Лоуренс Блок - Catch and Release

He was still a catch-and-release fisherman. He probably always would be. But, for God’s sake, that didn’t make him a vegetarian, did it?

Hell, no. A man still had to have a square meal now and then.

Toledo. What did she know about Toledo?

Like, Holy Toledo. The original city, in Spain, was famous for fine swords, and the newspaper here in Ohio called itself The Toledo Blade. That was a better name than the Mud Hens, which was what they called the baseball team.

And here she was in Toledo.

There was a Starbucks just across the street from the building where he had his office, and she settled in at a window table a little before five. She thought she might be in for a long wait. In New York, young associates at law firms typically worked until midnight and took lunch and dinner at their desks. Was it the same in Toledo?

Well, the cappuccino was the same. She sipped hers, making it last, and was about to go to the counter for another when she saw him.

But was it him? He was tall and slender, wearing a dark suit and a tie, clutching a briefcase, walking with purpose. His hair when she’d known him was long and shaggy, a match for the jeans and T-shirt that was his usual costume, and now it was cut to match the suit and the briefcase. And he wore glasses now, and they gave him a serious, studious look. He hadn’t worn them then, and he’d certainly never looked studious.

But it was Douglas. No question, it was him.

She rose from her chair, hit the door, quickened her pace to catch up with him at the corner. She said, “Doug? Douglas Pratter?”

He turned, and she caught the puzzlement in his eyes. She helped him out. “It’s Kit,” she said. “Katherine Tolliver.” She smiled softly. “A voice from the past. Well, a whole person from the past, actually.”

“My God,” he said, “It’s really you.”

“I was having a cup of coffee,” she said, “and looking out the window and wishing I knew somebody in this town, and when I saw you I thought you were a mirage. Or that you were just somebody who looked the way Doug Pratter might look eight years later.”

“Is that how long it’s been?”

“Just about. I was fifteen and I’m twenty-three now. You were two years older.”

“Still am. That much hasn’t changed.”

“And your family picked up and moved right in the middle of your junior year of high school.”

“My dad got a job he couldn’t say no to. He was going to send for us at the end of the term, but my mother wouldn’t hear of it. We’d all be too lonely is what she said. It took me years before I realized she just didn’t trust him on his own.”

“Was he not to be trusted?”

“I don’t know about that, but the marriage failed two years later anyway. He went a little nuts and wound up in California. He got it in his head that he wanted to be a surfer.”

“Seriously? Well, good for him, I guess.”

“Not all that good for him. He drowned.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Who knows? Maybe that’s what he wanted, whether he knew it or not. Mom’s still alive and well.”

“In Toledo?”

“Bowling Green.”

“ That’s it. I knew you’d moved to Ohio, and I couldn’t remember the city, and I didn’t think it was Toledo. Bowling Green.”

“I’ve always thought of it as a color. Lime green, forest green, and bowling green.”

“Same old Doug.”

“You think? I wear a suit and go to an office. Christ, I wear glasses.”

“And a wedding ring.” And, before he could tell her about his wife and kiddies and adorable suburban house, she said, “But you’ve got to get home, and I’ve got plans of my own. I want to catch up, though. Have you got any time tomorrow?”

It’s Kit. Katherine Tolliver.

Just saying her name had taken her back in time. She hadn’t been Kit or Katherine or Tolliver in years. Names were like clothes, she’d put them on and wear them for a while and then let them go. The analogy only went so far, because you could wash clothes when you’d soiled them, but there was no dry cleaner for a name that had outlived its usefulness.

Katherine “Kit” Tolliver. That wasn’t the name on the ID she was carrying, or the one she’d signed on the motel register. Once she’d identified herself to Doug Pratter, she’d become the person she’d proclaimed herself to be. She was Kit again — and, at the same time, she wasn’t.

Interesting, the whole business.

Back in her motel room, she surfed her way around the TV channels, then switched off the set and took a shower. Afterward she spent a few minutes studying her nude body and wondering how it would look to him. She was a little fuller in the breasts than she’d been eight years before, a little rounder in the butt, a little closer to ripeness overall. She had always been confident of her attractiveness, but she couldn’t help wondering what she might look like to those eyes that had seen her years ago.

Of course, he hadn’t needed glasses back in the day.

She had read somewhere that a man who has once had a particular woman somehow assumes he can have her again. She didn’t know how true this might be, but it seemed to her that something similar applied to women. A woman who had once been with a particular man was ordained to doubt her ability to attract him a second time. And so she felt a little of that uncertainty, but willed herself to dismiss it.

He was married, and might well be in love with his wife. He was busy establishing himself in his profession, and settling into an orderly existence. Why would he want a meaningless fling with an old girlfriend, who’d had to say her name before he could even place her?

She smiled. Lunch , he’d said. We’ll have lunch tomorrow.

Funny how it started.

She was in Kansas City, sitting at a table with six or seven others, a mix of men and women in their twenties. And one of the men mentioned a woman she didn’t know, though she seemed to be known to most if not all of the others. And one of the women said, “That slut.”

And the next thing she knew, the putative slut was forgotten while the whole table turned to the question of just what constituted sluttiness. Was it a matter of attitude? Of specific behavior? Was one born to slutdom, or was the status acquired?

Was it solely a female province? Could you have male sluts?

That got nipped in the bud. “A man can take sex too casually,” one of the men asserted, “and he can consequently be an asshole, and deserving of a certain measure of contempt. But as far as I’m concerned, the word slut is gender-linked. Nobody with a Y chromosome can qualify as a genuine slut.”

And, finally, was there a numerical cutoff? Could an equation be drawn up? Did a certain number of partners within a certain number of years make one a slut?

“Suppose,” one woman suggested, “suppose once a month you go out after work and have a couple—”

“A couple of men?”

“A couple of drinks, you idiot, and you start flirting, and one things leads to another, and you drag somebody home with you.”

“Once a month?”

“It could happen.”

“So that’s twelve men in a year.”

“When you put it that way,” the woman allowed, “it seems like a lot.”

“It’s also a hundred and twenty partners in ten years.”

“Except you wouldn’t keep it up for that long, because sooner or later one of those hookups would take.”

“And you’d get married and live happily ever after?”

“Or at least live together more or less monogamously for a year or two, which would cut down on the frequency of hookups, wouldn’t it?”

Throughout all of this, she barely said a word. Why bother? The conversation buzzed along quite well without her, and she was free to sit back and listen, and to wonder just what place she occupied in what someone had already labeled “the saint-slut continuum.”