Over Exposure Part 10

"Hey, Arthur, you know I'd love to talk shop a little more, but I really need to give Julie a big hug of celebration."

"You f.u.c.ked my wife, Shelton," Janeway hissed.

"What?"

Roger drew a careful breath and eyed the big man whose lips had begun to quiver with rage.

"She told me the whole story. Everything."

Bettina had her arm around Gigi's waist. The girl was leaning against her mother as the two of them plodded closer.

"What in G.o.d's name are you talking about?"

Janeway's eyes were slitted now, tipping close to Roger's face. He could smell Arthur's breath, taste the green peppers he'd eaten the night before, and the sour fumes of incompletely digested meat.

"She's yours, Shelton. She's your little girl."

"You really shouldn't joke about something like that, Arthur."

"No one's kidding."

Roger nodded stupidly, a ridiculous smile twisting his lips as he watched mother and daughter draw near.

"h.e.l.lo, Bettina," he said. "h.e.l.lo, Gigi. How're you doing?"

Gigi's mouth flickered. She stretched her neck as if something might be stuck in her throat. When she spoke, her voice was a raspy croak.

"I'm surviving."

"Good, good," Roger said, then turned to his employer. "Well, it's certainly nice to see you all. Nice that you're out and around again."

Roger turned to go but Janeway clapped a meaty paw on his shoulder and spun him around.

"Don't bother showing up on the lot again, Shelton. Not that anyone would notice you were missing."

Roger shrugged free of Janeway's grip and headed for the court where Julie was speaking to a writer for Tennis Magazine. As he stood waiting for the interview to conclude, he could feel the sting of three pair of eyes on the back of his neck.

A week later, Roger Shelton sat in the den surveying the bleak landscape of the want ads while Julie was in the living room knee to knee with a sales rep for Nike apparel. She was evaluating their latest offer sheet, and even from two rooms away Roger could hear her bargaining tone turn severe. The girl adamantly insisted on making all her own deals. Even with the avalanche of offers she received after winning the Orange Bowl, Julie hadn't so much as requested a hint of advice from Roger or Molly. So far she'd signed a half dozen contracts on her own, a shoe deal, a racket contract, another agreement to wear a Rolex watch, another to only drink Gatorade on the court. Not even out of high school, and already well on her way to her first ten million.

Roger had been making the rounds of dealers.h.i.+ps but had met nothing but cold smiles. He was certain Janeway had black-listed him. Roger had not given Molly any details about the disquieting conversation with Janeway, only telling her that he'd been downsized from his job of twenty years, without warning or just cause. Molly made a sad face, gave him a buck-up pat on the shoulder and poured him a double martini, and the next morning she was back to her punis.h.i.+ng tennis schedule as if nothing had changed, as if Roger was not languis.h.i.+ng in his pajamas till noon with the cla.s.sifieds open in his lap.

On the mantel across the living room, the round-faced clock ticked loudly. Roger stared at it, watching the second hand stutter around its face. He found himself ticking off the seconds as if counting down to some kind of blast-off, waiting, waiting, waiting for the great rocket to lift from its silos and carry him away, giddy and free of gravity. At last the terrible weight lifted from his chest, the earth's pressures relieved.

"Hey, Dad." It was Julie in the doorway. She was wearing a new outfit, a dark blue warm-up with a silky sheen. Her name was embroidered in gold over the left breast. And beside her name was the company's logo. His daughter, a freshly minted trademark.

"Yes?"

"Mr. Martino wanted to meet you."

The young man with slicked back hair and tight muscles and a dark tan marched across the room before Roger could rise from the chair. The salesman stuck out his hand and crushed Roger's meager grip.

"Julie's a d.a.m.n hard-bargainer, Mr. Shelton. Must've inherited that from you. I understand you're in the car business."

"Used cars," Julie said. "The junkers."

Martino nodded, fetching for a smile.

"And he couldn't even hack that," Julie said. "He got fired."

Roger looked at his daughter and then at Martino. Roger tried to smile but felt it wilt on his lips.

"A career transition," Roger said. He tapped the pile of newspapers in his lap, the pathetic red circles around job prospects.

"Well, I'm sure Julie owes a great deal to you, Mr. Shelton. You should be very proud."

"I am, I am."

"I owe something to Mom, maybe," Julie said. She was looking down at the breast of her new warm-up, studying the golden twist of letters that spelled out her name. "But I can't think of what Dad did. What I think is, the two of them found me on the doorstep. I mean, come on, look at me. And look at him."

Julie tugged the bottom of her warm-up to tighten the fabric against her swelling b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

"Sure, genes can be funny, but hey, you saw my mother. She's even skinnier than the old man. I think they found me under a cabbage somewhere."

Roger worked up the smile again and showed it to Martino.

"She's a s.p.u.n.ky one," Roger said. "She's right though. What she's accomplished is her own doing."

"Oh, sure, Dad picked me up after practice now and then. But he only did that so he could check out the other girls. He's a major lech."

"A lech?" Roger said. "Me?"

Martino backed up a step, looking between the two of them, trying to keep his smile in place as if this was a comedy routine still building to the punch line.

"I've earned it all myself," Julie said. "Just look at Gigi Janeway and her dad. He's got more money than the Pope, so Gigi had all the best teaching pros. Lessons every day. A coach to work on her serve, one for her backhand, another one for her net game. I had like this one guy, he couldn't even speak English. All he did, he hit me b.a.l.l.s from his basket. Bueno, bueno. An hour like that, him just hitting me forehands then backhands and yapping in Spanish, ninety-nine percent of which I couldn't understand. So yeah, I'd say I pretty much did it all on my own."

Martino left, chuckling and nodding like it was all an enormous joke. That uproariously witty Shelton family.

Julie went up to her room, shut the door, and turned on her rap music and Roger sat in the living room and watched the clock on the mantelpiece tick away the rest of the afternoon.

At dawn the next morning, he rolled from his sleepless bed and went downstairs and paced back and forth across the deck, staring out at the open field behind the house. As the sun broke into view above the pines, he went inside and took down a photo of Julie from the mantelpiece and stared at it. He sat in the living room easy chair and held it up, tilting it back and forth to catch the light. He put the photo back on the mantel and tiptoed upstairs and eased open the door to Julie's room. She was lying on her back, her head denting the pillow exactly in the center. She snored quietly. He stood there for several minutes watching the girl sleep.

At nine o'clock he roared into the used car lot, got out and stalked into the showroom. Gathered around the coffee machine, the other salesmen watched him but didn't so much as nod when he walked across the floor and went into his old office. Manny Mendoza was closing a deal with a black couple and their teenage daughter. He looked up at Roger and frowned.

"I'm looking for my stuff."

"Stuff?"

"My photos," Roger said. "The stuff I kept on my desk."

Manny nodded toward the far corner where a cardboard box was jammed behind the black couple and their daughter. He picked it up and took it out to the showroom and set it on the hood of a ten year old red pickup truck and dug through it till he found what he was looking for. He walked over to the large portrait of Arthur Janeway that hung on the back wall. He held his daughter's photo up to the portrait and cut his eyes back and forth between the two images.

The pouty lips, the heavy lids, the same crease in the earlobes, even an identical arch in the right eyebrow. When he was satisfied the likeness was unmistakable, he dropped the photo back in the box, left it on the hood of the pickup and went out to his nine year old Cadillac and drove straightaway to the Sand Hills Racket Club where he found Molly and her regular doubles partner engaged in a furious exchange of volleys with two much younger women.

Roger walked onto the court in the midst of the point, the ball whacking him between the shoulder blades.

"Roger! We were about to go up a service break. What in the h.e.l.l are you doing?"

"We need to talk," he said quietly and pried the racket from her hand and marched over to a bench in the shade of a royal palm.

Molly stormed over and stood looking down at him with her fists balled against her narrow hips.

"This better be good, Roger."

"It's not good," he said. "No, not good at all."

Molly stared into his eyes and whatever she saw melted the knot in her jaw, neutralized the acid in her eyes. She sat down beside him and together they looked out at the busy courts. The b.a.l.l.s pa.s.sing back and forth across the nets, the cries of exultation and disgust, the peals of laughter. Those neatly lined rectangles of green clay that had always seemed so tranquil to Roger, so calming. The orderliness of it all, a stage so neatly structured, while all around those courts the cosmos whirled haphazardly.

"She's not mine, is she?" Roger said. "Yours, but not mine."

"What are you talking about?"

"It's a wonder I never saw it before. It's so obvious, really. So d.a.m.n plain when you look at it. Even her personality. That same elbow-your-way-to-the-front approach. I guess on some level I've always known she couldn't be mine."

Roger watched the b.a.l.l.s traveling back and forth and back and forth again across the precisely measured nets. He listened to the thwock of cleanly hit serves, the machine gun exchanges with all four players at the net. Such an orderly game. So pure, so simple, so perfectly symmetrical.

Two days later Roger stood in the field of tall gra.s.s and looked at the back of his two story house, aglow with lights on that moonless night. He could see Molly finis.h.i.+ng her cleanup in the kitchen. The evening news was over now. She was watching the entertainment shows, learning about the latest tribulations of her Hollywood pals.

Earlier that afternoon Roger had an interview at a Buick dealers.h.i.+p down in Miami, over a hundred miles south. Then a half hour ago he had called Molly to let her know he'd been caught in a snarl of rush hour traffic, so he'd pulled off I-95 and stopped at some bar in Ft. Lauderdale to pa.s.s an hour till the roadways cleared.

The truth was, after the interview, he'd driven back to Sand Hills and made the call from a bar on the edge of town and then he'd driven to the junior high school a half mile from their house and waited till it grew dark. He'd carried the deer rifle through the stand of pine trees that separated the ball fields of the junior high from the development where he lived. And now he stood in the meadow watching the windows of his own home and thinking about justice and lucky sperm and the difference between an artistic temperament and a plodding, methodical one, which was, he was starting to believe, the difference between arrogance and humility. What utter hubris to have ever believed that a few lucky days of salesmans.h.i.+p was the equivalent of artistic triumph. Roger Shelton was a hopeless plodder just as his daughter was. All she had inherited from him was an unfathomable mediocrity. She wasn't flashy, wasn't a slugger, had no killing shot. All she'd ever done was keep the ball in play one hit longer than her opponent. Hanging on, surviving.

When Julie appeared in her window, Roger raised the rifle and brought her closer to him. He lay the center of the X across her ample chest. Julie was on the phone. She was wearing one of her new monogrammed warm-ups and her hair was damp from the shower. The words came from her lips in a furious rush. Maybe it was her agent or one of her numerous boyfriends. He could see her lips moving, then he watched the clench of her jaw as she forced herself to be silent and listen. It was a gesture he had witnessed in Arthur Janeway a hundred times. Exasperated restraint. As if the two of them believed what they had to say was without question worth more than what any other man might want to say.

Roger did not possess such confidence. He had no idea how it felt to be absolutely certain of anything. Even now, as he stood aiming his rifle, a lonely marksman in a field, he had only the faintest hope that he could undo some small part of the harm he'd caused. Indeed, justice was the smallest part of what brought him to that dewy gra.s.s. Roger was acting out the logic of a dream. Like some tennis player driven deep into a corner of the court, left with only one unavoidable shot.

He watched Julie glare out her window into the dark field where he stood. He watched her talk. This girl who was neither his flesh nor his blood, this alien creature who for fifteen years had lived within his household and who was now prospering only because he had wounded the wrong daughter. His own girl, her will broken, her precise, predictable, tireless stroke forever ruined. While this cheap imposter flourished.

He watched Julie Shelton talk on the phone. He watched her shake her head in disdain and spit a few words into the receiver and jerk it away from her ear in a fit of disgust. Then he watched her pop to sudden attention, her face drained of all but a last flicker of contempt. He watched her drop stiffly out of sight. Then he s.h.i.+fted his gaze to his wife, as Molly lifted her head and stared up at the ceiling where she must have heard a crash against the bedroom floor. He watched her cup her hand to her mouth and call out her daughter's name. He watched her throw her dish towel down and hurry to the door, then halt abruptly and send one backward glance toward the window that looked out on the darkened field. Her eyes touching his for an icy instant.

Roger Shelton stepped backwards into the shadows and lowered his rifle. He listened to the fading echo of his shot. That single blast rippling through the humid air, loud and final, but already dissipating, in just those few seconds the waves of sound spreading outward, breaking up and scattering, until finally the blast was lost in the endless racket of the night.

OVER EXPOSURE.

Johnny Fellows discovered the naked woman standing on a precipice when he was eight years old. She filled an entire page in the photography magazine, a perfectly focused black and white shot artful in its simplicity. Voluptuous nude woman poised on a stony perch.

Johnny found her in the bas.e.m.e.nt among a stack of his father's photo magazines. Photography was his father's hobby, a laborious and chemically messy activity in those days of 1955, requiring a cramped dark room, trays of dizzy smelling liquids, a clothesline where the drying prints hung and long hours working alone in the red-lit darkness.

In the back room of the local barbershop, Johnny had seen bare-breasted women in Playboy Magazine but their crotches were air-brushed clean. On the walls of the gas station where his father, Arnold, took his car to be serviced, pin-up pictures of s.e.xy babes were plastered everywhere, their crotches hidden behind feather dusters or conveniently placed objects. And he'd seen a few generic girlie magazines pa.s.sed around at school. But none of the b.r.e.a.s.t.s Johnny had seen, or the sumptuous hips or graceful legs compared to the brazen nude in his father's photo magazine.

The woman on the rock was tall with loose, luxurious black hair that fell down her back. Her arms were poised slightly away from her wide hips as if she meant to take a swan dive into some unseen canyon. Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s were full and round, her nipples as dark and taut as fresh raisins. A tangled thatch of pubic hair formed a mysterious shadow a few inches below her navel.

He studied that bush for hours when his father was away on his business trips and his mother was upstairs relentlessly cleaning the house.

His parents didn't question Johnny's long absences in the bas.e.m.e.nt for they believed he was engaged in a constructive hobby. In one corner of the bas.e.m.e.nt he had cordoned off a workshop area where he fas.h.i.+oned model cars from kits. He specialized in Ford hotrods, the '32, the '40, which he modified with his X-acto knife and soldering iron. Johnny chopped and channeled their molded bodies and customized their interiors with corduroy and other fabrics that he glued to the bucket seats to replicate rolled and pleated upholstery. Then he delicately placed screws which allowed the seats to swivel outward. His creations had even won trophies at local contests.

It was the first pubic hair of Johnny's life. Lush and snarled like a nest that some strangely beautiful creature had woven and left behind in the branches of a tree. Hiding inside that mat of hair was some unimaginable bliss that weakened Johnny's knees, flushed his cheeks, and tensed his breath.

While he listened to his mother's tread on the floor above, he held the photo up to the light, c.o.c.ked it at different angles, even used a magnifying gla.s.s. Still he could not penetrate the dark wooly triangle.

Months earlier while exploring his father's stash of magazines, Johnny had first discovered the photograph. The page was dog-eared, a small fold in the corner as if something in the photo had caught his father's attention. Arnold Fellows was a plain and colorless businessman who neither cursed nor boozed nor sinned in any way that Johnny had ever noted. He wore dreary suits and seemed more pale and quiet than the other fathers. So Johnny was certain he'd marked the page only because the photographer had employed some arcane technique that his father was trying to master.

Johnny, however, was struck dumb by the eroticism of the image and returned to it again and again, lured from his glue and spray paint and his modified antique Fords. Drawn to the cabinet where he knew she was standing on her rock, everything exposed. Her dark hair, her deep navel, her swollen hips, her faultless b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

She became for him, during those hours when he stared at her, the guiding image of his adult life, his anima, his secret touchstone for s.e.xual thrill. The woman on the rock in black and white with the shadow of her perfect body flattened on the cliffside to her left. The incalculably deep cavern that opened before her was beyond the frame of the photograph. But he knew it was there. She had that look on her face. The expression of someone teetering on the edge of an abyss.

He called her Myra. He didn't know why he chose that name. To his youthful ear it sounded vaguely exotic. When he considered Myra later, and the role she would play in his adult life, he could never sort the chicken from the egg. Had his fascination with the photograph of Myra, the long hours he'd spent gazing at her, implanted that image of a dark G.o.ddess in his psyche? Or was that image pre-existent in his s.e.xual genome, and Myra simply became the first and clearest manifestation of what was already lurking within him?

After graduating from college, Johnny married a thin blonde, whose body type and complexion was similar to his mother's. He loved Candace in a clear-cut, uncomplicated way. He found her familiar and easy. Like Johnny, she worked in the public schools. Candace taught math to the brightest high school kids, while Johnny was a guidance counselor in a nearby junior high, which meant he spent most of his day dealing with children who were failing in every imaginable way.

Candace and Johnny had half a dozen friends they met for dinner now and then. On school nights in the evenings while she graded quizzes, Johnny watched TV and nursed a single gla.s.s of wine. He read an occasional novel, whatever was popular at the moment. It was not a challenging life. Nor was it tumultuous. None of the p.r.i.c.kly rancor he'd witnessed between Candace's parents, none of the strained indifference he'd observed between his own.

They had a child, a son named Jason who resembled his mother, thin and tall and blond. Though he was a bit of a loner, Jason never acted out, and seemed a happy child. He did well in his studies, won a scholars.h.i.+p to a state university and found a job teaching math in a junior college in Georgia. Once a month they talked on the phone, and visited on the holidays. He had a girlfriend and it looked serious. The Fellows genes were going to pa.s.s on.

Over three decades Johnny and Candace fell into a satisfying routine in the bedroom. Sat.u.r.day was their s.e.x day. Her o.r.g.a.s.ms were reliable and definite and afterwards they smiled at each other the rest of the afternoon. They rarely argued. They made decent money, had solid benefits. Politically they were in full agreement and the areas where they disagreed caused them to have a few spirited debates, though nothing acrimonious. Before he married Candace, Johnny had slept with five college girls. Since their vows, Johnny was absolutely faithful to her and he was certain she was to him. By all the customary measurements, their marriage was nearly perfect.

However, the woman on the rock who he'd last seen when he was eight, never left him for long. It was as if Myra was lodged in an essential vein restricting the normal flow to his libido. She was always there, poised to dive. Daring in her nakedness. Dark-skinned in his memory, perhaps tanned from the sun, perhaps from some ancestral strain. She might have been from gypsy stock or Mediterranean. Sometimes when he was walking through crowds at the mall, he saw fleeting fragments of Myra. Her dark hair kicking up across the shoulders of her blouse. Her strong nose. Her hourgla.s.s body with black sand tickling through it continuously.

At times when he and Candace were making love, Johnny had closed his eyes and Myra appeared before him unbidden, her wide, welcoming hips, her ravenous appet.i.tes. l.u.s.ty and primitive, a mystery he'd never solved.

At fifty-eight Johnny retired. Together he and Candace decided she should keep working to retain their health insurance and because she claimed she still enjoyed the students.

Johnny decided he would try to write a book, a collection of anecdotes he'd been filing away for years. Some funny, some sad, some tragic. An insider's guide to the silliness and outrages of public education. Candace rooted him on.

At home alone for the first time in his adult life, Johnny fell into a routine. For an hour or two in the morning, he piddled with his ma.n.u.script, wrote a few sentences, maybe even a paragraph or two, then he reread his efforts, saw nothing but flaws, and wound up deleting every word he had written, and drifted to the Internet.

Without ever consciously deciding to do so, he began to search out p.o.r.n. He wasn't h.o.r.n.y. Even after thirty years, Candace never failed to arouse him, and he seemed to have the same effect on her. Theirs was, by any textbook definition, a sound and healthy marriage.

Yet, there he was, utterly unfettered for the first time since childhood, and Johnny Fellows found himself surfing madly through the most obscene websites imaginable. He explored every fetish he'd heard of and many new to him. Lesbians with strap-ons, golden showers, women having s.e.x with horses and other barnyard creatures, men with other men, women drenched with the sperm of a dozen men in leather masks. Men with silicone b.r.e.a.s.t.s, dressed as s.l.u.tty women, showing off full functioning c.o.c.ks. Old women s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g teenage boys. Teenage girls giving head to granddads, women dressed as nuns pleasuring themselves with gigantic, multi-headed d.i.l.d.os. It was all just a click away. He took the free tours, never subscribed, never used his credit card number. He just browsed and browsed and browsed.

After weeks of that, well into his first free semester in over fifty years, he began to circle in on what he'd come to consider his own domain. He found he liked to look at hirsute women, Earth-Mamas, Hippie G.o.ddesses, Hairy Honeys. Johnny was drawn instinctively to women with mounds of pubic hair like Myra's.

Finding images of such women was more tricky than he might have expected. While Johnny hadn't been paying attention, apparently the fas.h.i.+on of s.e.xual display had altered, and women began to coif their pubic patches, tr.i.m.m.i.n.g them to narrow strips, or manicured valentines, or most frequently, to shave their mons pubis bare.