A Man's Game

by Newton Thornburg

  The girl did not respond. Looking indifferent, she went past him and into the museum, probably heading for the den.

  “I’ll see you later,” he said, again to no response.

  After changing into khaki slacks and a pullover, he returned to the kitchen and made himself a meal of sorts—a ham sandwich, potato chips, iced tea—which he then carried through the house to the den. He did so without enthusiasm, for a change not even wanting to talk with Kathy. But he felt he had no choice. It simply wasn’t in him to go on living there with his wife and daughter as if they were all strangers, carefully avoiding each other, the air crackling with tension and resentment. If nothing else, he wanted at least to keep open the lines of communication, even if all he got for his trouble was static.

  He found her sitting on the floor, reading a copy of Vogue and listening to the stereo, a soprano aria he had heard often enough but still couldn’t place. He turned the volume down, sat, and took a bite of his sandwich. Kathy meanwhile was pretending that she was still alone.

  “I don’t know why you buy that,” he said. “It’s all ads.”

  “For the nudes. They turn me on.”

  “No kidding.”

  She still wasn’t looking at him. “Sure. Sex is what makes the world go around, isn’t it?”

  “True enough.”

  “And variety’s the spice of life. Isn’t that right, Daddy?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Oh, really?”

  Baird sighed. “Look, honey, I know what you’re getting at. But it’s like I told you in the car yesterday. I’m just going through a rough period, that’s all. I’ve been staying out late because I’ve been drinking—I admit it. But that’s all.”

  For a time she did not respond, just sat there on the floor raptly studying her magazine, turning each page as if it were made of papyrus. And Baird could not help asking himself whether Lee Jeffers was worth it, whether the excitement he found in her bed and company could possibly justify the loss of his daughter’s love and respect, not to mention that of his wife. It was a question whose answer he already knew of course, and had always known.

  “That’s not what Mother thinks,” Kathy said finally, still not looking up.

  Baird had a pretty good idea what Ellen was thinking, but didn’t want to hear it, especially from his daughter. “Is that why she tore out of here tonight?” he asked. “So we couldn’t talk?”

  “No, Susan called her.”

  “Good timing.”

  “It doesn’t matter anyway,” Kathy said. “Even if she was here, I don’t think she’d be talking to you.”

  “Is that a fact?”

  “Don’t you want to know why? You say you’ve been out drinking these nights. But that isn’t what Mom thinks.”

  “No?”

  Kathy shook her head. “No. She says you’re just doing what all men do. She says men use us until we get old and ugly, and then they throw us away and get someone young.” The girl looked up at him now, her eyes cold and matter-of-fact. “And that’s what you’re doing now, Mom says. You’re throwing her away. You’re throwing us away.”

  “That’s not true, baby.”

  “Really?” It was not a question. Closing the magazine, Kathy tossed it on the couch and got to her feet and started for the door. Baird reached out to stop her, but she avoided his grasp and hurried on, her bare feet padding across the museum floor. As he got up to follow her, he felt the ham sandwich lurch in his stomach like something alive. Afraid he might vomit, he made himself stand there for a time, breathing deeply, trying to relax. Then he went looking for Kathy again—why, he wasn’t sure, since she already had made it abundantly clear that she didn’t want his company.

  When he reached her bedroom door, he was not surprised to find it closed. He knocked and waited. When nothing happened, he went in anyway and found her lying across her bed, looking down over the far edge of it.

  “Please talk to me,” he said.

  She spoke to the floor. “Why? What difference would it make? You have your life, Mother has hers, I have mine.”

  “We have a life together.”

  “Did, don’t you mean?”

  “Why?” he asked. “What’s so different now?” He was beginning to wonder if she—and her mother—knew about Lee Jeffers.

  “It just is, that’s all.”

  “Why?”

  She rolled over, propping her head on one hand. “Why? Because you’re not a drinker—that’s what Mom says. She says you never have been. That you’ve never liked getting drunk, especially not night after night.”

  “I’m afraid my liver doesn’t agree.”

  “Look, I’d like to be alone now,” she said. “There are things I want to do.”

  Baird sat down on the edge of her bed. He took her hand in his, and when she started to pull it away, he tightened his grip. She gave him a look, almost a look of fear, and it was then that he felt the thing beginning, as if something vital had given way in him, something like a dam. He uttered a kind of moan, and Kathy looked stricken. Her eyes filled and she reached out for him, but he pulled back at her touch and felt himself slipping down off the bed onto his knees. And in a heavy, desolate sobbing, it began to come out of him, all that had been building behind the dam. Immediately Kathy was with him on the floor, taking him in her arms like a mother with a child.

  “Oh no, Daddy—don’t!” she pleaded. “Please don’t cry!”

  But he could not stop, and for a time their voices formed an eerie counterpoint, his racking sobs answering her soft pleas. When he finally ran down, she hugged and kissed him.

  “What is it, Daddy? What’s happened? Tell me!”

  He managed to shake his head. “Nothing, baby. Just life. Only life.”

  She took his face in her hands. “Tell me. Please.”

  Baird gently pulled away and stood up. “Really, it’s nothing,” he said. “I guess I always thought I could make your mother happier. And now I know better. Maybe that’s been working on me—I don’t know.”

  “But that’s been true for a long time, and you’ve never been like this. Please, Daddy—tell me.”

  He reached down and pulled her to her feet. He hugged her and gave her a kiss on the forehead. “Look, I’m really sorry about all this,” he said. “I feel so damn stupid. I don’t know what came over me. But you don’t have to worry, honey. I’m okay, I really am. And I love you—you know that. I would never do anything to hurt you.”

  She stood there looking up at him, her eyes full of anguish and confusion. “What does that mean?”

  In answer, all he could do was shake his head. And finally she sighed and turned away. She moved onto her bed and lay facedown on it again, giving him her back, obviously angry that he would not confide in her.

  “You’ll be all right?” he asked.

  “Of course. Why wouldn’t I be?”

  He smiled lamely. “Well, I guess I’ll go down and read the paper. If you want to join me—”

  “I’ll be all right here,” she said.

  For the rest of the evening, Kathy stayed in her room. Baird turned on the television in the family room and glanced through the evening paper. And even though he had promised himself not to have any alcohol that day, he soon went to the kitchen and came back with a vodka-tonic. He thought a good deal about what he should do when Ellen returned. On the one hand, he knew that he couldn’t very well go through his normal routine, shuffling into her path, giving her a peck on the cheek and asking how the movie was before going on up to bed with her. If he tried that, he was afraid her response would be something on the order of Lee Jeffers’ reaction to his first kiss, though hopefully not nearly so effective. On the other hand, if he continued to just sit there watching TV, Ellen would come home and go up to bed without his even seeing her or saying good night, and that would only widen the chasm between them.

  He was still worrying about the problem when she drove in at ten-thirty. He hurriedly put out a ciga
rette and jumped up, then caught himself and slowed down, ambling back through the museum so he could casually bump into her on her way upstairs.

  Instead, he frightened her, actually made her jump as he came out of the darkened foyer into her path. “Christ, you gave me a fright!” she said.

  “Sorry.”

  She sniffed the air. “What in God’s name—are you smoking again?”

  He shrugged. “You’ve got a good nose.”

  She sidled past him as if he were a leper. “Jesus, you really are falling apart, aren’t you?”

  “So it would seem.”

  As she headed upstairs, he added a halfhearted “Good night,” getting nothing in return. For a short while he continued to stand there in the foyer, feeling as if he’d been run over by a truck. Then he got out a fresh glass and made himself a stouter drink, even though his last one was still unfinished.

  Back in the family room, he sat down in front of the TV again, though it might as well have been turned off for all the attention he paid it. His tête-à-tête with Ellen had left him feeling more than ever that he was losing control of his life. He had known all along that it wasn’t going to work, wandering back to greet her as if everything were still all right between them, or at least manageable. Yet he’d gone ahead anyway, like a perfect fool. And now, when he tried to figure out why, the only answer he could come up with was that he still wanted a sane and secure home life—needed his wife and daughter’s love—the better to carry out his new career as a philanderer. Which of course was total hypocrisy.

  For that matter, he knew that his behavior with Lee Jeffers was not above reproach either, not after having made his little declaration of love that afternoon. It was true, he did find her extraordinarily appealing, but then he imagined that most men would feel the same way, especially after having sex with her. But as for loving her, he was afraid he had overstated his case a bit there. What he really loved were the feelings she gave him: the sense of danger and excitement, the intense sexual gratification, and above all, the temporary amnesia he got when he was with her. For those moments at least, he had been able to forget his mental picture of Slade floating inside the trunk of the old Impala, swaying there in the aqueous dark like some monstrous sea plant. Lying in Lee’s arms, his tongue in her mouth and his cock in her belly, Baird had briefly forgotten that chilling image. And he wanted to go on forgetting it.

  But as things stood now, he didn’t feel overly guilty about his declaration of love, largely because Lee had not seemed to take it too seriously either. Even after uttering her “Damn you,” as if he’d stolen her heart, she obviously still had that busy muscle very much under control. They had gone on to neck a little more, cautiously, watching for patrol cars, and she had told him that though she had changed her mind and did want to go on seeing him, they would have to be discreet about it. Then she had repeated herself, reminding him that she had a very demanding job and that having an open affair with a married man would not help her career in the slightest. He was to phone her now and then if he liked, and he could come to her house some evening the following week.

  From this Baird gathered that he wasn’t going to be enjoying as many temporary bouts of amnesia as he had hoped. And that was probably a good thing, he reflected, because the affair with Jeffers, like his crumbling home life, was not the most pressing thing on his mind at the moment. Overriding everything else, he had to get a grip on himself. He had to “chill out,” as Slade once advised him. Over and over he told himself that if he’d had guts enough to kill the man, then he ought to have guts enough to live with that fact. Not to do so would be more than ironic. It would be pathetic.

  It was a thought he liked so much that he drank to it now, draining the fresh glass too. And he was relieved to see that there was nothing on the eleven-o’clock news about either Satin or any bodies found floating in Lake Washington. He was about to go back for another drink when two other news stories caught his attention: the first about a young father who had hacked his two infant sons to death with a hatchet; the second about a baby’s severed hand found in a suburban pond.

  The father, an African alien, had been angry at his wife. He told the police that since it was he who had given the boys life, he had the God-given right to take it. The police described the murder scene as the grisliest they had ever seen. A beefy, gray-haired detective wept openly. Even the reporter seemed cowed. But it was the severed hand—the idea of it—that stuck in Baird’s mind. Showing remarkable restraint, the TV station did not actually show the hand, though its cameras did bore in on the place of discovery, the shore of the pond, bordered by a woodsy rail fence in front of which six or seven adolescent boys were horsing around, playing to the camera, having a great old time, so unconcerned one would have thought their little waterhole had turned up a baseball mitt instead of a human hand.

  Baird switched off the TV. He took the glasses back to the kitchen and made himself another drink, this one with only a splash of tonic. He took it out onto the deck and sat in the darkness sipping the vodka and looking down over the trees in the park at the lake in the distance, its obsidian surface glittering with lights from the homes of the Eastside rich. And it occurred to him that it was probably a good thing he was not able to see the northern quarter of the lake too, with its steep bluffs and dark secrets. Otherwise he might have had to spend the rest of his life sitting right where he was, watching that distant shoreline through his binoculars and wondering just when the body would finally reappear, like a severed hand.

  Baird slept poorly that night. Alcohol often had that effect on him, making him drop off immediately only to wake a few hours later with a parched throat and a full bladder. This night, though, his sleep was even worse than lying awake, a sleep of dreams that had him sweating and tossing and even whimpering at times, making sounds that eventually woke him, spilling him so abruptly out of the dream that he was able to remember pieces of it: sitting underwater, watching as bright, shiny fish circled him until he reached out finally and caught one, only to discover that it was not really a fish but a child’s arm, a thin, walleyed arm wriggling fiercely in his grip. Dropping it in horror, he swam for safety, diving deeper, down to a kind of trapdoor in the lake bottom, an opening through which he could see a number of infants sitting in a classroom, row after row of them, some without arms or legs, all of them hacked and mutilated but smiling at him nevertheless, even giggling as bright chains of bubbles rose from their round little mouths.

  When the alarm buzzed at seven o’clock, Baird turned it off and went back to sleep. And when he woke again, it was after ten and he was alone in the house. On the bed table there was a note written by Kathy.

  Daddy—

  I called Norsten for you and told them you had the flu or something and wouldn’t be coming in. I said you were finally asleep and would call in later. Mother will pick me up at work. Take care. Love,

  Kathy.

  In the shape he was in, the note brought tears to Baird’s eyes. Even though he had never doubted his daughter’s love—never doubted that she would come around in time—the girl’s gesture touched him unreasonably. Except for that, he wouldn’t have minded if a pair of jailers and a chaplain suddenly came through the door with his last meal. Later, as he showered, shaved, and dressed, he kept seeing bits and pieces of his dreams: the swimming arms, the fins with fingers, the hacked little bodies, the budlike mouths emitting streams of bubbles.

  He wasn’t sure why his subconscious had locked onto the slaughtered-infant thing, except for its obvious horror. But the hand in the pond, the fish, the bubbles—he knew all too well what they were about. And he decided that he could take it no longer: the fear of being caught, the anxiety of not knowing once and for all if Slade and his car and his switchblade were still where they belonged, under the bluff, under the water. Baird knew that it was probably the stupidest thing he could do, the classic mistake of the typical hapless criminal, but he decided he would do it anyway. He would return to the s
cene of the crime.

  He thought of getting a rental car, but reasoned that if anyone would see him there and remember his license-plate number—in the event Slade’s body was eventually discovered—that person could just as easily remember the plate of a rental car, which could then be traced to Baird the same as his own car. So he went in the Buick, driving slowly across the Evergreen Point Bridge, with the windows down and the air-conditioning off even though the temperature was in the low nineties, an extremely hot day for Seattle, which normally was cooled by northern breezes throughout the summer. This day, though, the air was dead still, and Baird could see the resulting smog stretching so far to the south that Mount Rainier looked like a great ghostly sail becalmed in a sea of rust. But the lake, as always, appeared cool and lovely, deep blue and flecked with dozens of boats ten miles in either direction. He followed its shore north through Kirkland and Juanita, an uninterrupted suburban sprawl, and very pricey along the waterfront, with even condos running into seven figures now.

  In time he reached Holly Point Road and finally the gravel lane itself. The houses it served were all on the lake side, all at least a hundred feet apart and at descending levels as the lane wound down along the sloping top of the bluff. They were expensive homes, the first two with closed garages and no sign of anyone on the premises, the next two with late-model station wagons parked in blacktop driveways, amidst kids’ bicycles and toys. Baird came to the S-curve and pulled to a stop at a point from which he could not see any of the houses, neither the one above him—the fourth in line—nor the one below, except for the topmost portion of its red tile roof.

  Getting out of the car, he lit a cigarette and walked cautiously to the front edge of the road, trying to appear like someone in the real estate business, someone looking for waterfront properly. Across the lake, close to the opposite shore, a long white ketch was dead in the water, its sails hanging limp. Even as Baird watched, two speedboats roared past it, heading south. Seconds later the tall sails began to rock in complaint and Baird continued to watch the boat until it was again still in the water. Then he forced himself to look downward, over the edge of the bluff. And there it was, an almost undetectable rectangle of light, probably a dozen feet under water and twenty feet from shore: the gray-primered roof of the Impala.