“Roe and Roe and Roe,” he told her, naming the law firm.
“As in ‘merrily, merrily, merrily’?”
“Verily. Will you do this?” he asked, holding up the razor. They were dressing for an evening of holiday partying, wandering in and out of the bathroom and bedroom, their reflections in half a dozen different mirrors. They looked, he thought, as if they’d fallen off a wedding cake, the too-skinny, too-tall man in the tux, the lovely voluptuous lady in the ivory dress.
“I adore it when you ask me to take a weapon to your neck,” said Catherine. Because long ago he’d been called vain for requesting this same service of a previous wife, he was always visited by her irritating words when he requested the favor of this wife. You’re so vain, she sang in his head. He wasn’t vain, he argued back to YaYa, wife number one; he was handsome, and he attended to his grooming, that was all. Catherine, like his other two wives, was less fastidious—wine stain on her sleeve, lipstick on her teeth—but she was also much younger. She could get away with laxness. Not forever, not for much longer, but for now.
He watched her in the three-way bathroom mirrors as she scraped away his errant hairs, her tongue between her lips and her eyes intent, so serious in making sure he was smooth. He smiled at her, felt a frisson of fondness when she finished by giving him a little nip on the ear with her teeth. “Good to go,” she said.
When his Sweetheart asked Oliver if he felt guilty about lying to his wife, Oliver provided a simple answer that was also a lie: “Yes,” he said, and tried to seem contrite, torn. But he didn’t feel guilt concerning love. In his life it was the sacred experience; he refused to turn away when it arrived. He had not invited it, after all; like any truly holy happenstance, it could not be found by conscious seeking. He might have felt guilty, doing that. But love had come regardless, in the form of the Sweetheart. She was one of his employees, a young woman who reminded him of Catherine twenty years earlier, a little awkward with herself, as if she’d woken one morning in a beautiful body that was not her own. She inhabited it in a slightly astonished mood, startling easily, sometimes glancing down at her own wrists or ankles and turning them, as if mesmerized by their perfection.
They were perfect, after all. And so was every other part of her, yet all this time it seemed she’d never quite noticed that fact, or never been told by someone to whom she was beloved. She had not been properly loved, Oliver decided. There was nothing more powerful than to be in the position of offering proper adoration to someone. He was still, after a month, meandering around in his own mind and heart about how they’d arrived at the amazing situation of having one another. It had happened before, and yet he never could be prepared for being struck by love. It fell upon him like an accident, like a car crash or knife cut, out of nowhere, without permission or intention. It was like luck, and he would not turn away from such a thing. He was stubborn, that way.
Loyal, he told himself. Loyal to love.
“Ready?” he asked the reflections in the mirror, dabbing at his wife’s upper lip, where she routinely rolled an extra bit of color.
“Ready,” she replied.
Coincidentally, the lawyer’s party, Roe and Roe and Roe’s holiday bash, happened to be taking place this evening just across the street from the charity auction the Desplaines were attending. Oliver appreciated the convenience of mixing business with pleasure. A young man stepped out of a ballroom at the downtown Hyatt, his necktie loosened and askew, as if he’d had second thoughts about suicide. He was redolent of gin and now standing too close. He had been stuck with a crooked name badge, Hello My Name Is JOSHUA, the words ornamented with hand-drawn mistletoe. Some chubby secretary had spent the morning making those, Oliver guessed.
Catherine offered her hand. She refused to heed Oliver’s warnings about germs and random intimacies. She would embrace and kiss anybody who felt the urge. She liked to monitor him at public functions as he maneuvered around greetings, avoiding being touched. Later she would congratulate him on his evasions, letting him know that he wasn’t fooling her. In this instance with JOSHUA, he suddenly patted his pants pockets, as if checking for the car keys or valet parking receipt. Catherine ducked her head, smiling.
Oliver thought of his hands in the Sweetheart’s hair, his heedless unwashed enthusiasm for touching her, that virtual stranger, that potential harborer of contaminants.
“You’re the godparents!” the drunk Roe and Roe and Roe minion told them, as if in congratulations. It was a week before Christmas, after all—season of office parties, candy platters, forgotten grudges, goodwill toward men, plus eggnog. This charge he made had the quality of gift, generosity, salutation. From me to you, with all good wishes, a girl! God Bless! In some other season it might have been presented differently, the general mood easily otherwise; in spring it might seem a sorrow or a tax, in July patriotic fanfare in the street or sky, near Halloween a disguised arrival, witch or ghost, costume concealing a secret body, inside of which ticked a tricky heart. A frightening youngster who thrust out a demanding empty bag: Gimme.
“Feliz Navidad!” the hotel’s sound system insisted, over and over. The tune was so catchy that it no longer required the words, they were there regardless. Oliver had been unwillingly whistling this and songs like it for weeks, snippets snared together in his head like fizzling flies in a web. A person could feel possessed. And as for the whistling, he knew it was a habit he had to suppress—it announced two things that he did not wish known about him. One was his happiness at being newly in love, and the other was his pitch-perfect ability as a whistler, a trait that dated him.
“You ran all this by one of the Roes?” he asked.
“I’m a Roe,” Joshua said. “Not one of the Roe and Roe and Roe, but grandson and son and nephew.” He spun suddenly to show them another markered name tag, slapped on his back: Hello My Name Is JUNIOR. “Anyhoo,” he said, “You’re the godparents, basically.” He looked back longingly at a crescendo in the raucous jollity of the ballroom behind him. “Although ‘godparent’ is hardly legally binding. I spoke with Houston. It’s pretty cut-and-dry, really. You can refuse, of course. And by the way, any decent attorney would have made sure there was a mutual agreement in advance, but whatever. And of course there’s always foster care, duh, if you decline. She’ll be an adult, sooner or later, and get a nifty little chunk of change, not to mention the trust, from which you all will be generously remunerated. It’s kind of a sweet deal, if you think about it. Depending—is she a good kid, or a bad one?” He raised his eyebrows inquiringly, a little blearily: Had he spelled it out?
“What about the father?”
“No father.”
“No father?”
“No father.”
The subject of the legal document was a fifteen-year-old girl; her mother, who had died six weeks ago, had been his wife’s friend from high school. There was no father listed anywhere, Junior now explained with wearied irony, not on a birth certificate, not on the documents at the school, not in the mother’s insurance or work or homeowner’s paperwork. No. Father. “Immaculate conception,” guessed Joshua Roe.
“Highly doubtful,” said Catherine. “I mean, I knew her mom. Immaculate would hardly be the way.”
Snowflakes had begun falling outside in festive complicity, covering the ugly, muting the unpleasant. Downtown Wichita had the aspect of snow globe, insular object of rapt sentimentality, a hush of love and hope, forgiveness and averted judgment. Sentences were being commuted, sins absolved, lips loosening, optimistic music as sound track. Oliver glanced out dreamily toward the convention center across the street, where the Sweetheart was setting up hors d’oeuvres.
Catherine began explaining why the circumstance seemed so peculiar. “We don’t really know this woman … I mean, it’s been years. And we didn’t agree. It’s like wow, out of the blue she’s given us her daughter!”
Joshua nodded, taking her in now under his bloodshot, tired eyes, holding out the well-traveled and -researched package.
“Well, actually? It’s not actually godparents, plural, but godparent, singular, you, Mrs. Desplaines. The deceased listed you. Catherine Anne Harding,” he added, as if she needed reminding. From being inside his jacket pocket, the packet now appeared to be damp. Oliver had asked him to verify its contents. It had traveled from Texas to Kansas, been forwarded, then forgotten, finally found, then driven to Oliver’s office, next couriered across town tucked away in a larger, less soiled envelope, now returned, like an elaborate relic, certified real.
“Happy holidays,” said Joshua Roe Jr., giving Catherine a hug, extending his hand once again to be shaken but then lifting it to his temple instead, offering Oliver a kind of awkward salute.
“You like to menace people,” his wife told him as they headed to the elevator, laughing.
“I don’t.” But maybe he did. He was old enough to be Joshua’s father, he was old enough to be Catherine’s father. He scrolled briefly through a mental file of the people he’d spent the day with—was he old enough to be everyone’s father? In general he enjoyed having them look to him as they would any elder, teacher or preacher or boss, waiting for orders and/or approval. He was very tall, his head heavy, his hair still thick. His gaze was necessarily down.
The Sweetheart. He could be her father, too. Earlier they had met at her grandparents’ house. The grandparents were in Florida; the Sweetheart house-sat, an annual arrangement from December through March. Strictly speaking, Oliver was of her grandparents’ generation, give or take. And had his Sweetheart grown up in Wichita, she would have graduated a few years behind the younger of his daughters. They might have been featured in the same yearbook. But her alma mater was in Portland; her grandparents’ aesthetic was suburban, traditional, dismissible; they could have been Oliver’s grandparents, the identical conventional furnishings and odors. He and the Sweetheart made love in the guest room, unaccustomed headboard knocking against the wallpapered wall. They drank Folgers afterward, sitting at the kitchen nook gazing over the salt and pepper shaker collection on the windowsill—ceramic pigs, anthropomorphized appliances, curtsying bumblebees—to the array of empty homemade bird feeders and dutifully covered lawn furniture outside.
I’m falling in love with you, he’d texted her. For her, he’d learned the technology.
I already fell, she’d texted him back, alert and swift on the keypad. What Oliver had yet to discover was the nature of her love. They had shared their histories, he had heard of the others in her past, but he could not discern the precise dimensions of her proclaimed love for him, the scale it represented in the grand scheme, the place he occupied in her assemblage. If her love were a pie graph … If she had to rank-order … If one love was the indisputable winner … She had declared it so easily, so early. While he was still falling under love’s revered spell, into its cloistered chamber, she had already, she said, arrived. She looked at him as if he were the sun. She undressed as if her exquisite body embarrassed her. After sex she clung to him and wept, whereas at Wheatlands, which she managed, she had the reputation of a wisecracker, an even-keeled, efficient, unsentimental straight-shooting no-nonsense boss.
He kissed the part in her hair because she had a hard time meeting his eyes.
They drove away in their separate cars. They would meet here tomorrow. Oliver had held her at the door and experienced a strange light-headedness, as if she had somehow lifted him, relieved him of his body at a moment when he’d briefly left it. And then he was suddenly heavy again, with things to do. Unlike his wife, he had a day planner filled with appointments.
The last of these was the charity auction being held across the street. It had been a piece of luck that Roe and Roe and Roe were to host their party at the Hyatt, at the same general hour. The Sweetheart and the bakery she managed were catering the auction, a bakery that had been Oliver’s most recent successful venture. It occupied an old car dealership in dying downtown; the picture windows now exposed ovens instead of Fords, a fleet of youthful staff wearing aprons rather than auto salesmen in cheap suits. At the thought of the Sweetheart in her Wheatlands apron, her hands powdered with flour, Oliver’s heart suddenly began drumming. He relished the thrill of this sensation, the impending encounter. He wished to delay it, to revel in anticipation of it, let the snow continue to fall in its perfect way.
“You’re whistling ‘Here Comes Santa Claus,’ ” his wife informed him now. She was busy folding the paperwork Junior had returned to her to tuck it into her cocktail bag, discarding the envelope in the trash can before the bank of elevators. There in the container’s rimmed lid full of sand was an ornate letter H. “Someone has to go around all day, putting H’s in the trash-can sand,” Catherine marveled. “You can’t even smoke in here, and still there’s an ashtray, with a cute cursive H.” She glanced around before swirling her hand through the carefully raked golden sand.
“Brat,” her husband said as the elevator arrived.
Inside, there they were once again, mirrored in golden tone on the ceiling. They both glanced up at their faces and elegant clothing. Was his tuxedo older than his wife? Oliver wondered, doing the math. Very nearly. The music continued in the elevator. “You want a drink before we meet up with the rest of the penguins?” he asked the reflection overhead.
“Sure.”
“That kid, Joshua, I probably met him before. There was a kid at a party, years ago.”
“Really?” Rilly, he heard; people were always saying it, uselessly.
“Yes, really. His parents used to throw parties, when I first moved to town. He might have been the one driving home the drunks one night, yours truly included, plus the wife.”
“Which wife?”
“YaYa.”
“That starter wife of yours. Will I never hear the end of her?”
“That one,” he agreed. “And you asked.”
They sat at the bar and admired themselves in its mirror, their faces among the array of beautiful bottles. The identical music played; in spite of himself, Oliver was impressed with the seamless sound system. This time it was Bing Crosby dreaming of a white Christmas. The bartender had some clever moves with the stemware. The walls were made of wood, the seats leather, and drinking, contained herein, could never seem a seedy pursuit.
“No television,” Catherine noted; Oliver routinely asked that televisions be turned off; he didn’t allow them in any of his own businesses. It was perhaps the only common ground he shared with his mother-in-law, a hatred of the television’s omnipresence in the world.
“Just these outstanding carols.”
“Although I am sort of enjoying watching the stuff about the BTK. You have to admit, that’s pretty compelling stuff. I wasn’t ever afraid of him, back when it was going on. Maybe if I’d been older, I would have been afraid? Isn’t it strange, how immune I felt? Or maybe that’s what being a teenager is all about.”
Oliver wondered if her capacity for imagining her own death had been fully formed yet; for how long could she continue to charm with her girlish innocence? And was it the fact of the Sweetheart that brought it to his mind, her more legitimate claim to youth? He himself could not remember the day when his own demise had appeared to him, but once there, it never went away. “I always thought he was an amateur,” he told Catherine, concerning the serial killer. “And you know my thoughts on amateurs. Plus, for all his ham-fisted idiocy, he still never got caught.” The most salient emotion Oliver recalled from the first mention of those times was his irritation at the way the killer distracted the local population from the monkeyshines of their disgraced president. Nixon flew off the front page; onto it landed the not-yet-named BTK. Local trouble always trumped the national; you had to get used to it, living in a smallish city. “May I tell you just one more thing about YaYa?” he asked.
“If you must.” She only pretended to not want to hear; Oliver knew that Catherine considered herself a winner, in the competition of his wives. She’d been one a little longer than either of the others.
“Ya
Ya also had an encounter with a serial killer.”
“I never said I encountered him. I said—”
“I know, I know. Yours is different. But listen.” YaYa’s claim was that she’d been driving to California from Kansas—
“A journey all Kansans have to make,” Catherine interrupted. “They either return to Kansas, or they stay in California.”
YaYa, Oliver told Catherine, had planned to be one of the latter, but en route, by herself, she had gotten lost in the desert. Which one? Oliver had asked, to which his first wife replied, I don’t know! I told you, I was lost! There she’d run into a cop in an unmarked vehicle. Only the two of them, there in the unknown desert. The cop was incredibly polite, helpful; after several tries at verbal instructions, he’d written down the directions that would take her back to civilization. And then he offered to follow, to make sure YaYa, twenty-two-year-old Kansas naïf, didn’t get lost.
“Hello?” said Catherine, incredulous.
“I know,” Oliver agreed. Why didn’t he lead, and you follow? She was twenty-two, YaYa explained; how was she to know such things? The cop’s directions took her farther into the desert; eventually she was turning onto a dirt road. With every navigational choice she made, she consulted her rearview mirror, just to see the officer nodding approval behind her, raising his fist, thumb up like a turtle’s eager head. Down the dirt road she traveled. Upward, toward dusty hills, the rocks pinging and thumping beneath her—Karmann Ghia, she’d interrupted herself, knowing Oliver would be curious—until she reached the final fork, one path that veered downward, a weaving steep route made and taken by thrill-seeking dune buggies, a sandy chutelike trail that YaYa could trace across the desert floor below her, the other a continuation of the road proper. The sign on it said Road Ends.
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