Little Children (15 page)

“Don’t forget the Ben-Gay,” said Pete Olaffson.

“And if all else fails,” said Bart Williams, “you can always consult our team physician.” Bart grabbed a shot glass from the cork-lined tray in the center of the table and offered it to Todd. “Dr. Daniels. His friends call him Jack.”

“To the good doctor.” Todd saluted his teammates with the glass, then threw back the shot. “I feel better already.”

One by one the Guardians took their leave until only Todd and Larry Moon remained at the table. Larry was in a funk; Todd had noticed it the moment they sat down. He’d been drinking steadily for the past hour and a half, but he’d held himself aloof from the conversation, only joining in if someone asked him a direct question.

“Thanks for punching that guy,” Todd told him. “I think he was about to dance on my head.”

Larry looked up in pained surprise. He lifted a small bag of ice away from his left eye, which was pretty much swollen shut. The Auditors had made him their primary target during the game-ending fisticuffs.

“You shouldn’t thank me. You should spit in my face.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I couldn’t block that guy. He was killing me all night.” Larry hung his head like a little boy caught misbehaving. “I let you down. I let the whole team down.”

“Bullshit. You played your heart out.”

“I’m slow and I’m fat and I let that dirtbag piss all over me.”

“It’s over,” said Todd. “Just forget about it.”

Larry pressed the ice bag against his eye and glared at Todd for a few uncomfortable seconds.

“Don’t fucking tell me to forget it, okay?”

Todd glanced at his wrist, where his watch would have been if he’d been wearing it.

“You know what?” he said. “I think I better get going.”

Todd didn’t think Larry was in any condition to operate a motor vehicle, but he didn’t want to upset him by raising the issue. It was just a short drive home, and the streets were pretty clear at this time of night.

“I let you down,” Larry repeated morosely, jabbing his key in the general direction of the ignition switch. “That’s what I do. I let people down.”

Larry handed Todd the ice pack. Without thinking, Todd pressed it to his own injured cheek. It felt good, better than he expected.

“My family, my teammates, the guys I worked with.” Larry successfully inserted the key and started the van. “Don’t count on me, ’cause I’m gonna let you down.”

“You’re overreacting,” Todd told him. “Anyone can have a bad game.”

Larry hesitated before leaving the parking lot. He looked both ways several times, then inched out into the empty street as if merging with rush-hour traffic.

“Joanie left me,” he announced. “Took the kids and went to her mother’s.”

“Jesus, Larry. That’s a tough break.”

“I deserved it. Me and my big mouth.” Todd didn’t ask for elaboration, but Larry provided it anyway. “I called her a fucking whore. Right in front of the kids.”

“Why would you do that?”

“I was in a bad mood or something.”

Larry punched the gas for no apparent reason, accelerating down Pleasant Street as if drag-racing an invisible opponent. His minivan had surprisingly good pickup; the speedometer shot up to fifty in what felt like a couple of seconds. Todd was both startled and relieved when he jammed on the brakes at the intersection with South Street, belatedly obeying a red light. Both men lurched forward and back along with the van.

“So now I’m fucked,” Larry said. “It’s gonna be lawyers, and custody rights, and child support. Then she’s gonna marry someone else, and some stranger’s gonna raise my kids. That’s what happens to assholes like me.”

“Maybe you can still work it out. Get counseling or something.”

“We been down that road. There’s nothing left to talk about.”

The light turned green. Larry was driving slowly again, as if unfamiliar with the area. Todd felt tired and a little buzzed; he searched his cloudy mind for conversational gambits unrelated to the game or his friend’s domestic troubles. What he really wanted was to talk about Sarah, and the beautiful strangeness of their affair, the way it seemed to fit so perfectly with the contours of his life—
the morning and night belong to my family, the afternoon belongs to her
—but something told him that Larry wasn’t the right audience for his confession. Then something else popped into his mind, something he’d been meaning to mention anyway.

“You hear about the pervert? He went swimming at the Town Pool.”

“What?” Larry whipped his head in Todd’s direction, turning his attention completely away from the road. “Who told you that?”

“I saw him myself. During the heat wave.”

“The Town Pool? That place is crawling with kids. Sometimes my boys go there.”

“It was just that one time. I don’t think he came back.”

Larry just kept shaking his head and muttering to himself, as if something were very, very wrong. Even before he stepped on the gas and spun the wheel hard to the left, pulling a cop show U-turn in front of the Pet Palace, Todd had already come to the conclusion that he would have been better off keeping his big mouth shut.

Lately, Kathy had found herself thinking a lot about a particular incident in her past, the moment when she had the first vague inkling that her future and Todd’s might somehow intersect. It happened during the spring semester of their junior year in college, in a class called Sociology of the American Family.

It wasn’t like they were total strangers. They’d attended the same small school for two and a half years at that point, and shared a handful of mutual acquaintances. They bumped into each other every so often on the compact, bucolic campus, and exchanged the obligatory smiles and slightly labored small talk of people who lived in the same world but had made a tacit decision not to become friends.

At least Kathy had made that decision, very early in their freshman year. She’d been hearing about this gorgeous football player ever since her first night in the dorm, when she and her three roommates stayed up late, comparing notes about the people they’d met. When Todd’s name came up, it inspired a chorus of ecstatic recognition.

“Oh my God, did you
see
him?”

“He is sooo hot.”

“Doesn’t he look like that J. Crew model?” the friendly one named Amy asked, glancing at Kathy for support. “The blond guy?”

Kathy shrugged, unable to offer an opinion. She was the only member of the group who hadn’t caught a glimpse of the magnificent, apparently ubiquitous Todd. Amy’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully.

“You know what?” she told Kathy. “You should go out with him. You’re like the two best-looking people in the whole class. You’d be, like, the perfect couple. Wouldn’t they?”

The other roommates agreed, and Todd was immediately designated Kathy’s boyfriend-in-absentia.
I saw your boyfriend today
, one of them would invariably say.
Your boyfriend’s in my bio lab
.

But all it took was a single conversation at a party a few weeks later to convince Kathy that her “boyfriend” would never be her boyfriend. He was handsome, all right, but he seemed less like a person than a type, the epitome of the dashing scholar/athlete, a category whose charms Kathy felt like she’d exhausted in high school. She hadn’t come to college to waste her time with another guy like
that
, the square-jawed captain of the team, the boy most likely to succeed.

No, Kathy was through with jocks, weary of the preening and self-congratulation, the minutely detailed recaps of yesterday’s game. She was on the lookout for scruffier, less conventional lovers, artists and intellectuals, unshaven guys in thrift-store paisley shirts who could help her to transform herself into the serious person she meant to become, someone her airheaded high school pals wouldn’t even recognize.

By the end of her sophomore year, she’d worked her way through a blues guitarist, an abstract expressionist painter, a pothead photographer, and an anthropology major who’d hitchhiked his way across Australia. Each of them was exciting for a while, but once the novelty wore off, she had to admit that the bohemians had just as little interest in actually getting to know her as the football players did. They didn’t want to spend hours discussing the finer points of art history or aboriginal culture; they just wanted to get her stoned and take her clothes off.

Then, in the beginning of junior year, she met Jason, a short, curly-haired guy whose parents were both history professors at a state college in Wisconsin. He was a fiery, unrepentant Marxist, one of the few on campus, with a passion for social justice and a seemingly inexhaustible appetite for conversation. All through the fall, he and Kathy stayed up late into the night, drinking black coffee and talking about politics. They disagreed about almost everything—Jason believed that the East Germans were justified in building the Berlin Wall, for example, and that a dictatorship of the proletariat couldn’t, by definition, be considered a repressive form of government—but that wasn’t the point. He was the first smart guy she’d ever been with who treated her as an intellectual equal, who listened to her opinions and tried to respond to them with reasoned arguments of his own. He didn’t act like these discussions were mere foreplay, a preliminary to the main event. For Jason, the talking
was
the main event. He never flirted, never tried to kiss her, and ignored her increasingly unsubtle hints that he no longer needed to be so respectful of her physical boundaries.

Needless to say, she fell madly in love with him. Once a source of pleasure and excitement, their chaste, endlessly unspooling conversations about Maoism and the Sandinista Revolution became a form of erotic torment. Finally, Kathy couldn’t take it anymore. She got him drunk on vodka one Friday night and took him to bed. The sex was everything she’d hoped for—intense and tender at the same time, full of sustained eye contact and whispered commentary, a physical and emotional dialogue. When it was over, she poked him in the chest and demanded to know what in the world had taken him so long. Jason looked away, scowling with embarrassment.

“I don’t know,” he muttered. “It’s stupid.”

“What? You can tell me.”

He forced himself to meet her eyes.

“You’re too tall,” he said.

She laughed out loud.
Was that all?

“Jay,” she said, “I’m like three inches taller than you.”

“Closer to four.”

“Whatever. It doesn’t matter to me.”

Kathy waited for him to echo her sentiment, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it.

“Say what you want,” he said. “It just doesn’t look right when the girl is taller.”

“Look right to who?”

“To people. Everybody.”

“My God,” she said. “You’re a revolutionary socialist. You hand out copies of
The Daily Worker
. Since when do you care what people think?”

“It just bothers me, Kathy. People are gonna laugh. And they won’t be laughing at you.”

“Let them,” Kathy whispered, leaning forward and kissing him. “Let the idiots laugh.”

They tried to make a go of it, but they didn’t last a month. Jason wouldn’t take her on dates, wouldn’t be caught dead holding hands with her in public or stepping onto a dance floor. Instead of arguing about dialectical materialism, they ended up wasting their time fighting about whether she was trying to “undermine” him by wearing a pair of cowboy boots to Sunday brunch. He finally dumped her on her first day back from Christmas vacation, apologizing profusely as he did so.

“I’m an idiot,” he said. “I’m probably gonna regret this for the rest of my life.”

“Then don’t do it,” she said, her eyes welling with hot, humiliating tears. “I’ll throw out the boots. I won’t ask you to dance anymore.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just not gonna work.”

She was still smarting from the break-up two months later, on that afternoon in sociology when her life veered suddenly in a whole different direction. The professor, a bearish ex-radical with an immense potbelly and a salt-and-pepper-beard, was pacing back and forth in front of the blackboard, on which he’d scribbled the enigmatic phrase, “Gender Expectations/Conflict. Insoluble Problem?”