A Man's Game

by Newton Thornburg

  “Jack—remember?”

  “Jack, then.”

  “I know. But I don’t want counseling anyway.”

  “What then?”

  Baird thought about it. “Emanations,” he said. “As I recall, you give off emanations that can make a man feel unreasonably happy.”

  “No kidding.” She wasn’t smiling. “I’ll tell you what—a cup of strong black coffee for the road, and that’s it, understood?”

  Baird nodded solemnly. “Understood.”

  Inside the house, she closed the door behind him and walked on ahead toward the kitchen, which was on the right, just past the dining area. On the other side there appeared to be two bedrooms and a bath, with a stairway at the rear leading up to the attic and down to the basement. But Baird barely glanced at his surroundings, not with Lee Jeffers’ muscular buttocks just ahead of him, rolling hypnotically under the velour of her robe, which was cinched tightly about her small waist. Her black hair was tousled, with a few loose curls falling over her face, giving her the slave-girl look then popular in Hollywood.

  As she went about making coffee, Baird sat down at the kitchen table.

  “You go out drinking by yourself very often?” she asked.

  “My wife doesn’t understand me,” he said, trying not to smile.

  Jeffers gave him a wry look. “And you think I will?”

  “Why not? I’m an open book.”

  “Maybe I don’t feel like reading.”

  “Ah, what disappointment.”

  “Life can be rough.”

  Though her manner was that of a grownup with a child, Baird did not take offense. He imagined she thought him drunker than he was. “Listen, I appreciate you making coffee, Lee,” he said. “But the truth is, I don’t really want any. I don’t want to upset my stomach. Maybe something with a little vodka or gin in it. Something for the road.”

  Shrugging, Jeffers turned off the burner under the teakettle. “I shouldn’t have any either. I do have to sleep tonight.”

  “Me too.”

  She smiled coolly. “Not here, you won’t.”

  “Oh hell, I know that. I’m not so high I’m having delusions of grandeur.”

  She filled a glass with ice, poured in Diet 7UP and added a shot of vodka from a bottle she kept above the broom closet, as if it were floor wax.

  “You do know how to sweet-talk a lady, don’t you, Jack?” she said, handing him the glass.

  “No, that was just an honest observation. Any rational man would think of you as the jackpot—you must know that. The winning lotto ticket. We may play the game, but we don’t really expect to win.”

  “There you go again.”

  “The sweet-talker, huh?”

  “For sure. You know, you surprise me. The other times we’ve met, you came across as Jack Baird, family man. I liked him better.”

  “So did I. But lately he seems to have lost the touch.” He gestured for her to join him at the table. “Why don’t you have a drink with me? I’ll get it.”

  “No thanks.”

  She went back into the living room then, and he got up and followed. Not by accident, she sat down in a wingback chair near the front door. Baird knew that the second he finished his drink, she would be on her feet, opening the door and ushering him out. Nevertheless, he sank back on the sofa as if he were there to stay.

  “Well, how do you like my house?” she asked.

  “Very nice. Very comfortable. I like it here.”

  “Just don’t get to liking it too much. Soon as you finish that drink, you’re out of here. Sleep, remember?”

  “Of course.” The drink tasted like pop. As he sipped at it, he contemplated her reaction had he suddenly blurted the truth to her:

  “I killed Slade last night.”

  “Oh, really?”

  Again he thought of her in the Oolala, without the blue robe. And once more he asked himself when it would happen, when he would begin to feel it. Looking at her, he wondered if he was having a breakdown.

  “The emanations,” he said. “I still feel them. And I think they’re helping me.”

  She gave him a rueful look. “No kidding.”

  “Yeah. I feel stronger now. Happier too.”

  “All that.”

  “Remarkable, isn’t it?”

  “Very remarkable.”

  He finished his drink and placed it on the coffee table. Immediately she got up and moved to the door. He followed, smiling, meeting her somewhat quizzical look. At the door, just as she was reaching for the knob, he took her in his arms and tried to kiss her, but she turned her head away. He forced her up against the door then and pulled her face back so he could push his mouth into hers—when her knee suddenly swung up into his groin and her forearm, hard as a two-by-four, smacked into his face, cutting dead his sharp cry of pain. He staggered back and fell to the floor, gasping and holding his testicles.

  “You stupid asshole,” she said. “You’re the last person I would’ve expected that from. What in God’s name got into you tonight anyway? Are you on something?”

  Baird was trying to catch his breath. “Jesus, did you have to do that?”

  “You didn’t give me a lot of choice.”

  “Goddamn, it hurts!”

  “Oh come on, I barely touched you,” she said. “You’ll be all right. Are you gonna leave now, or do I call the uniforms in?”

  “No, I’m leaving—don’t worry about that. Just give me a few minutes, okay?” He crawled to the couch and leaned back against it, still breathing hard. “Jesus, I’m cramping like the devil,” he said. “I hope I don’t puke.”

  “You do and you’ll clean it up.”

  “What a tough guy.”

  “That’s for sure.” She was still standing near the door, her arms folded under her breasts. “What did you expect, that I’d melt in your arms? Let you carry me off to bed?”

  Baird shook his head wearily. “God only knows. I didn’t plan any of it. It was just an impulse. I guess I’m drunker than I thought.”

  “I guess.”

  He looked up at her. The pain was beginning to ebb now, and he got it into his head that he might be able to explain himself to her. Even before he went on, he knew that it would be the alcohol speaking. But he couldn’t stop himself.

  “It was just an impulse,” he said again. “A wild hair. You’re a very beautiful woman, Lee, and for some reason that seems to be all-important to me lately. I don’t know why, but it is.”

  “Maybe you ought to reorder your priorities.”

  “Yeah, I suppose so. But sometimes I think we get the feeling—men, I mean, as we get older—I think we get the feeling that beauty somehow will save us. I mean, that if we can have that certain beautiful girl just once—take her in our arms, you know, naked, and kiss her and hold her…” He knew he was talking gibberish, that he was only making a greater fool of himself, but her look, rueful and puzzled, led him to continue. “And push it in all the way, and come, really come—fill her belly with it—that somehow that will save us. Make us whole. Make us young again. I don’t know why. I know it doesn’t make any sense. But there it is. It’s like sometimes we’re starving, and only beauty will fill us.”

  Though Jeffers still looked cold and angry, her eyes inexplicably had filled. “That’s stupid,” she said. “It makes no sense at all.”

  Baird started to get to his feet, then gave up and sat down on the sofa, hunching forward over the pain. He could barely remember what he had said. More than anything else, he was aware now of how drunk he was, how vulnerable. He was afraid that if he didn’t hold his tongue, he would confess everything, and for no other reason than his sudden terror of silence.

  “Listen, if you want to sleep it off here, on the sofa, you can,” Jeffers said. “You’re in no shape to drive anyway.”

  Baird thought about it. “Maybe for a little while.”

  “I’ll get a blanket,” she said. “And when you’re ready to leave, just pull the door close
d. It will lock. You won’t have to wake me.”

  With his legs still drawn up, Baird edged down onto the sofa, laying his head on a pillow at one end. Jeffers went down the hallway and opened a linen closet. She got out an afghan and brought it back to the living room. As she spread the cover over him, she smiled sadly.

  “Look, I’m sorry—I probably reacted too hard. I didn’t think,” she said.

  “No, it was my fault.”

  “Well, try to get some sleep, okay?”

  Leaving a night-light on, she went into the nearest bedroom and closed the door, though not tightly, letting it just touch the jamb.

  Baird did not fall asleep. The pain in his lower abdomen gradually disappeared, and after thirty minutes or so he got up and went down the hallway to the bathroom. In the mirror he saw a skein of dried blood running down his chin and neck from a split in his lip. He washed the blood off and drank a glass of water and urinated. Then, coming back up the hallway, he paused at her bedroom door. He knew that all he had to do was touch it slightly and it would open. And normally that was about all he would have done—thought about touching the door and going in. On this night, though, his hand came up and the door moved a few inches. And because of the night-light, he was able to see her clearly through the opening, lying on her side in a double bed under a sheet. Her right breast was exposed. The curve of her hip was steep and beautiful.

  Quietly he pushed the door all the way open and went over to the bed. It occurred to him that as a policewoman, a detective, she might have a gun under her pillow and that within a few seconds he could be lying on the floor with a bullet in his chest.

  But it was not to be. Instead she opened her eyes and calmly watched him as he reached down and peeled the sheet off her body, which even in the darkness looked a golden olive color, burnished, ineffably lovely.

  Baird got out of his clothes and moved onto the bed. He ran his mouth along her thighs and then kissed her belly and her breasts. His erection hooked against her pubis and she reached down and guided him in. Their mouths joined and he began to move in her. Neither of them said a word.

  When he got home, he found some of his clothes in a pile in the upstairs hallway, outside the guest room. Inside, there were more of them thrown on the floor and the bed and piled high on a chair. Ellen had even tossed in his things from their bathroom: his shaver and toothbrush and other toiletries. Seeing the mess, he felt no anger, because he knew he had it coming. But it puzzled him somewhat, since as far as Ellen knew, he had only been out drinking. He was too tired to think about it, though. All he could manage was to clear the things off the bed and get out of his clothes before collapsing again, giving himself over to his nightmares.

  In the morning neither Ellen nor Kathy bothered to wake him, and as a result he slept till almost ten o’clock. He thought of phoning the warehouse and telling them he was sick, but as usual talked himself out of it, because the prospect of picking up the day’s accounts later, adding to his already busy days, was not a pleasant one. However, he did phone in that he was having car trouble and wouldn’t be in for another hour. Then he called Ellen at the library and asked her to pick up Kathy for him at four, since he was getting such a late start. In answer, he heard an offhand “As you wish.” Then the phone went dead.

  He spent a few minutes hanging up his clothes, again had a shake for breakfast, and set out on the second day of his new life. He scanned the morning paper and listened to the news on the radio, but there was nothing more about Satin, and—better yet—nothing about a body having been fished out of Lake Washington. However, this aspect of his new life—Jack Baird the killer, the man awaiting his heavy appointment with guilt and remorse—was not the one that filled his mind as he moved through the day. But Lee Jeffers was.

  Even when he was with a customer, the images would flood in upon him. He would see her lying calmly in the dimness as his hand peeled the sheet off her body, and he would see her stretched out on her side, her hair cascading over his stomach, partially obscuring her face as she took him in her mouth. And later, when he was on top of her again, holding her head like a chalice in his hands, he remembered how her tongue had laved his cracked lip. Sometimes, as he caught himself thinking about her, he would wonder if he was losing his mind. It had been less than forty-eight hours since he had killed a man, yet here he was, mooning over a woman, and not just any woman either but one who would arrest him in a minute if she learned his terrible secret.

  Around noon he phoned her at the police station, but she was not in. The operator took down his car phone number and Lee phoned him about an hour later, agreeing to see him again that day, though not at her house. She suggested the history-museum parking lot, which struck him as an odd choice until he got there at the specified time, six o’clock, and saw her solitary car parked along the perimeter of the huge lot, facing the ship canal just beyond a row of poplars.

  Pulling in next to her, he got out of his car and entered hers, sliding onto the passenger seat. And though he detected a touch of coolness in her look and smile, he kissed her anyway, on the cheek. As usual, she was wearing jeans and boots, though this time with a man’s chambray workshirt and a leather vest.

  “I see you survived,” she said.

  “At the very least.”

  Smiling, he put his hand on her waist and started to move closer, in order to kiss her more properly, but she pulled back.

  “Let’s just talk, okay?” she said.

  “I was going to kiss you, that’s all.”

  “I think it would be better if we slowed down a bit and talked this over.”

  He looked at her. “I take it you’re having regrets.”

  “No, not regrets. I just wanted you to know that as far as I’m concerned, last night was—well, just what it was, nothing more or less.”

  “Meaning?”

  “That it was great. That I know we really like each other.”

  “But—”

  “Yes—but. I knew you’d been drinking. And I know you’re married, and that you’ve got a kid who really needs you now, with our friend Slade still in the picture. So I don’t expect anything more. I don’t think there ought to be anything more.”

  “Do I have any say in this?”

  “Of course. But it won’t change what I’m saying. Also, there are professional considerations. I don’t want to get involved with a man now, especially not a married man.”

  “You finished?”

  “For now.”

  “In other words, we had a one-night stand and should leave it at that.”

  She had been gazing down at her hands, and now she looked up at him, her dark eyes both assertive and defensive. “You could say that.”

  “No, I don’t think I could,” Baird said. “You see, I’ve got a problem, Lee. I’ve been thinking about you all day long. And I don’t mean just about your body and the good sex we had. There was something else that happened last night, and I’m not sure it’s something I can just forget about. I might want to, I might even need to—but I’m not sure I can.” He sat there looking at her, wondering what he would say next, just as he imagined she was. Then he plunged on.

  “I guess what I’m trying to say is…I’m afraid I’ve fallen in love with you.”

  “Oh, come on, Jack,” she said. “We’re not kids. We don’t have to fall in love just because we went to bed.”

  Baird tried to smile. “Maybe I do.”

  She turned and looked out through the trees at the water, where a young couple was canoeing slowly past. And there was a sudden softening in her eyes, the beginning of a smile on her lips. Baird leaned over and kissed her on the neck. He undid one of her shirt buttons and ran his mouth lower, into her cleavage. Then he felt her hands on his head and her lips kissing him on the ear and in his hair.

  “Damn you,” she said.

  Twelve

  That evening Baird moved slowly as he got out of the Buick and went up the back porch stairs of his home. It was still early, n
ot yet eight o’clock, so he knew they would both be there, the two persons he loved most in the world, yet at the moment wanted least to see. Though they probably would not even have believed him if he’d told them all that had happened, the whole terrible truth, they at least were aware that he had been out till almost sunup on three of the last four nights. And in his family that was extraordinary behavior, reason enough for a wife and daughter to wonder if the fabric of their lives was not beginning to unravel.

  Baird would not have been greatly surprised if the two of them, watching the clock during these last long nights, had conjured up someone very like Lee Jeffers, someone young enough and sexy enough to bedazzle a middle-aged family man like him. So he figured he had reason to feel dread.

  As he opened the back door and went on inside, he felt as if he were entering a stranger’s home. This one looked much too sunny and comfortable, not at all the sort of place where a philandering murderer would reside. Mercifully, no one was in the kitchen. Grateful for this small favor, Baird opened the liquor cabinet and put away the two large bottles of vodka he had bought earlier that day. He drank a glass of water, then went on through the dining room, heading for the stairs. But even before he reached them, Ellen came breezing past, practically running for the front door.

  “Where you going?” he asked.

  “Out,” she said, not bothering to look at him.

  The screen door banged shut behind her and she hurried down the front stairs, heading for her VW, which was parked at the curb.

  “Well, have a nice time!” he called.

  Without answering, she got into the little car and drove away. Baird turned back to the stairway just as Kathy rounded the landing and came skipping down, barefoot, wearing denim shorts and a colorful crew shirt.

  “Hi, honey,” he said. “Where’s your mother going?”

  “Somewhere with Susan. A movie, I think.”

  “You didn’t want to go?”

  “I wasn’t asked.”

  “That wasn’t very nice of them.”

  “I wouldn’t have gone anyway.”

  Baird smiled. “Well, that takes care of that.”