Fiction
At Union Square Journal I published two of my older stories under the pseudonym R. Parker McVey, a name that I first used twenty-some years ago for a couple of kids' mystery books that I wrote while on staff for a book packager.
The two stories at USJ, sitting there for four years, have garnered exactly one compliment, from John Sabotta, who thought one of them "pretty good," as I recall. Not even Mrs. McP likes the one titled A Professional Daughter, although she often praises The Common Heritage of Common Fear. An old girlfriend of mine who e-mailed me out of the blue (Mrs. McP was very understanding about it) wanted to know what I had been writing and I sent her links to both stories. She seemed to think that they represented only alternate urges on my part to "be a hero" in one and "a sadist" in the other. She was unpersuaded, I think, when I told her that neither of the main male characters in the two stories was based on me.
But I do happen to like A Professional Daughter, which was originally titled Holly. Its opening paragraphs set a scene in downtown Manhattan, where appearances, wealth, and anxiety often play hard together:
Peter held the heavy steel door for them with one hand, and a thick oil brush in the other. A line of olive paint crossed his cheek upward from the edge of his mouth. Holly and Patrice entered the building, each planting a kiss on Peter's clean cheek as they passed. They were his cousins in a generation that was waiting, with now awful impatience, for the family money to come to them.Trouble starts when Holly, the anti-heroine of the story, takes an instant liking to the loftmate, Calvin, who is a mere schoolteacher. While her sister hangs with cousin Peter in his studio to gush over his paintings, Holly sits down in the living space with Calvin and goes to work on him:
As they walked up one flight the women noted the poor condition of the building. Peter opened another heavy door for them, and they stepped into a long, high loft that smelled faintly of turpentine. It was not what they expected, not like the lofts they more often visited. It was no surprise to them, however, that in his need to prove thrift and self-reliance to his father, Peter was sharing rent that was just a fraction of what he easily could afford.
"This is such a nice big place," she said. "My sister's apartment is so small it gives me a headache."Holly is quickly dragged out of the loft by her sister, but shows up the next day driving a vintage Mustang in which she takes Calvin to a sleazy motel across the Hudson river in New Jersey where they make love. Just as quickly she disappears from his life until she shows up one evening at the loft with her fiance in tow. The next day she calls Calvin and taunts him with how her fiance laughed when she told him that Calvin was a teacher. She comes by that day and they do the deed for a second time, and then she comes back yet again:
"You don't live in the city?" he asked.
"No," she said, filling in no blanks.
"Where do you live?"
"Around. My family has houses all around. When I'm here I try to stay with Patrice. We miss each other. So what do you do, Carl?"
"It's Calvin. I teach school."
"High school?"
"Yes."
"What do you teach?" she asked.
"This coming year, two Biology classes and a Chemistry honors class."
"So you're a good chemist," she said, fixing her eyes on his, aggressively. It was dry, coarse flirtation, and it made his legs ache.
"Need another beer?" he asked, breaking the connection.
"Please," she said.
He got one for her. As he handed it to her she looked up at him, and from that angle he saw that she was afraid of him.
"Tell me something," she said, "do you think Peter's art is any good?"
"I like some of it. I'm not easy to please."
"I bet you're not," she said quietly, muttering it to herself. He left it alone.
"Are you an artist?" he asked.
"No," she said, again volunteering nothing.
"What is your line of work?" he asked less patiently.
"I'm a professional daughter, thirty-one, an acknowledged expert in the field. Father is the best manager in the world and very careful about the competitions he enters me in."
"And your father lives here in New York?" he asked, but she ignored the question.
"The championship events are the Al Smith dinner—the Cardinal comes to that—and the Westminster dog show. Father enters his Irish wolfhound. I'm expected for those."
To Calvin, there was something humorous about this, but it did not make him laugh.
"So you don't work?" he asked, not giving in.
"No, I do," she said, "I studied to be an architect, believe it or not. I mean I am an architect. I design homes, nice homes."
"Why didn't you just say that in the first place?"
She shrugged and batted the question back with an intentionally cheesy grin. Now he laughed a little. She caught his eyes wandering to her left hand.
"Engagement ring!" She made a sound like a game show buzzer and held up her diamond.
"And he's a professional son?" Calvin asked.
"No, he's an amateur bore, with outstanding bloodlines. Just like father's hounds."
"I can see you're crazy about him."
She stretched her arms back over her head and puckered her lips, weighing this ticklish matter.
"Well, he has almost no interest in sex; there's a check in the plus column," she said, allowing a high heel to dangle from her toes.
The next day, Sunday, she came and took him upstate to go riding on a sprawling farm. She wore jodhpurs and riding boots. He wore jeans and sneakers. He had not ridden in years and was nervous about it. Holly was comfortable on horseback, in command.
They rode out along a trail that led through a pasture. When the trail cut into deep woods, she took off at a gallop. He let her go, holding his calm mare at a walk. He lost sight of Holly.
It was twenty minutes before Calvin saw her horse in a small clearing off the trail. He dismounted and left his horse with hers. A narrow path led out from the back of the clearing, but he wasn't sure what to do, whether to call for her or wait or try to find her. For all he knew she might only be relieving herself out of view. That thought, of catching her with her pants down, appealed to him.
He took the path. It led through a patch of high grass and then to the soft dark floor that formed under the permanent shadow of the trees. He walked a little farther and saw her first.
She was sitting with her rear wedged against a rock. She had pulled her jodhpurs down over her boots and her knees were spread wide apart. Her head was curled forward and her hands were between her legs, and he thought that she had hurt herself in the saddle and was assessing the damage.
Then the day seemed to grow deliberately silent. She withdrew a hypodermic needle from a vein in her groin and let it dangle in her fingers. It fell to the ground. She leaned back against the rock and saw him. She smiled sickly and a glaze settled in her eyes.
Holly is a junkie. Calvin is rocked by it. She doesn't contact him again, and he can't bring himself to get in touch with her. What stops him? The implication, fixed in subtext, is that she is out of his league, someone he could never meet on an even basis. That is what keeps him in check until the date of her wedding approaches. Then he acts impulsively and thrusts himself back into her life:
"Where are you?" he asked.
She told him. He flew out of the loft and took a cab to the address she had given him. It was a townhouse on the upper east side.
Holly met Calvin at the door and embraced him. She was drunk and had been crying. They held each other for a long time and then sat in the kitchen, drank coffee and talked. She did all she could to give him no answers about her coming marriage. But by fishing persistently at the edges, Calvin got her to put a picture together for him.
Holly's father was no fool. He saw past her appearance of robust good health and her breezy ways. The father's school was the old one, and so he did what he had known to work in the past. Holly had an ultimatum to get married, and to the right man, absolutely the right man, or she got the very shortest end of the stick her father could give her when it came to the family wealth. And he had more than a little control over that.
In short, Holly was an embarrassment. Her father would correct that by threatening her with her worst fear. The money was as important to Holly as a sturdy pair of shoes are to the poor. She was that closely in need of it. But by breaking too many of the unwritten rules, she had put her claim on the money at risk. Hank was her shot for acquittal on these unnamed and unmentionable charges. A loveless match made on club grounds.
Calvin rejected this as plain weirdness. But she knew what he thought and there was no need for him to say it. Now, too, he understood why she feared him. It was because there was just none of this corruption in him. He had been raised a different way by a different kind of people, and he admired them too much to ever live a life believing so fervently in money. Holly had felt the strange, to her, gravity of his values from the beginning. To a house of cards even a gentle breeze is the very maelstrom at time's end.
"Let me talk to your father," he said. "Maybe I can reason with him."
"He does all the reasoning, Calvin. He would think you are crazy and throw you out. Then suddenly a half-dozen men would be looking into your life. You'd be lucky if you didn't find yourself out of a job."
"Now that is crazy," he said.
"It is the way things are done.""No," he said, "the way things are done is that people meet, they fall in love, they get married and their parents keep their mouths shut."
"That's your world, not mine."
"My world. We don't live in the same world, Holly? What is your world called, Mars?"
He knew, finally, that it might as well be. He relented and let her lead him off to bed. For the first time he stayed the night with her.
The next morning he called school and took a sick day. When the German housekeeper arrived, Holly gave her the day off. They stayed in bed until noon, and then Holly tried to fix him breakfast and burned everything.
She was ready to cry, but Calvin laughed when he saw the mess, and she began to laugh with him. He remade the breakfast.
They spent the afternoon watching television from a leather couch in an office den no one used. She held onto him. They lingered into the early evening until the time came for him to leave.
And he does leave, without convincing her. The marriage will go forward. He never expects to hear from her again. He had run up against what was implicit to the sub-text all along: she was out of his league. There's one final development, which I'll leave undescribed in this synopsis. If any reader thinks that it's a happy ending, I would urge skepticism toward that conclusion.
Anyway, as I said, I like the story. I wanted to unroll, actually, a series of scenes as they would unfold in a film, about two people whose only experience in common is that they are captured by an attraction that suits neither of them. They are for each other the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time. Yet the force of attraction between them has a potential to trump all that, and from that the very shape of their personal worlds are dramatically altered.
That's what I wanted to get at, and if I succeeded in getting at it, then the story succeeds.
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