans to boil in the next five years.
But then they start griping about their 401(k), and I think, okay, you didn’t actually mean that about moving to the top of a mountain in Switzerland. That was just how you share that you’re concerned about global warming. I get it. Me too. I am no longer scared of you. Officially.
So as Roger settled back into the book, and his drone drifted into detailed techniques for “mortification”, whatever that was, I decided that these people must also be the kind to talk a bigger game than they meant. Lots of people are worried about China, right?
And okay, yes, fine, it did cross my mind that Yvette was just too pretty to be nuts.
My mind raced ahead to how I could possibly make contact with her. Eventually, in theory, Roger would stop reading. Then what?
What if Roger went off again with Yvette in private? That would leave me with Kelsey, Mrs. Turcot, and Theodore — how long could I manage the Casual Linger, waiting for her to come back?
I couldn’t take that chance. If I wanted to get this girl’s number, I was going to have to take decisive action.
I slipped out my phone. With everyone’s eyes on Roger, I carefully texted Mark.
hey mark, I texted. (Oh yeah, I’m going to put texts in bold, okay? It’s a simple way to keep them clear.) you need to call roger and distract him.
The next few moments dragged in a torture that was truly medieval. At last, my phone vibrated with his reply.
what, are you actually doing detective work?
I hesitated. If we’d been face to face, I might have been able to make my full case. But texts are a limiting medium.
what do you think? I texted. i need to check up on a hot lead.
Which was technically true.
That’s the thing about texts. Even an empath can’t tell what you’re really feeling.
hmm, Mark texted back. not sure it’s a great idea to call while you’re there. suspicious?
don't say it’s you! I texted. just say you’re selling mutual funds or something!
nope. that would be lying. also called ‘pretense’, which as you know I can’t legally do until I get my much-coveted officially sanctioned investigator license.
Not only was this a frustrating nitpick, it was also one long freaking text. When I glanced up, Roger was scowling at me.
So was everyone else. Except Yvette, who looked genuinely hurt.
I felt mortified. (Oh, is that ‘mortification’?) I jammed the phone in my pocket and looked super studious.
After way too long a pause, Roger humphed and kept reading. And reading. And reeeeeaaaaaaading…
The phone rang. An old school landline, in the kitchen.
Everyone went still. Including Roger. Clearly, this never happened.
The phone kept ringing.
Finally, Mrs. Turcot clicked her beads down and went around a corner into the kitchen to answer.
Roger frowned, trying to listen.
Mrs. Turcot bent around the corner, her high head drooping. “It’s for you, sweetheart.”
“Tell them I’m busy.”
“I’m afraid I already tried.”
Roger’s eyes narrowed. He seemed to be taking the interruption personally. At last he said, “Excuse me a moment,” in a tone which promised that this caller was going to regret it. Then he heaved himself up and creaked around to the kitchen. He lumbered with a tired, older trudge, and I realized that merely getting off the couch had winded him. Weird. So much for whitewater rafting.
“Hello?” he boomed. “Who is this? How did you get this number? What? What? No, I have no interest in or need for a website.”
I nearly snorted with laughter. Nice, Mark, I thought.
Then I got focused. Even Mark couldn’t hold Roger for more than a minute or so. I’d have to be quick.
Um. Except, how exactly was I going to do this?
I turned to Yvette. “So, Yvette,” I said. “Are you on Tribesy?”
I know, I know, but I had to start somewhere.
Yvette looked startled, even more startled than the line deserved. “Oh, I don’t do any of those Myspace sites,” she said earnestly. “Roger says they’re always tracking you.”
That gave me a PTSD flashback to these paranoid middle-aged computer geeks Mark had made me meet, his “Linux User Group”. They felt the same way about Tribesy, not to mention smartphones, the Internet, and life in general. Was there something about being in groups that induced paranoia? Or just being in Back Mosby?
“Gotcha,” I said. “I totally get that, just stick to the good old telephone, right? Are you a phone person? Is that a better way to reach you?”
I waited as long as I could stand, but she didn’t say anything, just stared at me with those huge hungry eyes.
Out of nowhere, I realized that the best-case scenario here was a future “Yvette Villette.” What was it lately with these girls and their names?
Whatever, she could keep her name, or we could both be Smith, who cared … “Forget phones,” I floundered on. “Good old-fashioned live conversation, right? It’d be great to talk about all this spiritual stuff, really go deep…” (Um, bad word
choice, Pete) “…I mean, just bounce things off each other…” (not better) “…sorry, what I meant is, I’m just really interested in your view of the marital act.”
She made a little gasp.
“I mean mortification!” I said. “That is totally what I meant to say. How about postcards? You have an address?”
But Yvette’s face had drained white. She was staring up over my shoulder.
I turned back, and OH MY GOSH ROGER WAS RIGHT THERE, red and fuming and right in my face…
Chapter 18
I kept to myself for the next couple of days.
I felt pretty damn terrible.
At work, Vivian tried to ask what was wrong, but I blew her off.
I could have called Ceci, but I wasn’t going to go asking for stuff after that last conversation, and anyway, she was all super busy until we were meeting next week.
Mark, of course, knew precisely how I felt — I could tell by how much he gave me space.
Literally.
When I’d walk in home after work, he’d wince and his nose would wrinkle … it was like I had permanent body order, and I was rooming with a perfume connoisseur.
He’d always struggle to give me a friendly, casual, “Hey,” but that was it. He didn’t ask what was up. And I didn’t offer. I’d had enough rejection lately.
In theory, Mark was doing his very first skip trace, hunting down Samantha so we could see whether she’d killed her daughter. You know, catch a murderer. Do our thing.
But when I was around, all that happened was some serious TV. And I totally joined in.
Here’s the thing about binge-watching — it really does make the awful go away. For hours. I could finally see the appeal.
The problem was, I had to go to bed sometime. And then, in the dark, it would all pounce on my head.
Finally, when the weekend came, Mark broke first.
We’d settled on the couch, but his finger hesitated over the remote.
“So,” he said. “It’s Friday night.”
“Yep,” I said. Tonight, I was determined to watch until I actually fell asleep. If you were going to binge, that was the missing piece.