KATY and I sat across from each other, proofreading the transcript of a roundtable policy discussion on the economy to be published by our employer, American Political Enterprise, or APE. Katy’s white bra made brief appearances whenever she leaned forward to turn a crisp page, her silky, red blouse loosening forward from her shoulders. The distraction had me reading right over typos. With any luck, the booklet would be published long after I was safely back at Alba College with an “A” for my summer internship.
Six weeks in, with four to go. When I’d started in June, Katy was wearing an engagement ring, but she wore it no longer. I was engaged myself, though had no ring. Newly engaged. Semi-engaged. If an engagement announced the intention to marry, we’d whispered it only to the impatient sales clerk at the mall jewelry store. On the rebound from each other, Marilyn and I had gotten back together just weeks earlier, and in a cosmic overreaction, had pledged our eternal love, which had resulted in the cheap ring I assumed she was wearing back in Alba, where she was spending the summer manning the deep fryers at Arthur Treacher’s Fish and Chips.
Senator Mitchell all caps: Capital T The resources are there comma, but we have to do more than then? No. STET. hand out WIN all caps, open parens (capital W Whip capital I Inflation capital N Now close parens) buttons period.
I had been awarded the internship by Professor Combover (one word), the Alba College wife-swapping Dean, shortly after the swap became public and shortly before all involved parties evaporated in the slimy heat of the gossip. Professor Combover had some D.C. connection he’d parlayed into this summer program. By the end of the August, he himself showed up at APE’s offices seeking refuge as a consultant until he found another academic job.
At Alba, a small liberal arts college on the outskirts of Detroit’s outer suburbs, no one seemed to know that APE was the right arm of a right wing “think” tank, or even know what a think tank was. We knew they built real tanks at the Tank Plant in Warren, where many of us were raised. The student body consisted largely of Democrats or independents or bumblers like me who hadn’t given it much thought, just grateful to have been young enough to escape the draft and Vietnam. We were the sons and daughters of autoworkers, first-generation college students who believed in unions and fast automobiles and equality for all, more or less. Most of us were going to be teachers or accountants, or, despite our superior educations, follow our fathers and/or mothers into the factories, though perhaps as college graduates, we’d get to boss them around before they retired. We were not going to be politicians or diplomats or bureaucrats. We were not going to leave the great state of Michigan, the Water-Winter Wonderland. We were going to marry young, though not as young as our parents, and perhaps have one less child than they did, but own bigger houses.
FORMER SECRETARY OF DEFENSE REYNOLDS all caps, colon: capital R Removing nuclear n-u-c-l-e-a-r (nu-clear, just remember that—no extra u) weapons from capital S South capital K Korea shows capital P President capital C Carter’s complete lack of…
Late in my senior year, Marilyn and I had collided in the back seat of my father’s station wagon at halftime of a high school basketball game. She’d been drinking peppermint schnapps and I was stoned out of my fucking mind. The following year, she joined me at Alba, where we immediately began a long, extended break-up that involved so much screaming and tears that the RA in our co-ed dorm slammed her door shut when she saw one or both of us storming down the hallway toward her.
The break-up centered on mismatched hickies—betrayal and counter-betrayal and stale mates (two words). The usual, I’d come to learn, but back then, it was all high drama and low blows. We’d gone to high school together in Warren, so close to Detroit we could see it from our houses, but since the riots in 1967, the border had grown as large and wide as a DMZ, so when it came to college, we looked away from, not toward, Detroit. Things were greener in Alba, Michigan, and the people whiter—the rich were moving out to the distant ’burbs and making the long commute into the city as they grayed into Republicans.
Marilyn was a good kisser with a low tolerance for boredom or dissent. We’d hopped off the love train when we first broke up, then hopped back on when we got back together, not realizing the train was now and forever in reverse. We didn’t reveal our engagement, telling ourselves that we were still in college and we’d be waiting until after graduation to get married anyway. As soon as we walked out of the mall, we sobered up and the old irritants came right back: how I chewed gum, how she finished my sentences, etc. and etc.
Since our parents didn’t know, she only wore the ring when she left the house, or so she said. I wasn’t sure she was wearing it at all, and the truth was that if I’d had a ring, I wouldn’t have worn it either. I realized I was ashamed about being engaged and that I’d only done it to make up for the public embarrassment of our initial breakup. All the snot and tears and carrying on. They had to be worth something. Right?
When I got the internship in D.C., we were both relieved. I later learned that Marilyn was so relieved, she immediately started dating Joey, her fishy manager at Treacher’s.
The steam heat of D.C. stirred up lust, no seemed about it. Marilyn liked sex as much as I did. That, I missed. Our relationship had been entirely based on sex, I realized once I was physically away from her. In D.C., I was lusting after Katy, the only attractive female at work anywhere near my age. In fact, APE only employed two other women, Ann, the assistant director, an acerbic survivor feared, admired, and mocked by the male APES, and Cynthia, a matronly secretary with a chocolate addiction. Katy had quickly ascended into the top circle of my lust, and when her ring disappeared, she broke through to a theretofore unknown level of lust heaven.
heretofore one word STET means the same thing as theretofore make consistent.
Twenty-one years old, I had no business being engaged or working inside any kind of think tank. I had a hard enough time thinking outside the tank. Every day at five, I walked from the Think Tank back to the Stink Tank of my dorm room at Georgetown, where they stuck all the other D.C. summer interns. A dorm full of polished young men from around the country who all seemed more politically savvy and connected than I was. They even seemed to sweat less.
The bus in from Georgetown in the morning cost 35 cents, and I spent the summer timing my entrance in the long line of commuters so that my nickel fooled the driver in the rush of dropping coins into thinking it was a quarter. The morning driver didn’t seem to care. The afternoon driver busted me twice for shortchanging him, so I usually walked the two miles back to Georgetown, my shirt soaked through with sweat by the time I got to my room. There was no getting lost in D.C., with its numbered and lettered streets. Etch-a-Sketching my way through the city, 17th and M to 37th and P, every day. I ignored the diagonal streets named for states, though I imagined they were shortcuts.
My days consisted of sweat and smoke. Everyone at APE lit up, including Katy, the office a haze of unfiltered disgust with the Carter administration—the first election I’d been able to vote in, and I’d gone for the “hick peanut farmer” from Georgia because I liked that he had an asshole brother just like I did. The word “Republican” was rarely spoken at APE—it made everything redundant. One day Nixon himself came into the office to meet the mysterious guy down the hall who never seemed to enter or leave his office.
A Secret Service guy interviewed me and Ellis, the other APE intern. Apparently, they knew everyone else from previous Nixon visits. We were to stay in our offices while Nixon had his meeting, though I did peek out, and got a glimpse of one of the famous jowls.
“So, who’s that guy down the hall?” I asked Katy after the Secret Service interview.
“Roger Walters,” she said, like I should know. I gave her an honest, blank stare. “One of Nixon’s old speech writers. He wrote the Ford speech pardoning Nixon? He’s here writing his memoirs.”
I took a piss next to him in the men’s room once, one of those tiny bathrooms where you could hear the pee splashing into the urinal. He was standing there, but before and after I peed, I heard nothing from his urinal. I left him there, his forehead pressed against the tile wall. He never acknowledged my presence.
“Maybe if Nixon was still president, he wouldn’t be having so much trouble taking a leak,” I said to Katy.
She frowned. “That’s not the kind of joke you tell around here,” and I knew then what I should’ve known all along, that APE was no place for a punk from the sharp edge of Detroit.
“Now, just how did you get this internship?” Katy asked, not for the first time. I never had a good answer. I wanted to work in advertising, and the internship guidelines mentioned writing. Perhaps no one else applied. As Marilyn had asked, “Why would anyone want to go to Washington?”
quotation mark capital T The United States capital U capital S should not misinterpret the lessons of Vietnam period quotation mark cleavage bra cup.
Katy put down the manuscript and looked up.
“What?” I asked.
“It’s your paragraph, Jake,” she whispered, as if my zipper was down, or a booger was hanging out of my nose. I trusted her to discretely tell me those kinds of things. She was so kind and competent, so soft-spoken and quietly sexy, that I could forget at times that she was indeed a Republican, an unfamiliar species back where I came from—Detroit or Alba—though my sense of politics was not finely honed. Between Marilyn and not Marilyn, between drinking and getting stoned, between escaping Vietnam and escaping the Ford plant, I was still starring in my own life story. Sometimes I lost my place.
“Sorry. I forgot where we were. Is Nixon still president?”
“Ha. You sound like Roger Dodger.”
“Roger?”
She shook her head at me. “Walters,” she said. “By the time you leave, you have to learn everyone’s nicknames.”
“What’s yours?”
“I don’t have one,” she said. “I’m not important enough.”
It was “the Virgin Queen,” I learned later. The office was full of old letches—letch, a variant of lech, or lecher—who often stood over Katy to look down her blouse and ask her to lunch. Others had noticed the missing ring and likely knew the whole story. I was not privy to office gossip. The only other person who talked to me was Charlie Watson, a witty pundit who bred marijuana on his family farm in Indiana. Charlie frequently provided me with samples, like a kindly neighbor giving out candy to the local children. He was obsessed with cultivating pot and the Soviet Union, but beyond those two topics, he tended to fall silent. He also loved chess. He liked to get stoned and go to chess tournaments.
“Is that a typical Republican stoner activity?” I asked him once.
“A typical Republican stoner activity is to make existential Haldeman-Ehrlichman jokes. They’re the Vladimir and Estragon of the Republican party.”
“Huh?”
“In other words,” he said, “You’ve asked me an oxymoronic question.”
I was vaguely insulted, but then he slipped me one of his thin tight joints, and I was as happy as a dog who’d been fooled by his owner into chasing a ball that didn’t exist.
capital t The economy was of great concern during the capital F Ford administation fix administration
Despite or because of the numerous lecherous invitations, Katy began asking me to lunch to provide a buffer between her and the letches, which I saw as a capital O Opportunity. On my budget, I always packed, reusing an old plastic bread wrapper as my lunch bag. We often sat in the stinking Burned Coffee Room at a tiny, wobbly table for two. It stunk permanently of overheated coffee and sour mayonnaise. correct: mayonnaise
All the bald, overweight, middle-aged white guys went out to lunch every day. They’d poke their heads into the break room on their way out as if to ask Katy, “Are you sure?” but they never said a word.
One day she suggested we brave the heat and eat outside. Someone or some thing was breathing down her neck. As soon as we hit the street, she uncharacteristically raised her arms in the air and let out a high-pitched scream: Why are guys such assholes? She did not look to me for a response, and I did not give one.
We sat outside on a bench in the stillness of a D.C. noon in July. Every other office worker seemed to be inside an air-conditioned eatery. The only ones on the street were police officers, and tourists dripping sweat onto their unfolded maps when the fucking White House was right in front of them. “They all look alike,” I told Katy. “Those APE guys.”
“Those guys,” she said, “are going to make or break my career.” She’d smoked half a dozen cigarettes and eaten nothing. Her official job title was Production Assistant, though she had ambitions. She had ideas. She wanted to write books.
“They even smell the same. Is there some kind of Republican deodorant they use?”
Katy sighed. “You have so much to learn.” She began whistling the Old Spice commercial jingle.
“I never learned how to whistle,” I said. “Back in my neighborhood, there was something unmanly about it. We barked instead.”
“It’s easy,” she said, and she rounded her thin lips and her cheeks hollowed into sensuous curves.
Her silky blouse blossomed dark stains that quietly spread under her arms. Though my mouth was full of peanut butter and jelly, I suddenly wanted her with a crazed urgent lust. I leaned over and quickly kissed her puckered lips.
She jerked back, her cheeks flaming, but then laughed. “What the hell,” she sputtered. “Peanut butter and jelly—that’s a real turn-on… I think we need to keep you inside to cool those cocky jets of yours or you’re going to grow up and be one of them.”
“No, no,” I said. “I never wear cologne,” I protested. I swallowed. I ached everywhere. “I’m sorry,” I told her, though I wasn’t.
“I was engaged to a senator’s son,” she said.
“Holy shit,” I said. “Which one?”
“Guess,” she smiled primly, though also a little sad, I think. Like she was
trying out a joke about it, wondering if it was too soon. “There’s only a hundred of them. It can be your research project.”
“Only thirty-nine Republicans,” I added, proud of my growing knowledge.
“Don’t underestimate…” She didn’t finish. I thought she might have wanted to say “love” or “me.” “You’re going to have to strap on your thinking helmet for this one,” she added. Katy and I joked about the “tank” idea, though just about everyone else seemed to relish the war metaphor. The Brookings Institute was the enemy. They had their own tank. A sissy tank.
• • •
As part of the internship, I was supposed to do a research project and write a paper for Professor Combover, though when he showed up my last week at APE, he didn’t seem to know who I was. He’d lost out on the swap—his wife stayed with the other guy, but the other guy’s wife left him after a month.
all caps SENATOR HARDNESS (HARKNESS—I let that one through—sorry, Katy) colon: The energy crisis won’t be solved by solar panels in the capital W White capital H House.
The project was to research how much time the big three networks spent on various types of news stories. APE circulated a daily summary of the nightly TV news shows, so it was mostly math. I became obsessed with those end-of-newscast human-interest stories. The heart hyphen warmers that allowed you to click off the TV and believe for a second that the world wasn’t going to hell: the chimp who escaped the Pittsburgh Zoo and made it all the way to Ohio; the small town that elected a teenaged mayor; the world cha-cha champion with the wooden leg; the elementary school class that raised money to send their turtle to the world’s turtle racing championship; the guy who drove his car backwards across America; the child rescued from the well—that showed up three or four times that summer, with subtle variations. The guy at ABC seemed to have a weakness for those well stories. What that bias represented in political terms, I had no idea. In my paper, I classified those stories as: Awwww, Ha Ha, Hmm, or Wow. All the stories fit into one of those four categories.
photo ops two words sound bites two words
“Who broke off the engagement?” I asked one day in the middle of week seven, the week after I’d kissed her. “I mean, what happened?” I never told her I was engaged or disengaged. It seemed like more of an illusion every day. It never occurred to me to wonder why she never asked about my love life.
“It’s a long story,” she said.
Capital A American influence overseas after capital V Vietnam one word…
She raised her eyes. I had this tick about Vietnam, always wanting to separate it into two words.
…declined period.
Katy’d gone to Bryn Mawr and wore her class ring on her other hand, though I never noticed it until the diamond’s disappearance. I didn’t know anyone who had a class ring from high school or college. Back home, some bored guy sat at a table in our main hallway for a week playing with his cufflinks, then packed up his case and went on to the next school. We weren’t buying unless the ring turned into brass knuckles or had a hidden compartment for poison.
“Why’d you get a class ring?” I loved her hands, her long, thin, pale fingers. Delicate. Holding a pen, lifting her coffee, straightening my tie, which both aroused and infuriated me. She was touching me. She was treating me like a kid. What did it mean?
“Everyone got class rings,” she said.
“Everyone? You’ve gotta be kidding.”
“No,” she said, lifting her hand to study the red stone. “All the girls got a ring.”
“What about the guys?”
“It’s an all-girls school.” She raised her eyes, keeping her head lowered, as if she was looking over her glasses, though she wore no glasses. When she looked at me like that, with both exasperation and tenderness…I lived for those looks.
“Get Out. Really? I never met anyone who went to an all-girls school,” I said truthfully. “Was it like a convent or something?”
“Only if the nuns were sex-crazed drunks,” she said, giving her nervous little sly smile that made me feel like we were the only two people in that office who were alive, cool, wicked.
Marilyn was bored in Alba and had been threatening our nation’s capitol to visit me, but there were logistical issues. Where would she stay? Should/could she keep it from her parents? Should she just tell them we were engaged? We never had enough quarters for the payphone to work all that out. I was pretty horny, and hearing her voice melted me into spicy butter, but my fantasies about Katy burned that butter. Why hadn’t I told Katy about Marilyn? Or Marilyn about Katy? It was as if D.C. was a foreign country in which I could not translate my own life accurately to anyone.
capital H Here in our nation’s apostrophe s capitol—O-L—the unemployment rate…
• • •
Barton, a barrel-chested old blowhard from Georgia, had claimed the role of APE mentor to Katy, whose father was a friend of Barton’s. He had been instructed to look after her. Whenever I saw Barton, he was looking before, at, and after Katy. Since he had an in with her, she could not ignore him. Maybe she kind of liked him. He was a charmer.
She had gone to boarding school. Her father was distant and preoccupied, either in Washington or somewhere on the road, screwing around in an Eisenhower kind of way. I don’t even know what that means, but that’s how Katy described it.
When Barton stopped by her desk, he’d lean over to stare down her blouse and talk to her in this low, serious murmur, putting a hand on her shoulder and rubbing a little. He’d glance up at me and give me the hard stare like he was an assassin and I was a kindergartener who’d just wet his pants.
I wanted to punch his mottled alky nose and throttle his flappy jowls. He had the Old Spice going, just like the rest of them. In my neighborhood, cologne was in the same category as whistling. I did not kick his ass. I had a hard enough time just meeting his eyes.
When he made arrangements to take her out to lunch, that left me in the Burned Coffee Room making small talk with Ellis, a pimply-faced geek who’d be attending Princeton in the fall. Ellis had gone to Choate, another school I had to look up. He said “Choate” like it was the flavor of some exotic drink I’d never be worthy of trying. He was interning in the business office, though he treated me like he’d been elected class president and I was his parliamentarian.
Tip ONeal Tip O’Neal Tip O’Neil Tip Oneill Tip O the hat Tip-a-canoe Tip capital O apostrophe capital N eill double l STET
My tiny workspace one word no space was crammed into the corner of Katy’s office. On bad days, I felt like a misbehaving child stuck with his teacher after school while she graded papers. I felt either invisible or in the way, depending. Charlie was the only one who ever came to see me. Me. At the beginning of week nine, he dropped by Katy’s office while I was out taking a piss next to some great Republican mind.
“Your friend was here,” Katy said to me when I returned. “He left you a little present.”
No one seemed to know what to make of Charlie, and he liked it that way. Apparently, he was one of the smartest people on the planet, and that was his biggest liability. He had little patience, which had led to his interest in pot—it kept him calm in between writing right-wing manifestos for William F. Buckley. He was an old-school intellectual conservative, the kind that wasn’t so rare back then.
On my desk sat an APE stationary WRONG, stationery envelope on which he’d drawn a strikingly detailed and well-endowed orangutan. The envelope had no slight bulge to suggest it contained pot, but Charlie’s stuff was so strong, he rolled them very thin. I turned my back to Katy, slit open the envelope, and peeked in: two tickets. To a chess tournament. I barked out a strong laugh.
I turned back to Katy. “Did you ever hear of tickets for a chess tournament? Are there chess scalpers?”
She smiled playfully, raised her eyebrows, and shrugged. “Are they front-row seats with backstage passes?”
Charlie left a note inside: Come. Bring a date. I’ll drive.
I laughed again. “A date? To a chess tournament?”
“It can’t be worse than the opera,” Katy said, and I smiled. I had never been to an opera, but it represented all the pretense of high culture I’d imagined while melting my ears at rock concerts back in Detroit.
“Who are you going to ask to your hot chess date now that you’ve scored some primo seats?” she joked—the first time she expressed even passing curiosity about my social life.
“You,” I said. “I’m going to ask you.”
Though we were in AC-ville, I saw the little line of sweat that sometimes settled on her upper lip. She gave me a look that made me feel the years between us, but then her mouth cracked into a full grin.
“You’re on,” she said.
The day after Katy and I made our plans to for the chess tournament, I called Marilyn from the dorm phone at the end of the hall. I’d been getting stoned on the highest quality pot I’d ever come within whiffing distance of, and pissing next to Nixon’s old speechwriter, and now I had a chess date with an older woman. Suddenly, Alba seemed like a dusty, dried flower from a forgotten prom. I lived in New North dorm, though it must’ve been new in the twenties, given the lack of reliable plumbing, the lack of air conditioning, and the genteel decrepitude of the place.
Not gentile, not gentle. Genteel.
I was planning to break up with her, but didn’t get a chance. Well, I did get a chance—after she told me she was going out with Joey. I quickly jumped in: “That’s it. I want my ring back.”
“Fine,” she said. “I don’t even know where it is.”
“Fine?” I said.
“Yeah,” she said, sounding a little sad. “Fine. I mean, I don’t miss you. Isn’t that a sign?”
I swallowed. We’d been broken up for six months after being together two years, then we’d been back together for two months before the engagement. The phone pressed hot and sweaty against my ear.
“Just to be clear,” I said. “We’re breaking up, right?”
“You just asked for the ring back. What’s going on there with you?”
We had loved each other for at least the first six months, then we got all tangled up in how we were supposed to act if we were in love, then spent the next two years wrapping ourselves up in duct tape thinking we were making repairs when we were just making a mess that it’d take forever to untangle. It was a Rube Goldberg love that forgot what its point was.
Marilyn and I talked for another ten minutes about the weather and our classes in the fall and the last remnants of the swapping scandal. I was out of dimes and quarters anyway, and ready to break into tears, when a gigantor intern from, I assumed, some federal wrestling agency, demanded the phone.
Capital T The one word peanut word missing? farmer? from capital G Georgia believes that he can reform capital W Washington period. capital L Little does he know that capital W Washington re- hyphen forms presidents period. Did Charlie write this?
• • •
One morning, maybe week seven, Stan, the official APE handyman-gofer-mail deliverer, slipped while trying to lift a filing cabinet onto his dolly to move it into or out of Roger Walter’s office. It fell sideways, knocking Stan down and pinning him to the floor. Everyone rushed out into the hallway. Stan lay dazed and moaning.
“Should we call an ambulance?” Charlie asked. He took off the baseball hat he always wore—an accepted eccentricity, as if the hat signaled he was a sorcerer or genius—and scratched his bald head vigorously.
Barton blustered forward, then bent down and asked, “Stan, do you think you need an ambulance?”
Stan’s face was purple, and sweat poured off his face. “Get… this… fucking… thing… off me!” he gasped.
Barton looked at all of us gathered in a semi-circle. “Give him room,” Barton barked, but he himself did nothing. “I have a bad back,” he mumbled to Stan.
I stood directly in Stan’s line of sight, his head wedged away from the cabinet so that his shoulder took the weight. “Kid, you understand English. Get this damn thing off me!”
I lunged forward, braced my feet against the wall, and pushed on the top of the cabinet till it landed upright. I spotted Ellis neatly rolling up his sleeves in preparation to help. I wanted to push the cabinet over onto his sorry Choate-Princeton ass. Stan still lay curled on the floor. I bent to give him a hand, to see if he could stand.
“Don’t touch him,” Barton barked, the lawyer in him taking over. Stan rolled over onto his hands and knees, then slowly stood on his own.
Someone had called the building security guard, Larry, and when he arrived, he led Stan to the elevator and took him to the emergency room.
“Show’s over,” Barton said. I wondered how much TV he watched. He seemed to have all the lingo down. We dispersed back to our offices. I had forgotten about Katy, a rare occurrence during the workday one word, but she had witnessed everything.
“Why do you think he said that—that you understand English?” she asked as we returned to our usual seats in her office. We were proofing a foreign policy analysis of U.S. trade with China.
I shrugged. Stan and I rarely talked, but he knew I was from Detroit and my father worked at Ford’s. I wasn’t particularly strong—some might’ve called me scrawny—so I hadn’t been called out for my heft.
“He can tell I’m not a Republican. We have a secret sign,” I managed finally.
“I hope he’s okay,” she said, softly. I was hoping to be her hero, but instead she had genuine concern for someone she’d worked with for years. Go figure.
Stan had a bruised, separated shoulder and was out for a week. Barton assigned me his duties, and while Stan was gone, I delivered mail and supplies and made sure the bathrooms were stocked with toilet paper and hand towels. Charlie gave me extra dope as a way, I imagine, of apologizing for my demotion.
“I didn’t sign on for this,” I complained to Barton. “When am I going to get a chance to write something?”
“Want to write your letter of resignation?” he asked, leaning into me, Old Spice penetrating my skin like a tattoo needle. “We are paying you, correct?”
Correct. A paid internship, and I needed the measly stipend to help pay for Alba in the fall. Passing out mail, I realized most APE employees did not even know my name, though I knew all there’s theirs.
When Stan returned, I told him, “Sue the bastards.”
He cringed into a crooked smile, “You know how many lawyers they got working here, son?”
Capital S Spiro capital A Agnew resigned in disgrace after being indicted for receiving ei illegal campaign contributions period.
• • •
“Was it the Senior Senator from the ‘Show-Me’ State? The Junior Senator from the ‘Live Free or Die’ state?” A game I played with Katy, though I’d actually found out who her fiancée was from Ellis, who told me to warn me off, I guess. He seemed to be the only one to notice my infatuation with Katy.
• • •
Charlie picked me up in his green Volvo in front of the Georgetown student union at noon on Saturday afternoon. He already had Katy in the car, along with a young man who looked to be about her age. I briefly thought the signals had gotten mixed and he was Katy’s date, but he was Charlie’s son, Roger, from his first marriage. Charlie was in between marriages and girlfriends, so his son was his date. I sighed, then quickly inhaled the joint Roger passed to me, turning around from the front seat and rolling his eyes.
“Welcome to the Magical Mystery Tour,” he said. “Buckle up, we’ve got some hard core chess action comin’.”
Katy startled me with a loud “Ha!” She clearly was already stoned, and I had some catching up to do.
“I was handed these seeds by a notorious South American dictator,” Charlie confided. “Then I cross-bred them with seeds from a New Mexican mystic. They create an interesting conversation.”
We were incapable of an interesting conversation ourselves, laughing till our eyes watered as Charlie deftly maneuvered the D.C. streets, even the confusing diagonal ones that were named for states.
“Is cross-breeding like wife-swapping?” I asked. Everyone just stared at me.
• • •
The tournament was at the U.S. Chess Center on M Street. We had to wait in line, despite arriving an hour early. Everyone wanted to be there for the Grandmaster exhibition where this guy played fifty games at once, wandering the room, kicking everybody’s asses. Charlie had once played competitively. He had an attic full of trophies and a grudge against somebody, but he still loved the game.
The silence in the Center was stifling, despite the number of people in attendance, the number of games being played simultaneously. Charlie and Roger had disappeared into various matches for some strange kind of father-son bonding.
Katy and I snuck out into the hallway and exploded into laughter so loud they must have heard us inside, maybe wondering if someone had just told the greatest chess joke ever.
“Let’s get… the hell… out of here,” Katy said, gasping for breath, trying to stifle herself. She took my hands in her beautiful ring-less hands—no class ring either—and I was suddenly no longer stoned, except on Katy. Away from work, she seemed more animated, more beautiful—her whole body seemed unshackled, and she moved with a hip sway I had never seen.
I slipped back in and tapped Charlie on the shoulder. Bent at the waist, elbows on knees, he was studying a chessboard one word or dozing in stoned-out bliss. He startled, then shrugged sadly when I tilted my head toward the door. He palmed me a joint and gave me his blessing.
artificial castling epaulette matte trebuchet accent on first e capital S Spanish capital O Opening capital S Sicilian capital D Defense
On the slick, sweaty street, I leaned into Katy as we slid down the sidewalk and onto a bus, then the subway. I didn’t know where we were going, though we ended up at her cousin’s apartment in Arlington. Katy had a key and let us in. The cousin was out and might not be back until the next day.
“How about playing strip chess,” I asked.
Katy was sitting on my lap on her cousin’s black leather couch. Struck by her lightness and warmth and beauty, and my own dumb luck, I wrapped my arms around her.
“Oh, Jake,” she swiveled around and gave me a quick kiss, then lingered, her moist breath against my neck. “What am I going to do with you?”
She suddenly stood and began unbuttoning her blouse. “Chess is not necessary,” she said. “Chess is not foreplay. Chess is harmful to your health.” She unsnapped her bra, and her small breasts popped out at eye level. “Chess was invented as an anti-aphrodisiac. Chess is sex for the brain, but the brain doesn’t need sex. Chess puts libido in a corral and brands all the pieces as untouchable. All they can do is knock each other over.”
She pushed me back onto the couch and straddled me, gracefully removing my clothes like an x-rated magician.
“You sure know a lot about chess,” I said.
humina humina humina humina itals exclamation point question mark exclamation point
Around midnight, we heard a key clack into the lock.
expletive deleted
Katy leaped from her cousin’s bed, slipped into a robe from her cousin’s closet, and slipped out her cousin’s door.
Capital C Cousin colon:
Why are you still here? And with him?
Next time, get a hotel.
Who’s going to wash my sheets?
How old is he? Recruiting for the Young Republicans again?
“I’m 21,” I wanted to shout. “Legal in every state of the union. And the District of Columbia.” But I was thinking about the again.
I hadn’t heard any of Katy’s responses, but then I heard her snuffling, the cousin reluctantly consoling. I got up and quickly dressed. I stripped the sheets and put them in a neat pile. I would’ve gladly washed them. Or better yet, taken them with me as a souvenir of my first time as a victim of the reverse one-night stand maneuver.
When Katy came back into the bedroom, though her eyes were red, her cheeks streaked, she had hardened into her years—a college graduate with a healthy start on a career who’d been engaged to a senator’s son.
capital T The chair recognizes the senior proofreader from capital C Connecticut connect-i-cut
“Listen, Jake,” she said. I didn’t like the way she said my name, like it was a punctuation mark. “No one at work can know about this.”
“We eat lunch together every day. Charlie knows. I’m sure people are talking.”
“Are you? I’m not. All I have to do is put my engagement ring back on for a couple of days. You’re leaving in a week.” She was picking up her clothes. “I still have it… the ring…”
She went into the bathroom and closed the door to dress. We both knew Charlie with his libertarian views and pot smoking did not judge or share what others did outside of work. He barely paid attention to anything in the office, besides printed words.
“Who would I tell?” I said through the closed bathroom door. Standing in her cousin’s bedroom, I felt that chapter of my life slam shut—or maybe it was a saddle-stitched pamphlet, a quick gust of wind, and it was over. The suddenness shocked me. I was already halfway back to Alba.
Katy walked out, tucking her wrinkled shirt in tight. “You’re right, I’m sorry. I’m just”—she giggled oddly, high-pitched—“losing my mind a little bit right now. Look, go back to college—it’s a picnic. Have lots of picnics before you graduate. Whatever you do, don’t get engaged—“
I opened my mouth to speak, but she continued.
“…Picnics where you lay on a blanket with a girl and after it gets dark, you make love on the blanket. Maybe fireworks… Fireworks, or not. Wrap your arms around her when it cools off. Kiss her hard like you kissed me. Learn how to whistle. Learn what it feels like to whistle and no one comes…” she sighed, “and… goodbye. Goodbye goodbye goodbye no commas and see you on Monday but nevertheless goodbye unofficial and unexpurgated period quotation mark.”
She kissed me, dry and quick on the cheek. Then she shoved me out into the living room where her cousin stood, arms crossed, holding her high-heeled shoes in one hand, looking both pissed off and languid.
“Hi,” I said.
I stopped in front of her, but I had nothing more to say. She gestured toward me with her shoes, either this way to the exit or see-ya-later-alligator or both, and I was out the door and Katy was waving frantically, as if fanning away smoke. Then the door closed behind me.
It never cooled off at night in D.C., at least during the summer of 1977. I had no idea where I was or how to get back to Georgetown. In Arlington, I was out of the basic numbered and alphabetized zone and in an entirely different state. I knew crossing a bridge was involved. I had no choice but to get out my creased and torn map, worn through at the folds, and open it up like a lost tourist. stet
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jim Ray Daniels has published four collections of short stories and has won numerous prizes for his work. His latest collection, EIGHT MILE HIGH, was named a 2015 Michigan Notable Book. His writing has been featured on Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac, in Billy Collins’s Poetry 180 anthologies, and in Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry series. His poems have appeared in the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. A native of Detroit, Daniels is the Thomas Stockham Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University.
LF #060 © Jim Ray Daniels. Published by Little Fiction | Big Truths, April 2014.
