Russell Andrews - Aphrodite

That was the surface.

Inside, he hated smiling while he was bombarded with a constant stream of drivel. He hated all the novels he read and all the food he forced himself to eat at obnoxiously trendy restaurants. He hated almost everything and everyone. Inside, Wallace P. Crabbe was a roiling storm. Had been since he was twelve years old and Tony DeMarco knocked his schoolbooks out of his hands into a big patch of mud, then shoved him into the same mud patch and left, laughing, with his arm around the beautiful and bewitching eleven-year-old Abigail Winters. Wallace had been just about to ask Abigail, who had the most appealing ponytail, to go out to the movies with him. Instead, she went to the movies with Tony DeMarco, and that was when Wallace decided that life was basically unfair and that he was one of the unlucky majority who were going to get screwed over and over again by that very unfairness. But he saw no advantage to griping about it. The more he complained, the greater the chance, he figured, of being shoved into ever deeper and ever dirtier patches of mud.

By the age of forty-nine, Wallace P. Crabbe had managed to do everything he could to quietly prove his theory to himself and to show that he had zero chance of achieving the slightest bit of happiness. And with each additional proof, Wallace got angrier and angrier.

Inside.

He'd been married once, some years ago, and it had lasted six years, until his wife came home and told him she'd been seeing his best friend on the side. Wallace was not happy about losing his wife-she was fairly quiet and easy to be with-but he had to admit he was even unhappier about losing his friend, since he didn't have all that many to spare. On the outside, he was understanding and rather gracious during the entire divorce process. Inside, he began having fantasies of his ex-wife and ex-friend in combination with such things as meat grinders and crossbows and hunting rifles. At age fifty-two, after his publishing company was absorbed by a huge German conglomerate, he was offered-and told to accept-early retirement. He accepted it gratefully and unhesitatingly and was well paid off. But ever since, he had had dreams about the human resources director who gave him the bad news in which his own hands were wrapped around her pale, too-thick neck and he choked the life out of her.

Since he'd been laid off, he'd sold his one-bedroom Upper West Side apartment, making a tidy profit, as it was nearly mortgage free, and moved out to Long Island. Not one of the chic places, one of the suburban areas half an hour from the chic places. He got a small ranch-style house with a patch of a backyard and set himself up. Why not? What was in the city for him now? That was an easy one to answer: not much. The move didn't affect whatever work came his way. He could still get his occasional freelance copyediting assignments, that was no problem. There was less noise, less hassle, less pretension in suburbia. His social life had suffered, no question about that; it was a lot harder to meet people, especially women, but even in the city his social life had been moderately successful at best. Currently, he was seeing a woman who worked at a magazine geared for home gardeners. He found her too angular to be attractive and too obsessed with various subspecies of daylilies to be interesting, but he saw her two or three times a week. Either she cooked a bland meal that he didn't like or they went to a restaurant where the maitre d' kept them waiting too long before seating them. Through it all, Wallace P. Crabbe kept smiling. But slowly, he began retreating into the world within his 1950s two-bedroom ranch house.

His routine there was very consistent. Every morning, Wallace had all three New York newspapers, the Daily News, the Post, and the Times, delivered. As well as Newsday, the Long Island paper. On Fridays, which was the day it came out, he also read the East End Journal. He had tried to break himself of this end-of-the-week habit several times but was unable to do it. He felt compelled to read the inane gossip about famous people he despised and the police reports about thieves stealing leftover chicken out of refrigerators and the idiotic letters to the editor about the new speed-bump controversy. He particularly was unable to resist the obituaries about the barbers who'd been cutting hair so many years they refused to use electric razors and the old biddies who'd been around so long they thought they'd come over on the Mayflower. So, over three cups of strong, black coffee, he read his papers, always in the same order-News, Post, Times, Newsday, on Fridays the Journal-and always cover to cover. Nothing made him angrier than reading about crooked politicians and slimy rich people who broke all the rules and got away with it. On almost any given day, Wallace would rant and rave-silently, to himself-about national politics, local politics, the heat, the cold, the lack of quality on TV, obscene music lyrics by gangster rappers, the price of groceries, the low level of water in the reservoirs. Later that day, right before lunch, when he'd speak with his girlfriend on the telephone or with someone calling to ask him about a possible copyediting assignment, he would bring up a story he'd read earlier, one that had knotted his stomach and caused his throat to constrict. When it provoked no anger on the other end of the line, he would let it drop and say, in an absolutely even tone, "Yes, you're right, it's just the way of the world. It's nothing to get excited about."

After lunch, he usually spent a couple of hours at his computer, in chat rooms, talking to his new circle of anonymous and mostly pseudonymous friends. In the late afternoon and, if he had no plans, at night, Wallace P. Crabbe would retreat into his one passion that elicited no anger and that never let him down: the movies. He rented at least one tape or DVD a day, sometimes two or even three. He read every book he could about Hollywood: celebrity biographies and autobiographies, critical analyses, books on how to write screenplays, behind-the-scenes "making of" books. He was obsessed with Hollywood movies. Not all of them, not the silents-he couldn't care less about those-but everything from the late thirties on. Screwball comedies. Melodramas. Noir thrillers. The Astaire and Kelly musicals. Mushy romances. He loved them all. At night he was usually awake until two or three in the morning watching his rentals or old films on cable. He thought he knew everything there was to know about the movies; he could tell you who directed what and who the cinematographer was and even the theme song that played over the credits and who wrote it. Watching a 1940s Clark Gable picture or a 1950s Ava Gardner was the one thing that transported him into a state of relative inner calm.

All in all, Wallace didn't mind the fact that he was almost always angry. Something inside him had long ago told him to be afraid of what was in there, never to let it out, and since he hadn't, he was fairly proud of the way he'd dealt with things. He was not all that unhappy with the way he'd organized his life, and he felt he had things pretty much under control.

Until this past Friday, when Wallace's two main obsessions had come together to drive him into a state of barely controlled fury.

At first he didn't even realize what the problem was. He had finished all the real papers and was aggravating himself with the East End Journal. He made a mental note to remember how much money the school board was trying to gouge the town for and he checked out the diagram of a house that some Israeli was building in the Hamptons that was supposed to be the largest private residence in the world. There were several decent obits, too, so while sipping his final half-cup of coffee, he read quarter-page summaries about the life of one man whose hardware store had been on Main Street since 1957 and the history of another who'd invented some kind of special lawn-mower blade that had revolutionized the lives of gardeners everywhere. The third obit was about an actor, William Miller. It was longer than the others, and somehow it seemed more personal. Wallace paid particular attention to it because it was about Hollywood.