by M. O. Walsh
When the smell of tobacco faded, Douglas turned down the air-conditioning and opened the compartment on the dash to see what she was smoking these days, to see if she had her customary pack of skinny Benson & Hedges stashed in there, but she did not. In it instead were a number of what he first thought to be receipts. The papers were blue, however, and folded neatly together, not in the way a person disposes of trash. So, Douglas became curious. He pulled into the school parking lot and removed the small slips from the tray. The paper was waxy like that of a gas-station pay pump’s and, after he parked, he unfolded the slips from the middle. He had seen something like this before, he sadly realized, from the student who claimed he would grow up to play with plutonium.
At the top of the first slip was the outline of a man, arms and legs spread like da Vinci’s model. On his chest, in dark blue ink, was a double helix: the drawing of DNA. Underneath this was the word DNAMIX.
He then saw his wife’s name, Cherilyn Mae Fuller, her maiden name, and Douglas found himself the reluctant master of a puzzle. Why he hadn’t put together that his wife had tried this ridiculous new machine at the store, and why he didn’t ask her about it the night before, became to him a looping wonder, a reason to second-guess his every move from there out.
Listed beneath her name was a series of numbers in incredibly fine print, as well as things such as eye color, hair color, and potential height. This is when Douglas recalled everything from the previous night, triggered by that word potential, which Cherilyn had said was the whole point. He remembered her fork and its carefully speared pasta, the way dimples showed up in her thighs when she sat Indian-style on the sofa, and the way she held him close with her ankles when he had finished making love to her that first time.
Her potential height read 5'6", and Douglas thought that was about right. The potential number of children she could have read 12, which seemed to Douglas outlandish and insulting, especially since they were childless after several early years of trying. And then Douglas saw another category, which listed Potential Life Station.
It read, in bold print: ROYALTY.
Douglas shook his head. How Cherilyn could put any stock into this contraption unnerved him. It seemed totally unlike her and yet, as with many surprises, he could not tell if this delighted or depressed him. He moved the first sheet aside and looked at the one behind it, an exact copy of the former. Again and again, all in all totaling ten different times his wife had entered this machine. Each one of her responses read the same: Royalty, Royalty, Royalty. One of the final slips said SURFER, but Douglas saw that this was not his wife’s reading at all, that it didn’t even have a name at the top. Still, he cross-referenced the series of small numbers of this readout with Cherilyn’s and they were not a match. Why would she subject herself to something like this? he wondered. What was she hoping it would say? And who even knew how this thing worked? It was outlandish. He looked at the Surfer readout again and saw that it had been soiled, likely discarded, as Douglas felt he might do with anything that told him to jump in the ocean. Still, he folded all the slips back up and put them in his pocket. He then walked into the school building, strolled down the hallway to his classroom, and found Rusty Bodell swatting away at a drone.
Now here he was again, back in his classroom on his lunch break, flipping through the readouts once more and nursing a necessary cup of coffee. He’d decided to give Cherilyn a call and talk it over, to bridge the small gap he sensed between them the night before and approach the subject with humor, as he felt his wife’s anxieties were easy to be solved. Douglas now thought it rather cute that Cherilyn had buried her nose in that textbook, trying to find a picture of her potential self. It was endearing, the way she had been poring over foreign recipes. This was something, Douglas figured, they could laugh about in the years to come. This could be simply another spud, he reckoned, in their marital pile of small potatoes. Douglas then imagined everything about the previous night smaller than it was before because, for the first time in his life, he discounted the undertow of our dreams.
He took out his cell phone and, remembering that hers was broken, dialed their home phone instead. After an unusually large number of rings, Cherilyn answered.
“Your car won’t start,” she said.
Douglas smiled. He wanted to tell her how glad he was that this whole business from last night wasn’t serious. He wanted to say that he could go twice in a row right now if she asked him to. “I know,” he said, grinning. “I took the Outback. I’m sorry. I was running late.”
“What’s so funny?” she asked.
Cherilyn sounded on edge, as if he’d interrupted her, and Douglas stopped smiling. “Oh,” he said. “Nothing. Nothing’s funny. Everything okay?”
“Well,” Cherilyn said, and sighed. “I’d wanted to run some errands with Mom, but I guess I won’t. We do need groceries, though. Can you swing by the store?”
“Sure,” he said, “anything for you,” and took out a pen and paper from his satchel.
“Okay,” Cherilyn said and shuffled something around in the background. “Here goes. We need four eggplants, pita bread, a bottle of lemon juice. There may be a coupon for that in the driver’s-side door. I’m not sure. Um, we also need some tahini. Just ask if you can’t find it. Two cloves of garlic. I’ve got salt, green onions. Get some more olive oil, though. It looks like we are going to need a lot of olive oil.”
Douglas took down what she said, feeling his stomach sink a bit more with each request, and wrote a question mark next to every single item. In the long history of their marriage, had he ever been asked to purchase such things? He had not. But should the addition of unexpected items in one’s life even be of note? After all, that’s the heart of jazz, isn’t it? If he wanted to stand onstage, be a man on the scene, he figured he had to embrace a little improvisation. Yet his mood became sullen. He traced over the question marks time and time again. He underlined the word eggplant.
“Are you feeling all right?” he asked her. “How’s your head? You sound down.”
“I’m fine,” she said. “I’ve just been watching the news. You know, the world seems kind of terrible when you watch the news.”
“Should I pick up some steaks or something?” he asked.
“No,” Cherilyn said. “I think that’s the whole meal. It’s mainly an eggplant thing.”
Douglas told her he would swing by the store after his trombone lesson at four and be home around five-thirty or six. “Okay,” she said.
“I love you,” he said.
“Okay,” she said. “Me, too.”
Douglas turned off his phone and set it on the desk. He didn’t even have time to whistle out some blues when, behind him, he heard a man say, “I love you, too, sugar-nuts.”
Douglas looked up to see Deuce Newman, the de facto town photographer of Deerfield, standing in the doorway to his classroom.
Deuce was a man who took up a lot of space. Although not even six feet tall, he had a certain girth about him, which, like the trunk of a tree, only seemed to grow with time. His thick face, the strange outdated haircut that swept over his ears, the two heavy and professional-looking cameras slung around his neck: They were enough to block Douglas’s view of the hallway. The two of them had been classmates in high school forever ago and Deuce Newman, whose actual name was Bruce, was once an all-state middle linebacker who, as luck would have it, wore the number 2.
Now hitting forty himself, Deuce had become a somewhat legendary figure around Deerfield. After tearing up his knee in his senior year, Deuce had decided to do what many local athletes do and spend the rest of his life milking his youthful celebrity for all it was worth. At this, he was successful.
After all, Bruce Newman’s story is the type a small town understands. He didn’t come from much, a little two-bedroom house with a dad who worked at the auto shop, didn’t have any fa
ncy training techniques, just the old rusty tackling sleds behind the school, and yet was given, or as many in Deerfield would say, blessed, with outsized abilities. He’d once had a clear path out of Deerfield and into the larger world, complete with fame and riches and everything a person can dream of, until an illegal crack back block from a big-city kid quickly took him out at the knees. This was Deerfield life in a nutshell.
But Douglas didn’t feel too bad for Deuce. He was ambitious in his own way and had ultimately achieved a sort of fame, after all, becoming akin to the town mascot. After the injury, he stood on the sideline with his crutches and led cheers for the fans, got pecks from the cheerleaders. Even after he graduated, the coaches still invited him to the field as a sign of goodwill, where, out of little other than boredom, Deuce took to bringing a camera with him. He took action shots at ground level, candid photos of hopeful parents in the stands, and this resulted in the local paper, The Deerfield Bugle, running some of his pictures, and the next twenty years of Bruce’s life were pretty much set.
Yet Douglas had no idea why he was at school that day, nor why he was standing in the doorway to his classroom staring at him.
“Bruce,” Douglas said. “What can I do for you?”
“I just have to know,” Deuce said, “what kind of man can be married to a woman like Cherilyn and still sit there with a face as sad as a donkey’s dick?”
“Lovely,” Douglas said.
“That was Cherilyn, right?” Deuce said. “I’m not interrupting something secret, am I? Maybe some side honey with a teacher’s pet?”
Douglas stood up from his desk and walked over to shake Bruce’s hand. This type of crass and innocuous teasing was common between them, so Douglas didn’t think much of it. “I think you know me better than that,” he said. “It’s good to see you.”
Truth be told, though, Douglas didn’t feel like seeing anyone at that moment. And, out of all the nobodies Douglas didn’t want to see, Bruce Newman ranked pretty high. It was nothing overtly contentious, but they’d always had a sort of odd relationship, all the way back to high school, as Bruce long harbored and still maintained, Douglas would argue, an unrelenting crush on Cherilyn. The practicalities of the matter had been settled years ago, of course, as Cherilyn had never shown a lick of interest in Bruce, as she had loved and married Douglas without incident, and as the world was a logical place. But the misguided hearts of some men, for whatever reason, never waver. So, the way Bruce always asked about her, the way he would kiss her hand when they saw each other out shopping or at some event in the town square, the way he would be sure to remind Douglas how lucky he was to have her, inevitably made small talk between the two men a bit strained.
“Damn,” Deuce said. “What happened to your mustache? Your face looks like a dolphin’s vagina.”
“I have to say,” Douglas told him, “you have an impressive amount of animal genitalia similes.”
“Whatever that means,” Deuce said, “I thank you.”
“So,” Douglas asked. “What brings you to campus?”
“Bicentennial fever,” Deuce said. “I’ve only got two days left to get all these headshots done and these damn kids don’t show up to appointments. I’ve tried everything I could think of and then some. I figured I’d just track them down here.”
The bicentennial. Of course. Everything in town, it seemed to Douglas, was about the damned bicentennial. That very weekend Deerfield was to hold what they considered to be a huge celebration. It was something the mayor and the city council imagined would be a statewide news item, maybe inject a little energy into the place, pump some tourism dollars into the local economy, although Douglas felt this to be a bit delusional. Still, the party had become a sort of homework assignment for the whole town that past year. The school band was learning new songs, banners were being printed up by the dozens, Cherilyn was making birdhouses like crazy. Even the courthouse building had been pressure-washed and repainted. Bruce Newman’s role in this occasion had become prominent by his own design. He’d promised their mayor, Hank Richieu, a sort of monumental mosaic, one of those hidden-picture computer-type deals about ten feet high and five across, to be made up of a small photo of everyone in Deerfield’s face. There was also to be a talent show, a parade, a gumbo cook-off, and even a fireworks display, but Deuce’s mosaic of the nearly twelve thousand people in Deerfield was said to be the centerpiece. The whole thing was even kicking off tomorrow night, Douglas remembered, in the school gym. He had no plan to attend. All he wanted this Friday night, he knew, was a normal dinner with his wife.
“Actually,” Bruce told him, “I still need a photo of you, don’t I? How about you hop up there on your desk and give me an action shot? We’ll call it ‘The Teacher in Deep Thought.’”
“You know,” Douglas said. “This really isn’t a good time.”
Deuce took one of the cameras in his hand and began fiddling with the lens. “Come on,” he said. “Pucker those lips and give me a trademark Hubbard whistle. I’ll get you in the middle of ‘What a Wonderful World’ by that fat guy.”
Douglas reached down to his desk and grabbed his beret, picked up his mug of coffee that was already getting cold. “You mean Louis Armstrong?” Douglas said. “American genius?”
“That would be a good caption,” Bruce said. “Stand over there by the window. I’ll get you in your artsy-fartsy hat and everything. We’ll call it ‘Douglas Hubbard: The Professor in Repose.’”
Douglas knew he was trapped. So, rather than fight it, he walked to the window and stood thoughtfully enough, he felt, with his coffee and beret. “I’m not actually a professor,” he said, and just like that, here was another thing that reminded Douglas of what he had never accomplished. No Ph.D. No stellar career. No dynamo in the sack. And this thought led him back to Cherilyn.
“Bruce,” Douglas said. “I was wondering. Have you heard about that new machine at the grocery?”
“Indeed,” Bruce said. “Amazing, isn’t it?”
“What,” Douglas said. “You believe in that thing?”
“No,” Bruce said. “I meant it’s amazing the shit people will buy if you shovel it.”
“I’m guessing you haven’t tried it, then.”
“No need,” Bruce said. “Why mess with perfection, am I right? It’s like you. Why would you try something like that? You know who you are. It’s the same person you’ve always been. The luckiest man in the world.”
“I don’t know,” Douglas said. “I imagine I could be a lot of different things.”
“Whatever you say,” Deuce said, and angled his camera. “Now give me a smile, Mr. President. Give me a big cheesy grin for the ages.”
Douglas rested his hip against the windowsill and willed himself to smile. Before Deuce could get a shot off, however, a baseball crashed through the glass. It hit Douglas in the hand, cracked his mug, and splashed coffee all over his blazer.
“Perfect,” Douglas said.
A boy named Tim Nevers quickly ran up to the window, nearly out of breath, and surveyed the damage. He looked through the hole and into the room. “Damn!” he said. “How fast you think that was going?”
Deuce picked the ball off the floor, tossed it in his hand a couple times. “Upper eighties, easy,” he told him. “Nice little slurve to it, too.”
Douglas mopped at the coffee with the sleeve of his blazer. “Go see the principal, Mr. Nevers,” he told him. “Tell her to call maintenance.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Hubbard,” Tim said. “I just found out yesterday that I’m going to be a pitcher. A Major Leaguer! Can you believe it? I didn’t even know I liked baseball.”
Deuce turned the ball in his hand. “A pitcher, eh?” he said. “That’s what DNAMIX told you?”
“Yes, sir,” the boy said.
Deuce tossed the ball back to him. “Not bad,” he said.
�
�You may want to work on your command,” Douglas told him. “And start thinking of a way to pay for this window.”
“Won’t be a problem,” Tim said. “I’m going to be a millionaire!” And then he ran along.
When Douglas looked back up at Deuce, he saw that he was already clicking away, grinning and aiming his camera, catching shot after shot of Douglas looking grumpy and stained and miserable.
“Douglas Hubbard, everybody,” Deuce said. “The Luckiest Man in the World.”
4
Cherilyn
England. Luxembourg. Liechtenstein. Monaco. Morocco. Qatar!
So much royalty googled and it was not even noon.
So many stories.
Did you know, for instance, that the Kingdom of Bhutan has a Dragon King named Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck and he married a non-royal woman named Jetsun Pema and made her a queen? Just like that. Boom! She was royal. At their wedding they wore multicolored scarves and pink kimonos and he had a ponytail and she got a crown. This was something Cherilyn did not know yesterday.
It was nice to be reminded, she thought, that the Internet was useful. Although she spent a good amount of time on it, checking Facebook, looking at the things her friends either birthed or ingested on Instagram, getting craft ideas from Pinterest, she did this all from the small cloister of her smartphone. Maybe she would venture over to her news feed every once in a while to read the gossip headlines about which celebrities were mad at other celebrities about what rumored affairs they’d had at which beach house in the Hamptons or Martha’s Vineyard or some such place, but Cherilyn didn’t think this counted as being “online.” She was not one of those “Internet people.” The opposite, actually.