At the Bureau of Divine Music

The Message

16 The Message My husband had a knack for knowing things. I don’t know how he knew about Jack and me, unless he had me tailed. I think he did, though he would never say. All I know is one day the Company security came by and told me to clean out my desk and head for the parking lot. Something about the use of company funds for personal business, something about me and Jack that they found out and wouldn’t tell me how, and wouldn’t tell me which of us was the one that used the other. Jack had been reprimanded. I was fired. It had to be my husband. I never thought the crazy bastard knew me well enough, he was so stupidly in love with me. He’d call me up when I was out of town and tell me how he wished that he was there, and there I’d be with Jack or someone else reaching his hands around me from behind trying to get inside me with his fingers. One time I almost had to cry out loud. My husband kept on talking and never noticed. Finally I told him he didn’t get the message. This was in Dallas at the Anatole. Jack had a towel on, I was in my robe. My husband nearly cried he was so sick, so painfully adoring, I almost told him but didn’t want to yet. There was no reason to let him know what he should figure out. I had a plan to meet Jack in Shreveport. I called him at the chicken plant in Seguin— 17 on the 800 line, so it wouldn’t show. He ran the loading dock. He got his boss to let him drive to pick me up in Shreveport and take me to the plant, supposedly on business.We both loved that part of it. He turned in his mileage to the Company. “We’re really pulling a fast one,” I told him. “Why don’t I sit and cross my legs and smile and say to Randy, ‘Thanks for letting Jack come get me’?” Jack said no to that. Jack said Randy was not the type to be amused. “He’d kill me and care,” Jack said. His sense of fun stopped short where business and his job came in. I understood, but that was not the point. I told him I’d have new pink panties on, maybe a new nightgown he could take off. He said I wouldn’t need one—I would spend the whole time naked once I hit the door. I said I’d work out doing deep knee bends and eat nothing but vegetables till then. He promised he would drink nothing but tea, to get rid of the beer gut. Exercise was out for now. He had an injury from playing softball, and it hadn’t healed. He talked about his problems with RandyWade and how he needed to get out of there. “I’ll put my whole life in your hands,” he said, trying to make me sick with loving me. I knew he wanted something, like they all did, just like my husband always did. The fool was so in love with me he never noticed 18 how much I had despised him all along. All men are fools in love, without exception. It turns them into boys, or idiots. They never notice where the line is drawn between the thing they want and what I’ll give them. Sometimes I’d take the trophy off the shelf, the one I won when I was three years old for being the prettiest little girl in town, and I would rub it till a piece of it got smooth enough to show my face, almost the way it looked in 1962, and I could tell something of what they saw, a tiny part of what I must have been and could have gone on being, had I known when I was young and stupid what would happen and what I stood to lose when I got older. The things a man demands, the things a woman gives to a man that can’t be taken back. I tried to tell them, but they wouldn’t hear me. My husband wasn’t any different. He’d come to bed when I was half asleep and bring...