The Interloper Read Free Page B

require much talking. We hated to sit around the house, and we’d grown tired of buying something every time we went out. We weren’t joggers, golfers, cyclists, rollerbladers, surfers, volleyballers, softballers, basketballers, footballers, or any other kind of ballers, and—despite its aesthetic appeal—I hated tennis. I hated tennis because you could never know ahead of time whether courts would be available. We had tried target shooting for a while, with a Glock we bought for protection. I am a crack shot. I thought shooting would be good for Patty, but aside from the momentary thrill, it had no effect on her. Eventually, the local gun club was shut down because some depressed person decided to shoot himself instead of the target.
    Frisbee was freedom. And aesthetically, Frisbee was pleasing, especially when I was throwing and she was catching. Theother way around, aesthetics was lost in the dirt. There was something undeniably pleasurable about playing Frisbee with Patty, at a time when pleasure seemed in short supply. The combination of tranquility and exertion, the physicality of the exchange, the fact that we faced each other as we played.
    I threw a long coasting shot that cleared her head and hovered there. She turned and plucked it from the air and faced me, all in one fluid motion. It’s difficult to forget, more difficult to remember. She threw back, less gracefully.
    I had decided that I would tell her that evening, over dinner, how I had rented the PO box and written to Henry Joseph Raven. I knew it would take a long time for her to understand what I had done. I would have to confess how misguided I’d been in trying to pursue correspondence with Raven. Digging the Frisbee from a hedge, I considered the possibility of never telling her what I had done. No, I had to come clean. Otherwise I would be able to think of little else. I was not well-suited to deception. I decided again that I would tell her over dinner, and I threw the Frisbee.
    She caught it magnificently and returned it to me with a fluid and direct shot. The Frisbee drifted on the air as if in slow-motion. I skipped to the side and lined myself up to catch it. I crouched, raised my hands. Then the Frisbee, cruising directly through the frame of my outstretched fingers, hit me squarely on the forehead, and I had the idea. A plan to eclipse all plans dropped egg-like into my brain, whole, and it began with this realization: my pseudonym had been of the wrong gender. Why would Raven have any interest whatsoever in corresponding with John Dark? He was a lonely man, locked up with a bunch of otherlonely men. He didn’t need letters from another lonely man, on the outside, to add to his pile of loneliness and maleness. He needed a lonely woman.
    The plan unfolded with crystal clarity in my mind even as I bent down to retrieve the Frisbee and throw it back to my wife. I would rent a new PO box under a female pseudonym. Henry Joseph Raven would fall in love with his correspondent and then, when she had wholly gained his affection, when she had come to inhabit every fiber of his being, she would break his heart. Raven would suffer the wrenching removal of someone from his life.
    I resolved then and there not to tell Patty about my plan until I had reaped its fruits. The idea of hiding something from her, as I mentioned above, made me uncomfortable, but what I was doing I was doing for her, and when the opportunity came to reveal what I had done, that is, when my plan was successful, I’d tell her. All my duplicity would turn out for the best, like planning a surprise party. This was the only way I could unpoison the soil, restore a sense of justice and balance to our world, bring the old Patty back. Then we could begin building our normal lives again.

3
    I got a new PO box, at the Mailboxes Store in Second City, a neighboring town, so Raven wouldn’t suspect that John Dark and his new female correspondent were the same person. Composing the letter