by Otto Penzler
“Where are you going?” Molly asked as Roger rose. “She’s still serving. You’re going to distract her.”
But Roger was already in motion. Thudding down the bleacher aisle, leaving a murmur of displeasure in his wake, he pushed past two wolfish teenagers in red sweatsuits, the Hungarian contingent, excused himself and hurried into the shadows beneath the bleachers.
His breath was still hot in his throat when he felt the presence behind him.
“You can’t get away from me.”
Roger swung around and bumped his shoulder into the deep chest of Arthur Janeway.
Janeway was a few inches taller and outweighed Roger by fifty pounds. Since Gigi’s injury, he’d virtually disappeared from the dealership. Indeed, this was the first time Roger had seen him in months. The man had lost his steak-and-martini paunch and his florid face, and the rigors of his grief had hardened his thickset body and turned his cheeks the color of frozen iron.
Roger tried to force some compassion into his smile.
“Hello, Arthur. It’s good to see you. How is everything?”
Janeway eased his bulk close to Roger. He drew down a breath and blew it out so fiercely it was as if the very taste of air disgusted him.
“I know what you did, Shelton. I know everything.”
Roger floundered for a half-second, then found a salesman’s smile somewhere down in the hollow depths of his chest.
“You mean that Olds Ciera fiasco? Yeah, yeah. I low-balled it a little, but I had the wholesale numbers jumbled. Don’t worry, Arthur, I’ll get it back on the next deal.”
“I’m not talking about a fucking Oldsmobile, Shelton. You know exactly what I’m talking about.”
Roger watched as Bettina helped Gigi down the last steps of the bleachers then halted and surveyed the grounds until she caught sight of the two of them.
“Hey, Arthur, you know I’d love to talk shop a little more, but I really need to give Julie a big hug of celebration.”
“You fucked my wife, Shelton,” Janeway hissed.
“What?”
Roger drew a careful breath and eyed the big man, whose lips had begun to quiver with rage.
“She told me the whole story. Everything.”
Bettina had her arm around Gigi’s waist. The girl was leaning against her mother as the two of them plodded closer.
“What in God’s name are you talking about?”
Janeway’s eyes were slitted now, tipping close to Roger’s face. He could smell Arthur’s breath, taste the green peppers he’d eaten the night before, and the sour fumes of incompletely digested meat.
“She’s yours, Shelton. She’s your little girl.”
“You really shouldn’t joke about something like that, Arthur.”
“No one’s kidding.”
Roger nodded stupidly, a ridiculous smile twisting his lips as he watched mother and daughter draw near.
“Hello, Bettina,” he said. “Hello, Gigi. How’re you doing?”
Gigi’s mouth flickered. She stretched her neck as if something might be stuck in her throat. When she spoke, her voice was a raspy croak.
“I’m surviving.”
“Good, good,” Roger said, then turned to his employer. “Well, it’s certainly nice to see you all. Nice that you’re out and around again.”
Roger turned to go but Janeway clapped a meaty paw on his shoulder and spun him around.
“Don’t bother showing up on the lot again, Shelton. Not that anyone would notice you were missing.”
Roger shrugged free of Janeway’s grip and headed for the court where Julie was speaking to a writer for Tennis magazine. As he stood waiting for the interview to conclude, he could feel the sting of three pairs of eyes on the back of his neck.
A week later, Roger Shelton sat in the den surveying the bleak landscape of the want ads while Julie was in the living room knee to knee with a sales rep for Nike apparel. She was evaluating their latest offer sheet, and even from two rooms away Roger could hear her bargaining tone turn severe. The girl adamantly insisted on making all her own deals. Even with the avalanche of offers she received after winning the Orange Bowl, Julie hadn’t so much as requested a hint of advice from Roger or Molly. So far she’d signed a half dozen contracts on her own, a shoe deal, a racquet contract, another agreement to wear a Rolex watch, another to drink only Gatorade on the court. Not even out of high school, and already well on her way to her first ten million.
Roger had been making the rounds of dealerships but had met nothing but cold smiles. He was certain Janeway had blacklisted him. Roger had not given Molly any details about the disquieting conversation with Janeway, only telling her that he’d been downsized from his job of twenty years, without warning or just cause. Molly made a sad face, gave him a buck-up pat on the shoulder and poured him a double martini, and the next morning she was back to her punishing tennis schedule as if nothing had changed, as if Roger was not languishing in his pajamas till noon with the classifieds open in his lap.
On the mantel across the living room, the round-faced clock ticked loudly. Roger stared at it, watching the second hand stutter around its face. He found himself ticking off the seconds as if counting down to some kind of blastoff, waiting, waiting, waiting for the great rocket to lift from its silos and carry him away, giddy and free of gravity. At last the terrible weight lifted from his chest, the earth’s pressures relieved.
“Hey, Dad.” It was Julie in the doorway. She was wearing a new outfit, a dark blue warmup with a silky sheen. Her name was embroidered in gold over the left breast. And beside her name was the company’s logo. His daughter, a freshly minted trademark.
“Yes?”
“Mr. Martino wanted to meet you.”
The young man with slicked-back hair and tight muscles and a dark tan marched across the room before Roger could rise from the chair. The salesman stuck out his hand and crushed Roger’s meager grip.
“Julie’s a damn hard bargainer, Mr. Shelton. Must’ve inherited that from you. I understand you’re in the car business.”
“Used cars,” Julie said. “The junkers.”
Martino nodded, fetching for a smile.
“And he couldn’t even hack that,” Julie said. “He got fired.”
Roger looked at his daughter and then at Martino. Roger tried to smile but felt it wilt on his lips.
“A career transition,” Roger said. He tapped the pile of newspapers in his lap, the pathetic red circles around job prospects.
“Well, I’m sure Julie owes a great deal to you, Mr. Shelton. You should be very proud.”
“I am, I am.”
“I owe something to Mom, maybe,” Julie said. She was looking down at the breast of her new warmup, studying the golden twist of letters that spelled out her name. “But I can’t think of what Dad did. What I think is, the two of them found me on the doorstep. I mean, come on, look at me. And look at him.”
Julie tugged the bottom of her warmup to tighten the fabric against her swelling breasts.
“Sure, genes can be funny, but hey, you saw my mother. She’s even skinnier than the old man. I think they found me under a cabbage somewhere.”
Roger worked up the smile again and showed it to Martino.
“She’s a spunky one,” Roger said. “She’s right, though. What she’s accomplished is her own doing.”
“Oh, sure, Dad picked me up after practice now and then. But he only did that so he could check out the other girls. He’s a major lech.”
“A lech?” Roger said. “Me?”
Martino backed up a step, looking between the two of them, trying to keep his smile in place as if this was a comedy routine still building to the punch line.
“I’ve earned it all myself,” Julie said. “Just look at Gigi Janeway and her dad. He’s got more money than the pope, so Gigi had all the best teaching pros. Lessons every day. A coach to work on her serve, one for her backhand, another one for her net game. I had like this one guy, he couldn’t even spe
ak English. All he did, he hit me balls from his basket. Bueno, bueno. An hour like that, him just hitting me forehands then backhands and yapping in Spanish, ninety-nine percent of which I couldn’t understand. So yeah, I’d say I pretty much did it all on my own.”
Martino left, chuckling and nodding like it was all an enormous joke. That uproariously witty Shelton family.
Julie went up to her room, shut the door and turned on her rap music and Roger sat in the living room and watched the clock on the mantelpiece tick away the rest of the afternoon.
At dawn the next morning, he rolled from his sleepless bed and went downstairs and paced back and forth across the deck, staring out at the open field behind the house. As the sun broke into view above the pines, he went inside and took down a photo of Julie from the mantelpiece and stared at it. He sat in the living room easy chair and held it up, tilting it back and forth, to catch the light. He put the photo back on the mantel and tiptoed upstairs and eased open the door to Julie’s room. She was lying on her back, her head denting the pillow exactly in the center. She snored quietly. He stood there for several minutes watching the girl sleep.
At nine o’clock he roared into the used car lot, got out and stalked into the showroom. Gathered around the coffee machine, the other salesmen watched him but didn’t so much as nod when he walked across the floor and went into his old office. Manny Mendoza was closing a deal with a black couple and their teenage daughter. He looked up at Roger and frowned.
“I’m looking for my stuff.”
“Stuff?”
“My photos,” Roger said. “The stuff I kept on my desk.”
Manny nodded toward the far corner where a cardboard box was jammed behind the black couple and their daughter. He picked it up and took it out to the showroom and set it on the hood of a ten-year-old red pickup truck and dug through it till he found what he was looking for. He walked over to the large portrait of Arthur Janeway that hung on the back wall. He held his daughter’s photo up to the portrait and cut his eyes back and forth between the two images.
The pouty lips, the heavy lids, the same crease in the earlobes, even an identical arch in the right eyebrow. When he was satisfied the likeness was unmistakable, he dropped the photo back in the box, left it on the hood of the pickup and went out to his nine-year-old Cadillac and drove straightaway to the Sand Hills Racquet Club where he found Molly and her regular doubles partner engaged in a furious exchange of volleys with two much younger women.
Roger walked onto the court in the midst of the point, the ball whacking him between the shoulder blades.
“Roger! We were about to go up a service break. What in the hell are you doing?”
“We need to talk,” he said quietly, and pried the racquet from her hand and marched over to a bench in the shade of a royal palm.
Molly stormed over and stood looking down at him with her fists balled against her narrow hips.
“This better be good, Roger.”
“It’s not good,” he said. “No, not good at all.”
Molly stared into his eyes and whatever she saw melted the knot in her jaw, neutralized the acid in her eyes. She sat down beside him and together they looked out at the busy courts. The balls passing back and forth across the nets, the cries of exultation and disgust, the peals of laughter. Those neatly lined rectangles of green clay that had always seemed so tranquil to Roger, so calming. The orderliness of it all, a stage so neatly structured, while all around those courts the cosmos whirled haphazardly.
“She’s not mine, is she?” Roger said. “Yours, but not mine.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It’s a wonder I never saw it before. It’s so obvious, really. So damn plain when you look at it. Even her personality. That same elbow-your-way-to-the-front approach. I guess on some level I’ve always known she couldn’t be mine.”
Roger watched the balls traveling back and forth and back and forth again across the precisely measured nets. He listened to the thwock of cleanly hit serves, the machine gun exchanges with all four players at the net. Such an orderly game. So pure, so simple, so perfectly symmetrical.
• • •
Two days later Roger stood in the field of tall grass and looked at the back of his two-story house, aglow with lights on that moonless night. He could see Molly finishing her cleanup in the kitchen. The evening news was over now. She was watching the entertainment shows, learning about the latest tribulations of her Hollywood pals.
Earlier that afternoon Roger had an interview at a Buick dealership down in Miami, over a hundred miles south. Then a half-hour ago he had called Molly to let her know he’d been caught in a snarl of rush-hour traffic, so he’d pulled off 1–95 and stopped at some bar in Ft. Lauderdale to pass an hour till the roadways cleared.
The truth was, after the interview, he’d driven back to Sand Hills and made the call from a bar on the edge of town and then he’d driven to the junior high school a half mile from their house and waited till it grew dark. He’d carried the deer rifle through the stand of pine trees that separated the ball fields of the junior high from the development where he lived. And now he stood in the meadow watching the windows of his own home and thinking about justice and lucky sperm and the difference between an artistic temperament and a plodding, methodical one, which was, he was starting to believe, the difference between arrogance and humility. What utter hubris to have ever believed that a few lucky days of salesmanship was the equivalent of artistic triumph. Roger Shelton was a hopeless plodder just as his daughter was. All she had inherited from him was an unfathomable mediocrity. She wasn’t flashy, wasn’t a slugger, had no killing shot. All she’d ever done was keep the ball in play one hit longer than her opponent. Hanging on, surviving.
When Julie appeared in her window, Roger raised the rifle and brought her closer to him. He lay the center of the X across her ample chest. Julie was on the phone. She was wearing one of her new monogrammed warmups and her hair was damp from the shower. The words came from her lips in a furious rush. Maybe it was her agent or one of her numerous boyfriends. He could see her lips moving, then he watched the clench of her jaw as she forced herself to be silent and listen. It was a gesture he had witnessed in Arthur Janeway a hundred times. Exasperated restraint. As if the two of them believed what they had to say was without question worth more than what any other man might want to say.
Roger did not possess such confidence. He had no idea how it felt to be absolutely certain of anything. Even now, as he stood aiming his rifle, a lonely marksman in a field, he had only the faintest hope that he could undo some small part of the harm he’d caused. Indeed, justice was the smallest part of what brought him to that dewy grass. Roger was acting out the logic of a dream. Like some tennis player driven deep into a corner of the court, left with only one unavoidable shot.
He watched Julie glare out her window into the dark field where he stood. He watched her talk. This girl who was neither his flesh nor his blood, this alien creature who for fifteen years had lived within his household and who was now prospering only because he had wounded the wrong daughter. His own girl, her will broken, her precise, predictable, tireless stroke forever ruined. While this cheap impostor flourished.
He watched Julie Shelton talk on the phone. He watched her shake her head in disdain and spit a few words into the receiver and jerk it away from her ear in a fit of disgust. Then he watched her pop to sudden attention, her face drained of all but a last flicker of contempt. He watched her drop stiffly out of sight. Then he shifted his gaze to his wife, as Molly lifted her head and stared up at the ceiling where she must have heard a crash against the bedroom floor. He watched her cup her hand to her mouth and call out her daughter’s name. He watched her throw her dish towel down and hurry to the door, then halt abruptly and send one backward glance toward the window that looked out on the darkened field. Her eyes touching his for an icy instant.
Roger Shelton stepped backward into the shadows and lowered his rifl
e. He listened to the fading echo of his shot. That single blast rippling through the humid air, loud and final, but already dissipating, in just those few seconds the waves of sound spreading outward, breaking up and scattering, until finally the blast was lost in the endless racket of the night.
PROMISE
JOHN HARVEY
At Wimbledon, Kiley found himself sharing overpriced strawberries and champagne with Adrian Costain, a sports agent he’d brushed up against a few times in his soccer days, and when Costain rang him a week later with the offer of some private work, he thought, why not?
So here he was, ten years down the line from his twenty-five minutes of fame, a private investigator with an office, a computer, pager, fax and phone; a small but growing clientele, a backlog of successfully resolved, mostly sports-associated cases.
Jack Kiley, whatever happened to him?
Well, now you know.
• • •
Kiley was alone in his office, August 3. Two rooms above a bookshop in Belsize Park. A bathroom he shared with the financial consultant whose office was on the upper floor.
“So what d’you think?” Kate had asked him the first time they’d looked round. “Perfect, no?” Kate having been tipped off by her friend, Lauren, who managed the shop below.
“Perfect, maybe. But rents in this part of London… there’s no way I could afford it.”
“Jack!”
“It’s all I can do to keep up with the payments on the flat.”
“Then let it go.”
“What?”
“The flat, let it go.”
Kiley had stared around. “And live here?”
“No, fool. Move in with me.”
So now Kiley’s name was there in neat lettering, upper- and lowercase, on the glass of the outer door. The office chair behind the glass-topped desk was angled round, suggesting his secretary had just popped out and would be back. As she might, were she to exist. In her stead, there was Irena, a young Romanian who waited on tables across the street at Cafe Pasta, and two mornings a week did Kiley’s filing for him, a little basic word processing, talked to him of the squares and avenues of Bucharest, excursions to the Black Sea, of storks that nested by the sides of country roads.