Little Children (24 page)

“I’ll do it,” Kathy said. “Just tell me her last name so I can look it up in the phone book.”

“I don’t know her last name.”

“All right,” she said. “I’ll take tomorrow afternoon off. I’ll meet you at the pool.”

“Calm down,” he said. “I’ll take care of it. Now would you just chill out already?”

The kids ate first—hot dogs and Tater Tots and baby carrots—then migrated into the living room to watch
Thomas and the Magic Railroad
, a movie Kathy found disturbing on any number of levels. It was a cinematic catastrophe, shifting clumsily between the inane antics of the talking trains and a bewildering psychodrama starring Peter Fonda, of all people. As a filmmaker, Kathy felt insulted and even polluted by the sheer awfulness of the storytelling; as a parent, she was mystified that her normally rambunctious three-year-old could tolerate, let alone enjoy, its art house pacing and dark Freudian overtones. But Aaron would have watched it every day if she let him, and Lucy seemed willing to trust his recommendation.

In the past couple of years, as if in apology for his failure to pass the bar exam, Todd had become a surprisingly talented cook. Tonight he’d grilled salmon, and it was done to perfection, a vivid tic-tac-toe board of grill marks seared into the flesh of each moist, flaky fillet. He beamed as the compliments poured in.

“This is delicious,” said Sarah.

“You could start a restaurant,” said Richard. “House of Todd.”

“Your wine is terrific,” Todd replied.

“Speaking of wine…” Richard raised his glass. “Here’s to the chef, and to his lovely wife.
Salud
.”

There was a slightly awkward pause after the toast, a moment of collective floundering they masked with tentative, encouraging smiles. Kathy was about to fill the space by asking Richard if it might be possible for her to film some of his meetings with the Charlie Chopsticks executives. For too long, she’d put off planning a new project, on the assumption that Todd would pass the bar and find a good job, freeing her to take a break for a couple of years, spend a little more time with Aaron, maybe have another baby. But recently she’d come to accept the possibility that it might not happen, and it had occurred to her that it might be fun to do some kind of comic documentary, something lighthearted but socially engaged, a little hipper and edgier than her current project. The creation of a nationwide chain of Chinese restaurants by a bunch of clueless white guys seemed like just the sort of vehicle she was looking for, a way to shine an amusing light on what was actually a troubling phenomenon: the voracious march of American business, its insatiable need to devour everything in its path—other people’s history, their cuisine, their ethnic identities and cultural traditions—and then spit it back out as bland commodities for sale to middle America. But she needed to be diplomatic, to figure out a way not to tip her satirical hand, and while she was pondering her strategy, Richard shifted the conversation in an entirely different direction.

“Lots of sturm and drang in our quiet little town, eh?”

Nobody had to ask what he was referring to. In the past couple of days, the papers and TV news had been full of Larry Moon and Ronald James McGorvey, the sensational tabloid drama of the pervert expelled from church by “the killer cop,” the assault and battery charge filed against a man some people considered a hero and others a dangerous vigilante.

“It’s crazy,” said Sarah. “He’s lucky he didn’t kill the guy.”

“And in church of all places,” agreed Kathy. “I’m not religious myself, but I was like, is nothing sacred?”

“What I want to know,” said Richard, “is what a creep like that was even doing in church.”

“Which creep?” asked Sarah.

“Larry’s not a creep,” said Todd. “McGorvey was sitting near his family. Larry didn’t like the way he was looking at his kids.”

“Todd’s biased,” Kathy explained. “He’s friends with the cop. They’re both on that Committee of Concerned Parents. That’s why he’s defending him.”

“Well, who am I supposed to defend?” Todd wondered. “The poor little child molester?”

“Nonviolent protest is one thing,” said Kathy. “Throwing a man down a flight of stairs is something else.”

Sarah was staring at Todd in apparent perplexity.

“I didn’t know you were on that committee.”

Todd shrugged. “I kinda got sucked into it. I play on Larry’s football team, and he asked me to distribute some flyers.”

“He’s on your team?” Sarah said. “You never told me that.”

Kathy heard something jarring and oddly familiar in Sarah’s tone, almost as if she were a wife who resented being kept in the dark about her husband’s activities. It was a tone Kathy herself had been striking a lot in the past week, and it was odd to hear it coming out of another woman’s mouth.

“I just wanted to play football,” said Todd, a bit defensively. “There turned out to be a little more baggage than I bargained for.”

“What kind of football do you play?” asked Richard.

“Tackle,” Kathy interjected. “Without pads. He comes home looking like he was in a bar fight with Mike Tyson. It’s very responsible behavior for a grown man.”

“It’s not that bad.” Todd sounded proud of himself. “Just a few bumps and bruises.”

Richard plucked a piece of bread from the basket in the middle of the table.

“What’s he like? Your friend the cop.”

“Decent guy, I guess. Bit of a hothead.”

“As a general rule,” Richard said, buttering his bread as though it were an especially delicate operation, “I don’t condone throwing people down the stairs, but in this particular case I can’t say I feel too bad about it. Especially if this S.O.B. gets the message and finds somewhere else to live.”

“Where’s he gonna go?” Sarah asked. “The same exact thing will happen in the next place.”

“Fine with me,” declared Richard. “Just as long as it’s not in my backyard. If that makes me a selfish yuppie, so be it.”

“Mr. Liberal.” Sarah’s voice was laced with disgust. “I thought you, of all people, would be a little more tolerant.”

“I am tolerant,” Richard replied. “I just happen to draw the line at child molesters.”

Sarah seemed more upset than the conversation merited.

“But everything else is okay, right?”

“Pretty much.” Richard spoke with an air of icy calm that Kathy found unpleasant. “If consenting adults are involved, I say go for it.”

Todd was studying Richard with almost as much intensity as Sarah was, and Kathy couldn’t help feeling like she was missing something important. She spoke more to dispel her own discomfort than anything else.

“You know what’s weird? I’ve never even seen this McGorvey guy.”

“We did,” said Sarah.

“No, we didn’t,” said Richard.

“Not you,” said Sarah. “Me and Todd. That day at the pool, remember?”

Todd looked momentarily stumped.

“Oh yeah. I forgot about that.”

“He went swimming with flippers and a mask,” Sarah continued. “Everybody got out of the water. It was the middle of a heat wave, and he had that whole gigantic pool to himself. But then the cops came and kicked him out.” She looked at Kathy. “He wasn’t scary or anything. He was just this pathetic loser, you know?”

Richard shook his head. “Those are the ones you have to worry about.”

Kathy turned to Todd. Her voice came out sharper than she’d meant it to.

“You never told me about that.”

“Sure I did.”

“You did not.”

Todd shrugged. “I thought I did.”

“I took Lucy swimming last year,” said Richard, “and a kid threw up in the water. That cleared the pool pretty quick, too.”

Sexual tension is an elusive thing, but Kathy thought she had a pretty good radar for it. All through dinner she’d been watching Sarah and Todd and not picking up on any suspicious behavior—no furtive eye contact or flirty repartee, no nervous laughter, nothing. But suddenly—it happened the moment Sarah said “we” in reference to herself and Todd as though it were the most natural thing in the world—it was like someone had turned a knob a hair to the right, and the radio station clicked in, so loud and clear it almost knocked her over.

Wham.

Once she became aware of the connection between them, it seemed impossible that she’d missed it before. Todd and Sarah didn’t even need to
look
at each other. There was just this thick fog surrounding them, engulfing the table, the mini-climate generated by two people sharing a powerful physical and emotional bond, a force field that turned everyone else into outsiders—mere footnotes—even their lawful spouses. Kathy felt embarrassed by the realization, as if she were seeing a stranger naked, and for a couple of seconds she couldn’t think of anywhere to look except straight down at her plate.

“I really respect that you’re a filmmaker,” Sarah was saying. “I’d give anything to be able to do something creative like that.”

Kathy forced herself to look up, and when she did, Sarah seemed to have been transformed into an entirely different woman. Not beautiful, but powerful nonetheless. Maybe it was the wine she’d drunk, or the pressure of the situation—she’d been dealing with it all night, of course, while Kathy had just tuned in—but whatever the cause, her face was full of color, a feverish flush of excitement. Her eyes were glittering with what Kathy couldn’t help but recognize as sexual triumph, a kind of animal pleasure. So what if she envied Kathy’s career? There was only one contest between them, and Sarah had won by a mile. The most galling part of it, Kathy thought, was that her mother had been right all along.

“It’s really not that creative,” she replied. “It’s more like an oral history.”

“Still,” Sarah insisted. “You’re making something, contributing to the culture. What am I doing with my life?”

“You’re raising a child,” said Richard. “There’s nothing more important than that.”

On a hunch, Kathy dropped her fork and quickly ducked under the table to pick it up. She thought she would catch Todd and Sarah playing footsie, but she was mistaken. All she found down there was a forest of bare motionless legs—Todd’s muscular and downy, Richard’s scrawny and covered with coarse hair, Sarah’s bare and tanned. She had okay legs, nothing special. Nice calves, knobby ankles, boring Birkenstocks. The only surprising thing was the polish on her toenails—somehow Kathy hadn’t noticed it before—a hideous metallic blue, the kind of color a trashy twelve-year-old would have loved, nothing you’d ever expect to find on the feet of a grown woman, the mother of a young child. You would have to be crazy to wear nail polish like that, or so deeply in love that you were beyond caring.

“Kathy?” Todd’s voice seemed far away, like he was talking through a cement wall. “Are you okay?”

It was getting embarrassing, she understood that. She had been hiding under the table for too long, way longer than it should have taken to simply retrieve a fork. But she didn’t really want to get up just yet, to sit in her chair and carry on a civil conversation with the woman who’d stolen her husband.

She would do it, though, she knew she would. She wasn’t going to make a scene, not in front of guests, not with two three-year-olds in the next room. She was going to have to get off the floor and somehow make it through dinner with her dignity intact. No tears, no accusations. She’d do it if it killed her.

“I’m fine,” she said, still on her hands and knees, still staring dumbstruck at the other woman’s toes. “Just give me a second.”

AFTER THREATENING ALL DAY TO GO TO THE FOOTBALL GAME,
Todd’s mother-in-law decided against it at the last minute.

“You sure?” he asked, trying to keep the pleasure out of his voice. “You’re welcome to come.”

“I’d like to,” Marjorie lied, “but I’m a little tired. You and Aaron sure kept me hopping this afternoon.”

“Looks like you’re on your own,” said Kathy, who was sitting beside her mother on the couch. The two women looked nothing alike—Marjorie was short and thickly built, with permed gray hair and little octagonal eyeglasses—but both were staring at him with the same unfriendly expression, like he was a grounded teenager unworthy of the trust they were placing in him.

“Suit yourself,” Todd muttered. “It’s your choice.”

What a fool he’d been. Todd had convinced himself that the dinner party had gone okay, that he and Sarah had managed to put Kathy’s suspicions to rest, at least temporarily. She certainly hadn’t accused him of anything, or behaved in a way that made him think she’d noticed anything untoward. All she’d said before going to bed that night was that she’d enjoyed meeting Sarah and Richard, and thought that Lucy was a sweet little girl.

Two days later, however, her mother had showed up with three suitcases for a “surprise visit” of ominously indeterminate length, and from that moment on, Todd’s activities and whereabouts couldn’t have been more closely monitored if he’d been a psycho making death threats against the president. Marjorie accompanied him and Aaron everywhere—the playground, the library, the supermarket, the Town Pool, the movie theater. If Todd wanted to go for a walk after dinner, Marjorie invariably could use a little air herself. He was surprised she didn’t squeeze into the bathroom with him, making small talk while he sat on the toilet, offering to scrub his back in the shower. When he managed to escape for a run in the evening, he kept expecting her to pull up beside him in a slow-moving vehicle, checking a stopwatch and shouting encouragement through the open window.

Aside from the occasional lovesick e-mail he managed to fire off while Marjorie wasn’t looking, Todd hadn’t had any substantial contact with Sarah for five days. He was beginning to consider desperate measures—sneaking out in the middle of the night, tossing pebbles at her bedroom window. Anything, just to be able to steal a couple of minutes alone with her, a handful of kisses. He’d gone so far as to think about applying for some kind of mindless job at Home Depot, so he could arrange to meet her during his lunch hour.

The worst of it was the pool, seeing her in their usual spot, in her little red bikini—the briefest glimpse of her shocked him like a defibrillator—and not being able to spread his towel next to hers or rub sunscreen on her back, not being able to do anything but trade lingering doleful glances from afar, conducting a short wordless conversation that always ended up with Todd offering a helpless little shrug in response to her unspoken question:
When can I see you?

“Besides,” Marjorie said, patting Kathy affectionately on the leg, “I need to spend a little time with my daughter. I’ve hardly said two words to her since I got here.”

Todd bent over to tie his sneaker, wondering if he could slip upstairs and call Sarah from his cell phone. Maybe she could leave the house on a supermarket run or something, spend a couple of minutes with him before the game. Even that would be better than nothing. But before he could figure out the logistics, a horn sounded in the street outside.

“That’s my ride.” Todd leapt up and headed for the door, hoping to complete his exit before Marjorie changed her mind.

“What time will you be home?” Kathy asked.

“Hard to say. One or two, something like that.”

“Be careful,” Marjorie warned him, smiling like it was all in good fun. “And stay out of trouble.”

You might have thought that having a felony assault charge and a potentially ruinous civil lawsuit hanging over your head would spoil your appetite for a football game, but Larry was fired up for the Guardians’ season finale against the Controllers. Todd sensed it the moment he stepped into the minivan. The guy was high on adrenaline, itchy for combat. Instead of saying hello, he punched Todd in the sternum.

“You ready?” he demanded. There was a harsh, nonrhetorical intensity to the question. “You better fuckin’ be ready.”

“I’m ready.” Todd held his gaze, but spoke in a quieter, more probing voice. “How about you? How you holding up?”

If Larry understood this as a reference to his legal problems, or the relentless media scrutiny he’d endured as a result of his arrest, he wasn’t letting on.

“I’ll tell you something,” he said, his expression relaxing a little as they pulled away from the curb. “I’ve always liked being the underdog. I like stepping onto the field knowing that the other guy thinks I’m going to roll over and play dead, especially if the other guy’s an arrogant, overconfident asshole. I like seeing the look on his face the first time I knock him on his ass, and he realizes he’s in for a street fight.”

It was an understatement to say that the Guardians were underdogs. At 0–5, they were the basement dwellers of the Midnight Touch Football League, a low-scoring, error-prone gang of amateurs who always managed to find a new way of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, at least on those rare occasions when victory was even a vague possibility. The week before, they’d been whupped by the lowly Technicians, a team that hadn’t won a game in three seasons, by a score of 20–0. The Controllers, on the other hand, were 4–1, with an explosive big-play offense that regularly racked up forty and fifty points a game. In all likelihood, they were already looking past the Guardians to next week’s championship showdown with their archrivals, the Auditors.

“These guys are good athletes,” Larry conceded, “but they’re a bunch of crybabies. You clean their clocks a few times, they just wanna pick up their ballie and go home.”

“Be nice to pull off an upset,” said Todd, gazing sadly down Sarah’s street as they drove past, wondering what she was up to, if she missed him as badly as he missed her.

“We gotta shut down their running game early. That’s the key. Their passing game’s more erratic than it looks on paper.”

It seemed surreal that Larry was so focused on football at such a turbulent moment in his life. Todd’s own situation wasn’t half as dire, and he’d barely given the game a passing thought all week.

“How’s your lawyer?” he asked. “Are you satisfied with your representation?”

“He’s no Johnnie Cochran,” said Larry. “But I’m no O.J. Simpson, either.”

“Must be a pretty scary time for you.”

“Scary?” Larry turned to Todd in what appeared to be genuine surprise. “You think there’s a jury in the world that’s going to convict me of assaulting Ronnie McGorvey? No wonder you failed the bar exam. They’ll probably give me a medal.”

Larry circulated among the Guardians during pregame warmups, accosting and cajoling them as they did their jumping jacks and hurdler’s stretches. He was head cheerleader one minute, Vince Lombardi the next.

“We’re tougher than they are!” he proclaimed, batting Tony Correnti vigorously on both sides of his head, as if he were wearing a helmet. “Am I right? I said, AM I RIGHT?”

“Fuckin’ A,” Correnti replied, hauling off and smacking Larry right back. “They’re a bunch of shithead stockbrokers.”

Grinning, Larry moved on to his next victim, hammering DeWayne on his unpadded shoulders with both fists, as if trying to pound him into the ground.

“Who we gonna beat?” he demanded.

“Controllers!” DeWayne bellowed.

Pete Olaffson was next in line. As if performing a dance they knew by heart, Larry and Pete locked hands and slammed their bodies together, three times on the right, three times on the left.

“Who’s a winner?”

“I’m a winner!”

“Go Guardians!”

“Go Guardians!”

“Kick some ass!”

“Kick some ass!”

Larry swaggered over to Todd with a bravado that would have been comical if not for the look of stone-cold conviction on his face.

“Who’s scoring the first touchdown?” he yelled, pummeling Todd’s stomach as if working on a speedbag.

“I am!” Todd sang out obediently, tightening his abs to deflect the blows.

“I got second!” cried DeWayne.

“I’ll take number three,” volunteered Bart Williams.

It felt like a joke at first, a parody of the high school coaches they all remembered with varying degrees of fondness and resentment, but after a while—the evolution was so gradual as to be almost imperceptible—it turned serious. Todd had seen this phenomenon in every sport he’d ever played, ever since he was old enough for Little League. The mood of a team was a delicate, volatile thing—it only took one person to change the whole chemistry.

Larry’s feverish optimism spread among his teammates like a virus. By the time they lined up for the opening kickoff, the Guardians—Todd included—had worked themselves into a frenzy of barely suppressed excitement. As if he’d drunk some sort of magic potion, Bart Williams, an indifferent placekicker, charged forward and connected with a monster boot. The football rose high above the lights and into the night sky, soaring over the heads of the dumbstruck return men, and bouncing out of the end zone for a touchback.

If the Auditors were the thugs of the Midnight Touch Football League, the Controllers were the pretty boys, spandex-clad twenty-somethings from the financial industries who arrived at the field in a caravan of BMWs, Lexuses, and Cadillac SUVs, bringing along a platoon of hot women who apparently didn’t mind staying up late to cheer the boys on, a sure sign they were girlfriends instead of wives.

There was a cockiness about them as they broke the huddle and lined up for first down, a palpable air of command. The quarterback—he was lanky and sandy-haired, with chiseled features and a deep beach-house tan—gazed across the line of scrimmage with the unquestioned self-assurance of a guy who’d been pulling down six figures since the day he graduated from B-school, a hotshot with a Palm Pilot, a German luxury car, and another fat bonus right around the corner.

That could have been me
, Todd thought, shifting uneasily from foot to foot in the secondary. He made this observation without shame or regret, accepting the truth of it with an almost perverse sense of pride. He felt okay about where he was, over on this side of the line with Larry and DeWayne, men who eked out forty or fifty grand a year and struggled to scrape together the down payment on a two-bedroom cape that needed work, men for whom a new car was a twice-a-decade extravagance.

On the first play from scrimmage, the Controllers ran straight up the middle. From his godlike perspective at free safety, Todd watched a hole open in the Guardians’ front line, a momentary gap between Olaffson and Correnti just big enough for the Controllers’ halfback—a wiry speedster who supposedly competed in Iron Man triathalons in the off-season—to shoot through. Reading the play perfectly from middle linebacker, Larry rushed forward on a collision course with the ballcarrier. Somehow, though, the collision never occurred. Dancing a quick little stutter step that left his would-be tackler with two handfuls of air and a faceful of artificial turf, the Iron Man slipped into the open field, loping straight toward Todd, the defender of last resort.

He was one of those shifty runners, a virtuoso of jukes and misdirection, eyes going one way, shoulders another, legs somewhere else, but Todd knew enough to stay put and focus on the hips, (
Gentlemen,
Coach Breeden used to say, in one of his rare aphorisms that had worn well over the years,
the hips don’t lie. Not in the boudoir and not on the field of play
.) Realizing he wasn’t going to elude his man with fancy footwork, the halfback tried to do it honestly, veering toward the sideline with a sudden and disheartening burst of speed. He almost turned the corner, but Todd just managed to trip him up from behind with a desperate, diving tackle that almost certainly saved a touchdown.

The girlfriends on the Controller bench rose as one, whooping it up like cheerleaders as the Iron Man bounced to his feet, brushing nonexistent dirt off his hairless, freakishly muscled legs with his gloved hands.

“Way to go, Zack!”

“Controllers rule!”

“Go team!”

Todd picked himself up a little more gingerly, trying to ignore the burning sensation in his right knee, which he’d skinned on the unforgiving carpet. The Iron Man pulled out his mouthpiece and grinned.

“Dude,” he said, bestowing a comradely pat on Todd’s shoulder, “I’m gonna keep you busy.”

Jogging back to the huddle, Todd couldn’t help noticing the wilted expressions on the faces of his teammates, the sense of impending doom that had replaced their irrational exuberance of a moment ago. All it had taken was one bad play to wake them from their collective dream, to remind them that they were a bunch of losers due for an ass-whipping. But Todd wasn’t in the mood to fold just yet.

“Come on!” he said, clapping his hands sharply. “Buckle down! Let’s play some D!”

“That was my bad,” Larry said, picking up the thread. “It won’t happen again.”