“The Greenstown Daily News?”
“Comments section for now, just so I could get a record made.”
Jenny relaxed a bit and poured the lite soy sauce into her bowl. The tenure committee wouldn’t be reading comments sections. “What do you think she’s doing right now?” she asked him.
He picked up another piece, dipped it in the sauce, and pondered the ceiling. “Taking nude photos of herself and sending them to prisoners.”
Jenny wobbled her head. “Yeah, could be.”
While Dr. Peggy’s husband had abandoned their family over the difficulties with Carla, Davis often felt that Megan’s troubles—their dealings with Megan—were the only thing keeping him and Jenny together. Who else would have either one of them with Megan as a part of the deal, a part of the shared life? And with Megan, they had something strong in common, something all-consuming.
When they first met, in their midtwenties, Davis and Jenny had had nothing in common. They’d merely sat next to each other at a Boston College football game to which Davis had been dragged by a friend and Jenny by her sister. Jenny kept asking him what was going on in the game. “No clue,” he said again and again until, tipsy, she asked him what the heck he had a clue about.
“Animals, ask me anything about animals.”
“What animal do I look like?” she demanded, and then turned her face in profile.
That was a surprise question, but after only a moment, he answered, “I guess I’m going to say puma.”
She opened her mouth in delight. “I love them! I have a sweater made out of one!”
He tucked chin to chest and peered up at her. “It’s a cat.”
“The puma!” She sat up straight. “Yes. Got it. So that’s what I look like?”
“I was picturing the dove-gray eyes and the long, shallow nose ending in a pink tip. Of course, the brown hair. Puma.”
Leaning in, she asked, “Am I dangerous?”
“Pumas have been said to have quite an affinity for mankind…” Davis continued telling a puma story that was swallowed by the commotion over a touchdown. Still, at the end of it, she announced, “You’re cute!”
When she next tired of the football game, she turned to him. “Would you like to come over to dinner sometime?”
Around Jenny, Davis felt like a man, which wasn’t something he had especially noticed feeling before. She touched him when she spoke to him; she deferred to him along the typical lines—she had him drive her car when they used it, asked him to select a computer for her, let him order the wine. He’d not experienced this treatment from any woman before. Certainly no female zoologist would enjoy playing up to a man. Davis thought that, in return, he allowed her to be wildly flirtatious without the consequence of reckless, unmarried sex, in which she was too Catholic to indulge. She kept asking him to do things with her, and he kept doing them, until they were solidly on a path. Then he finally made the big commitment to her when he put that note in Aletta Van Der Hooft’s box. That’s how he saw it. Marriage itself was not the truest act of commitment. No, the truest act was turning away from a lovely woman whose ardor had put a match to your crumpled paper soul.
“The best ever,” Jenny said to Brant, tapping the front of the glass counter with her chopsticks as he was reaching in to select a fish. “You are a complete genius,” which made him shyly smile at her from within the glass enclosure, like a happy flounder.
# # #
Davis and Jenny arrived home to the smell of brownies, which were cooling on a rack.
“Yum,” Davis said loudly enough to reach wherever Megan might be. She soon bounded down, shrieking that they were not to be touched!
“I believe we bought these brownies,” Davis said.
“They’re for school.”
“Maybe for a boy at school?” Jenny asked.
“Shut up!”
“Enough, Megan.” Davis put his brownie back and looked around for any evidence of misbehavior. Then he went up to bed, where he started to read and fell asleep, only to be awakened by Jenny, asking, “Davis, what are you doing with these?” and holding up a pair of striped underwear.
“I was asleep.”
“These were peeking out from under your pillow.”
He twisted to look back at the pillow.
Jenny said, “They’re Megan’s underwear.”
“Right, she put them there while we were out.”
Jenny carefully turned back the blankets and the top sheet as though she might unveil a cache of bras and panties. “Well that’s strange.”
They stared at each other until Davis said, “If you think I’m doing anything inappropriate with Megan, you’re very wrong.”
“No, no, I just was concerned. I mean it’s very strange.”
“Stop saying that.” And then he sat up and lifted his pillow for another look. “Were you sorting laundry on the bed?”
“No.”
“It was Megan or static cling,” he announced before lying back down for another attempt at sleep.
TIM
He waited for her in his socks on the wet cement floor of the dark basement, between Miles’s mountain bike with the rusted gears and a molding tower of boxed-up Christmas crap. Someone turned the water on upstairs, so the water meter in the corner lightly chugged, like the motor of an antique riverboat. Tim was on a trip of sorts down there, just waiting for his fellow passenger. He looked at his phone again. They had decided to text at eight p.m. Maine time/five-thirty a.m. Afghanistan time, or pretend Afghan time. And sure enough:
GIB here, hon. How was Ur night?
Hi Blondie. Not good, friend in hospital.
O no! How Bad?
Not looking good. IED. Unseen bomb. Our Hummer just missed hitting it. Next vehicle didn’t miss. Was just giving him shit the day before. I should’ve seen it in the road.
O Rusty! Not UR fault! If you’d been looking down, someone would’ve shot from above. How hell works. Can I send something to the hospital over there? Can I send you something?
Don’t send anything.
WANT to.
“Oh, shit,” Tim said to his phone and looked up at the sound of footfalls in the kitchen.
It’s complicated.
K, give me the steps.
Just send whatever it is to my dad. He was a Marine. He knows the channels.
Tim sent her the address and name of Rusty’s father, Tim Turner. She texted back.
If only I cd hold you right now.
Tim put his left arm across his chest and pressed it there as he typed.
How’s ur dad treating you?
Mom found my underwear on his side of the bed.
???? Call the police on him!
Do it now!
The basement door opened, and Tim looked up from the phone to see Mona’s sour face. “What are you doing down there?” Then his phone pinged again.
Wish you could come get me.
“Looking for my hammer, then I got a work text.”
“Vinnie needs you to move your truck.” She reshut the door.
Blondie, I’m in Afghanistan. You need to call the police.
When she didn’t text back, he wrote again:
Give me your address, I want to send something, too.
# # #
As he entered through shipping on this Friday morning, Tim found Mike inserting NMBA flyers into each October issue of Bells Up. He Frisbeed a flyer across the room to Tim. The cover was of a teenage girl playing the French horn with her sad eyes rolled upward toward a practice-session egg timer on a shelf. “There’s still time to register!”
Tim opened it to find glossy photos of Joe Masotta and The Publisher side by side. She didn’t waste any time. On the back, she’d put out a call for anyone wishing to march in a band directors’ band in the Veterans Day parade. Blow Your Own Horn, Again! she’d titled the piece. Nice.
“Went to see Angela yesterday,” he told Mike. “Most terrifying sight I’ve ever seen.”
�
�Oh, real sick, huh?” He stopped the stuffing.
“She told her husband she was worried about them getting her last paycheck. Know what I think? I think she’s right. There’ll be some mistakes made on that check.”
Mike scratched a biceps. “Really?”
Tim’s next stop was Angela’s office. Her sales notebook was still there, and Tim stuck it up under his shirt. At his own desk, he had a look at her previous month’s sales. “That’s a hell of a month,” he said aloud. It would come to about twelve thousand dollars’ commission.
“Hey, listen.” Mike had appeared in the doorway and was reaching up to set his fingertips on the doorframe for a pull-up, as was his habit. “I didn’t want to say anything earlier, but I thought you might be interested in a recent discovery.”
“Not really. No offense but—” Tim made a ta-da gesture toward his paperwork.
“It’s about Emily’s new additions, the bazingas.” He lifted himself half a foot and hung there. “I saw them online.”
“Sure you did.”
Mike dropped and stepped in closer. “I got a site I go to; you rate chicks’ racks.” He raised his hands in surrender. “Hey, the girls put the pictures up themselves. They don’t show their faces. Well, some do. Anyway, yesterday’s pick had this little freckle triangle right here”—he traced one over a clavicle—“just like our Emily.” He sat in the guest chair.
“I can’t listen to this,” Tim told him. “I’m working.”
“Now that she’s all about the cleavage shirts, I am very familiar with the triangle.”
“Get the fuck out,” Tim said, which blew Mike’s head back.
“Whoa. Kill the messenger, why don’t you.”
It was ridiculous, Mike’s inane fantasy. Mike didn’t know Emily. She was actually afraid of male attention. Flaunting herself on a website for masturbators? Never. Would not happen. When Tim heard the door to shipping slam shut, he Googled the racks website. The current day’s rack was a pair of tubular sandbags with nipples the size of coasters, Tim scrolled down to the one Mike would have seen the day before: pale, lovely breasts. The freckles did look a little like Emily’s triangle, but there were billions of women in the world. The shot was taken in a bathroom that had a shower curtain covered in big blue polka dots. Tim looked at the comments section—disgusting suggestions about what men wanted to do with the boobs, invitations to email more naked photos. Then Tim noticed the comment from MikeyLikes, which was particularly crass, about shooting his wad all over the breasts, and which at the end said, “Love the little freckle triangle, reminds me of someone I know.”
Would Emily subject herself to this while a kiss from Tim was out of the question? No way, it wasn’t her. He uncapped a pen and drew the configuration of the girl’s freckle points onto the torn corner of an envelope for live comparison.
# # #
“So we’re supposed to try to write a book together for The Publisher to stick her name on,” Tim told Emily, dumping himself into her guest chair. Today’s top was a purply, silky thing, undone an extra button. She lifted both hands to her hair, and her heavy silver bracelets collided, clanking down to the elbows and then moving noisily back to the wrists when she rested her arms on her lap, just like the ones in his mom’s dating costume.
“God help us,” she said. “About what?”
“The President’s Own.”
“The Marine band?”
“History of the Marine band. She wants a page count today. Yesterday, actually.”
“Two pages. Then it goes downhill.”
Tim rolled his fingers on his thighs, then slowly moved a hand up to take the freckle paper out of his pocket.
Emily, oblivious, said, “Let me guess, this gets done on the weekends.”
“Well, I know the director of that band, so he can help us.”
“Good, he can write it. What are you doing?”
Tim lowered the paper. “I can’t read my own notes anymore. She wants us to select our target.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“The page count.”
Emily got up and pulled Spectacle Design for the Nineties off of the shelf. “I think this was the last book she published.” She flipped to the end. “A hundred and seventy-six pages.”
“Target selected.”
She sat back down. “What else?”
“Nothing. Except I’m taking a bathroom poll. My wife’s got me taking a shower in a daisy explosion—giant gerbera daisy heads in colors you should only be able to see on LSD. I think a shower curtain should be clear. Like, a little frosty but clear. What say you?”
“Jesus, Tim, there are people dying on the streets of our cities at the hands of the police and you’re having a cow about daisies?”
“Not a cow, just a little preoccupation. Hey,” he said, quickly changing direction, “I suggested that for NMBA, we field a marching band in the Veterans Day parade downtown. It’s the day before the convention, so we get all the old directors to line up and play.”
“Oh, God. Really?” Then her expression metamorphosed into a look of wonder. “I wouldn’t mind playing in this band.” He figured she imagined it like he did: the gleeful crowds, the mass of skilled players, the pyrotechnic music.
After they went back and forth naming their ideal playlist and the conversation came to a rest, he decided to ask about it. “So, have you made all of these changes for some new guy?” Tim flapped his hands near his own hair in the hope that she would not think he was referring to the new boobs.
She deadeyed him, “You know when I decided to start saving for a complete makeover, Tim? When you determined that I was at the point where I’d like to have a sweaty, barrel-bellied, married guy my father’s age who pays for beer with nickels and dimes he’s dug out of his truck as my lover.”
Tim smiled quickly, briefly, thinking her comment might be going that way—a joke. Then he looked down at his hands clutching his thighs. Something had really hardened her. She’d had a personality transplant. “I saw Angela yesterday,” he finally said. “She’s nearly dead.”
# # #
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The Publisher clacked into Tim’s office in her little hard heels and put both hands flat on his desk like she was holding it steady in a gale. “I’d like you to take that bouquet from Lawrence Fife and Drum to Angela’s hospital room this afternoon. It doesn’t belong in the lobby. It’s slowing everyone down. Depressing.”
“Do we know if she’s still alive?”
“No one has informed us otherwise.” She craned herself back up and turned to leave.
“Her husband’s worried they won’t get her commissions,” Tim told her.
She looked back at him, stricken. An accomplished faker.
“I told him that of course they will,” Tim said.
“Yes, of course! Why would he even wonder about that?”
“I guess she was worried about it.”
“Angela?”
He nodded.
“This makes no sense to me.” She took a few steps toward the hall, then turned back. “I’ve already taken her notebook out of her office, and I’ll match her list to any sales that come in. I’m not going to short a dying woman!”
Tim wanted to yank open his desk drawer and throw Angela’s sales notebook at The Publisher’s mock-suffering face.
She huffed a hot breath. “How her husband can talk about it, and so greedily! It’s astonishing! While she’s lying in the hospital bed!” After a beat, then: “Have you discussed the page count with Emily?”
“Hundred and seventy-six.”
“That sounds about right. Have you worked out the table of contents?”
“In the process. You’ll have it next week.�
��
“Tim, next week? How long should a TOC take? I’m not saying it has to be the final one, but how did you come up with a page count without doing a TOC?”
“No, we talked about it, but we just didn’t finalize anything.”
“Sounds like a perfect weekend project. I’ll look for it on Monday.”
After she left, Tim opened his desk drawer and took out Angela’s notebook. Also in the drawer was the slip of paper describing Rusty, his ideal self. He pinched the tiny scrap and moved it up onto his desktop.
Rusty Turner
Marine Sniper
21, 6′ 2″, 9″
At the bottom, in tiny print, he scrawled, “To happen on” and the next day’s date.
# # #
Tim pulled into the driveway behind the BMW belonging to George, the pen salesman. He was sure George had selected Friday evenings for his lesson time so it would seem most like a date, just as Tim had done when he took Emily out for beers.
As though they had awaited him, Mona began playing the easy piano arrangement of Schubert’s The Elf King as Tim was opening the door. After she rolled out the dramatic bass theme a few times, George sucked a great breath and began singing the narrator’s lines—about a father carrying his son on horseback through the night. On key, yes, but overdone, with strain not strength. Still, instead of rushing into the kitchen, Tim remained by the door, watching George tuck chin to neck, eyebrows up and longing for each other as he then sang the father’s lines, asking his son what is wrong, above trembling chords. How many high-end gold pens did they have in this house because of George? Tim wondered. The guy had given Mona dozens, enough maybe to pay a month’s mortgage.
Now George sang the little boy’s reply, telling his father of the Elf King he sees, who is offering him wondrous things. For this, George placed his hands in prayer and stood up on his tasseled toes.
Next, the Elf King’s lines, sung tenderly, enticing the boy to leave his father. Mona had to lean away from all of the Teutonic spewing s’s.
Look at the guy, Tim told himself. Why had he been so dismissive of this man who was right now feeling a piece of great music, letting it move him? Isn’t this what Tim longed to experience? He readied his hands to clap well before the narrator described the boy dead in his father’s arms.
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