Now here he was again, back in his classroom on his lunch break, flipping through the readouts once more and nursing a necessary cup of coffee. He’d decided to give Cherilyn a call and talk it over, to bridge the small gap he sensed between them the night before and approach the subject with humor, as he felt his wife’s anxieties were easy to be solved. Douglas now thought it rather cute that Cherilyn had buried her nose in that textbook, trying to find a picture of her potential self. It was endearing, the way she had been poring over foreign recipes. This was something, Douglas figured, they could laugh about in the years to come. This could be simply another spud, he reckoned, in their marital pile of small potatoes. Douglas then imagined everything about the previous night smaller than it was before because, for the first time in his life, he discounted the undertow of our dreams.
He took out his cell phone and, remembering that hers was broken, dialed their home phone instead. After an unusually large number of rings, Cherilyn answered.
“Your car won’t start,” she said.
Douglas smiled. He wanted to tell her how glad he was that this whole business from last night wasn’t serious. He wanted to say that he could go twice in a row right now if she asked him to. “I know,” he said, grinning. “I took the Outback. I’m sorry. I was running late.”
“What’s so funny?” she asked.
Cherilyn sounded on edge, as if he’d interrupted her, and Douglas stopped smiling. “Oh,” he said. “Nothing. Nothing’s funny. Everything okay?”
“Well,” Cherilyn said, and sighed. “I’d wanted to run some errands with Mom, but I guess I won’t. We do need groceries, though. Can you swing by the store?”
“Sure,” he said, “anything for you,” and took out a pen and paper from his satchel.
“Okay,” Cherilyn said and shuffled something around in the background. “Here goes. We need four eggplants, pita bread, a bottle of lemon juice. There may be a coupon for that in the driver’s-side door. I’m not sure. Um, we also need some tahini. Just ask if you can’t find it. Two cloves of garlic. I’ve got salt, green onions. Get some more olive oil, though. It looks like we are going to need a lot of olive oil.”
Douglas took down what she said, feeling his stomach sink a bit more with each request, and wrote a question mark next to every single item. In the long history of their marriage, had he ever been asked to purchase such things? He had not. But should the addition of unexpected items in one’s life even be of note? After all, that’s the heart of jazz, isn’t it? If he wanted to stand onstage, be a man on the scene, he figured he had to embrace a little improvisation. Yet his mood became sullen. He traced over the question marks time and time again. He underlined the word eggplant.
“Are you feeling all right?” he asked her. “How’s your head? You sound down.”
“I’m fine,” she said. “I’ve just been watching the news. You know, the world seems kind of terrible when you watch the news.”
“Should I pick up some steaks or something?” he asked.
“No,” Cherilyn said. “I think that’s the whole meal. It’s mainly an eggplant thing.”
Douglas told her he would swing by the store after his trombone lesson at four and be home around five-thirty or six. “Okay,” she said.
“I love you,” he said.
“Okay,” she said. “Me, too.”
Douglas turned off his phone and set it on the desk. He didn’t even have time to whistle out some blues when, behind him, he heard a man say, “I love you, too, sugar-nuts.”
Douglas looked up to see Deuce Newman, the de facto town photographer of Deerfield, standing in the doorway to his classroom.
Deuce was a man who took up a lot of space. Although not even six feet tall, he had a certain girth about him, which, like the trunk of a tree, only seemed to grow with time. His thick face, the strange outdated haircut that swept over his ears, the two heavy and professional-looking cameras slung around his neck: They were enough to block Douglas’s view of the hallway. The two of them had been classmates in high school forever ago and Deuce Newman, whose actual name was Bruce, was once an all-state middle linebacker who, as luck would have it, wore the number 2.
Now hitting forty himself, Deuce had become a somewhat legendary figure around Deerfield. After tearing up his knee in his senior year, Deuce had decided to do what many local athletes do and spend the rest of his life milking his youthful celebrity for all it was worth. At this, he was successful.
After all, Bruce Newman’s story is the type a small town understands. He didn’t come from much, a little two-bedroom house with a dad who worked at the auto shop, didn’t have any fancy training techniques, just the old rusty tackling sleds behind the school, and yet was given, or as many in Deerfield would say, blessed, with outsized abilities. He’d once had a clear path out of Deerfield and into the larger world, complete with fame and riches and everything a person can dream of, until an illegal crack back block from a big-city kid quickly took him out at the knees. This was Deerfield life in a nutshell.
But Douglas didn’t feel too bad for Deuce. He was ambitious in his own way and had ultimately achieved a sort of fame, after all, becoming akin to the town mascot. After the injury, he stood on the sideline with his crutches and led cheers for the fans, got pecks from the cheerleaders. Even after he graduated, the coaches still invited him to the field as a sign of goodwill, where, out of little other than boredom, Deuce took to bringing a camera with him. He took action shots at ground level, candid photos of hopeful parents in the stands, and this resulted in the local paper, The Deerfield Bugle, running some of his pictures, and the next twenty years of Bruce’s life were pretty much set.
Yet Douglas had no idea why he was at school that day, nor why he was standing in the doorway to his classroom staring at him.
“Bruce,” Douglas said. “What can I do for you?”
“I just have to know,” Deuce said, “what kind of man can be married to a woman like Cherilyn and still sit there with a face as sad as a donkey’s dick?”
“Lovely,” Douglas said.
“That was Cherilyn, right?” Deuce said. “I’m not interrupting something secret, am I? Maybe some side honey with a teacher’s pet?”
Douglas stood up from his desk and walked over to shake Bruce’s hand. This type of crass and innocuous teasing was common between them, so Douglas didn’t think much of it. “I think you know me better than that,” he said. “It’s good to see you.”
Truth be told, though, Douglas didn’t feel like seeing anyone at that moment. And, out of all the nobodies Douglas didn’t want to see, Bruce Newman ranked pretty high. It was nothing overtly contentious, but they’d always had a sort of odd relationship, all the way back to high school, as Bruce long harbored and still maintained, Douglas would argue, an unrelenting crush on Cherilyn. The practicalities of the matter had been settled years ago, of course, as Cherilyn had never shown a lick of interest in Bruce, as she had loved and married Douglas without incident, and as the world was a logical place. But the misguided hearts of some men, for whatever reason, never waver. So, the way Bruce always asked about her, the way he would kiss her hand when they saw each other out shopping or at some event in the town square, the way he would be sure to remind Douglas how lucky he was to have her, inevitably made small talk between the two men a bit strained.