“Three times. Always to strangers who happen to turn up while I’m fishing. Always on long lazy afternoons, those afternoons when the fish just don’t bite no matter what you do.”
Mowbray began to do several things. He began to step backward, and he began to release his tight hold on his fishing rod, and he began to extend his left arm protectively in front of him.
But the filleting knife had already cleared its sheath.
Strangers on a Handball Court
We met for the first time on a handball court in Sheridan Park. It was a Saturday morning in early summer with the sky free of clouds and the sun warm but not yet unbearable. He was alone on the court when I got there and I stood for a few moments watching him warm up, slamming the little ball viciously against the imperturbable backstop.
He didn’t look my way, although he must have known I was watching him. When he paused for a moment I said, “A game?”
He looked my way. “Why not?”
I suppose we played for two hours, perhaps a little longer. I’ve no idea how many games we played. I was several years younger, weighed considerably less, and topped him by four or five inches.
He won every game.
When we broke, the sun was high in the sky and considerably hotter than it had been when we started. We had both been sweating freely and we stood together, rubbing our faces and chests with our towels. “Good workout,” he said. “There’s nothing like it.”
“I hope you at least got some decent exercise out of it,” I said apologetically. “I certainly didn’t make it much of a contest.”
“Oh, don’t bother yourself about that,” he said, and flashed a shark’s smile. “Tell you the truth, I like to win. On and off the court. And I certainly got a workout out of you.”
I laughed. “As a matter of fact, I managed to work up a thirst. How about a couple of beers? On me, in exchange for the handball lesson.”
He grinned. “Why not?”
We didn’t talk much until we were settled in a booth at the Hofbrau House. Generations of collegians had carved combinations of Greek letters into the top of our sturdy oak table. I was in the middle of another apology for my athletic inadequacy when he set his stein down atop Zeta Beta Tau and shook a cigarette out of his pack. “Listen,” he said, “forget it. What the hell, maybe you’re lucky in love.”
I let out a bark of mirthless laughter. “If this is luck,” I said, “I’d hate to see misfortune.”
“Problems?”
“You might say so.”
“Well, if it’s something you’d rather not talk about—”
I shook my head. “It’s not that — it might even do me good to talk about it — but it would bore the daylights out of you. It’s hardly an original problem. The world is overflowing these days with men in the very same leaky boat.”
“Oh?”
“I’ve got a girl,” I said. “I love her and she loves me. But I’m afraid I’m going to lose her.”
He frowned, thinking about it. “You’re married,” he said.
“No.”
“She’s married.”
I shook my head. “No, we’re both single. She wants to get married.”
“But you don’t want to marry her.”
“There’s nothing I want more than to marry her and spend the rest of my life with her.”
His frown deepened. “Wait a minute,” he said. “Let me think. You’re both single, you both want to get married, but there’s a problem. All I can think of is she’s your sister, but I can’t believe that’s it, especially since you said it’s a common problem. I’ll tell you, I think my brain’s tired from too much time in the sun. What’s the problem?”
“I’m divorced.”
“So who isn’t? I’m divorced and I’m remarried. Unless it’s a religious thing. I bet that’s what it is.”
“No.”
“Well, don’t keep me guessing, fella. I already gave up once, remember?”
“The problem is my ex-wife,” I said. “The judge gave her everything I had but the clothes I was wearing at the time of the trial. With the alimony I have to pay her, I’m living in a furnished room and cooking on a hotplate. I can’t afford to get married, and my girl wants to get married — and sooner or later she’s going to get tired of spending her time with a guy who can never afford to take her anyplace decent.” I shrugged. “Well,” I said, “you get the picture.”
“Boy, do I get the picture.”
“As I said, it’s not a very original problem.”
“You don’t know the half of it.” He signaled the waiter for two more beers, and when they arrived he lit another cigarette and took a long swallow of his beer. “It’s really something,” he said. “Meeting like this. I already told you I got an ex-wife of my own.”
“These days almost everybody does.”
“That’s the truth. I must have had a better lawyer than you did, but I still got burned pretty bad. She got the house, she got the Cadillac and just about everything else she wanted. And now she gets fifty cents out of every dollar I make. She’s got no kids, she’s got no responsibilities, but she gets fifty cents out of every dollar I earn and the government gets another thirty or forty cents. What does that leave me?”
“Not a whole lot.”
“You better believe it. As it happens I make a good living. Even with what she and the government take I manage to live pretty decently. But do you know what it does to me, paying her all that money every month? I hate that woman’s guts and she lives like a queen at my expense.”
I took a long drink of beer. “I guess our problems aren’t all that different.”
“And a lot of men can say the same thing. Millions of them. A word of advice, friend. What you should do if you marry your girlfriend—”
“I can’t marry her.”
“But if you go ahead and marry her anyway. Just make sure you do what I did before I married my second wife. It goes against the grain to do it because when you’re about to marry someone you’re completely in love and you’re sure it’s going to last forever. But make a prenuptial agreement. Have it all signed and witnessed before the marriage ceremony, and have it specify that if there’s a divorce she does not get one dime, she gets zip. You follow me? Get yourself a decent lawyer so he’ll draw up something that will stand up, and get her to sign it, which she most likely will because she’ll be so starry-eyed about getting married. Then you’ll have nothing to worry about. If the marriage is peaches and cream forever, which I hope it is, then you’ve wasted a couple of hundred dollars on a lawyer and that’s no big deal. But if anything goes wrong with the marriage, you’re in the catbird seat.”
I looked at him for a long moment. “It makes sense,” I said.
“That’s what I did. Now my second wife and I, we get along pretty good. She’s young, she’s beautiful, she’s good company, I figure I got a pretty good deal. We have our bad times, but they’re nothing two people can’t live with. And the thing is, she’s not tempted by the idea of divorcing me, because she knows what she’ll come out with if she does. Zeeee-ro.”
“If I ever get married again,” I said, “I’ll take your advice.”
“I hope so.”
“But it’ll never happen,” I said. “Not with my ex-wife bleeding me to death. You know, I’m almost ashamed to say this, but what the hell, we’re strangers, we don’t really know each other, so I’ll admit it. I have fantasies of killing her. Stabbing her, shooting her, tying her to a railroad track and letting a train solve my problem for me.”
“Friend, you are not alone. The world is full of men who dream about killing their ex-wives.”
“Of course I’d never do it. Because if anything ever happened to that woman, the police would come straight to me.”