Doug Allyn - The Best American Mystery Stories 2003

“Aw, man...”

“All right, all right...”

“But...”

“O.K. All right. Friday.”

“Friday. I swear.” Duff replaced the receiver, clenched his teeth, and mopped his beaded brow. “Son-of-a-bitch.”

He searched his shelves for something small to break, hefted but replaced unharmed his golfing trophy, a dusty Salesman of the Week plaque. He picked up the framed glossy of Miranda and little Duff Jr. He gazed upon his lovely wife and his only issue, chip off his block. There was one thing he could do. He fogged the nonglare glass with his shaky breath, buffed it to a shine with his shirttail, and replaced it to its place of prominence on his desk. Duff straightened up, the old fighting spirit rising in him. It was time to sell cars.

Miranda sat beside Josh and kissed him abruptly on the mouth. Then looked him eye to eye.

“I’m not, I don’t ever, don’t do things like this,” she said truthfully. “I can’t, well, you know. But if you want, if we’re careful, we can, maybe, sort of. Only so far.”

“Okay,” said Josh.

He was on her at once, eager to please, his hands and his mouth here and there, careful, lightly and firm, grasping, finessing. He had studied for this moment. Miranda pushed aside her awkward childhood, her rumbling guilt. Plenty of time for that later, she thought. Time only now for this traveling heaven. Josh knelt on the floor and kissed her on both knees, and then the mole that she always had hated. His mouth moved up her leg, his hot breath saying something profound to her on a cellular level, though his words were too muffled to make out. Miranda thanked god she’d taken a shower that morning, and buried her hands in his hair, guiding his enthusiasm onward and upward.

Duff, across town in a stall in the men’s room at Jeff Davis Honda, snuffed with vigor. He licked his finger, and wiped the paper bindle clean of its powdery residue and paused. He peered at the small, unfolded piece of paper, the glossy image of a fleshy cheek or inner thigh, a curve of breast perhaps. The Frenchman folded his gram bindles from the pages of skin mags. Pervert, thought Duff, dropping the piece of paper into the toilet bowl. He rubbed his gums, depressed the handle of the toilet with a polished wingtip, and exited the stall.

In his office waited a distinguished professor from the college and his youthful second wife, teetering on the brink of a new red D’Accord LX. Duff consulted his granddaddy’s pocket watch and sniffed again, admiring the smooth, ancestral sweep of the second hand, and savored the metallic drip at the back of his throat. He’d give them another five minutes. Enough time to call the wife. He would close this sale and knock off early, play the back nine at the public course, and maybe celebrate with happy hour at Maxi’s Lounge.

Duff called home from an empty office, and got his own voice on the answering machine. Annoyed, he hung up on himself. In the next office, the professor and his wife discussed options and finances in intimate whispers. Duff counted down, took a deep breath, and burst in beaming.

“Good news, folks,” he began. “I just talked to my boss, and he says I can knock two bills off the luxury package. This one time.” Duff paused significantly to let the full import sink in. “You can’t tell a soul,” he went on with a conspiratorial wink. “I’m taking a beating on this. Because I know you want to get into this car today. What do you say?”

They signed the papers, the tweedy intellectual and his young missus. Duff awarded them the keys and firmly shook their hands, a little extra squeeze for the little lady. What does she see in this stuffy old fart, he wondered, a typical pinhead up on his Dante and Shakespeare but unable to change a flat or sink a ten-foot putt. And they looked happy. Duff hustled them out the door, chalked his sale up on the big board, and headed for the links in his Interlude demo. En route, pumped up victorious, he called home again on the cellular, this time recording a message on the machine.

“Miranda, baby. Made a big sale, and hard working on yet another. I’ll be late, so don’t wait up. Oh yeah. Don’t forget my dry cleaning. Love ya.” A kissing noise.

Miranda, sufficiently satiated and repositioned by this time, heard Duffs distant disembodied voice in the other room, and paused in her ministrations, her head in Josh’s lap. The machine clicked off. Like in a dream she was. She had forgotten the dry cleaning. She had forgotten much of the past ten years in the recent throes of Josh’s tireless exuberance. Indeed, she had almost forgotten. How much fun. It had only seemed fair to reciprocate.

The erstwhile clown was now sprawled back on the yellow-blanketed sofa, limbs outstretched as if he’d been hit by a bread truck. They were nearing the moment of truth, the fork in the road that Miranda recalled from her brief honeymoon, dates with Duff, and a few other early intimate encounters with males of the species. She had never much liked this part of things, so was surprised to find an odd thrill in bringing this polite young man to apparently new heights of ecstasy. He did not touch her, as if he were afraid of breaking the spell, and she felt in complete control of him by virtue of simple manipulations of his proud appendage. The mixture of power and pleasing was an intoxicating one. But, the decision.

On the one hand, no pun, there was the imminent mess to consider — her hand, the sofa cover, her dress, perhaps even her hair. And further then, the evidence of guilt, feelings of foolishness, and deep regret intensified by the chore of cleanup. Her idly stroking hand stopped as she pondered, and Josh returned reluctantly to the world.

“Please,” he implored in a voice weak with want. “Miranda, oh, please.”

“Mmm,” said Miranda. “Okay...” And she, eyes closed, again hungrily, as if savoring the last fresh forbidden pastry in the box. He whispered endearments in quick, shallow breaths. Miranda persisted, and, and, and, oh, primly swallowed.

Josh, overwhelmed, hugged her, and kissed her, but Miranda only tucked in his shirt and pushed him gently toward the door.

“That was so, I mean, I think,” he stammered, “I think I love, and must see you again. Oh, Miranda.”

“Don’t be silly.” Miranda handed him his sample case, and opened the door. The breathtaking heat walloped them. “This should not have happened, and never did. I hope you sell some encyclopedias. And never give up on your dreams. Now go.”

Josh stepped back onto the stoop and attempted again to express his jumbled feelings.

“Miranda, I understand, but I must, you see...”

“Good-bye, Josh.”

The door closed on him and he was left alone in the heat of the afternoon. The sweat began again on his brow, and down below this new ache. Josh got into his car, dazed, and drove home. He could no longer sell encyclopedias today. He needed to think. He had plans to return to State in the fall, to finish that degree in Marketing, again pursue the perpetually cheerful, perky coeds, and so on. But all that seemed dull now in the wake of this moment with Miranda, his first true taste of earth and heaven. A future without Miranda seemed no future at all.

Josh paced the floor of his efficiency down by the tracks, clutching the fateful lead he’d received with the others just that morning — Leach, Miranda and Duff, one child, address and phone. He authored great fantasies in which he rescued Miranda from her suburban limbo, from the boorish Duff who no doubt took for granted his inimitable wife, forcing her to cook and deliver dry cleaning for him, to live in a modest ranch house, its walls decorated with duck-hunting prints in gilt frames.

In Josh’s elaborate fantasies, a balding, pot-bellied Duff wore a dirty, sleeveless undershirt and needed a shave. Poor Miranda, distraught in a simple blue dress that accentuated her fine form, was torn between her vows to this ruffian and her true new love for Josh. Our hero appeared on the scene righteous and reassuring, sometimes here quoting scripture, and the greatest of these is love, and there dispatching Duff with an honest haymaker to his stubbly chin. Sometimes he, Duff, merely belched drunkenly from his La-Z-Boy, and dismissed them both without looking away from the Braves game.