I
liked Bryan Vaughn, and he seemed to like me as well, and, soon enough, we became good friends. Basically, all we did was sit around at his place or mine, drinking and talking. He had a lot of great stories about the police force, many of which turned out to be violent and sad.
I soon became friends with David Larson too. He lived in the house next to Bryan’s. David taught political science part-time at San Diego State University. He would get home around one in the afternoon, take a nap, and join Bryan and me at around three.
It got to be that each morning I’d get up and look forward to getting drunk with my newfound friends. I took Matthew to school, Jessica always found something to entertain herself with, or she’d nap, or she’d just play on the grass while we men lounged about. I started to become lax in my house duties, but Tina didn’t seem to notice or didn’t mention it. She was too caught up, now, in the world of full-time work.
On weekends, the three of us would sometimes get together for the rap-and-drink session, but this was usually short. Bryan’s wife was home, and she liked him to pay attention to her. David didn’t have a wife or a girlfriend; he liked to read books.
On Saturdays, of course, there was baseball.
I told Bryan that I thought David was gay. “He’s never mentioned any women in his past,” Bryan said. “And he certainly doesn’t have any women now. I hear these college professors always get laid by the young girls in their classes. Father-figure or authority-figure thing. Rachel ran away with a forty-year-old man, you know.”
“I didn’t,” I said.
“She did,” he said.
“Maybe he is screwing some students, but keeps a lid on it,” Bryan said. “That sort of thing can get you fired, and he doesn’t have tenure.”
“Maybe.”
“I
don’t
think he’s gay,” Bryan said.
“Would it matter if he was?”
“I guess not,” he said.
I knew that David didn’t make enough as a part-time professor to live in a two-story suburban home. He told us, one day, that the house belonged to his mother, and when she died, he inherited it. There was no doubt about David’s sexual orientation the day we all saw Cassandra Payne come home in a rush.
She was driving her Taurus down the street fast, and tore into the driveway of her house, tires screeching. Bryan, David, and I were on my porch, and we stopped talking at once. She hurried out of her car, sunglasses on, wearing tight blue jeans and a halter. She opened her front door and left it ajar.
Bryan raised his eyebrows and said, “Some people lead such hasty lives.”
David twitched in his chair.
Several minutes later, she came back out, this time wearing a short gray skirt and fumbling with the buttons of a pale blue blouse. I caught a glimpse of a dark bra, and her white skin, as she was trying to button the blouse, tuck it in the skirt, and get back into the car.
This sight, needless to say, had an erotic effect: the skin, the clothes, the bare legs, the high heels clacking on the cement of the driveway.
She drove away as fast as she arrived.
“She’s going to get a ticket,” Bryan said.
“She’s too gorgeous to get a ticket,” David said.
“Yeah,” Bryan said. “One glance at her, a traffic cop’ll tear the ticket up.”
“Who is she?” I said.
“You don’t know your own neighbors?” David said, like he was amused. He also seemed suddenly quite nervous.
Bryan laughed. “Sometimes, I bet, Philip doesn’t even know his own last name.”
I had to think about that one. He was kidding, of course, but it struck a sensitive chord in me. I tried not to let it show.
David said, “Her name is Cassandra Payne. And that’s all I know about her,” he added quickly. “I don’t even know her husband’s first name.”
“Lawrence,” said Bryan.
“I’ve seen her once or twice,” I admitted. “But not the husband.”
“He keeps odd hours,” Bryan said. “Out of town a lot. England, I think.”
“England,” I said.
“They’re Brits, both of them. Great accents, just like Roger Moore or something.”
“David Niven,” said David.
“I’ve talked briefly with both of them,” Bryan said, “but I don’t know squat about their lives.”
“But she’s a looker,” said David.
“You got
that
right,” said Bryan, smiling wide. “Did you get a load of those
legs?″
“Yeah,” I said.
“Not much in the tit department, but who cares?”
“And that ass,” David said.
“I didn’t get a glimpse of her ass,” Bryan said. He was lying.
“She has a nice ass.”
“That I wouldn’t doubt.”
“Well,” David said, like he knew, “she does.”
“How old do you think she is?” I asked. “Thirty?”
“I’d say a few years younger,” Bryan said.
“How can you tell?” asked David.
Bryan said, “I used to be a cop. I can tell these things. And she likes older men, because Lawrence Payne is at least fifty.”
“How long have they been married?” I said.
“Don’t know,” Bryan said. “But they’ve lived here about two years.”
“I never noticed them move in,” I said.
“Of course you didn’t,” Bryan said.
“I did,” David said, looking at his beer.
Tina came home
from work two hours later than usual. She’d called and said she would, told me she was going out to have a few drinks with some of the girls who worked at the Social Security office. I ordered pizza—the kids were excited about that. We left two slices for Tina, but when she came home, she said she’d had some food from the happy hour platter. She was also tipsy and started to act very affectionate, kissing me all over my face.
“You shouldn’t drink and drive like that,” I told her.
“Look who’s talking,” she said, touching the beer bottle I was holding. Then she grabbed it, and took a swig.
“I don’t drink and drive,” I told her.
“You’ve been drinking a lot lately.”
“You’ve been spying on me,” I laughed.
“I notice more things than you think, baby,” she said, kissing me on the lips.
“You taste like tequila.”
“Margaritas.”
“How many’d you have?”
“You’re sounding like a lawyer again,” she said. “Three, counselor.”
“With salt?”
“No.”
“On the rocks?”
“Blended.”
I asked, “So what did you and the girls talk about as you sat in some bar and drank margaritas?”
“I was the only one drinking margaritas,” said Tina. “We started talking about work. Then we talked about men.”
“Were there men in the bar?”
“Oh yes.”
“Anyone try to pick you up?”
“I think I got a few looks.”
“Smart men.”
“I’m
horny,”
she said.
She was reaching into my cut-off shorts. I touched her short blond hair, the tanned skin of her shoulders.
“Not in front of the kids!” I pleaded.
We went to the bedroom. It was a quick copulation. I was thinking about the sexy British woman in the short skirt and the screeching tires. I don’t know what Tina was thinking about. She had her eyes closed and was louder than usual. The proper description would be vocally appreciative. I don’t remember her ever having more than one or two drinks at a time. I suspected she’d had more than three margaritas tonight.
“God, I needed that,” she said when we were done.
I imagined her saying that with a sultry British accent.
I
was, in retrospect, obsessed with Cassandra Payne, more so in the beginning than I realized, or wanted to believe.
Had I known how sickening and utterly disturbed my behavior would eventually become, I would’ve stopped myself right then and there, and my life—everyone’s lives—would be different today.
But you can’t think that way, it’ll only make you depressed and crazy.
You have to accept your actions and live with the consequences, as I do now.
I couldn’t help myself; there was a wonderfully sexy, beautiful woman living across the street whose life, whose very existence, was a puzzle and a mystery.
Maybe I wasn’t in love with my wife anymore. Maybe it was all a midlife crisis thing.
I began to take note of her comings and goings. She had no set schedule. Her husband, who drove a black BMW, usually left early—if he was around—or came home late. Sometimes the BMW would be there, but he’d depart or arrive by cab, with flight luggage. He was a tall, thin man, much like his wife, with silver-gray hair and thick glasses. He always wore three-piece suits.
When I was sitting around with either Bryan or David, we always stopped whatever we were talking about to observe the woman as she was leaving her house or coming home—and we took stock, of course, of what she was wearing. Cassandra Payne could make a potato sack sexy on her body. We never said anything about her, not usually, resuming whatever it was we were saying when she either left or went inside; but I could see it in their eyes, and Bryan and David probably saw it in mine: in our fantasies, we were undressing her, touching her, kissing her, making love to her. It didn’t matter that Bryan and I were married, that she was an unattainable woman, a forbidden neighbor—in the world of fantasy, anything was possible and everything was permissible.
I continued with my home life, my married life, and became more and more curious about what went on inside the house across the street, and what went on inside Cassandra Payne’s head.
In a dream I had of her, she came to me and offered me a berry. It was a red berry.
“Eat it,” she said, “and we’ll be married forever.”
I had no idea what the dream meant.
My son. Matthew,
was starting to have problems at school—he was getting into fights with other boys. He told me that the other boys started it, but his teacher said otherwise.
“Fighting does no good,” I told my son. “People get hurt—people get arrested and file lawsuits over fights. People lose teeth, break bones.”
“They’re jerks,” Matthew said.
“Who?”
“Everyone.”
“How are they jerks?”
“They just are!” he huffed, and crossed his arms, and wouldn’t look at me.
I was worried about him. He seemed to be getting more and more angry and destructive.
I told myself it was a phase for five-year-old boys. I recalled getting into some fights at his age … I think.
Jessica, I knew, would grow up to be a striking woman, perhaps as beautiful as Cassandra Payne. Men would adore her, chase her. She’d have no problem finding success in her future. It made me uncomfortable to think of my three-year-old daughter as a grown woman and using her sex appeal to make her way through the world.
Tina started going
out with “the girls” one night a week, usually on Thursdays. She’d come home drunk, and she would either be frisky or she’d fall right to sleep. I thought it was good that she and her friends went out and blew off steam.
We were starting
to get a lot of crank phone calls. At first, they were hang-ups, and then sounds, like gurgling, hissing, panting, gargling. I ordered Caller ID from the phone company; when it arrived in the mail, I immediately installed it. So when the next crank call came, and someone moaned and panted and hung up, I looked at the phone number on the little ID machine.
“Gotcha.”
I dialed the number.
A kid’s voice answered, male: “Hullo.”
“Listen you little twerp,” I said, “if you call here one more time, I will tell your parents, and I will go over to your house and open up a can of whup-ass and whup your ass, you hear?”
He hung up, I called him back.
“Uh, hullo?”
I panted and moaned. I really got into it, too.
He hung up.
I laughed.
Someone was pulling at my shirt. It was Jessica. She frowned and said, “Daddy, what are you doing?”
“Just playing,” I said.
My daughter gave me a weird look. I was no better than the silly kid who’d been making the calls.
But the calls stopped.
One night,
I had an idea. Tina and I were in bed. She was reading a book; I was lying next to her, looking at the ceiling.
“Let’s have a party,” I said.
“What?”
“A barbecue type deal, during the day,” I said. “We’ll cook food, invite our friends, even the neighbors.” I sounded excited about this, too.
“Why?” she asked.
“Why not? When’s the last time we had a get-together?”
“Before Jessica was born,” she said.
“You see. Plus, it’d be a good way to acquaint ourselves with our neighbors.”
“You know the neighbors.”
“Just Bryan and David.”
She thought about this, and nodded. “It’d be good to see some old friends, too.”
“So let’s do it,” I said.
“You get it together and arrange it,” she said.
“Deal,” I said.
The master bedroom
was on the bottom floor, the kids had their bedrooms upstairs, the third room outfitted as my office. I hadn’t used it much since being disbarred, but the office had a new purpose: the window looked right across at the Paynes’ home. Some nights, while Tina slept, I sat at my desk, the curtains drawn, and espied the house. I’d see shadows move about, hers and his. One time, their shadows confronted each other, and I could distantly hear them having an argument that only lasted a minute. Another time, her shadow swayed back and forth, like she was dancing. I wondered what kind of music she listened to.