Charlotte Rogan - Now and Again

“Let’s see,” said Will. “I’m guessing A might scare her off, and I can eliminate D, so I’m guessing the answer is C.”

“B worked for me,” said Lyle, and Jimmy and Will laughed.

“Even if that’s what you did with Mom,” said Will, “it wouldn’t work with most girls. Most girls like to be pursued.”

“Correctamente,” said Jimmy. “And what if the girl doesn’t think she’s interested in you? In that case, you have to change her mind. So B is out, and telling her how much you like her not only scares her off, but it makes you look weak. Women like strong men. They like men who have options, not some sad sack who’s mooning after them like a sick dog. I suppose you could ask her out on a romantic date, but that isn’t as good as D.”

“No way,” said Will.

“You’ve got to establish yourself as a player. Then the women will come to you.”

“Jeezus, Jimmy. That’s not how it was with Maggie and me.”

“You have to keep them guessing. It crossed my mind that all that weirdness up at the plant is just because Maggie needs a little excitement in her life.”

“What weirdness?” asked Lyle. “All she did is quit her job.”

“But why did she quit it? That’s the buried question. People are curious if all that do-gooding talk was just a smoke screen for something else.”

“Who’s saying that?” asked Lyle. Then he added, “And what would it be a smoke screen for?”

“Forget I mentioned it. It’s just rumors, anyway. The point is that a romantic date is good too. The strategy has to fit the man. No percentage in acting like a player if you can’t pull it off.”

Lyle had never been a player, but now he wondered if he had let Maggie down in some way, if he should have worked harder to keep their romance alive. And then he wondered if she had let him down too, if they were missing a crucial part of life because of something she had done or failed to do. Nah, he told himself. It was Jimmy who was missing something. “There’s more to life than dating,” he told Jimmy. “You’d figure that out if you had a wife and kids.”

“I won’t try to tell you your business,” said Jimmy. “But Will here has a chance to learn from a master.”

“A divorced master.” Lyle laughed before turning in his seat to look at Will. “Consider the source, son. Always consider the source when people are giving you advice.”

“Love and war,” said Jimmy. “Or, rather, love is war. Specifically, it’s maneuver warfare. You have to feint and circle, and then you overwhelm. Women like a show of force — nothing over the line, that’s not what I’m advocating. I’m just saying, who likes a pussy? Frankly, about the only thing more fun than seduction is war.”

“And fishing,” said Lyle.

“That goes without saying,” said Jimmy.

Lyle hadn’t been fishing in a long time, and now he remembered what it was like to feel at one with the world around him instead of looking on from the bleachers while other people made the plays. As a young man, he’d had a vague notion that when he was called upon to provide for a wife and family, he’d do it by casting his line out into the world and reeling whatever he caught back in. That wasn’t the way things turned out to be, though, and he’d been silly to think it. Still, he liked the way his hands knew what to do without his brain having to tell them. He liked knotting on the shiny lure and flinging it toward a far-off shore and then feeling it tug against the water and trying to spot it beneath the murky surface of the lake as he jigged it in. He settled into a soothing rhythm: the buzz of the line stripping off the reel as he flung it forward, the musical plunk when the lure hit the water, the ratcheting purr of the reel, the smooth arc of his arm and flick of his wrist for the back cast, the cool spray of drops against his skin as the lure whizzed above his head, and finally, the shooting line and agreeable plink as it hit the surface of the lake. He liked watching the water smooth over it and imagining a whole mysterious world roiling beneath the surface, filled with creatures that would live and die without knowing a thing about Lyle’s world, just the way he wouldn’t know a thing about theirs.

3.8 Maggie

By April, Maggie had changed her mind about the prison, not only because the idea of helping the prisoners filled an important requirement for her new life, but also because of the adrenaline rush she experienced when she found out shocking things — that Tomás might be innocent, that profit-driven private prisons relied on a steady stream of bodies for their cells, that “growth” was an industry buzzword, that she suspected her boss was cheating on his wife.

“Do you think DC is having an affair?” she said to Valerie one day when the director was out of the office.

“What makes you say that?” asked Valerie.

“He’s been so cheerful recently, and he’s lost a bit of weight.”

“Good lord!” said Valerie. “You seem to be just as eager to convict the innocent as you are to let the guilty go free. That seems to be a thing with you.”

Maggie had hoped she and Valerie could be friends the way she had been friends with True and Misty, but whenever she made overtures in that direction, Valerie would find an excuse to remind her who was the first assistant to the director and who was the second. “Let’s not forget who you work for,” she said.

“I work for the director.”

“On paper, perhaps, but he hired you to help me.”

Valerie sold makeup out of her car, and as a gesture of friendship, Maggie bought a pot of eye shadow even though she worried that the makeup had been tested on defenseless rabbits. While Valerie was dabbing pastes and powders from her sample kit onto Maggie’s face and showing her the results in a handheld mirror, she chattered about the great loves of her life and running off with her current husband to Las Vegas while she was still married to someone else.

“Oh, Johnny and I are all respectable and settled now,” she said. “But we sure had some fun first. Now, tell me about all of the terrible things you’ve done.”

Maggie couldn’t think of any that would interest Valerie. She had once been spanked for losing her house key, and another time she had burned a pan of lasagna and blamed it on her sister. By far the worst thing she had ever done was to strap baby Will into his car seat and forget all about him for an entire hour one autumn afternoon. The idea that if it had been a hot summer day he would have cooked still kept her up at night, but she knew this wasn’t the kind of thing Valerie was after. She had never had an illicit rendezvous in a forest or unbuttoned her blouse behind the bleachers or engaged in heavy petting in the back row of a movie theater or been groped by a stranger in a bar or on a bus. She had never had a doomed first love. Now she knew she never would, and the thought filled her with sorrow for the dark swaths of experience she would never know.

But when she skimmed the prisoners’ files for indications of suppressed evidence or incompetent legal representation, it was as if she had circled around and was approaching the forest from the other side. Whenever she found something particularly egregious, she copied the document and slipped it into Max Gray’s file, and then her nerves would tingle and her lungs would feel as if they might collapse for all the pressure put on them by her heart. What if she was discovered? What if Valerie or DC himself walked in and caught her in the act? On those days, she would breeze through her duties as if she had taken one of the little violet pills Valerie claimed to have taken in her youth.

It seemed as if her energy and confidence was catching, for even Tomás straightened his shoulders and started to speak up in class. He didn’t seem to notice when Maggie forgot to bring him something special, just a bag of candies for the entire group. Instead of whining and looking hurt, he only inquired if she and her family were well.