Waveland Read Free

legal stuff was over and he was in his second new apartment and she was at the house and three months had gone by. Papers came in the mail. He signed them andpushed them back into the return envelope. The envelope was gray. The world was different. Days were longer, nights were unbearable. Sleep was a paradise.
    When he told Greta about the birthday dinner, she said, “Fine.” She had just come in the kitchen door and he'd met her there, so they were standing in the kitchen. He went to the sink and washed his hands using the dishwashing liquid, which had a filmy feel to it.
    “Maybe she wants something else, maybe she has some ideas,” he said.
    “Don't you get started,” Greta said.
    “She wouldn't call if she didn't want something.”
    “Maybe she's lonely. Maybe she wanted to wish you Happy Birthday.”
    “Well, sure,” he said. “But I talked to her like once in the last year and now she wants to take us out to dinner.”
    “I talked to her more than you did,” Greta said. This was true. After Vaughn introduced Greta, back in the summer, she and Gail became phone pals for a while. “We're buds.”
    “You're in the paper, apparently,” he said. “Gail said she read it. Pictures, the whole thing.”
    “I know,” Greta said. “It'll pass. I have it in the car if you want to read it. I was going to bring it in, but I guess I thought maybe we could just skip it.”
    “Fine by me,” Vaughn said. “There's no point in shooting
me
anyway.”
    “Funny,” she said.
    “So, anyway, we've got to go to dinner with Gail, andI'm thinking she's got an ulterior motive, something up her sleeve.”
    He could almost hear Greta rolling her eyes. “I hate to tell you this,” Greta said, “but I think she's over the divorce and ready to be friends again. It'll be fine.”
    “What about me?”
    “You are not over the divorce, but you'll be fine, too, eventually. You can do this, Vaughn. You're the man. You're Mr. Nice Guy.”
    “Thanks,” he said. This was Greta's final answer to his idea of a new personality. She used it all the time.
    “You should stop worrying. It'll be easy and pleasant, and anyway, it would be better if you and she talked more—you know, like friends or something.”
    “Okay. We'll have a nice dinner and all that. It won't be so bad. You'll go with me, right? And we're not worrying about it.”
    “Now you're talking,” Greta said. “I wouldn't miss it. But right now I'm going to yoga.”
    “You are? You just got home.”
    “It's okay, Vaughn. I'm coming back afterward.” She kissed his cheek, picked up her yoga gear, and left again.
    He watched her back out of the driveway and then went to the computer and tried a more general search: “husband killers.” One million seven hundred and eighty thousand entries in six-tenths of a second. He read a few of those, including “I fight my husband's killer with laughter” and several other choice headlines. Then he tried “beheadings,” which produced eight hundred and twenty-one thousand hits and numerous videos. He started a couple of those, then gave it up. Years before he'd been interested in grotesque news, hadput together a site that featured news like the woman who cooked her husband in a pot, the couple who kept their dead relatives in plastic bags, the father who buried his child to the neck in ants. There was a surprising amount of that going on, he discovered, then, as now; only now he wasn't that intrigued. Now he was thinking: With Google, why bother with school?
    He did a vanity search and found references to buildings he'd worked on for architects here and there, and one entry for a monograph he'd cowritten in college on the work of Bruce Goff and Herb Greene. It was available at a used bookstore in Arkansas.
    Eventually he gave up on the computer and went back to the television, letting the broadcasts wash over him. There was too much of everything. He flipped between a show on illegal aliens and another show on the child