“Hi!” Doreen said perkily as she opened the door. Richard wasn’t even halfway up the walk yet. What had she been doing? Watching out of the window, waiting for him to show up? He resisted the urge to shake his head ruefully.
“Hi, Doreen. It’s good to see you.”
Doreen—dressed in too-tight acid washed jeans, a too-tight tie-dyed t-shirt, arms ringed with bracelets and fingers with rings, her hair frosted and feathered like she was trying to look like a teenager—came up and threw her arms around his neck. “You decided to come!” she a said, kissing him briefly on the cheek. Richard couldn’t help but notice that each ear had not one, not two, but three earrings. Well, she was making an effort and being contemporary, he supposed. Did that help on the dating scene? Considering she was still single, and had been single, pretty much every time he had talked to her over the past seven years, maybe not. But given that his wife and been screwing another man while he had been working two jobs to pay for the penthouse apartment that she had wanted, and that she had divorced him and taken pretty much everything he owned . . . well given all that, he was not in a position to be judging any other person’s abilities at relationship management.
“So? Are you hungry? I made some lunch.”
“I guess, a little,” Richard said. “Is it okay that I’m parked in front of the house?”
“That’s fine, don’t worry. Come on in. I made sandwiches.”
A smorgasbord was more like it, Richard saw as he stepped into the cool dark of the house. Sandwiches—dozens of them, cut in neat little halves and skewered with toothpicks with colored cellophane glued to the ends. Cubes of cheese—yellow, white and a flecked white cheese that might have been pepper jack—sat on little blue plates beside fat green olives, round wheat crackers, and neatly sliced cold kielbasa. Small round jars of horseradish sauce and hot mustard and some sort of relish or chutney also sat on the small coffee table. A big pitcher of iced tea, beside a big pitcher lemonade, sat sweating, both of them swimming with ice. Good Lord, pretzels, peanuts, potato chips—what was that in the bowl on the little end table beside the green vinyl couch? Bridge mix. She had napkins and little plates set out.
“I’ve got cold beer in the fridge, if you’d prefer that,” Doreen said brightly.
“Uh, yeah,” Richard said, looking at the spread. How many of him, exactly, had she been expecting to feed? Come in my parlor, said the spider the fly. “A beer would be really good.”
She practically leapt the distance between couch and kitchen. “Do you want Michelob or Budweiser or Coors? We have Coors down here now, you know.”
“Budweiser is fine,” Richard said. He looked around for another lamp. All the curtains and shades were drawn, and only a lamp on the side table next to the couch was providing any real light. And a light in a room down a short hallway—probably the lamp in her bedroom, he guessed. After a moment, he decided to get up and pull open the curtains next to the front door.
He noticed that Doreen looked back at him, and she didn’t look entirely pleased, but she didn’t say anything. Richard sighed. She was just going to have to deal with it. He liked more light on general principal, and the spider/fly analogy seemed entirely too real to him, here in the dark. It had been a long time since he had dated Doreen, and he was a very different person. He never would have imagined it possible before marrying Julie, but the whole idea of sex in general just made him nauseous. Doreen’s over-the-top, woman-on-the-prowl demeanor just made it that much worse. He thought there may have been a time, back when he still played bass, back when he still thought he might be in a band, back when his hair was thick and black and long and not receding backwards, when he would have considered Doreen’s I’ll-do-anything-to-please-my-man-and-I-do-mean-anything vibe a good thing. While he would never have considered that sort of woman for a long term relationship—no, Richard had to pick a girls like Julie, who started difficult and got progressively worse with each passing day—it would have been a chance for a little tail. A roll in the hay with a woman who’d do anything you asked? Well, hell, he was pretty sure he wouldn’t have passed that up, back in the day. Even now, Doreen was not unattractive, aside from the stench of desperation, and was probably a whole hell of a lot better in bed than Julie had ever been on her best days.
But he couldn’t. He couldn’t do it. The very idea made him ill. Because he couldn’t be that person. He’d have to leave in a few days, he couldn’t provide for himself much less anybody else, and he didn’t want a long-term relationship with anybody. And it wouldn’t be fair to Doreen to pretend that it was otherwise.
She popped the top on two brown bottles of beer—both Budweisers, he noted, perhaps as a small token demonstration of how much they had in common—and walked back to the couch. Although he had left ample room for her to sit without touching him, she sat down right next to him, putting her hand on his knee. Damn, she didn’t waste time. “So, how are things in Washington? Going pretty good for you?”
“Uh,” he mumbled. Remove the hand or not remove the hand? How to handle that? He decided to leave it be, but determined then that he would leave the minute he got to talk her son. “Not so good. Just go laid off my regular job. I may have mentioned that. Signed the papers on the divorce about six months ago, but its still not over. I lucked into this story, about Donald Bernhard and Oak Ridge but—I just don’t know how I’m going to make ends meet, doing freelance stuff like this.”
Doreen didn’t take her eyes off him. “Really,” she said. “It sounds like you’ve been having a real tough time.” She leaned forward slightly. “You must be under a lot of stress.”
Did he just feel her hand slide up an inch on his knee? Surely not. “Not that bad, just life,” he said quickly. “So, where’s Jon?”
“Jon’s gone out with his new girlfriend for awhile.” She laughed. “It feels funny to say that. I’m not used to Jon having girlfriends. I’m not used to him being interested in girls. Seems like it was just yesterday he was in diapers and now he’s got girlfriends and they’re going out and—I don’t know, it’s just weird.”
Richard nodded. “So he’s going to be back—?”
“By tonight, I’m sure. Maybe in three or four hours.” She took her hand off his knee to stretch. He thought maybe it was supposed to appear provocative, but it just didn’t quite make it. Then, her hand came back down, this time squarely on his thigh. “So we’ve got the place to ourselves for now. Give us a chance to, you know, catch up.” She leaned forward a little more. “It’s been a long time. I’ve missed you.”
“Hey, I’m sorry, I really need to use the restroom. Where’s the toilet?”
Doreen blinked a little. “Oh. Uh. Just down the hall.”
“Thanks,” he said, putting his beer down on the coffee table and standing up, heading quickly for the bathroom. As soon as he was there, he got in and closed the door. The question was, could he find a good excuse to stay in the bathroom for the next three hours?
As he turned around, he decided that no, he could not. She had prepared the bathroom, too. There were thong panties and a silk negligee draped over the towel bar, obviously new bottles of bubble bath and bath oil on the edge of the tub, a loofah sponge and scrub brush neatly hung over the showerhead. There was a bottle of baby oil just sitting on top of the sink, right beside the new bottle of Scope. Perhaps innocuous by itself, but given the sexy underwear hanging where the towels should have been, he thought there might be a message there, too. We can take a bath together! Oil me up! Whatever you like! I’ll have fresh breath! Come on, my kid’ll be home in a few hours, time’s a wastin’!
The medicine cabinet was slightly open—no doubt, so he wouldn’t be too confused by its obvious location behind the mirror—and Richard was pretty sure he knew what that meant. He had learned from girlfriends before Julie—or Doreen, for that matter—the ancient art of reading medicine cabinets, and the frequency with which women tended to do it. He opened it up, amazed, but not entirely surprised, by the contents. The birth control pills he had figured on—to let him know there was no risk of pregnancy. But the new box of Trojan condoms, the spermicide, the diaphragm case, the KY Jelly—she just had to drive the point home with a sledgehammer, didn’t she? I am prepared to have sex at a drop of a hat!
Richard seriously doubted she left this sort of shit out when her son was at home, so the bathroom had obviously been prepped for him. She probably kept it all in a little box under her bed, just for this sort of occasion. And, sure, maybe if they had been married and trying to keep the flame alive, this sort of stuff would have been okay. He would have been happy as a lark to see 10% of this sort of stuff from Julie, inside the sanctified bounds of the frozen tundra of their doomed matrimony. But Richard and Doreen had dated for a month or so, years ago. They barely knew each other now. In that sort of circumstance, it just made Richard think that Doreen had become a lot bigger slut than he remembered, and she hadn’t exactly been chaste, or shy, when they had dated.
He picked up the jar of MINT-FLAVORED ORAL JELLY, shaking his head. A good Christian girl just sounded better and better. No, she would probably never bring home a jar of MINT-FLAVORED ORAL JELLY, even if they were married fifty years. But there were worse things in life. And there were much worse things in life than living with somebody moral, somebody good and decent, knowing that they would never in a million years bring home a tube of ANAL LUBE or crotchless panties and that there was no reason to even hope for that sort of thing, no matter how much they looked like they could be a supermodel, so you’d just have to let it go and get on with life. There was definitely something worse. There was the promise, the hint, the hope. The hope and the want and the craving that, instead of bubble baths and baby oil and flavored blowjob lubricants, turned into darkness, depression, despair. That turned into Julie. Although he guessed she might have gotten a jar of MINT-FLAVORED ORAL JELLY for Jason Bishop. Considering that she had actually given him blowjobs.
Then, he had his solution. Simple, he thought, and relatively non-offensive. He had been wondering if he could play sick, and lay down until Jon came home but was worried Doreen Nightengale might try to do some sexual healing on him. But this idea was much better.
He jiggled the handle and the toilet flushed, and he came out. He noted, with a faint smile, that Doreen had closed back the curtains across the front window, apparently trying to re-establish the romantic mood. What was that smell? Incense? She had lit some incense while he was in the bathroom; he could see it, in its little incense tray, on the kitchen counter. He had thought people had gotten over that crap in the seventies. He guessed the idea was to establish an even more romantic mood, but it just smelled like burning perfume. And he was supposed to eat finger sandwiches and cheese and olives with that smell going on?
No matter, he thought he had his solution.
Although Doreen was making it obvious there was plenty of room on the couch for him, he sat, instead, in the chair beside the couch.
“So, anyway, how’s your job?” Richard asked. “What are you doing now? Last time I talked to you, weren’t you working at a—a car dealership, is that right?”
Doreen raised her eyebrows, looking not-a-little-pleased that Richard actually remembered some details of her life. She laughed. “Not anymore. They wanted me to keep working longer and longer and do more jobs and still punch out at five—when they wanted me to start cleaning the bathrooms, that was it, and I quit. The money was shit, anyway. Now I’m a cubicle monkey at ALCOA. Or another cubicle monkey’s administrative assistant, technically. But I’ve got my own cubicle to assist from. The pay is about the same but most everybody leaves at five, and nobody wants me to clean the toilets, and there’s a chance I might move upward, someday.”
Richard nodded. “ALCOA. They make aluminum products, right?”
Doreen nodded. “We make so much stuff, I don’t know what half of it is. Parts and chemicals and raw aluminum and building materials and aluminum foil—but enough about me. My life’s boring. Living in Washington, working for newspapers, that’s got to be really great. Really something.”
Richard smiled as Doreen leaned forward. “It’s really something, all right. But what I’m really excited about is the work we’re doing at the church.”
Doreen blinked. “You’re working on a church?”
“My church, New York Street Presbyterian,” Richard said, hoping he wasn’t going to go to Hell for the big fat lies he was about to tell. “We’ve been doing a lot—“ Doing what? Passing around the collection plate? “—to spread the gospel of Jesus Christ.” That sounded good. That was the sort of thing people who went to church a lot said, right? He hoped he remembered the next part correctly. He had been to church occasionally, after all. “And to spread the good news that Jesus Christ died for our sins.”
Doreen blanched. “Ah—oh—hey, wow. That’s great. I’m so happy for you.”
“Thanks. After the divorce, I realized something had been missing in our marriage, and missing in my life. And what had been missing was the Bible. What had been missing was the Word of God. What had been missing was the Holy Spirit.” Richard paused, thinking that was probably pushing it far enough. If he went any further, he was afraid he might demonstrate that, in fact, he had no idea what he was talking about. Yet, anyway, since Debi was going to be dragging him to Bible study. Maybe he should invite Doreen to Bible study—no, no, she might accept. The best strategy was a light touch, and just let Doreen’s imagination do the work.
“Wow. That’s—uh—something else. I never figured you for a—dedicated church type. You know. When we were dating—I don’t know, I don’t you even mentioned church. Or the last time we talked—”
Richard laughed. “It took me by surprise, too, but it’s—it’s a good thing. It has been good for me.”
“Oh, yeah. Hey. That’s great. So—how long have you been going to the church? I go to Oak Ridge Unitarian. It’s a universalist church, so all denominations are welcome, and there are a lot of younger people there, which is nice. It’s not all fire and brimstone and you’re going to Hell if you do this or that—I mean, not that your church is like that, it’s just—how long have you been going?”
“About since the divorce,” Richard lied. He should be telling the truth, he knew, but damn, it was saving him so much hassle. It was either that or claim he was gay and had decided to come out of the closet, which would be too complicated a lie to keep up. “But, no, it’s not all fire and brimstone. How long have you been doing the Unitarian thing?”
“For the last six years. It’s a good way to meet guys, and they aren’t all hung-up and straight-laced—I mean, not that you are, now. But it was a good place. To meet other people in—you, know, fellowship.”
“So what about the ALCOA gig? Did you know somebody or did you just apply to a help wanted ad or—?”
Doreen settled back in her chair. “Actually, that’s a funny story,” she started.
And Richard was free. Just like that. What was more, as he patiently listened and talked with Doreen, waiting for her son to get back from wherever he had disappeared to, he found himself having a good time. She was actually funny, even kind of charming, once she stopped acting like a desperate, two-dollar hooker.
After several beers and too much finger food between them both, she excused herself to the bathroom and, because he had put away three beers, he followed suit as soon as she was done. Except for the bubble bath and scrub brushes, he noted, all her other props were gone. There were even different items in the medicine cabinet—acne medicine and Aveeno and Tums. He chuckled. What elaborate mating rituals people picked for themselves. But it had to mean, he thought, that she had given up on seducing him. Just like that. This fly had just escaped this particular spider’s parlor. This church thing could come in handy.
It was three-and-a-half hours before Jon finally showed up. By the time he did, Richard knew a lot more about aluminum, the creeps who run car dealerships, the hard life of single moms, and self-actualization than he really wanted to, but the time flew by. Doreen was actually much more witty and charming and smart than he ever remembered her being while they were dating. Of course, when they had been dating, she had usually been too busy being desperate and clingy to actually be charming. Hell, if she lightened up on the make-up, started dressing like an adult, and saved the MINT-FLAVORED ORAL JELLY and condom boxes for a little further into the relationship, she might actually find a guy worth keeping. As it was, her approach was just scary.
Of course, Richard reminded himself, he was in no position to criticize anybody else’s relationship skills. His wife had been fucking another guy while Richard worked two jobs, and he was no closer to getting over the whole mess than he had been a year ago. Hell, maybe Doreen had the right approach. Have some fun and then scare them off.
If he ever did start dating again, he thought, maybe he ought to do something like that. What would be the equivalent of leaving MINT-FLAVORED ORAL JELLY and boxes of condoms for a guy? Pictures of himself doing housework, remembering anniversaries, and showing up unexpectedly with flowers?
He shook his head as the small, spindly kid in a ratty t-shirt and tennis-shoes stepped up to him, hand out, a taller and much less-spindly girl—a young woman, really, she looked like she could have been a freshman in college—standing behind him, smiling broadly.
“Hi, I’m Jon,” the kid said, taking Richard’s hand and shaking it as he lifted himself off the couch. “You must be Mr. Mathers. This is Megan.”
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