by Paul Heald
Maria waved and pointed him out to her friends as she passed by. One of them, a black girl with elaborately braided and beaded hair fell down as she turned to glance back at him. Unabashed, she picked herself up quickly and rejoined hands with her partners. Looking around the rink, he tried to determine the age at which Clarkeston children started to segregate themselves by race. Hand holding seemed to stop around six or seven, but mixed race groups of skaters persisted through the ten- and eleven-year-olds. Older adolescents and adults no longer came to the rink together, but they did acknowledge each other in a friendly fashion and chatted in line at the snack bar. Arthur concluded that people got along better in Clarkeston than his home town in Iowa. He doubted his friends’ mothers would have let their children go to a rink where a third of the skaters were black.
When Maria started to tire, she came to sit next to him, and he soon found himself surrounded by a bevy of little girls swinging their skates back and forth and interrogating him.
“How come you’re not skating with us?”
“Are you Maria’s father?”
“Did you see me fall down on my butt?”
“What kind of car do you have?”
They peppered him with questions until Jeannie waved them all over to a carpeted door at the far side of the rink that led to tables covered with cake and presents.
When the hostess declined his offer to help, he sat down to cake and ice cream with the kids and regaled them with stories of his years on the professional skating circuit. They were fascinated, their moms were amused, and he got a second helping of cake. Why did his brother always complain about attending kiddie parties? Apart from some temporary hearing loss caused by an especially loud rendition of “YMCA” the outing was more enjoyable than his usual Saturday morning. He and Maria stayed until the end of the affair, and he washed down the sweets with a cup of coffee from the snack bar as Maria made a few final circuits before her legs gave out.
The little girl was too full of cake to be interested in lunch, so they drove straight to Judy’s house. Her head bobbed drowsily against the back of her seat until she fell asleep against the sun-baked fabric, leaving Arthur in silence to reflect on the strange places his career was leading him.
XII.
GARDENING AT NIGHT
The shock absorbers of Arthur’s Plymouth groaned loudly as they clipped the curb on the turn into Judy’s driveway. He noticed Suzanne watching from the window as he helped Maria with her seat belt. As soon as she was released, she was wide awake and racing into the backyard.
“We’re here!” she cried as she jumped into a plastic turtle sandbox occupied by Judy’s daughter. Arthur left them to their Tonka back-hoes and steam shovels and met Suzanne at the back door.
“We survived,” he said. “I think she had a pretty good time. Lots of cake and ice cream … no broken bones.”
“Thanks again, Arthur.” She gave him a warm smile and checked on Maria with a quick glance. “Now come in and see what we’ve done. There’s beer in the fridge.”
He grabbed a couple of cold bottles, and she led him toward the sound of rustling paper in a corner room at the back of the house. Judy was hanging a muted floral pattern over a ghastly shade of purple.
“Very nice!” he commented as she stretched to hold the edge of a sheet of paper flush to the ceiling.
“Well, thank you,” she replied tartly, “but how do you like the paper?”
Suzanne laughed, a lilting song extended by Arthur’s failure to muster a good comeback.
“Have you ever done this before?” Judy asked.
“No, just some painting.”
“Then why don’t you just sit down and watch while you drink your beer.”
Seeing no chairs, he leaned against the wall and sank down to the floor. “How come the wallpaper only goes two-thirds of the way down the wall from the ceiling?”
“I’m gonna to run a chair rail around the room at about thirty-six inches,” Judy explained, “and then touch up the chipped spots in this horrible purple.”
“Why keep the purple if it’s horrible?”
“It’s the original paint color for the room and shows how weird people’s tastes were back in the twenties.” She laughed. “People used really outrageous colors. It’ll be a good conversation piece for the room.”
He spent the rest of the afternoon at Judy’s house, learning how to paper and fetching the girls Kool-Aid and ice cream sandwiches when their moms’ hands were messy. While Suzanne and Judy cleaned up, he retired to the patio and had another beer as the shadows crept over the backyard. The women soon emerged from the house with a small cooler, and he listened to their tales of motherhood and genteel poverty. They were refreshingly different from the people he had been to law school with. Their easy intimacy was world’s away from the status-conscious pontificating that passed for conversation between law students. Judy asked him how many brothers and sisters he had, but not where he went to college.
“Why don’t you let me treat you all to pizza?” he suggested gratefully. “And if I order from Pizza Villa, they’ll deliver more beer and soda for the girls too.”
“Where did you find this guy?” Judy teased Suzanne as she got up to show him the phone. Once dinner arrived, they ate on the floor of the newly papered dining room and sucked down more beer to replace the fluids that the unairconditioned house had drained out of them.
“So what band are you going to see?” Judy asked.
“Hillbilly Dracula. Have you seen ’em?”
“Nah, but I read about them in the Flagpole.” She shook her head. “But any band that’s supposed to be a marriage of Elvis and the Clash can’t be all bad. I wish I could come with you guys.” She bent down and picked up the empty pizza boxes. “I haven’t been out forever.”
“Why don’t you? Is there someone who could sit for both the girls?”
“Maybe Louise?” Suzanne suggested. “She owes you big time for when Sheena was sick.”
“I’ll pay for it,” Arthur offered.
“No, it’s getting late, and I’ve got some more work to do. And besides, unlike your date, Arthur, I gotta do more than just run a brush through my hair to look gorgeous. It takes me hours just to achieve mediocre. Now, get out of here, or you’re going to miss the show.” With a wink at her friend, Judy pushed Suzanne and Arthur out of the house.
As they walked to the bar, Arthur wondered whether Suzanne thought they were out on a date. Trying to define the term had led to a memorable spat with his ex-wife years before.
“In my opinion,” he had argued, “a person is not on a date unless he or she is open to romance with the person they are with.”
“So,” Julia had replied, “under your definition, one person could be on a date while the other one isn’t.”
“Exactly … and that would explain some shitty dates people have.”
“Sorry, but I prefer the definition used by every woman I know: if a woman is out alone with a man for an evening, then she’s on a date.”
“Well, then many virtuous women would be surprised to learn that they continued to date even after they were married.” And the argument had gone downhill from there.
* * *
Arthur had drunk to the pleasant point where he didn’t care whether Suzanne would side with him or Julia on the definition of dating. She seemed utterly unbothered by the ambiguous status of their outing. As a widow and a mother, the danger of petty embarrassment seemed beyond her. She did not need Arthur to entertain her, nor did she seem concerned about his intentions. They walked the twelve blocks to the Wild Boar with scarcely a lull in the conversation.
Talking was impossible once they entered the building. The band rocked frenetically, and the small dance floor was crowded with bodies slamming into one another. They squeezed their way to the bar and leaned against it while the band churned out high-quality Clash covers and their own unique combination of thrash and rock-a-billy (thrash-a-billy?). He had heard them by acc
ident a few weeks earlier when a happy hour rendezvous with Phil extended into an evening sound check.
He looked over at Suzanne and inclined his head in the direction of the mayhem to see if she wanted to join in. She nodded cautiously in response. As the music jolted every shred of self-consciousness from his body, he grabbed her hand and pulled her closer to the band. He was an awkward dancer, but nothing much like dancing was happening at the Wild Boar that night. Nobody had enough space to do more than bounce up and down, but even that limited art form was interrupted by the domino scrumming of those who had trouble staying upright. Unlike punk clubs in New York and Los Angeles, no one was intentionally throwing punches or NFL-quality blocks, but they were buffeted about the floor, roughly to the beat of the music, until the crowd spit them out like a watermelon seed into the hallway leading to the kitchen and bathrooms.
Suzanne rested her hand on his shoulder and pushed the hair off of her damp forehead. “I haven’t done that for a long time,” she yelled in his ear. “I’m getting too old for this!”
“Do you want to go?” He thumbed in the direction of the door, but she shook her head and slipped off to visit the ladies’ room.
From the hallway, the band’s manic stage show was framed by the edges of the door and the bobbing heads of the crowd. The music ran through Arthur’s veins, picking up oxygen in his lungs and pumping through every artery of his body with monster truck force. He felt like Superman … No, I am Clerk Kent: Able to leap piles of briefs in a single bound, faster than a snap decision, more powerful than the Federal Judiciary Committee. Super Clerk, with his faithful sidekick Judgeling, was civilization’s last hope against the devastating forces of anti-lawyer public opinion, the greatest threat to democracy the world has ever known.
“What are you smiling at?” Suzanne sneaked her arm around his waist and yelled in his ear.
Before he could reply, the opening guitar licks of “White Riot” snatched him and propelled both of them back out onto the dance floor where they shared in the group seizure until the band finished its set. When the last encore was over and the houselights were turned on, they spilled out onto the street and gulped in fresh air. They sat on the curb between two cars and waited for their ears to stop ringing. He could see the street lights twinkling in Suzanne’s eyes.
“Thanks so much for taking me out tonight! I can’t even remember the last time I heard a band … or danced for that matter—if you want to call that dancing.”
“But this town is so full of great music. You must go out all the time!”
“Well, it’s hard to get a sitter for Maria, and it’s no fun—and not super safe—to go out to the bars at night alone.”
“But you must have a line of guys three deep begging to take you out.”
“You are so sweet.” She gave him a peck on the cheek. “And so utterly full of shit that your eyes are brown.” She laughed. “In case you hadn’t noticed, the ideal southern woman is rather slimmer than me and comes without a jabbering four-year old.” She set forth the cultural facts without a trace of self-pity. She wasn’t seeking consolation, so he offered none.
“Well, these brown eyes better start moving or they’ll be waking up in the gutter. Can I escort you home, Madame?”
“Absolutely.” She pulled herself up on his arm and leaned against him as they walked away.
* * *
Suzanne tried to remember the last date she had been on. It must have been sometime before getting married, but then she remembered Frank from the preschool. He was divorced and picked up his daughter every other Friday. A dinner and a movie had led to some awkward groping in his living room, where he had insisted on playing Barry White on his stereo to “set the mood.” She found excuses for his subsequent overtures, and he had quietly faded into the background.
“I think I’ve danced off enough beer to be safe to drive us home from Judy’s,” Arthur offered.
She smiled at him and wondered what to do next. Arthur was difficult to figure out. He was intense and intelligent—all the Judge’s clerks were high-fliers—but he honestly seemed to like Maria and seemed perfectly happy to spend the day talking with two moms about everything except law. He gave no indication that he expected a romantic interlude as a reward. Unlike the typical lawyer, he seemed to be comfortable with her calling the shots. Which brought her back to the original question about what to do next.
“We don’t have to go back to Judy’s,” she said. “Maria can sleep over, and I don’t see any reason to wake her up this late just to put her in her own bed.”
They strolled through campus, talking quietly about music and listening to the hum of the tree frogs and locusts. The moonlight shone on the river as they walked over it and into their neighborhood. The house was dark as they approached.
“You want to sit out on the porch?” he asked.
“It’s kinda buggy. Why don’t we sit and watch videos instead?” MTV was still enough of a novelty to interest viewers whose complexions were clear, and it followed naturally from their prior conversation about the relative merits of INXS and R.E.M. and the drivel produced by Debbie Gibson and her clones.
After a few minutes in the kitchen, Suzanne emerged with two coffees and plopped down beside Arthur to watch Billy Idol zap zombies off a high rise and Peter Gabriel shock a troupe of monkeys. She muted the sound when the commercials started.
“Is working with the Judge what you expected, Arthur?”
“I don’t know,” he said after a short pause. “Some of my classmates from law school have great relationships with their judges, dinners at their homes, stuff like that … I just find the Judge a little difficult to cuddle up to.”
“He wasn’t always that way.” She looked at him and tried to explain. His intense brown eyes stopped her, and she knew that if she got lost in them, she would do something foolish. She brushed her hair past her ear and glanced at him. He was stretched out on the sofa, lean and languid. What would he do if she ran her hand underneath his shirt?
“The Judge was one of my father’s old law partners. He was a lot of fun when I was a kid, but I haven’t seen much of him since Daddy died.” She sighed. “There’s been something uncomfortable about him for a long time. I can’t really put it into words.”
“So, I’m not just being paranoid? Phil doesn’t understand what I’m talking about. He thinks the Judge is some kind of a foster father.”
“Every year someone finds a father figure in the Judge. He has more clerk children named after him than he can possibly remember at Christmas time.” She sighed again. “I don’t get it. I love him, but I gave up trying to figure him out a long time ago.”
As they drained their mugs, their butts sank lower into the spongy mush of the aging divan, finally fusing comfortably at the hip. While they watched and tried in vain to develop some objective criteria for judging the new video art form, they became progressively more wedged together. When Arthur made a lazy attempt to put his empty cup on the coffee table underneath their feet, he listed heavily toward Suzanne, landing his chest in her lap and bonking his head on the far armrest. He struggled to extricate himself and finally slid his legs off the coffee table, pushing hard with both hands on her armrest until he flopped back to his side.
Suzanne turned and laughed. “That may be the clumsiest pass anyone has ever made at me!” She found her lips mere inches from his as he rebounded with a grunt against her shoulder. She smiled and looked deeply into his eyes, signaling that he was equally free to offer a snappy come back or to kiss her. Arthur leaned over and pressed his lips against hers and lingered for a long moment.
“Wow,” he whispered.
“Hmmm … pretty good ….” This time she took his face in her hands and pressed close against him, parting her lips slightly, tilting her head, his breath beery sweet and coffee bitter, her mouth soft and urgent. They came up for air at the same time and kissed lightly just to reestablish contact, but that kiss lingered and soon they were rolling on the s
ofa, reaching for each other like a couple of teenagers home alone for the first time.
* * *
“Maybe I should shut the door,” Arthur gasped. “What if Mr. Bernson came down?”
“Lock it.”
In truth, he didn’t know what he really wanted to happen. Julia was the only woman he had ever slept with, so his experience was full of gaps. Logic dictated caution, but after weeks of being rational at work and after months of over-thinking every aspect of his failed marriage, the need to be irrational overwhelmed his common sense. He had not brought a condom. As he walked back to the sofa, she stood up and met him with a seductive embrace.
“Uh, I’m really embarrassed to admit this,” he whispered, “but I don’t have any protection.” He moaned as her fingers stymied further coherent thought.
“That’s good,” she said contentedly as his pants slipped toward to the floor.
“Huh?”
“That means you didn’t expect this to happen. You didn’t spend all night being handsome and charming just to get me into bed. You’re really sweet.”
“Really sweet?”
“Um hmmmm.” As his worries about birth control faded, she pushed him back down onto the couch and reduced him to a quivering mass of nerve endings. After a few ecstatic minutes, she broke contact, and he opened his eyes to find her slipping her jeans past her knees and ankles and onto the floor.
“But …”
“Shhhh …” She straddled him, rocking back and forth slowly. “I ovulated two weeks ago … it’s okay.”
One final scrap of rationality remained, a testament to an effective Sunday school program or a gifted sex education teacher.
“How do you know?”
As she laughed, she squeezed him deep inside her.
“Didn’t you notice that blemish on my chin two weeks ago? I always feel a little twinge and get a big zit when I ovulate.”