printing there was written in black with a firm hand: Nothing really hooks together. Life lacks romance.
Looking at the photograph and those lines made me feel peculiar. I refolded the fold-out and started to replace it inside the book, then I thought maybe I’d throw it in the trash, but finally decided to keep it out of curiosity.
I shoved it into my back pocket and finished putting up the books, then got ready to leave. As I was going, Martha said, “You want a job here putting up books I’ll take you on half a day five days a week. Monday through Friday. Saves some wear on my bad leg. I can pay you a little. Won’t be much, but I don’t figure you’re worth much to me.”
“That’s a sweet offer, Martha, but I don’t know.”
“You say you want work.”
“I do, but half a day isn’t enough.”
“More than you’re working now, and I’ll pay in cash. No taxes, no bullshit with the employment office.”
“All right,” I said. “You got a deal.”
“Start tomorrow.”
I was lying naked on the bed with just the nightlight on reading a hard-boiled mystery novel. The window was open as always and there was actually a pretty nice breeze blowing in. I felt like I used to when I was twelve and staying up late and reading with a flashlight under the covers and a cool spring wind was blowing in through the window screen, and Mom and Dad were in the next room and I was loved and protected and was going to live forever. Pleasant.
There was a knock at the door.
That figured.
I got up and pulled on my pajama bottoms and put on a robe and went to the door. It was Jasmine. She had her long, dark hair tied back in a pony tail and she was wearing jeans and a shirt buttoned up wrong. She had a suitcase in her hand.
“Connie again?”
“Her and that man,” Jasmine said as she came inside. “I hate them.”
“You don’t hate your mother. She’s an asshole, but you don’t hate her.”
“You hate her.”
“That’s different.”
“Can I stay here for a while?”
“Sure. There’s almost enough room for me, so I’m sure you’ll find it cozy.”
“You’re not glad to see me?”
“I’m glad to see you. I’m always glad to see you. But this won’t work out. Look how small this place is. Besides, you’ve done this before. Couple times. You come here, eat all my cereal, start missing your comforts, and then you go home.”
“Not this time.”
“All right. Not this time. Hungry?”
“I really don’t want any cereal.”
“I actually have some lunch meat this time. It’s not quite green.”
“Sounds yummy.”
I made a couple of sandwiches and poured us some slightly tainted milk and we talked a moment, then Jasmine saw the fold-out on the dresser and picked it up. I had pulled it from my pocket when I got home and tossed it there.
She opened it up and looked at it, then smiled at me. It was the same smile her mother used when she was turning on the charm, or was about to make me feel small enough to wear doll clothes.
“Daddy, dear!”
“I found it.”
“Say you did?”
“Cut it out. It was in one of the books I was putting up today. I thought it was weird and I stuck it in my back pocket. I should have thrown it away.”
Jasmine smiled at me, examined the fold-out closely. “Daddy, do men like women like this? That big, I mean?”
“Some do. Yes.”
“Do you?”
“Of course not.”
“What are these lines?”
“I don’t know exactly, but that’s what I thought was weird. It got my mind working overtime.”
“You mean like the ‘What If’ game?”
The “What If” game was something Jasmine and I had made up when she was little, and had never really quit playing, though our opportunities to play it had decreased sharply over the last couple of years. It grew out of my thinking I was going to be a writer. I’d see something and I’d extrapolate. An example was an old car I saw once where someone had finger-written in the dust on the trunk lid: THERE’S A BODY IN THE TRUNK.
Well, I thought about that and tried to make a story of it. Say there was a body in the trunk. How did it get there? Is the woman driving the car aware it’s there? Did she commit the murder? That sort of thing. Then I’d try to write a story. After fifty or so stories, and three times that many rejects, I gave up writing them, and Jasmine and I started kicking ideas like that back and forth, for fun. That way I could still feed my imagination, but I could quit kidding myself that I could write. Also, Jasmine got a kick out of it.
“Let’s play, Daddy?”
“All right. I’ll start. I saw those slashes on that fold-out, and I got to thinking, why are these lines drawn?”
“Because they look like cuts,” Jasmine said. “You know, like a chart for how to butcher meat.”
“That’s what I thought. Then I thought, it’s just a picture, and it could have been marked up without any real motive. Absentminded doodling. Or it could have been done by someone who didn’t like women, and this was sort of an imaginary revenge. Turning women into meat in his mind. Dehumanizing them.”
“Or it could be representative of what he’s actually done or plans to do. Wow! Maybe we’ve got a real mystery here.”
“My last real mystery was what finished your mom and I off.”
That was the body in the trunk business. I didn’t tell it all before. I got so into that scenario I called a friend of mine, Sam, down at the cop shop and got him geared up about there being a body in the trunk of a car. I told it good, with details I’d made up and didn’t even know I’d made up. I really get into this stuff. The real and the unreal get a little hard for me to tell apart. Or it used to be that way. Not anymore.
Bottom line is Sam pursued the matter, and the only thing in the trunk was a spare tire. Sam was a little unhappy with me. The cop shop was a little unhappy with him. My wife, finally tired of my make-believe, kicked me out and went for the oil man. He didn’t make up stories. He made money and had all his hair and was probably hung like a water buffalo.
“But say we knew the guy who marked this picture, Daddy. And say we started watching him, just to see —”
“We do know him. Kind of.”
I told her about Waldo the Great and his books and Martha’s reaction.
“That’s even weirder,” Jasmine said. “This bookstore lady —”
“Martha.”
“— does she seem like a good judge of character?”
“She hates just about everybody, I think.”
“Well, for ‘What If’s’ sake, say she is a good judge of character. And this guy really is nuts. And he’s done this kind of thing to a fold-out because… say…say…”
“He wants life to be like a Harlequin Romance. Only it isn’t. Women don’t always fit his image of what they should be — like the women in the books he reads.”
“Oh, that’s good, Daddy. Really. He’s gone nuts, not because of violent films and movies, but because of a misguided view about romance. I love it.”
