by Otto Penzler
“Why? Don’t you like me?”
“Of course I like you, Sylvia, but you work for me. They have rules about that. Anita Hill and all.”
“The point of an affair is that it’s carried on in secret.”
“And the point of embezzlement is to get away with stealing money, but I wouldn’t put my job at risk that way. I plan to retire from this job in a few years.”
“But you feel what I’m feeling, right? This incredible force between us?”
“Sure.” It seemed only polite.
“So if I find a job with one of our competitors, then there would be nothing to stop us, right? This is just about the sexual harassment rules?”
“Sure,” he repeated, not thinking her serious. Then, just in case she was: “But you can’t take your Rolodex, you know. Company policy.”
A month later, he was called for a reference on Sylvia and he gave her the good one she deserved, then took her out to lunch to wish her well. She put her hand on his arm.
“So can we now?”
“Can we what?”
“Fuck.”
“Oh.” He still wasn’t comfortable with that word. “Well, no. I mean, as of this moment, you’re still my employee. Technically. So no.”
“What about next week?”
“Well, my calendar is pretty full—”
“You don’t have anything on Thursday.” Sylvia did know his calendar.
“That’s true.”
“We can go to my apartment. It’s not far.”
“You know, Sylvia, when you’re starting a new job, you really shouldn’t take long lunches. Not at first.”
“So it’s going to be a long lunch.” She all but growled these words at him, confusing Charlie. He was pretty sure that he hadn’t committed himself to anything, yet somehow Sylvia thought he had. He had used the company’s sexual harassment policy as a polite way to rebuff her, and now it turned out she had taken his excuse at face value. The thing was, he did not find Sylvia particularly attractive. She had thick legs, far too thick for the short skirts she favored, and she was a little hairy for his taste. Still, she dressed as if she believed herself a knockout and he did not want to disabuse her of this notion.
(And did Charlie, who was fifty-eight, with thinning hair and a protruding stomach, ever wonder what Sylvia saw in him? No.)
“I’m not sure how I could get away,” he said at last.
“I’ve already thought that out. If you told people you were playing golf, you could get away Thursdays at lunch. You know how many men at the company play golf. And then we could have Saturdays, too. Long Saturdays, with nothing but fucking.”
He winced. “Sylvia, I really don’t like that word.”
“You’ll like the way I do it.”
He did, actually. Sylvia applied herself to Charlie’s needs with the same brisk efficiency she had brought to being his administrative assistant, although she was clearly the boss in this situation. He made a few rules, mostly about discretion—no e-mails, as few calls as possible, nothing in public, ever—but otherwise he let Sylvia call the shots, which she did with a lot of enthusiasm. Before he knew it, a few years had gone by, and he was putting his golf clubs in his car twice a week (except when it rained, which wasn’t often, not in this desert climate) and he thought everyone was happy. In fact, Marla even took to bragging a bit that Charlie seemed more easygoing and relaxed since he had taken up golf, but he wasn’t obsessive about it like most men. So Marla was happy and Charlie was happy and Sylvia—well, Sylvia was not happy, as it turned out.
“When are you going to marry me?” she asked abruptly one day, right in the middle of something that Charlie particularly liked, which distressed him, as it dimmed the pleasure, having it interrupted, and this question was an especially jarring interruption.
“What?”
“I’m in love with you, Charlie. I’m tired of sneaking around like this.”
“We don’t sneak around anywhere.”
“Exactly. For two years, you’ve been coming over here, having your fun, but what’s in it for me? We never go anywhere outside this apartment. I don’t even get to go to lunch with you or celebrate my birthday. I want to marry you, Charlie.”
“You do?”
“I looooooooooooove you.” Sylvia, who clearly was not going to finish tending to him, threw herself across her side of the bed and began to cry.
“You do?” Charlie rather liked their current arrangement and, given that Sylvia had more or less engineered it, he had assumed it was as she wanted it.
“Of course. I want you to leave Marla and marry me.”
“But I don’t—” He had started to say he didn’t want to leave Marla and marry Sylvia, but he realized this was probably not tactful. “I just don’t know how to tell Marla. It will break her heart. We’ve been together thirty-eight years.”
“I’ve given it some thought.” Her tears had dried with suspicious speed. “You have to choose. For the next month, I’m not going to see you at all. In fact, I’m not going to see you again until you tell Marla what we have.”
“Okay.” Charlie lay back and waited for Sylvia to continue.
“Starting now, Charlie.”
“Now? I mean, I’m already here. Why not Saturday?”
“Now.”
Two days later, as Charlie was puttering around the house, wondering what to do with himself, Marla asked, “Aren’t you going to play golf?”
“What?” Then he remembered. “Oh, yeah. I guess so.” He put on his golf gear, gathered up his clubs and headed out. But to where? How should he kill the next five hours? He started to head to the movies, but he passed the country club on his way out to the multiplex and thought that it looked almost fun. He pulled in and inquired about getting a lesson. It was harder than it looked, but not impossible, and the pro said the advantage of being a beginner was that Charlie had no bad habits.
“You’re awfully tan,” Marla said two weeks later.
“Am I?” He looked at his arms, reddish brown, at least up to the hem of his golf shirt’s sleeves. “You know, I changed suntan lotion. I was using a really high SPF, it kept out all the rays. But a little sun can’t hurt.”
“When I paid the credit card bill, I noticed you were spending a lot more money at the country club. Are you sneaking in extra games?”
“I’m playing faster,” he said, “so I have time to have drinks at the nineteenth hole, or even a meal in the restaurant. In fact, I might start going out on Sundays, too. Would you mind?”
“Oh, I’ve been a golf widow all this time,” Marla said. “What’s another day? As long”—she smiled playfully—“as long as it’s really golf and not another woman.”
Charlie was stung by Marla’s joke. He had always been a faithful husband. That is, he had been a faithful husband for thirty-six years, and then there had been an interruption, one of relatively short duration given the length of their marriage, and now he was faithful again, so it seemed unfair for Marla to tease him this way.
“Well, if you want to come along and take a lesson yourself, you’re welcome to. You might enjoy it.”
“But you always said golf was a terribly jealous mistress, that you wouldn’t advise anyone you know taking it up because it gets such a horrible hold on you.”
“Did I? Well, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.”
Marla came to the club the next day. She had a surprising aptitude for golf and it gave her extra confidence to see that Charlie was not much better than she, despite his two years of experience. She liked the club, too, although she was puzzled that Charlie didn’t seem to know many people. “I kind of keep to myself,” he said.
The balance of the two months passed quickly, so quickly and pleasantly that he found himself surprised when Sylvia called.
“Well?” she asked.
“Well?” he echoed.
“Did you tell her?”
“Her? Oh, Marla. No. No. I just couldn’t.”
“If you don’t tell her, you’ll never see me again.”
“I guess that’s only fair.”
“What?” Sylvia’s voice, never her best asset, screeched perilously high.
“I accept your conditions. I can’t leave Marla, and therefore I can’t see you.” Really, he thought, when would he have time? He was playing so much golf now, and while Marla seldom came to the club on Thursdays, she accompanied him on Saturdays and Sundays.
“But you love me.”
“Yes, but Marla is the mother of my children.”
“Who are now grown and living in other cities and barely remember to call you except on your birthday.”
“And she’s a fifty-nine-year-old woman. It would be rather mean, just throwing her out in the world at this age, never having worked and all. Plus, a divorce would bankrupt me.”
“A passion like ours is a once-in-a-lifetime event.”
“It is?”
“What?” she screeched again.
“I mean, it is. We have known a great passion. But that’s precisely because we haven’t been married. Marriage is different, Sylvia. You’ll just have to take my word on that.”
This apparently was the wrong thing to say, as she began to sob in earnest. “But I would be married to you. And I love you. I can’t live without you.”
“Oh, I’m not much of a catch. Really. You’ll get over it.”
“I’m almost forty! I’ve sacrificed two crucial years, being with you on your terms.”
Charlie thought that was unfair, since the terms had been Sylvia’s from the start. But all he said was, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to lead you on. And I won’t anymore.”
He thought that would end matters, but Sylvia was a remarkably focused woman. She continued to call—the office, not his home, which indicated to Charlie that she was not truly ready to wreak the havoc she was threatening. So Marla remained oblivious and their golf continued to improve, but his new assistant was beginning to suspect something was up and he knew he had to figure out a way to make it end. But given that he wasn’t the one who had made it start, he didn’t see how he could end it.
On Thursday, just as he was getting ready to leave the office for what was now his weekly midday nine, Sylvia called again, crying and threatening to hurt herself.
“I was just on my way out,” he said.
“Where do you have to go?”
“Golf,” he said.
“Oh, I see.” Her laugh was brittle. “So you have someone new already. Your current assistant? I guess your lofty principles have fallen a notch.”
“No, I really play golf now.”
“Charlie, I’m not your wife. Your stupid lie won’t work on me. It’s not even your lie, remember?”
“No, no, there’s no one else. I’ve, well, reformed. It’s like a penance to me. I’ve chosen my loveless marriage and golf over the great passion of my life. It’s the right thing to do.”
He thought she would find this suitably romantic, but it only seemed to enrage her more.
“I’m going to go over to your house and tell Marla that you’re cheating.”
“Don’t do that, Sylvia. It’s not even true.”
“You cheated with me, didn’t you? And a tiger doesn’t change his stripes.”
Charlie wanted to say that he was not so much a tiger as a house cat who had been captured by a petulant child and then streaked with a Magic Marker. True, it had been hard to break with Sylvia once things had started. She was very good at a lot of things that Marla seldom did, and never conducted with enthusiasm. But it had not been his idea. And, confronted with an ultimatum, he had honored her condition. He hadn’t tried to have it both ways. He was beginning to think Sylvia was a little unstable.
“Meet me at my apartment right now, or I’ll call Marla.”
He did, and it was a dreary time, all tears and screaming and no attentions paid to him whatsoever, not even after he held her and stroked her hair and said he did love her.
“You should be getting back to work,” he said at last, hoping to find any excuse to stop holding her.
She shook her head. “My position was eliminated two weeks ago. I’m out of work.”
“Is that why you’re so desperate to get married?”
She wailed like a banshee, not that he really knew what a banshee sounded like. Something scary and shrill. “No. I love you, Charlie. I want to be your wife for that reason alone. But the last month, with all this going on, I haven’t been at my best, and they had a bad quarter, so I was a sitting duck. In a sense, I’ve lost my job because of you, Charlie. I’m unemployed and I’m alone. I’ve hit rock bottom.”
“You could always come back to the company. You left on good terms and I’d give you a strong reference.”
“But then we couldn’t be together.”
“Yes.” He was not so clever that he had thought of this in advance, but now he saw it would solve everything.
“And that’s the one thing I could never bear.”
Charlie, his hand on her hair, looked out the window. It was such a beautiful day, a little cooler than usual, but still sunny. If he left now—but, no, he would have to go back to the office. He wouldn’t get to play golf at all today.
“Who is she, Charlie?”
“Who?”
“The other woman.”
He sighed. “There is no other woman.”
“Stop lying, or I really will go to Marla. I’ll drive over there right now, while you’re at work. After all, I don’t have a job to go to.”
She was crazy, she was bluffing. She was so crazy that even if she wasn’t bluffing, he could probably persuade Marla that she was a lunatic. After all, what proof did she have? He had never allowed the use of any camera, digital or video, although Sylvia had suggested it from time to time. There were no e-mails. He never called her. And he was careful to leave his DNA, as he thought of it, only in the appropriate places, although this included some places that Marla believed inappropriate. He had learned much from the former president and the various television shows on crime scene investigations.
“Look, if it’s money you need—”
“I don’t want money! I want you!”
And so it began all over again, the crying and the wailing, only this time there was no calming her. She was obsessed with the identity of his new mistress, adamant that he tell her everything, enraged by his insistence that he really did play golf in his spare time. Finally, he thought to take her down to the garage beneath her apartment and show her the clubs in the trunk of his car.
“So what?” she said. “You always carried your clubs.”
“But I know what they are now,” he said, removing a driver. “See this one, it’s—”
“I know what’s going on and I’m done, I tell you. The minute you leave here, I’m going to go upstairs and call Marla. It’s her or me. Stop fucking with me, Charlie.”
“I really wish you wouldn’t use that word, Sylvia. It’s coarse.”
“Oh, you don’t like hearing it, but you sure like doing it. Fuck! Fuck, fuck, fuck, fucking!”
She stood in front of him, hands on her hips. Over the course of their two-year affair she had not become particularly more attractive, although she had learned to use a depilatory on her upper lip. What would happen if she went to Marla? His wife would probably stay with him, but it would be dreary, with counseling and recriminations. And they really were so happy now, happier than ever, united by their love of golf, comfortable in their routines. He couldn’t bear to see it end.
“I can’t have that, Sylvia. I just can’t.”
“Then choose.”
“I have.”
No, he didn’t hit her with the driver. He wouldn’t have risked damaging it, for one thing, having learned that it was rare to have a club that felt so right in one’s grip. Also, there would have been blood and it was impossible to clean every trace of blood from one’s trunk, according to those television shows. Instead, he pushed her
, gently but firmly, and she fell back into the trunk, which he closed and latched. He then drove back to the office, parking in a remote place where Sylvia’s thumping, which was growing fainter, would not draw any attention. At home that night, he ate dinner with Marla, marveling over the Greg Norman Shiraz that she served with the salmon. “Do you hear something out in the garage?” she asked at one point. “A knocking noise?”
“No,” he said.
It was Marla’s book club night, and after she left, he went out to the garage and circled his car for a few minutes, thinking. Ultimately, he figured out how to attach a garden hose from the exhaust through a cracked window and into the backseat, where he pressed it into the crevice of the seat, which could be released to create a larger carrying space, like a hatchback, but only from within the car proper. Sylvia’s voice was weaker, but still edged with fury. He ignored her. Marla was always gone for at least three hours on book club night and he figured that would be long enough.
It would be several weeks before Sylvia Nichols’s body was found in a patch of wilderness near a state park. While clearly a murder, it was considered a baffling case from the beginning. How had a woman been killed by carbon monoxide poisoning, then dumped at so remote a site? Why had she been killed? Homicide police, noting the large volume of calls from her home phone to Charlie’s work number, questioned him, of course, but he was able to say with complete sincerity that she was a former employee who was keen to get a job back since being let go, and he hadn’t been able to help her despite her increasing hysteria. DNA evidence indicated she had not had sex of any sort in the hours before her death. Credit card slips bore out the fact that Charlie was a regular at the local country club, and his other hours were accounted for. Even Marla laughed at the idea of her husband having an affair, saying he was far too busy with golf to have time for another woman.
“Although I’m the one who broke 90 first,” she said. “Which is funny, given that Charlie has a two-year head start on me.”
“It’s a terrible mistress, golf,” Charlie said.
“I don’t play, but they say it’s the worst you can have,” the homicide detective said.