by Tim Sandlin
I concentrated on the freckle between her nose and right eye. It was like one of those little thermometers that pop out of turkeys when they’re done. Gilia’s freckle glowed as she approached passion, such as when she raged at Ronald Reagan and the invasion of Grenada. She really cared about current events. Lydia used to be a news junkie, after she stopped drinking and before she went into feminist literature. Now, she’s a single-issue newshound. I’ve never followed the world that closely myself.
“Clark Gaines tried to kill himself in my garage last night,” I said.
Her head did the sudden cock to one side thing. “How hard did he try?”
“He made a Polish joke out of it.”
The freckle kind of spread toward the eye. That was her introspective look. “Poor kid.”
“I think I’ll call Billy this afternoon. All Clark wants is attention, but he’s liable to slip up and waste himself trying to get it.”
Gilia put both hands around a coffee cup. “I remember Clark from company picnics when I was young. He was the kid the other boys depantsed in the woods.”
“I’ve been that kid. Makes for a tough puberty.”
Judy came over to pick up our plates and tell us about the other Judy’s pinworms. We listened with interest and Gilia even asked a consistency question. Everyone needs someone who is interested in their problems, especially career waitresses, but I for one was glad I’d finished my blintz.
While I nursed a final cup—my fifth of the day—Gilia stared out the window at the damp Carolina morning. Rain had been threatening all week, and now it looked ready to dump.
“I’m free tonight,” Gilia said. “Care for a movie? Terms of Endearment is playing at Four Seasons Mall.”
It was my turn to pay. “A movie?”
“Like a date, sort of. We’ll go Dutch so neither one of us worries about strings attached.”
I studied the check closely, making certain Judy added right. “I’d love to, but tonight I can’t. There’s this CEO in from Nebraska whose country club might buy a hundred ten Shilohs, and I’m stuck with the wining and dining. If it’s over early, I’ll call.”
Gilia cocked her head and studied me a moment. Then she said, “Sounds good. Maybe we’ll hit the movie tomorrow night.”
22
Okay, I lied. Crucify me. There was no CEO from Nebraska to wine and dine, and if there had been, I sure as heck wouldn’t be the winer and diner. Schmoozing was Ambrosia’s turf.
All I can figure is maybe I was falling in love, because my strictest ethical rule is never, ever lie to a woman. Let them lie to you. Maurey wrote a letter back in college in which she explained honesty, love, and sex. She wrote: “Sam, I’ve discovered how to seduce anyone I want. If you don’t love them, act like you do, and if you do love them, act like you don’t.”
So, by lying to Gilia, what I actually did was prove my love for her. I only hoped she saw it that way when I got caught.
***
The direct cause for my lie was Katrina Prescott’s birthday. Within minutes after Skip threatened me by phone Saturday, he and Sonny left for the Sport Shoe Trade Show in Atlanta. Every year they spent the first week of November in Atlanta, staying abreast of new developments in footwear—and drink and fornication, according to Katrina—and every year Katrina threw a hissy fit because Halloween was her birthday.
And Friday, in a moment of post-orgasmic pity, I’d promised Katrina she didn’t have to spend another birthday alone. The poor woman wanted a spark of out-front, formal celebration—something more traditional than bondage stunts with a stranger in a Ramada Inn motel room. She wanted to dress nice and eat in a public place with civilized lighting and table service. That’s not asking so much for a birthday.
She applied pressure and I said yes. I haven’t said no to a woman yet. No reason to think I’d start on a birthday wish.
***
Gaylene stormed across the Magic Cart Company parking lot, demanding to know who this Vernon Scharp was who’d shown up saying I promised him a job.
“He’s a process server.”
“And how does serving processes qualify him to build golf carts?”
“I felt sorry for him,” I said. “Bringing people bad news must be a sad way to make a living.”
Gaylene stared up at me and twitched. She’s fifty or so and about four ten, and the plant workers are scared to death of her. Much of my fear of fiery little women stems from Gaylene.
“You plan on hiring every sad case you feel sorry for?” she asked. “Because if you are, I’m going to work for R. J. Reynolds.”
I’d hoped to mention Babs and Lynette, but this didn’t seem the time. “I won’t do it again.”
“Write the checks, Sam. Leave running the shop to me.”
***
Mrs. Gaines told me Billy was in Atlanta at the Sport Shoe Trade Show. I’d never met the woman and didn’t know if Billy had told her my story, so I felt funny about saying, “I’m your husband’s bastard son and your legitimate son tried to kill himself in my garage last night.” There’d been enough life-shattering conversations lately; I couldn’t handle another one.
“What should I tell Billy this is in reference to?” she asked.
“His name came up as a possible judge in the Coke versus Pepsi competition.”
“Billy only drinks root beer. Caffeine makes him irritable.”
“I’ll make a note of that.”
***
Moses Cone Hospital was only too happy to accept my credit card. I talked to a woman in patient billing and I’m not sure but I thought I heard a smirk behind her voice. The whole staff was probably gossiping about the man who fathered two babies in one day.
She asked my relationship to the patients and I said, “Benefactor.”
***
Next I called the Dyn-o-Mite Novelty Company to cancel the As-God-Is-My-Witness bumper sticker. So much for my anti-monogamy pledge. From now on side sex would be fraught with guilt, which is how it should be, I suppose.
***
Wanda’s voice crackled. “Have you no gratitude?”
“Hi, honey.”
“After all I sacrificed for us as a couple, you have the unmitigated gall to break into my home and steal my property.”
“My property, actually.”
“You did me wrong, Sam, and now you owe me.”
“I notice you saved the autographed copy of The Shortstop Kid. Freud would take that as a sign you still love me.”
“The novels are trash, Sam. Only a whore writes genre fiction.”
“I saw your little video setup.”
Wanda’s controlled breathing oozed over the line. “My Art Erotica is none of your business.”
“Haul me into court and we’ll let the judge decide who’s creating art and who’s a whore.” I couldn’t help but wonder how charging Sam’s and Sammi’s births on my credit card would go over at a divorce hearing. Didn’t take a writer’s imagination to foresee messiness.
“I know you too well, Sam. You don’t have the balls to fight me.”
“Want to bet?”
She hung up.
***
Shirley poked her head through my office door.
“A man’s roaming the halls, looking for you.”
“I’m not here. Send him to whoever I would send him to if I was here.”
She scowled as if I’d insulted her intelligence. “I already did. He says he has to meet with you, personally. He looks like a politician.”
“Oh, God, it’s Cameron Saunders.”
“Should I tell him to go away?”
“Hell.” My mind raced through the boundless implications. Unlike Skip Prescott, who ran on heat and steam, Cameron wasn’t the type you could dodge until he lost interest. “Send him in.”
Tall, bald Cameron glided in on Cole Haan shoes. I own a pair, but I’m not pretentious so I don’t wear them. Cameron wore a three-piece suit that fit him perfectly and a tie so tasteful I could spit.
He said, “Mr. Callahan.”
I said, “Mr. Saunders.”
He stepped forward and spread a deck of Polaroid prints across my desk. I picked up the one on my far left, carefully, by the borders, so as not to smudge the picture of Katrina and me entering room 247 of the Ramada Inn. They all followed the same vein—Katrina and me coming out of room 247 with her hand on my butt, Katrina in her red-and-white cheerleader outfit, walking into the Manor House, a through-the-window shot of Katrina dancing while I hang naked on the wall with a pom-pom on my crotch. In each photo, she was smiling and I wasn’t.
“You hired another detective,” I said.
Cameron flashed his ice blue smile, smug as a snake on a rat. “Frankly, my man was following Katrina. You came as something of a bonus.”
I stood up and moved to the window. From behind a row of pines, a Piedmont Airlines plane lifted off, headed west, where I should have been.
Cameron spoke to my back. “My ambition is to run for Congress, for a start.”
“I knew you were a politician.”
“And I cannot afford a business partner whose wife causes scandals.”
“What does Skip think of you spying on his wife?”
“Skip doesn’t think.”
“He doesn’t know.” I watched the weather and waited for whatever was coming next. The problem, as I saw it, was I’d let myself fall into the hands of an unethical man who hated me while I loved his daughter. I smiled at my reflection in the window; that was nice, I loved his daughter.
Cameron leaned forward with three fingers forming a tripod on my desk. “Bottom line, buster. You are to leave Greensboro. You are never to speak of the incident in question to anyone. No newspapers. No TV. You better not even tell a priest, because I will find out and I will destroy you.”
One last look at the plane disappearing west, then I turned to face him. “Did you think to ask politely? I never intended going on TV.”
“This matter cannot be left to a bastard’s discretion. Politics is expensive, the party cannot risk you turning wise-ass the week before an election.”
“That’ll be the Republican Party?”
He said, “I needn’t spell out the consequences.”
“Spell them out anyway.”
“Skip Prescott.” Cameron’s upper lip glistened with a light film of sweat. I’d seen the same film on Gilia and thought it lovely.
“To tell the truth, Mr. Saunders, I’m not afraid of Skip. What exactly could he do?”
“His money can hire you a gob of grief.”
“My money can sue his shorts off.”
Cameron strummed his fingers as he studied the photos. His eyes came up to meet mine. “Gilia.”
Got me cold. “Why would Gilia care what I do?”
His laugh was bitter. “Nothing in my political career is being left to chance.”
“You’re spying on your own daughter?” No way could a man this sleazy be my father.
“For some inexplicable reason, she has developed a trust in you. Consider how these photographs will affect that trust.”
Since the bald buzzard wasn’t Dad, that cleared up the incest problem, at least as far as sister went. She could still be a cousin. None of it would mean squat when Cameron showed her the pictures.
“That’s a lousy way to use your daughter.”
He shrugged. “I am protecting her.”
“If I had proof my daughter’s boyfriend was a pervert, I wouldn’t blackmail him. I’d tell her.”
He smiled again. “That would do away with my leverage, wouldn’t it?”
***
The numbness started in my solar plexus and spread in and up until all the major organs were desensitized. This sort of thing happens when you live by your own private version of right and wrong and say to hell with everyone else’s values. I’d justified Katrina on the grounds that I was not yet promised to Gilia, but when it came time for Gilia to know the score, my justification stank.
I made it into the executive bathroom, fully intending to vomit, but as I knelt over the toilet bowl I remembered my novel Bucky on Half Dome in the tank. Even though a few pages had curled about the flush mechanism to the point where they disintegrated on touch, most of the manuscript surfaced more or less whole. I cradled the sopping mess in my arms and carefully carried it to my desk, where I cleared a space by tossing Wanda’s picture in the trash.
Shirley poked her head back through the door. “What did the politician want?”
“Blackmail.”
“I should have thought of that years ago.” When I didn’t laugh, Shirley went away.
The typewriter ink hadn’t smeared, but my handwritten notes in the margins had. I read the page where Bucky assures Samantha’s mother that their trip holds no danger. Tension between Samantha and her mother runs through all the Bucky books.
Peeling the sheets apart required concentration—not my strong suit, at the moment. Fifteen minutes’ work brought back six legible pages, then I gave it up as a waste of time. Even nauseous, I knew I was only pulling the past out of the toilet because Cameron had mangled the future. And the past itself was shot; the book had gone underwater in the first place after Wanda spoiled my memories. Which left nothing but the present, and right now the present wasn’t so all-fired wonderful either.
***
What I needed was advice from someone simple. Complex people get so distracted by looking four moves ahead that they’re frozen when it comes to what to do next. Slow thinkers make faster decisions.
So I headed for the hospital. Not that Babs and Lynette were slow, as in stupid; they just knew the worth of intellect, which doesn’t rate too high compared to other functions.
First stop was the viewing window by the nurses’ station. Sam and Sammi lay next to each other in clear, Plexiglas bassinets with crib safety instructions on the side. They both wore white knit hats and had rose-petal eyelids. I could tell which was which by the rubber bulb thing the nurses use to clear gunk from babies’ noses. Sam’s was blue, Sammi’s pink. I pretended they were forty-three and called me Dad. I would be seventy-six.
Two doors down the hall, Babs and Lynette sat propped up in bed, wearing billowy purple nightgowns, sucking Coca-Cola through hospital straws and watching The Bold and the Beautiful on the wall-mounted TV. When they saw me they both squealed and broke into labor and birth stories.
“Dr. Hayse told me I was the bravest girl he’d ever seen,” Lynette said.
Babs flounced on her pillow. “He said the very same thing to me too. I bet he says that to ever’one.”
“Be just like a man.”
I talked. I hadn’t meant to when I walked into the room, and I’m not certain how I got started, all I know is the whole story poured out—from Christmas 1949 to Cameron calling his daughter “Leverage.” The first few minutes Lynette split her attention between me and the soap, but by the end I had both girls rapt. It was the longest uninterrupted speech I’ve ever made to a woman.
When I was done, I sighed once and waited for their verdict.
Hearing it aloud made me realize how tawdry I was. The girls could condemn or shun me; they still had time to change Sam’s and Sammi’s names. Whatever they did, I deserved it.
Lynette sucked air off the bottom of her Coke can. “Shoot,” she said. “That happens all the time on TV.”
“All the time?” I hate it when my problems aren’t unique.
“Not all the time,” Babs said. “Not exactly like you told it. But nobody knows who their folks are and someone’s all the time threatening to expose someone else.”
“So what do people on TV do?”
Babs giggled. “The dumbest thing they can think up.”
Lynette nodded. “People on TV are stupid.”
“Any geek knows what you should do,” Babs said.
I didn’t get it. If any geek knew the answer, why didn’t I? Novelists are supposed to understand the human plight.
Lynette sa
id, “Dump the woman you don’t like and beg forgiveness from the one you do.”
Babs added, “Only you better confess before her daddy spills the beans. If he tells, you’re in deep doo-doo.”
I considered the advice. It had to be good; no one who says doo-doo has hidden motives. Besides, nothing I’d tried had worked.
“If you were Gilia and I confessed and begged your forgiveness, would you forgive me?”
Lynette looked at Babs, who thought a moment, then said, “Fat chance.”
23
Catharsis comes from the ancient Greek word καζαιρω, which literally translated means “to pass a hard stool.” That evening as I stood in my room dressing for the appointment with Katrina, I passed a hard stool. It was inspired by what Lynette said about soap opera characters always doing the stupidest thing possible.
As a kid, I lived for books. I inhaled every book I could lay my hands on, from Nancy Drew to Hemingway and beyond. Books were real; social reality was a bother. Tom Swift and Peter Pan were stronger, faster, smarter, and morally superior to anyone I saw in person; therefore whenever I faced a situation I learned to take the course my heroes would have taken.
Here comes the catharsis: Fictional people don’t make logical choices, they go with whatever is most interesting for the story. And stupid mistakes are much more interesting than wise conduct. Which means that when it comes time to decide the future, I—deliberately—am stupid.
Marrying Wanda to save her was interesting, but stupid. Searching for five fathers, eating Katrina, adopting strangers’ babies—all interesting but stupid. I’d found a motto. Or better yet, the inscription for my tombstone: Sam Callahan was interesting, but stupid.
***
Realizing a fatal flaw in your character and fixing that flaw are separate matters. My first choice under the boring-but-right system would be what to wear tonight. Going as a slob would show disrespect for Katrina and her birthday, but dressing upscale might be taken as a sign we’re dating. Didn’t want to send the wrong message. I finally decided on fairly new Levi’s, a button-up, tuck-in Banana Republic shirt, and a sports coat Shannon bought at the Burlington Factory Outlet store. I considered cowboy boots, but that felt like too much. After all, this was a breakup.