Last evening had replanted in his mind the long dormant germ of an idea. The time was coming when he’d need a wife — not for sex, but other things. Sex was an itch to be relieved on Sundays when business was slack, on Aurora Avenue North in a rooms-by-the-hour waterbed motel. At $65 for oral — he disliked the other kind — it was like taking an expensive dump; he was always glad to get back to the truck afterward, and never used the same woman twice. But a wife would be different. The shogun authors of his favorite books all had wives: wives gave substance and background to elite players, making them more 3-D. Wives did accounting and also made food and entertained. Building up his holdings in parking lots, Charles O had treasured the airy lightness of his solitude, the trim and compact life that would fit inside the cab and flatbed of his old truck, let alone his new one. But as owner and ruler of the Acropolis, a landlord, he lacked the ampleness that only a wife could provide.
Of all his tenants, Lucy N. Bengstrom, apartment #701, had interested him the most since the day he first toured the building. Sure, she was old — fifty, maybe even more — but he wasn’t prejudiced: on Aurora Avenue, he picked old ones because they worked harder to please and made better noises. Fat, too. That evening, he’d eyed her thick ankles and the rotund swell of her belly under the loose dress that was meant to hide it. He was okay with fat.
But consider her assets:
• She had citizenship. He needed a wife with citizenship.
• She wrote for magazines, so she had good secretarial skills.
• She had the kid. Two for one, a ready-made family. He needed a family, and starting one from scratch took too much time and money. The kid was smart enough, and seemed to like him, a big plus.
• Good homemaker. He liked the bird’s-nest coziness of #701: nothing too expensive or fancy, but it felt upmarket. Books, pictures, lot of classy-looking CDs. Everything in the apartment suggested money carefully, economically spent, and he appreciated that. Worst thing in the world was big-spendy women.
• That old car. She’d taken good care of it, not like most American women, who trashed cars in a year or two like they were flashlight batteries or disposable razors. Alfa Romeo — prestige brand, and another testament to the fact that, though poor, she had class.
• Her best asset: an insufficiency that he could smell on her like mold. Why else hang out with that fag actor? A real loser, with his cheap homo sarcasm and funny voices. Mr. MagiGro was a prime candidate for an eviction notice. No, to hang out with a half-man like that, a woman must be sick with loneliness, and Charles O could only begin to imagine her pathetic gratitude if she was to be rescued from this misery by an elite player. She’d be in his debt for the rest of her life. Thank you, thank you, thank you! He liked the thought of that a lot.
• What was the kid’s name? Mouse? No, Rabbit. He’d have to call her something else, like Nicole, or Meryl, or Marilyn, or Sigourney — a name already stamped with success. When the time came, he’d send her to college: East Coast, Ivy League. She’d need an MBA to help him in the business. “Speak to my PA, my daughter Sigourney…” That sounded nice.
The more he thought about her, the sweeter appeared the prospect of life with Lucy N. Bengstrom. Lucy Lee! She was made for the name — it fit just right, like the inevitable destination she’d unknowingly been headed toward all these years. Lucy Lee. Charles O. and Lucy Lee. Mr. and Mrs. Charles O. Lee. The Lee Residence. They were fated to be conjoined. It was meant. Once upon a time, he’d been full of superstitions — astrologers, feng shui, all that crap. Now, in spite of himself, he needed to find out her birth year. Water-dragon, water-pig would be the best of all combinations, and he had a powerful sense that Lucy N. Bengstrom would turn out to be a water-pig.
Thinking of her had given him a big hard-on, sticking right through the flap of his boxers. Fully awake now, he reached to the box of Kleenex on the floor beside the couch and pictured her pulling the flowery dress over her head…nice underwear, not like a hooker’s, but lacy, white, high-class intimate apparel from Nordstrom or some place like that. She stood before him in the darkness, strangely luminous, like the Indiglo lighting on his Timex.
“Please, honey, may I take you in my mouth?”
Big-bellied, old, grateful, she went down on him, wet lips busy, making little doggy whimpers of satisfaction as she sucked, cradling his balls in her hands.
Briskly, fastidiously, he jacked off into the waiting tissue. Not a drop spilled.
“God, you taste so good,” Lucy said, then faded into black.
He padded into the bathroom, where he flushed the balled-up Kleenex down the toilet and vigorously soaped his limpening cock in the basin. He checked his watch—4:30. By five he’d be out on the prowl in the F250, searching his lots for overnighters who’d failed to pay and display: 5:30 was the hour of the tow truck at Excellent Parking, and his 60/40 deal with the towing companies meant big profits even before the sun began to clear the eastern mountains. On a good morning he’d catch a hundred or so illegals and deport them to places as remote as Kent and Issaquah. What was funny was that the no-goods were almost never clunkers, but late-model Audis and Lexuses and Jaguars; poor people paid for tickets, and the rich tried to cheat him. Just yesterday he’d waved bye-bye to a new red Ferrari, its nose ignominiously hoisted up on the tow truck. Guy would’ve been legal if he’d paid $6.00, and now it cost him $334 and a $50 cab fare to get his Ferrari Superamerica back. That had made Charles O’s morning.
He set a cup of water in the microwave. The breathy, churring noise of the oven mixed with the clank and rumble of a freight train traveling northward through the city. Far ahead, he heard it bellow like a wounded cow as its locomotives trundled into downtown. They’d just about be passing the Acropolis. He wondered if Lucy heard the whistle, too.
Act with decision. The elite player never wavers once his choice is made!
He’d begin at the weekend, with those crates she had for bookshelves. Sipping his scalding Nescafé, he wondered whether along with his cordless drill he should take flowers.
AT A FEW MINUTES before five, the hand set off on its regular morning excursion from under the covers. The terrain was familiar as it snaked in the dark through the thicket of easily upsettable plastic bottles of aspirin, Halcion, St. John’s wort, melatonin, and protease inhibitors, then across the spine of the book that splayed facedown on the bedside table, a lurid kiss-and-tell memoir by the latest fugitive from the administration, the former Department of Defense chief of staff. Eventually the hand found the knurled volume knob of the elderly transistor radio, whose antenna had long ago been replaced by a wire coathanger.
KUOW was still relaying the BBC World Service, a British voice reciting soccer scores, something about the UEFA cup, a cricket match in Australia.
At five o’clock sharp, National Public Radio’s Morning Edition began with the first news of the day from Washington, D.C., and the sleeper roused himself to listen to the lead headline.
This was how Tad’s mornings always began, with the vague, routine apprehension of atrocity. Pacific Standard Time was in part to blame, for the world’s most shocking events usually happened while the West Coast was still asleep. By this PST, Cairo, Rome, Madrid, Paris, and London had survived the conventional hours of atrocity, while New York and D.C. were just about to enter them.