Copyright 2001 by Morris Rosenthal
"I can't believe you're still corresponding with that jerk," Connie berated Eric. "He tried to kill you in cold blood."
"Hey, he apologized," Eric protected the letter from her unpredictable grabs. "A week after the explosion, when the cops finally figured out that he was at home waiting to be arrested, he used his one phone call to let me know how sorry he was."
"I know, I know," Connie was getting madder and madder, "I took the phone call, Mr. Memory. Someone else was still a little hard of hearing."
Eric caught himself wishing that they could hurry up and get married so that they could buy a house and he could have a workshop to hide in. Six months had passed since Richard Markey had been sentenced to fifteen years in the state penitentiary for trying to blow him up. Eric had talked to him a couple times at the trial, and couldn't get over how mortified the guy was at almost having killed the wrong person. When he renounced the use of violence and begged forgiveness from society, Eric was willing to let him walk. The prosecutor wasn't, and playing with explosives was a serious parole violation. Richard had written him a letter from inside, philosophizing about finding in oneself the traits one condemned in others. Eric replied, and they been regular pen pals since.
"I like getting mail," Eric rationalized for her, "And Markey's the only person I know who writes back."
"I still think it's sick," she relented slightly, "What do you write about anyway?"
"Oh no!" he blocked her attempt to snatch the page just in time. "So this was all an act to get my guard down."
She shrugged and returned to the other chair. "Lovers shouldn't have secrets," she replied archly.
"Yeah, right." He stuffed the paper in the already addressed envelope and sealed it.
"I could mail that for you," she offered hopefully.
"Yeah, right," he repeated a second time, hitting the identical note of sarcasm blended with scorn. His keeping the letters private was actually the idea of his ex-psychiatrist and future sister-in-law, who advised him not to let Connie take over his entire life. He had laughed at first, but on the morning he realized that the letters were about the only thing they didn't share, he decided to try and keep it that way as a symbol of sorts. Sharing with Connie was a bit like sharing with a grizzly. No matter how warm and cuddly they look, you know who gets the picnic basket in the end.
The letter was shorter than Eric's usual reply, just a note to say that he had passed all his courses and was graduating a few weeks, plus a short poem based on an incident from one of Markey's letters. It was actually more of a limerick then a poem, and it was the first time he had tried the visual route. If it had been anything else, he probably would have given in and let Connie read it.
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"Fine," she said huffily, "I have to change for my date with the football team anyway." Connie's favorite new gimmick for torturing Eric was dressing seductively for her "Physics for Jocks" course. She had been hired by the University as a temporary professor for the Spring semester, after one of the tenured Physics instructors was suspended following a grades for sex scandal. During the frantic intercession job search, the only qualification the Dean had insisted on was non-male; he still thought of her teaching ability as a sort of a unexpected bonus. The department head was so happy with her that he had already informally offered her a lecturer slot for the next year, though she hadn't made up her mind if she wanted it yet.
Connie had been surprised herself to find how much she enjoyed spoon feeding the laws of motion to math impaired semi-professional athletes and their future wives. She spent week after week analyzing curve balls and doctored bats, spiral passes and hooking field goals. The entire hockey team was taking her course, so she held a couple lectures at the rink and had the heavily padded players act out the conservation of momentum through a series of inelastic collisions.
Eric sat in on one or two of the classes, but he couldn't stand watching all the jocks staring her and daydreaming. Worse then that, she let all her students know that she didn't believe in failing grades, and they still kept on coming to class. Any time she wanted to go out when Eric wanted to stay home, all she had to do suggest that it might be a good night to start having office hours for the students who wanted extra help.
"How are they going to know you're there?" Eric had asked the first time.
"Funny thing," she replied, "But those sweet boys keep on putting their phone numbers on their homework. Is that normal?" she asked innocently. That night they ended up going to see a movie without any men in it.
Every time that Eric got to feeling like living with Connie wasn't the luckiest thing that ever happened to him, he just called Brian. Brian and Ingrid Four were still together, although Brian had bought and returned so many diamond rings by this point that all of the jewelry stores in Northampton had banned him. When she mentioned during the Christmas morning 'I'm not ready yet' rejection that she might want to return to Sweden, Brian had thrown himself into winter sports, claiming that he'd always been a cold weather man at heart. He dragged Eric out cross country skiing a few times, but Eric got depressed at how obviously happy Brian always was to get back to the car.
On the other hand, when Eric got to feeling too good, he'd call Colin, whose life had turned into a fairy tale after his 'Fleeing Industry' story had won a national award for journalistic excellence. First, Susan had dragged him off to see the Wizard of Oz, who explained to him that he already had a heart. The Wizard was living in Los Vegas these days, so they came home broke and married. Then, out of the blue, he was asked to write a 'Civil War' style documentary for PBS about America's demise as the world's great manufacturing center. Between that and a book deal, one of three offers he had to choose from, he had less than nothing to complain about.
Susan was still working for the senator, who had begun officially grooming her as his replacement. In a classic turnaround of events, Mrs. Hardwick was now keeping a seat warm for her husband on the H Vector board of directors, waiting for end of his current term. Jason explained the new alliance in his typically blunt terms. "I've been a politician all my life, because that's where I thought the money was. Now I find that the really big bucks are in playing janitor to Mother Nature. Go figure."
One project that H Vector didn't get geared up in time to win was the massive Wilkins cleanup. By the end of May, the entire site had been excavated to a depth of twenty feet, and resembled nothing more than a strip mining operation. The steadily rising price tag for the work now stood at over twenty-three million dollars. Big Ed was getting worried.
"I don't understand," he complained to the supervisor for main contractor, "I could have given the contract to a relative and still gotten the hole dug for a third of the price."
"You really don't understand, Mr. Mayor," the woman replied. "You're not just paying for this hole. You're paying for an identical hole on a reservation in Colorado. Even more than that are the trucking costs for bringing your hole there, and their hole here."
The mayor brightened at this reminder. The earth being trucked in from Colorado was being temporarily stored at a high rent in the parking lot of a failed mall in which his in-laws had a forty percent interest. By the time they finished shuffling all the dirt around, he'd make almost as much as that jackass Rodriguez this year.
Rodriguez had broken his six figure contract in January to take a bigger six figure contract in St. Louis, whose schools were demonstrably worse then those in Springfield. When the selection committee from St. Louis saw that Springfield was able to run their Jr. High Schools without a National Guard presence, they'd offered Rodriguez a new contract on the spot. St. Louis also paid the ten thousand dollar fee to a corporate law firm for figuring out how to break Rodriguez's iron clad contract, which had been drawn up by city's legal department. The agreed upon price had been twenty thousand, but since a paralegal had spotted the legal loophole while making a bathroom stop on the way to the copying machine, the firm lowered their fee out of sheer guilt.
Connie came out of the bedroom wearing shorts and a halter top over a sleeveless black body stocking. "Where the hell did you get that," Eric cried, hoping it was a bad joke. "You look like one of those suicidal teenagers hookers who hang out downtown all night."
"It's Carol's" she answered. "I'm giving the final exam today, and she asked me to test her theory that men think better when all the blood drains from their brains." She did a little models twirl. The shorts were cutback so far that there was no leg left at all.
"Better not put anything in your pockets," Eric grumped, "I think the bottoms are cut off."
"Crybaby," she stuck out her tongue, and swung her hips over to the door. "Don't forget you promised Carol to help her move Laura's office files over this afternoon." She closed the door most of the way, then stuck her head back in the room and added, "See you later, maybe," and was gone.
Eric hunted up his steel toe boots from his service station days and headed for Carol's. She and Laura had decided to consolidate their individual practices into one, part of the partner arrangement they had worked out. They had stumbled on a lucrative business as marriage counselors to the lesbian community. Everybody loved coming to the group sessions and listen to the two of them interrupting the patients to tear into each other. As Eric had pointed out months before, laughter is the best medicine.
As he crossed Main Street in one of the pedestrian right-of-way crosswalks, a brand new T-Bird nearly ran him over. Eric walked angrily around the driver side to yell at the idiot, when the polarized electric window shot down and Anthony gave him a big smile.
"Eric, old pal," he yelled shamelessly, "How ya' been."
"I'm O.K. Ant," he allowed, "Nice trick, staying out of prison and all."
"Thank you," Ant accepted it as a compliment. "What do you think of my new wheels?"
"Looks expensive Ant," he answered grudgingly, "One of those two year lease deals?"
"No way," Anthony laughed, "Cash on the barrel-head. I'm a consultant now, you know."
"Consultant?" Eric wished he hadn't gotten sucked into this conversation. "Who would hire you as a consultant?"
"The city, man," Anthony looked hurt. "Fifty bucks an hour, all the hours I can bill."
The school bus behind Anthony gave a long toot on it's horn. "Gotta run, man," Anthony looked at his wafer thin watch. "I'm working now. We're looking into buying the decommissioned Yankee Rowe Nuclear Plant and setting it up next to the Basketball Hall of Fame as a tourist attraction. Later."
"Later," Eric responded, talking to a opaque window. Damn, those things were fast. He took the shortcut down Sunshine Alley, but pulled up to a halt halfway down the street. Parked in front of the Green Valley building was a panel van with a 'Nuke the Whales' bumper sticker and out of state plates. Eric carefully turned around and tiptoed back the way he came.
THE END if you've made it this far, drop me a line