“Grandpa Bill, Grandpa Bill, I was playing Sonic and I got three more lives,” Walker said.
“Three more? Three is three-mendous,” I said. I had no idea what he meant, but if he was pleased, I was pleased.
He giggled. “Tree-mendous, silly.”
“Three is nothin’,” said Tyler. “I got seven.”
“Oh yeah? I got…I got seventy-seventy-seven,” said Walker.
“Did not. Besides, there ain’t no such number, poopy-breath.”
“Tyler Brockton,” came a warning voice from the kitchen. “Isn’t any such number. And no name-calling, or no computer.” Jeff’s wife Jenny appeared in the doorway holding a pizza box in one hand and a Diet Coke in the other. “Hey there,” she said. “We got in from a soccer match in Oak Ridge about two minutes ago. Will you eat some Big Ed’s with us?”
“Sure,” I said, “if there’s enough.”
“More than enough,” she said. “Jeff just called; he’s bogged down in some surgeon’s huge tax return-big surprise, huh? — so he probably won’t be home for a couple more hours. You can have his share. Walker, let go of Grandpa Bill’s legs so he can move. Tyler, you come help me set the table.”
I set Tyler down, and he staggered into the kitchen as if it required his last ounce of strength. Actually, considering the way boys tend to run hard until the moment they give out completely, that might have been the case.
Jenny moved around the kitchen with an easy, athletic grace. She had played soccer in both high school and college; she, not Jeff, was the parent who helped coach the kids’ teams. By training and trade, she was a graphic designer; she worked part-time, freelance, from an office over the garage. I’d seen some of her pieces-mostly corporate brochures, but some magazine ads and even a few album covers-and liked them. From a distance, they looked like thousands of other pieces of commercial art: children and dogs, perfect couples, rolling farmland in buttery light. But when you actually looked at them, something small and quirky always caught the eye and prompted a smile: a doggie treat in a kid’s mouth, a piece of corn wedged in a husband’s smile, a cow squirting out a fresh pie in one corner of the pasture. The deadpan humor was Jenny’s approach to life and marriage and motherhood, as best I could tell, and I knew it had been good for Jeff. Jenny loosened up the tidy, stuffy streak that allowed Jeff to spend two thousand hours a year happily adding and subtracting digits that represented other people’s money.
The pizza-extra cheese, extra pepperoni-had a thin but yeasty crust, dusted underneath with cornmeal. Big Ed’s Pizza had been an institution in the nearby town of Oak Ridge for as long as I’d been in Knoxville. It was housed in a cavernous, high-ceilinged building that dated back to the town’s Manhattan Project days, and it looked like the floors hadn’t been refinished, and possibly hadn’t been swept, since the atomic bomb was dropped on Japan. Big Ed himself had died a few years back, but his blocky caricature and his signature line-“I make my own dough”-remained on the job, as did the recipe for his memorable crust. The pizza was heavy, greasy, and extremely good. We ate fast and appreciatively.
“I haven’t seen your name in the paper lately,” Jenny said, taking a third slice. “Things pretty quiet in the seamy underbelly these days?”
“Things are never quiet in the seamy underbelly. Just quiet in the press, thank goodness.”
“What’s an underbelly?” asked Tyler.
“This is an underbelly,” I said, and reached down and tickled him.
“Where’s my underbelly?” Walker asked, so I tickled him, too.
I asked Jenny about her recent projects, which were safer dinnertime fodder than my work. The winter had been slow, but she had just landed a contract to design a collection of brochures and ads for UT, which was launching a billion-dollar fund-raising drive. “Be sure you use some good photos of my research subjects,” I said.
“I like it,” she mused. “Tell folks if they don’t pony up, this is the fate that awaits them. I think the money would roll right in.” Then she shared war stories from a photo shoot with the UT herd of dairy cattle. Apparently, getting that photo I’d seen of the rolling pastures and the pooping cow took multiple shoots. “Who’d have thought, with all those cows, it would take us a whole week and the magic of PhotoShop to get that pooping cow in the picture?”
“Poopy cow, poopy cow,” crowed Walker.
“You’re the poopy cow,” said Tyler.
“Huh-uh, you’re the poopy cow.”
“I hope,” I said, “we’re not having chocolate ice cream for dessert.”
“Ooooh,” said everyone.
Jenny finally hauled us back to civility. “Tyler, do you want to tell Grandpa Bill about the project you’re doing for school?”
“Sure,” he said. “It’s a PowerPoint about sea turtles.”
A PowerPoint? The kid was in second grade. I had tried making a PowerPoint presentation once, and I ended up needing a new hard drive in my computer. “Sea turtles? I like sea turtles. Can I see it?”
“’Course,” he said. “C’mon.” I followed him into the den, where Walker had already settled into a video game involving some whirling, twirling, spiky-furred creature. Sonic, I presumed, living his three more lives at warp speed.
Tyler clicked the mouse on the Apple computer sitting on a table in the den, and the big flat-panel display-which until recently had been Jenny’s graphic-design monitor-came alive. The screen’s background image consisted of a collage of photos of Tyler and Walker from babyhood on. In one close-up, Walker stared, transfixed, at a monarch butterfly perched on his index finger; in another, Tyler peered out from behind an enormous sphere of purple bubble gum, half the size of his head. Every photo showed a child alive with wonder, and I suddenly felt a stab of fear and sadness. All that joy and innocence reminded me of the two other children whose faces I’d seen on computer monitors just a few hours before: the young boy and girl being sexually abused by a paunchy, middle-aged man.
It took everything I had to focus on Tyler’s slideshow about sea turtles-their long lives, the remarkable homing instincts and nesting habits of the females, the way many of the species were being driven to extinction by hunting and beachfront development. Finally he finished, and I praised his work extravagantly and excused myself. I found Jenny in the kitchen, packing the next day’s school lunches. “Can I ask you something?”
She looked at me closely. “Sure; what’s wrong? You look upset.”
“I’ve gotten a little too close to the seamy underbelly lately,” I said. “My friend Art is working on Internet crimes against children-he’s chasing down pedophiles who troll for kids online.” She looked upset now, too. “We didn’t have to worry about this when Jeff was growing up, thank God. How do you deal with that kind of threat, and that kind of fear?”
“Eternal vigilance,” she said. “I love the Internet; I couldn’t do what I do, the way I do it and where I do it, without e-mail and Google and all those other things. But cybertechnology is the best of tools and the worst of tools. Besides allowing people to do things faster and better than ever, it allows people to do things faster and worse than ever. Including letting kids get in way over their heads way before they realize it.”
“I know you can’t put the genie back in the bottle, but how do you protect the kids? I mean, I don’t do that much on the Internet, but even so, I’m always getting e-mails promising to enlarge my penis or show me girls gone wild. Are there ways to filter that stuff out, keep kids from seeing it?”
She made a face. “In theory. We’ve tried both CyberPatrol and Net Nanny, which promise to block that kind of stuff. But the reality is, even if they’re ninety-nine percent effective, which they’re not, even one percent of what’s out there is an enormous amount of smut. Hell, you know me, Bill; I’m a free-speech advocate, I give to Planned Parenthood and the ACLU, and I opposed the death penalty until I started to hear about the kinds of people whose handiwork you end up dealing with. But I swear, bleeding-heart liberal
though I am, the parent in me thinks we need to get a whole lot more restrictive about what’s on the Internet.”
“I agree,” I said. “But meanwhile, what do you do to protect Tyler and Walker?”
“We don’t let them go into chat rooms. We don’t let them download files-if they come across some reference to something they need, Jeff or I will download it for them. We only let them e-mail with a very limited group of friends-we’ve created a list of approved contacts, and the computer blocks anything to or from anybody who’s not on that list. Mostly, though, we try to keep a pretty close eye on what they’re doing-that’s why neither one of them will ever have a computer in their bedroom. Not till they’re in college, anyhow.”
“Sounds like you’re being super careful.”
“We are,” she said, “but we can’t be with them all the time. They have computer access at school, at the library, at friends’ houses. We do our best to make sure those places are pretty strict, too, but sooner or later they’re bound to get curious and get into stuff I wish they wouldn’t. All we can do is hope and pray that by that time, they’re pretty well grounded.”
CHAPTER 6
I HEARD A SHARP rap at my front door, but before I could get there, the door rattled open and Jess Carter’s voice rang out, “Bill? I’m here and I’m hungry. Where are you? Or where’s the food?”
“Back here in the kitchen,” I called. “Straight back.” Her boots clomped on the slate floor of the entryway. I realize it’s just a function of the materials used to make the heels, but I’ve always found it fascinating that women’s shoes tend to announce themselves so much more loudly than men’s. The designers’ strategy, if that’s what it is, works well, at least on me.
She appeared in the kitchen doorway holding a cloth shopping bag in each hand. She set them down on the granite counter. “You still a teetotaler?” I nodded. “As I suspected. I came prepared.” She reached into one of the bags, pulling out a fifth of vodka and a bottle of cranberry juice cocktail.
“What’s in the other bag? After-dinner cigars?”
She made a face. “Yuck, no. Something much tastier. You mentioned steak and asparagus and potatoes, but you didn’t promise dessert.” She fished a low, wide box out of the other bag. The picture showed a golden brown fruit pie, which the label proclaimed as “Razzleberry.”
“What kind of berry’s a razzleberry?” I asked. “Never heard of it.”
“Them,” she said. “Two kinds, raspberry and blackberry. Good on their own, fabulous together. The perfect couple, you might say. Much like us.” She faced me dead-on and raised her left eyebrow by what seemed to be an inch, while the right remained perfectly stationary.
I laughed. “How’d you do that?”
“What, this?” She did it again, this time with her right eyebrow.
“Yeah. That’s amazing. How’d you learn to do that?”
“Diligent practice. While the other med students were dissecting cadavers, I was perfecting facial gymnastics in the mirror. Honing indispensable skills like this.” One side of her mouth suddenly turned upward in a big smile; the other side drooped in an exaggerated, clownlike frown; it was as if invisible hands were tugging in opposite directions on either side of her face. I shook my head in astonishment. “It’s just muscle isolation,” she said. “Like belly-dancing, only higher-brow.” She did the eyebrow again to underscore the pun.
I tried to duplicate the maneuver. I felt my whole face contort with the effort. She grimaced in mock horror. I took another run at it; this time, I felt my scalp shifting and my ears twitching. “Ow. I think I just pulled a muscle I didn’t know I had.”
She shook her head and patted my arm. “There, there. We all have our special talents. I’m sure you’ll discover yours one of these days.”
“Hmph,” I said. “Now you’re patronizing me.”
“Everybody needs a patron,” she said.
I opened the cabinet and pulled out a tall glass, then filled it with ice cubes from the freezer and handed it to her. She set it on the counter and half filled it with vodka, which she topped off with cranberry juice.
“You don’t need to measure?”
“It’s not chemistry lab,” she said. “Plenty of margin for error.” She took a long pull and smiled happily. “Ah, just what the doctor ordered. You sure I can’t corrupt you?”
“Pretty sure,” I said. “I can barely keep up with you sober. I wouldn’t have a prayer if I were impaired.”
“You would if I were more impaired,” she said, taking another swig.
I took this as a sign that it was time to put the steaks on. I opened the fridge, took out the steaks, and unwrapped the white butcher paper. They were big, thick filets, nearly as tall as they were wide, wrapped in bacon. I’d picked them up at the Fresh Market, the grocery store on the edge of Sequoyah Hills. Sequoyah is Knoxville’s ritziest neighborhood, unless you count some of the suburbs to the west, in Farragut. Normally I shopped at Kroger-not the Fellini Kroger, but a far closer and far tamer one-but the Fresh Market’s meat was the best in town. It was actually worth paying Sequoyah Hills prices for.
My house was in Sequoyah Hills, but it was not of Sequoyah Hills, to borrow a prepositional distinction Jesus once made to his followers about their relationship to the world. I had an archetypally common ranch house-an extra-ordinary house, I sometimes called it-which shared a shady circle with a half dozen other ranchers. The only remarkable thing about them was the way they were surrounded by hundreds of mansions. Whenever things got dangerously ostentatious in the neighborhood-a fancy symphony party or political fund-raiser at the Versailles-like palace around the corner, attended by glittering people in formal wear-it comforted me to imagine our modest homes as pioneer wagons, circled for self-protection. If our protective circle were ever breached, it probably wouldn’t take long before every ranch house on the street got torn down and replaced with some stucco-slathered behemoth three or four times as big, crowding its property lines and its equally steroidal neighbors. Not that I was bitter or anything.
Plopping the steaks on a plate, I sprinkled both sides with salt and pepper, rubbing the seasonings in, then dashed some Worcestershire sauce on top to add a little zing.
Jess nodded approvingly. “You gonna put some sizzle in that steak?”
“Gonna try.”
“How you cooking them?”
“I’m a guy; on the grill, of course.”
“Gas or charcoal?”
“Be a waste of a good steak to cook it over gas,” I said.
“Indeed,” she said. “Gas is great for a crematorium, but a steak just cries out for the extra flavor of those charcoal carcinogens.”
“You do have an eye for the tarnished lining. Anybody ever tell you that?”
She looked down at her drink. “Ouch. Actually, I’ve been told that’s one of my special talents,” she said. She looked up again, and I could see hurt in her eyes.
“I was just joking,” I said. “Who said it that wasn’t joking? And why does it make you look so sad all of a sudden?”
“My ex-husband. My most recent ex-husband, to be clinically precise.”
“You introduced me to a lawyer husband a couple years ago; that the one?” She nodded. “How many other exes you got scattered around?”
“Just one other. If you’re only counting husbands.”
“And if I’m counting other significant others?”
She rolled her eyes. “It’d take me some thinking to tally them up. Four or five semiserious guys, and one experimental woman.”
The world had changed in the several de cades since I’d last dated, I decided. “A few months back, you told me you were happily lesbian. Was that the experiment?”
She laughed. “Naw, that was just to fend you off in case you were harboring any designs on me. You seemed so bogged down in your grief over Kathleen still, I knew you weren’t ready for anybody yet. Or maybe I just didn’t want to get tangled up in all that sadness.”
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br /> “And now?”
“Now you seem over it, or at least through the worst of it. Not exactly giddy with joie de vivre yet, but then again, that’d be a stretch for a guy in your line of work. You seem…solid now.”
“Did I seem solid a few months ago, when we had that near miss with a dinner date?”
“Solid enough,” she said, “at the center. A little gooey around the edges, maybe, but who isn’t sometimes?” As she said it, she cocked her head and shrugged slightly, and smiled not so slightly. I could have sworn I felt myself getting a little gooey around the edges but stirringly solid at my center. I took a step toward her and reached up a hand to touch her cheek. When I did, she nodded her head up and down, rubbing against my hand. I closed my eyes to concentrate on the feel of her skin. “So you didn’t mind that I invited myself to dinner to night?” My eyes still closed, I shook my head. “So why didn’t you ask me out again after I had to skip out all those months ago?”
The truth was, I’d gotten scared, but I wanted to appear more suave than that. “I was playing hard to get,” I said. As I said it, I heard my voice crack like that of a boy just hitting puberty. So much for suave. I laughed. “I’ve heard nothing interests a woman more than acting indifferent.”
I felt a palm smack my face, but it was a playful smack. I opened my eyes and saw Jess shaking her head, but she was grinning as she did it. “You are such a lying piece of shit,” she said. “You are a seriously bad liar. But a seriously good man.”
She moved closer to me and turned her face to mine. Maybe some things in the world hadn’t changed all that much, because I had no trouble interpreting an invitation to kiss her. With her boots on, her mouth was nearly at the level of mine. Just enough lower that it felt good to reach a hand around to the back of her neck, threading my fingers through her thick auburn hair.
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