THE UP AND COMER

by Howard Roughan

  Jessica got out of bed and went to the window. She pulled back the curtains and stood there naked. In the sunlight that spilled in, she became a silhouette. A worried one at that.

  "So he's onto us," she said.

  "Correction. He's onto you."

  "What's that supposed to mean?"

  "It means you're obviously acting different around him and it's making him suspicious."

  "I'm not, though," she said.

  "You may think you're not, but you've obviously got a tell."

  "A what?"

  "A tell. It's a poker term. It means you do something that you're unaware of that gives away your hand."

  She didn't quite follow. "What in the hell are you talking about?!" she snapped.

  "Never mind," I said. "Listen, Connor was saying that when you're having sex it's like you're not there."

  "So?"

  "So, what I'm saying is, you have to get your head back into the sex, or at least make it seem that way."

  "I don't believe this; you're telling me that I have to have better sex with my husband?"

  I shrugged. "Fake the orgasms if you have to."

  She put her hand on her hip. "What do you think I've been doing?"

  I stopped and looked at her for a second. She instantly knew what I was thinking.

  Said Jessica, "Oh, yeah, right, like I really wanted to take on a second acting job."

  My ego back in check, I pressed on. "I know this all sounds weird and I know it can't be easy for you. The good news is, I went a long way in calming Connor down last night. I don't think it's going to remain a problem, I really don't."

  My jury of one looked at me. She appeared to have come around to my point of view.

  Then came, "Maybe we should just cool it for a while."

  The way she threw it out there like it had been a bottled-up thought, it was obvious that she was barely paying attention to me. It pissed me off.

  "Maybe," I responded. "In the meantime, now that every pervert with a telescope has gotten a good look at you, do you think you could close the curtains?"

  Now we were both pissed off.

  "Doesn't this ever bother you?" asked Jessica, raising her voice.

  "What?"

  "This! Us! What we're doing here. Doesn't it ever bother you?"

  "I take it I should say yes. Is that what you want?"

  A snicker. "What I want, or at least what I was hoping, was that for once you would express some guilt about what we've been doing. Maybe, dare I say, a little remorse."

  "That would prove what?" I asked.

  "For starters, that you're human," she said.

  My turn to snicker. "You're making it sound like you're being made to do something against your will."

  "Spare me the two-to-tango bit," she said.

  "You might also want to keep in mind that it wasn't me who led us down beneath that brown-stone the first time," I said.

  "Oh, I see, so you're the innocent victim?"

  "I didn't say that."

  "You didn't have to. I guess my powers of seduction were too much for you to resist that night, huh? You poor thing." She was starting to lose it. "Don't you see, what I'm trying to tell you is that the only thing that bothers me more than my conscience is the fact that you don't seem to mind at all. Actually, it does more than bother me... it scares me."

  I was shaking my head. "Grant me one assumption," I said. "That my not telling you about any guilt-ridden moments doesn't mean that they haven't existed for me. Yes, I'm human. Yes, I've had my doubts about this whole thing. Not to turn the tables, but you haven't exactly been forthcoming yourself. Maybe it was a game of chicken. Part of the reason I never said anything is because you didn't."

  "If it's getting to the both of us, though, why do we keep doing it?"

  "Force of habit?" I joked. I should've known better.

  "See, that's what I'm talking about. It's like you're too fucking blind or arrogant to figure it out! This isn't make-believe, Philip, this is real, with real consequences. And you? You act like you're merely along for the goddamn ride!"

  "Oh, Jesus, Jessica, give me a break."

  "You want a break? I'll give you a break," she said.

  Jessica immediately began to put her clothes back on. She said nothing more. I sat there in the bed and watched her. When she had angrily fastened the last button on her blouse, she picked up her purse and marched out of the room.

  "Fuck you too!" I yelled as the door slammed behind her.

  EIGHT

  Lunch with another woman for a change.

  Sally Devine strolled into Hatsuhana that Thursday at one-fifteen, as expected. The reservation was actually for one o'clock, but Jack had tipped me off that she'd never been less than fifteen minutes late for anything in her life. Consequently, I'd been waiting at our table for no more than a few minutes myself when she arrived.

  We'd met once before, at an office Christmas party that she and Jack had hosted at the apartment they kept in the city, though I wasn't sure if she'd remember me. The most I'd said to her that evening was "You have a lovely place here." Had the line to suck up to her as the boss's wife not been so long, I'm sure I could have made a greater impression.

  Now here she was standing before me. "You must be Philip," she said, shuffling her Chanel bag from under her right arm to her left. A heavily bejeweled right hand was promptly extended to me.

  "And you must be Mrs. Devine," I replied, getting up and shaking her hand.

  "Please, call me Sally."

  "Sally it is."

  The short and stocky proprietor type who'd shown her to our table pulled her chair back for her. At first glance he kind of looked like a Japanese Buddy Hackett.

  "A-ri-ga-to," she said to him as if repeating back to a Berlitz tape.

  He nodded appreciatively and rested two menus on the corner of our table. With a slight bow, he turned and walked away.

  Sally, once settled in, leaned over to me as if she had a secret. In a hushed tone she said, "Let me say right off the bat that I wish our meeting for lunch was under better circumstances."

  I agreed, although it quickly occurred to me that had the circumstances truly been better we'd probably never have been meeting in the first place.

  While Sally craned her neck this way and that to check out the clientele at the neighboring tables, I regarded her for a moment. At first glance she was a few years past her prime, though for a woman in her late forties she was giving aging a significant run for the money. She had auburn hair down to her shoulders, very alert eyes, and from what I could tell, a shapely figure. A face-lift was a definite possibility, although the only cosmetic surgery that was clearly evident was a nose job. The thing was just too perfect to be God's handiwork.

  Her attention returned to our table. "This is my favorite sushi restaurant," she declared. "Did you know it once got a four-star rating from the New York Times?"

  "I didn't know that," I said.

  "I wish I had the chance to get here more often; I spend most of my time these days out in the country, you know."

  "I take it you and Jack don't use your apartment here in the city much anymore?"

  "Really the only time is when we're going to the theater or have a function to attend," she explained. "Of course, Jack uses it sometimes when he's working late… that or when he's screwing one of his girlfriends."

  She said it so nonchalantly I almost missed it.

  "Excuse me?" I said.

  "You heard me," was her reply.

  I was saved by a young waitress in a kimono. She asked us if we'd like anything to drink.

  "Sake," Sally ordered.

  "Vodka tonic," I said, clearing my throat. Two minutes earlier it would have been a club soda. As a rule I never drank during a working lunch. Suddenly the rule didn't seem all that important.

  "Well, before we get down to the details of my unfortunate accident last weekend, I'm going to insist that you tell me a little about yourself," said Sally.
"After all, I can't imagine anything more ridiculous than being represented by a total stranger. Can you?"

  I couldn't, I told her.

  The questions came one after the other, though for the most part they remained innocuous. Then, without any hesitation, Sally asked me whether or not I came from money, assuring me in the same breath that she certainly didn't care if my family was dirt poor or filthy rich.

  "Do you know why I don't care, Philip?" she said. "Because either way — dirt poor, filthy rich — you're never clean."

  She sat back and waited for my response to her clever wordplay.

  "I never thought of it that way," I said, feigning enlightenment. From there I had little choice but to go ahead and share with Sally Devine some of the details of my upbringing.

  There were no trailer parks in my past, I let her know. Nor for that matter were there any nannies. The Randalls were strictly a middle-class family from the suburbs of Chicago, with my father, Jay Randall, primarily responsible for the strict part. He had worked as an electrical engineer with the same company for most of his life and the need for precision on the job had managed to spill over into his family life. For the most part, however, I respected him. He rode my ass from time to time when I was a kid, but he worked his own ass off not only to put me through four years of college, but prep school as well before that (Dartmouth South: Deerfield).

  My mother, Ellen Randall, had been an elementary school teacher in addition to a doting wife, never quite sure what all the fuss was about feminism. She was from Kennebunk, Maine, originally and loved to tell me stories when I was a kid about how my great-grandfather, god rest his soul, would swim in the Atlantic every morning at 6 a.m. until well past Thanksgiving. These days she volunteered at the local library. Besides returning books to their shelves, I was pretty sure my mother was the one responsible for telling people to "shhh."

  Lastly, I had one sibling, a younger brother named Brad living in Portland, Oregon, who was a painter (canvasses, not houses). Having sold a piece here and there, he didn't quite qualify as a starving artist. Malnourished was more like it.

  Throughout it all, Sally hung on my every word. She was either an incredible actress or truly interested in hearing about my family. When she asked me how often I saw them I wanted to lie. I wanted to tell her that we got together every holiday including Flag Day, that we were as close-knit as they come, that Ken Burns was looking into doing a documentary on us entitled The Model Family. As far as I was concerned, the fact that we made the Reagans look like the Waltons was none of her business.

  In the end, however, I couldn't lie. The way she looked at me I knew she'd be able to tell. I suppose when you're married to a guy with the ultimate bullshit meter, some of it's bound to rub off.

  "Let me see your hand," she said, grabbing my arm. Madame Devine began to trace the lines of my palm with her finger. "Do you see these two lines here going across?"

  "Yeah."

  "Those are your family lines. Do you see how they get wider and wider apart as you move along?" she said.

  "I suppose that must mean something."

  "Only that it confirms everything you've told me. You're someone who's dealing with deep feelings of alienation, Philip, am I not right?"

  At that moment I pictured Sally Devine learning to read palms at some adult spiritual-awakening class. I pictured the entire group being made up of wives of wealthy men, women who had already done the crystals thing, some having also done a weekend seminar on channeling.

  "Am I not right?" Sally repeated.

  "I think it's time we discuss your accident," I said.

  "I understand," Sally replied, with a knowing pat on my hand.

  I reached for my briefcase and retrieved a yellow legal pad and a pen. My sincere hope was that a reincarnated Allen Funt would take this opportunity to come out from around the corner with his trademark Candid Camera laugh. No such luck. This was all really happening.

  "Let's talk about some of the proceedings we'll have to deal with in the next couple of weeks, starting with court," I said. "First off, you'll be required to go before a judge, who will hear the charge against you. Am I correct in assuming that you've never been arrested for drinking and driving before?"

  "Oh, for heaven's sake, no!" she gasped.

  "Good. The reason I ask is that your county has recently taken a page from Connecticut and put in place an initiative whereby first-time offenders can request to enter what's called an alcohol education program."

  "Is that like AA?"

  "No, it's more like Responsible Drinking One-oh-one. I think you meet once a week for like ten weeks or something. Complete the program and after a year, without any further incident, the DUI charge is erased from your record."

  "Permanently?"

  "Permanently."

  Sally smiled. "It's kind of like a get-out-of-jail-free card, huh?"

  "Kind of. Though for your offense, jail really isn't a possibility. Unless, that is, you get arrested for DUI again. Then you go to jail, no two ways about it."

  Sally's smile disappeared. "So this program you're talking about, is that what you think I should do?"

  "Odds are yes, except before we go that route for sure, I want to check out the police report and look at the tape."

  "What tape?" she asked.

  "Most police stations videotape their processing rooms. It protects them from people who make bogus brutality claims against them. Of course, the door swings both ways. It also could vindicate you. If they stated in the police report that you were stumbling drunk and on the video you come across as stone sober, we'd have a pretty good chance of winning the case, if not getting the whole thing dismissed."

  "We're allowed to see that tape?"

  "I am; you're not. It's kept at the prosecutor's office."

  "What about my license? Jack was telling me that's a whole different ordeal."

  "It is," I told her. "It's an entirely separate hearing with the DMV. As I'm sure Jack explained, the reason he wanted you to have the blood test and not the Breathalyzer was so you'd have that much more time to let the alcohol metabolize in your body. Unfortunately, despite the extra time you still came in at point one six."

  Sally snickered. "I still don't think it was accurate."

  "Could be, except as far as the state is concerned, you were legally intoxicated. That being the case, it's mandatory that your license gets suspended for three months."

  "Shit!"

  "I know," I said.

  "Isn't there anything you can do?" she asked with a face that had surely gotten her out of a speeding ticket or two.

  "The only thing I can do is to, once again, look over that police report and see that they followed procedure. If they screwed up in any way, we could try to get off on a technicality. I simply wouldn't bet on it, that's all."

  Truth be told, a technicality was exactly what I was betting on. If there was one thing in this world on which a lawyer could rely, it was sloppy police work. Not that I blamed the cops. To learn all their standard operating procedures, all the rules they had to follow, was to realize that these poor guys could barely blow their noses without violating some regulation. Seriously, it was a miracle they could put anyone behind bars.

  "Now here's what I'd like to do, if you don't have any objection," I said, removing the cap from my pen. "I want you to take me through the events of that Sunday from beginning to end. There's no detail too small, and to prove it let me apologize up front for all the times that I'm going to interrupt you with nit-picking questions. Remember, I'm the good guy, the one on your side, so it's important you tell me the truth as best as you can remember it."

  Sally nodded. She drew a deep breath and started. "Okay, you see, I was at the club—"

  "Back up," I immediately interrupted. "What time did you wake up that morning?"

  She gave me a quick "how is that relevant?" look. I ignored it.

  Sally shrugged. "I suppose it was around nine-thirty."

 
"Did you eat breakfast?"

  "I never eat breakfast."

  "Okay, nothing to eat. How about anything to drink?" I asked.

  She appeared put off. "Do you mean alcoholic?"

  "Not necessarily. You didn't have a coffee or juice or anything?"

  "No," she said.

  I waited. She knew why.

  "No, nothing alcoholic either," she tacked on.

  "Okay, so you go to the club for this brunch. What time did you arrive?"

  "I don't know exactly."

  "What time did it start?"

  "Noon, though I wasn't on time."

  Shocker.

  "I suppose it was maybe around twelve-thirty," she decided.

  "Was it a sit-down affair?"

  "Eventually, though there was something like a cocktail hour to kick it off."

  "Did you have a drink during this time?" I said.

  "Yes. One."

  "What was it?"

  "A kir royale."

  "Did you order it or were they being passed around?"

  Raised eyebrows. "You're going to tell me that it makes a difference?" she asked incredulously.

  Sorry, Sally. You get to read palms, I get to ask any damn question I want. "I apologized up front for the nit-picking, did I not?"

  "You did," she sighed, "and the drinks were passed around."

  "Now you're sitting down to eat. What did they serve?"

  "It was a buffet. I had some poached salmon and a salad."

  "To drink?"

  "Another kir royale."

  "Just one more?"

  "Just one more."

  All along I was taking notes, with Sally trying her not-too-obvious best to read them. That my handwriting was barely legible straight on let alone upside down must have been incredibly frustrating for her. As it was, the temptation to inscribe, This woman is a complete wacko! was all but irresistible.

  "Okay, so what time did you leave the club?" I asked.

  "The brunch ended officially at three. I left pretty much right after that."

  "Did you feel fine to drive?"

  "Absolutely."

  "Then what happened?" I asked.

  "I started to drive home."