LITMIR.BIZ

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agency, landed the accounts of several major suppliers to Boeing, and then, at the age of sixty-two, sold his company for enough money to buy a condominium on the ninth hole at Salishan and a little cabaña down on the beach at Cabo San Lucas. Daniel, a graduate student in astronomy at U.W., where Christy taught psychology, didn’t have any money of his own. Neither, for that matter, did his father, who, in the years of Mr. Kite’s prosperity, had run two liquor stores, a printshop, and a five-and-dime into the ground, and now lived with Daniel’s mother amid the coconut palms and peeling white stucco of an internment camp for impoverished old people not far from Delray Beach. “Maybe we ought to just –”

      Christy cut him off with a sharp look. The lighter popped out, and Hogue reached for it, and they watched in uncomfortable silence as, hands shaking, he tried to light his cigarette. After several seconds and a great deal of fearsome wheezing, the few frayed strands of tobacco he had succeeded in getting lit fell out of the end of the cigarette, landed in his lap, and began to burn his chinos. He slapped at his thigh, scowling all the while at the house, as if it, or its occupants, were somehow responsible for his ignition.

      “Maybe we ought to take a look at it, Mr. Hogue,” Christy said.

      Mr. Hogue looked back over at the house. He took a deep breath.

      “I guess we’d better,” he said. He opened his door and got out of the car, eyeing the house warily.

      Daniel and Christy lingered a moment by the Mercedes, whispering.

      “He looks like he’s seen a ghost,” Christy observed, buttoning the top button of her white cardigan. “He looks awful.”

      “Did he look better at our wedding?”

      Daniel understood that Bob Hogue had been among the guests at their wedding, the summer before last, but his recollection of that remote afternoon had grown vague. In fact, the great event itself had, at the time, unfolded around him at a certain vague remove. He had felt not like the star attraction, along with Christy, of a moderately lavish civil ceremony held on the slope of a Laurelhurst lawn so much as like a tourist, lost in a foreign country, who had turned in to an unfamiliar street and found himself swallowed up in the clamor of a parade marking the feast day of some silken and barbarous religion. He remembered this Bob Hogue and his handsome wife, Monica, no better than he remembered Bill and Sylvia Bond, Roger and Evelyn Holsapple, Ralph and Betsy Lindstrom, or any of the three hundred other handsome old friends of his in-laws who had made up the bulk of the wedding guests. He knew that Hogue was a college chum and occasional golfing partner of his father-in-law’s, and he was aware that an acrid ribbon of bad news was sent curling toward the ceiling of any room in which Bob Hogue’s name was brought up, though he could never keep straight whether Hogue had married the lush, or fathered the Scientologist, or lost a piece of his left lung to cancer.

      “To tell you the truth,” Christy said, “I don’t remember him at our wedding. I don’t really know the Hogues very well. I just kind of remember how he looked when I was little.”

      “Well, no wonder he looks awful, then.” He stepped back to admire her in her smart green Vittadini dress. Her bare legs were new-shaven, so smooth that they glinted in the sun, and through the gaps in her open-toed flats you could see a couple of slender toes, nails painted pink. “You, however, look very nice.”

      She smiled, and her pupils dilated, flooding her eyes with a darkness. “I liked what we did last night.”

      “So did I,” Daniel said at once. Last night they had lain on top of their down comforter, with their heads at opposite ends of their bed, and massaged each other’s feet with fragrant oil, by candlelight, while Al Green cooed to them in the background. This was an activity recommended to them by their couples therapist as a means of generating a nonthreatening sense of physical closeness between them. Daniel blushed now at this recollection, which he found painful and sad. To his great regret there was nothing even remotely erotic to him about feet, his wife’s or anyone’s. You might have permitted him to anoint the graceful foot of Semiramis or Hedy Lamarr, and he would not have popped a boner. He slid a hand up under the hem of Christy’s dress and tried to skate his index and middle fingers up the smooth, hard surface of her right thigh, but she moved, and somehow Daniel’s entire hand ended up thrust between her legs, as though he were attempting to hold open the doors of an elevator.

      “Ouch,” said Christy. “You don’t have to be so rough.”

      “Sorry,” said Daniel.

      They started up the driveway after Mr. Hogue.

      “Who’s Herman Silk?” Daniel said, as they passed the discreet little sign.

      “Who’s Herman Silk?” Hogue wove a puzzling thread of bitterness into the question. “That’s a good one.” Daniel wondered if he should recognize the name from some local real-estate scandal or recent round of litigation in the neighborhood. He tried to keep track of such mainstays of Kite-family conversation, but it was hard, in particular since they were generally served up, in the Kite house, with liberal amounts of Canadian Club and soda. “That’s very funny,” said Hogue.

      When they got to the front door, Mr. Hogue could not seem to work the combination of the lockbox there. He tried several different permutations of what he thought was the code and then, in a display of bafflement at once childish and elderly, reached into his pocket and attempted to stick one of his own keys in the lock.

      “Funny,” he muttered, as this hopeless stratagem in due course failed. “Herman Silk. Ha.”

      Christy looked at Daniel, her eyes filled with apology for having led them into this intensifying disaster. Daniel smiled and gave his shoulders an attenuated shrug, characteristic of him, that did not quite absolve her of blame.

      “Uh, why don’t you tell me the combination, Mr. Hogue?” Christy suggested, yanking the lockbox out of his hands. She, who was willing to lie for hours listening to Reverend Al while Daniel worked over her oiled foot like a desperate man trying to summon a djinn, was finally losing patience. Daniel’s heart was stirred by a wan hope that very soon now they would have to give up on old Mr. Hogue, on buying a house, on Christy’s entire project of addressing and finding solutions for their problem. Now that things were starting to go so wrong, he hoped they could just return to their apartment on Queen Anne Hill and resume ignoring their problem, the strategy he preferred.

      Hogue fed Christy the combination one digit at a time, and she worked the tumblers. She gave a sharp tug on the lockbox. It held firm.

      “Are you sure that’s the right number?” she said.

      “Of course it’s the right number,” Hogue snapped. All at once his face had turned as red as the wrapper of his Pall Malls. One would have said that he was furious with Christy and Daniel, that he had had his fill of the unreasonable demands and the cruel hectoring to which they had subjected him over the last forty years. “Why are you always pestering me like that? Don’t you know I’m doing my best?”

      Daniel and Christy looked at each other. Christy bit her lip, and Daniel saw that she had been afraid something like this might happen. A sudden clear memory of Mr. Hogue at the wedding returned to him. There had been a series of toasts after dinner, and Mr. Hogue had risen to say a few words. His face had gone full of blood and he looked unsteady on his feet. The woman sitting beside him, Monica Hogue – slender, youthful, with red spectacles and a cute gray bob – had given his elbow a discreet tug. For a moment the air under the great white tent had grown still and sour, and the guests had looked down at their plates.

      “Well, sure we do, Mr. Hogue,” Christy said. “We know you’ve been doing a great job for us, and we really appreciate it. Don’t we, Daniel?”

      “Well, yeah. We really do.”

      The blood went out of Hogue’s face.

      “Excuse me,” he said. “I – I’m sorry, you kids. I’m not feeling very well today.” He ran a hand across the close-cropped top of his head. “Here. Let me see something. There used to be –” He backed down the steps and, half crouched, hands on his knees, scanned

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