Wendy Wendy Wendy. By now, my needs having evolved, she was no longer just the pure dream of a forlorn boy. I wanted her carnally, too. She’d become a beautiful young woman.
Near the end of that summer an unseasonable rainy grayness filled the skies. People at the track took to wearing winter coats. A few races had to be called off. Wendy and her father suddenly vanished.
I looked for them every day, and every night trudged home feeling betrayed and bereft. “Can’t find your little girlfriend?” my father said. He thought it was funny.
Then one night, while I was in my bedroom reading a science fiction magazine, he shouted: “Hey! Get out here! Your girlfriend’s on TV!”
And so she was.
“Police announce an arrest in the murder of Myles Larkin, who was found stabbed to death in his car last night. They have taken Larkin’s only child, sixteen-year-old Wendy, into custody and formally charged her with the murder of her father.”
I went twice to see her but they wouldn’t let me in. Finally, I learned the name of her lawyer, lied that I was a shirttail cousin, and he took me up to the cold concrete visitors’ room on the top floor of city jail.
Even in the drab uniform the prisoners wore, she looked lovely in her bruised and wan way.
“Did he start beating you up again?” I asked.
“No.”
“Did he start beating up your mother?”
“No.”
“Did he lose his job or get you evicted?”
She shook her head. “No. It was just that I couldn’t take it anymore. I mean, he wasn’t losing any more or any less money at the track, it was just I... I snapped. I don’t know how else to explain it. It was like I saw what he’d done to our lives and I... I snapped. That’s all — I just snapped.”
She served seven years in a minimum-security women’s prison upstate during which time my parents were killed in an automobile accident, I finished college, got married, had a child and took up the glamorous and adventurous life of a tax consultant. My wife, Donna, knew about my mental and spiritual ups and downs. Her father had been an abusive alcoholic.
I didn’t see Wendy until twelve years later, when I was sitting at the track with my seven-year-old son. He didn’t always like going to the track with me — my wife didn’t like me going to the track at all — so I’d had to fortify him with the usual comic books, candy and a pair of “genuine” Dodgers sunglasses.
Between races, I happened to look down at the seats Wendy and her father usually took, and there she was. Something about the cock of her head told me it was her.
“Can we go, Dad?” my son, Rob, said. “It’s so boring here.”
Boring? I’d once tried to explain to his mother how good I felt when I was at the track. I was not the miserable, frightened, self-effacing owner of Advent Tax Systems (some system — me and my low-power Radio Shack computer and software). No... when I was at the track I felt strong and purposeful and optimistic, and frightened of nothing at all. I was pure potential — potential for winning the easy cash that was the mark of men who were successful with women, and with their competitors, and with their own swaggering dreams.
“Please, Dad. It’s really boring here. Honest.”
But all I could see, all I could think about, was Wendy. I hadn’t seen her since my one visit to jail. Then I noticed that she, too, had a child with her, a very proper-looking little blond girl whose head was cocked at the odd and fetching angle so favored by her mother.
We saw each other a dozen more times before we spoke.
Then: “I knew I’d see you again someday.”
Wan smile. “All those years I was in prison, I wasn’t so sure.”
Her daughter came up to her then and Wendy said: “This is Margaret.”
“Hello, Margaret. Glad to meet you. This is my son, Rob.”
With the great indifference only children can summon, they nodded hellos.
“We just moved back to the city,” Wendy explained. “I thought I’d show Margaret where I used to come with my father.” She mentioned her father so casually, one would never have guessed that she’d murdered the man.
Ten more times we saw each other, children in tow, before our affair began.
April 6 of that year was the first time we ever made love, this in a motel where the sunset was the color of blood in the window, and a woman two rooms away wept inconsolably. I had the brief fantasy that it was my wife in that room.
“Do you know how long I’ve loved you?” she said.
“Oh, God, you don’t know how good it is to hear that.”
“Since I was eight years old.”
“For me, since I was nine.”
“This would destroy my husband if he ever found out.”
“The same with my wife.”
“But I have to be honest.”
“I want you to be honest.”
“I don’t care what it does to him. I just want to be with you.”
In December of that year, my wife, Donna, discovered a lump in her right breast. Two weeks later she received a double mastectomy and began chemotherapy.
She lived nine years, and my affair with Wendy extended over the entire time. Early on, both our spouses knew about our relationship. Her husband, an older and primmer man than I might have expected, stopped by my office one day in his new BMW and threatened to destroy my business. He claimed to have great influence in the financial community.
My wife threatened to leave me but she was too weak. She had one of those cancers that did not kill her but that never left her alone, either. She was weak most of the time, staying for days in the bedroom that had become hers, as the guest room had become mine. Whenever she became particularly angry about Wendy, Rob would fling himself at me, screaming how much he hated me, pounding me with fists that became more powerful with each passing year. He hated me for many of the same reasons I’d hated my own father, my ineluctable passion for the track, and the way there was never any security in our lives, the family bank account wholly subject to the whims of the horses that ran that day.
Wendy’s daughter likewise blamed her mother for the alcoholism that had stricken the husband. There was constant talk of divorce but their finances were such that neither of them could quite afford it. Margaret constantly called Wendy a whore, and only lately did Wendy realize that Margaret sincerely meant it.
Two things happened the next year. My wife was finally dragged off into the darkness, and Wendy’s husband crashed his car into a retaining wall and was killed.
Even on the days of the respective funerals, we went to the track.
“He never understood.”
“Neither did she,” I said.
“I mean why I come here.”
“I know.”
“I mean how it makes me feel alive.”
“I know.”
“I mean how nothing else matters.”
“I know.”
“I should’ve been nicer to him, I suppose.”
“I suppose. But we can’t make a life out of blaming ourselves. What’s happened, happened. We have to go on from here.”
“Do you think Rob hates you as much as Margaret hates me?”
“More, probably,” I said. “The way he looks at me sometimes, I think he’ll probably kill me someday.”
But it wasn’t me who was to die.
All during Wendy’s funeral, I kept thinking of those words. Margaret had murdered her mother just as Wendy had killed her father. The press made a lot of this.
All the grief I should have visited upon my dead wife I visited upon my dead lover. I went through months of alcoholic stupor. Clients fell away; rent forced me to move from our nice suburban home to a small apartment in a section of the city that always seemed to be on fire. I didn’t have to worry about Rob anymore. He got enough loans for college and wanted nothing to do with me.