Fat Lightning (17 page)

Sam's going to the Outer Banks for a deep-sea fishing trip with several of his friends. He's bought all the equipment he's been told he'll need, and now, on Friday afternoon, he's home packing.

“Don't forget the Dramamine,” Nancy reminds him.

“I don't get seasick,” he tells her with his back turned, and she doesn't bother to remind him again about the honeymoon cruise.

The second week in October has been a quiet one for Sam and Nancy. He's been trying to get caught up at work so he won't have to miss the fishing trip; she's been trying to figure out what to do with the rest of her life.

“Can we talk?” she asks him, staring at his back.

He seems to stiffen slightly, still packing things into his bag.

“About what?”

“About us. About not talking. You know, everything.”

Sam still doesn't want to give up his holiday mood. Why, he wonders, can't this wait?

He sighs. “OK. Talk.”

“What do you think's been going on?” she asks him.

“What do you mean?”

Nancy wonders if he's being obtuse on purpose.

“I mean,” she says, “if you suspect me of doing something, I wish you'd tell me, instead of just slipping around here like I've got some social disease. I haven't had but two goddamn marriages, but this sure doesn't seem like the way one should work. Or am I wrong?”

Sam finally gives up on the packing and sits on their bed, facing Nancy. His face is turning red, she notices.

“I don't suspect you of anything,” he says. “Why should I suspect you of anything? Do you suspect me of anything?”

It hasn't occurred to Nancy to suspect Sam of anything other than neglect.

“No. Should I?”

Sam starts to say something, even opens his mouth, then closes it.

“Should I?” Nancy repeats.

Sam hangs his head. “I thought you knew. I thought you must have known.”

“What?” Nancy looks closely at Sam, who is avoiding her eyes. It's so quiet she can hear Wade breathing as he sleeps in the next room. She figures she probably knows what, wonders why she didn't figure it out for herself before this.

So he tells her why he seems to be gaining back the weight he lost during the summer, despite working out every day, why he doesn't talk any more about how close he's getting to what he used to call critical mass, where he can dunk a basketball.

He tells her about Corinne Cobb DeVault.

Sam ran into Corinne again, in early August. He had just finished the 10 100-yard dashes that were part of his regimen for that day and was walking around the track, catching his breath, when a woman in a sweatsuit jogged toward him. It was Corinne, wet dream of his youth.

She acted as if she didn't even remember that she'd last seen him wrestling with a box of super tampons in the aisle at DrugLand, and she seemed glad to see him. Sam remembered, though, that Corinne's special talent, even in high school, was always seeming to be glad to see everyone, a fact he soon forgot.

She was married to the Mosby football coach, an ex-Virginia Tech linebacker from Baltimore whom Sam had met at the drugstore shortly after he moved back. Corinne had persuaded her husband to apply for the Mosby job so she could return to her home town. He'd given up a job at a larger school to take it. Sam remembered Frank DeVault from their meeting at the store as a fireplug, a man with no shoulders and an enormous gut, and he thought he must not have weighed so much when Corinne married him. Later, she would tell Sam that she'd married him because he intercepted a pass to beat Virginia her senior year.

Sam and Corinne talked, and he found out she usually worked out later in the day. Sam told her he had to come out early in order to get to the drugstore on time. The next morning, when Sam got to the track at his usual time, Corinne was there already.

Sam would run his dashes, going from one end zone to another. He hadn't been big enough or agile enough to play football in high school, and he liked to fantasize crossing the goal line with the winning touchdown against Lunenburg or Fluvanna. The only lines he crossed athletically at Mosby High were the ones used to mark the end of the one-mile run in track, and the cheerleaders had better things to do than scream for such as that.

In those days, while Corinne was leading cheers along the sideline and her boyfriend, Freddie Stone, was dismembering quarterbacks and halfbacks out on the field, Sam, along with a couple of bookish, smallish friends, would watch from the stands. They always called Corinne's boyfriend Fred Flintstone, behind his back of course. One of the highlights of Sam's junior and senior years was getting to drive a new Ford convertible through the goalposts at halftime of the homecoming game with a would-be queen atop the back seat. All the girls' boyfriends, of course, were in the locker room being called piss-ants by Coach Van Lear.

His senior year, he got to drive Corinne Cobb, who was already Miss Mosby High and head cheerleader. As part of the college-bound minority, they had some classes together, and Corinne had personally asked him to be her driver.

As he helped her into the car in the darkness behind the end zone, she grabbed his arm.

“Kiss me for luck?” she asked him. Their lips barely touched, because Corinne certainly didn't want to appear before her adoring fans—hers until the football team came back out—with smudged lipstick. She produced a Kleenex from somewhere and wiped the red from Sam's face.

“There,” she'd said. “Now, let's go get 'em.” Sam felt he was the recipient of a pep talk, but he never forgot that kiss.

Now, Corinne was accessible, and Sam was willing. Their workouts would end with a quick walking lap around the track, and they'd talk about old friends and their lives growing up in Monacan. Sam hadn't known Corinne well at all when they were teen-agers, and he was regretful to hear her claim she wasn't nearly as secure as she seemed back then, that she only went steady with Freddie Stone because she was afraid she'd be home alone on Fridays and Saturdays if she didn't go steady with someone.

One morning, Corinne told Sam that she wouldn't be able to jog at the field for the next two weeks.

“Why?” Sam asked her, disappointed.

She looked at him as if he'd just landed from Mars.

“Summer football drills, silly,” she said. “You remember.”

Sam didn't, mainly because he'd never played football, a fact he didn't bring up.

It turned out that Corinne's husband was starting preseason football practice the next day, so the field would be occupied from 6 a.m. until 9:30 a.m.

“Frank's so into it that he's going to put up a tent next to the field,” she told Sam, “and stay out here all day. His assistants, too. He says the boys have got to understand that he can be tougher than them.”

The team would have two practices a day, the last one ending after 8 p.m. Then, Frank and his assistants would spend another hour talking strategy and playing cards before they came home to their wives.

“I don't suppose I'll see much of old Frank the next two weeks,” she sighed.

She had told Sam earlier that she and Frank had decided to wait to have children.

“What the hell, we're only 32. That's young,” she'd said at the time.

Sam felt as if somebody had handed him a script, that all he had to do was read it properly to make things fall into place.

“I guess we'll have to figure out somewhere else to go, then,” he said.

Corinne didn't miss her cue.

“Why don't you come over to the house tomorrow morning?” she said. “We can jog or something.”

The next morning, Sam left home at the usual time, dressed in his shorts and T-shirt, but he kept going, right past the field where he could see teen-agers running endless laps and hear the bark of a high school coach pretending to be a drill instructor.

When he got to Corinne's house, a red brick rancher just outside town on a dead-end road, a quarter-mile from its nearest neighbor, Corinne answered the door. She was wearing pink jogging shorts and a gray T-shirt. She asked Sam if he'd like a cup of coffee. He and Corinne, girl of his dreams, sat in the kitchen, she on the window seat, he in a chair to her right. He could see the sun shining through the skylight on her hair, and he could catch the few slivers of gray that were just now beginning to interrupt all that blondeness. It would be years before they would speak loudly enough to suggest that Corinne Cobb DeVault was past her prime, but the sight of them moved Sam as nothing had in years.

“I've never forgotten that kiss you gave me at homecoming,” he said, not planning to say such a thing at all.

She got up from the window seat and walked over to where Sam sat, his coffee cup still in his hand, leaned over and kissed him.

“Don't have to worry about smudging my lipstick any more,” she said.

For the next two weeks, Sam didn't come home to shower after his workout. He didn't work out at all, except at Corinne's. He told Nancy that he could save time by showering at the gym, then grabbing a bite at the drugstore counter.

After Frank DeVault packed up his tent and ended two-a-days, Sam and Corinne arranged to meet twice a week at the new Holiday Inn out by the interstate, far enough away from town to make discovery a long shot. They'd meet at different times. Sam still made enough home deliveries, an indulgence he'd grudgingly inherited from his father's regime, to mask a 90-minute or two-hour disappearance.

Sam had almost come to see his dalliances as a normal and permanent part of his life. He didn't really think that Corinne was going to leave her husband, and he was reasonably certain that he wasn't going to leave Nancy and Wade. He wasn't even that star-struck any more. He was reasonably sure he didn't love Corinne, and he realized that sex with her was neither better nor worse than sex with Nancy, once the novelty wore off. There were things about Corinne that even put him off, which depressed him greatly. If 90 minutes at the Holiday Inn with Corinne Cobb, girl of his dreams, she not even bothering to wear panties, or, better yet, bothering to buy and wear crotchless ones, wasn't enough, what was?

But Corinne, he discovered, had bad breath, something that had escaped his attention 15 years before, and her habit of using the toilet while he was showering or shaving offended his sense of privacy. And, he came to realize, Corinne's conversations tended to always look backward. Other than the past, her only other interest seemed to be real estate, a vocation she was pursuing with some force on weekends. Her ability to mix business and pleasure sometimes stunned Sam. Once, riding him on the queen-sized motel bed, she stopped and asked him if he and Nancy were planning to rent forever.

But Sam had no plans to sever this link with the past he never had, just assumed that something would happen. He actually had to admit that he felt worse about quitting his quest for the ultimate vertical leap than he did about cheating on Nancy. Every time he drove by the weight room or the high school track, he felt a pang.

And Sam hadn't meant to tell Nancy about any of it. In 20 minutes on a Friday afternoon, though, with their son still sleeping peacefully in the next room, he does something he'd never really planned to do. He confesses.

Nancy doesn't cry, or scream, or throw hairbrushes. She listens calmly while her husband gives her a rough outline of what has replaced weight-lifting and sprinting in his life the past two months.

“Well,” she says with a sigh when Sam stops, “you'd better keep packing. Don't want to miss that fishing trip.”

Sam wants to ask her if he should pack for more than a weekend. Instead, he says, “I can't do that. I can't go away until we've talked this out.”

Nancy shakes her head as if she's trying to clear it.

“I don't believe a weekend is going to make much difference,” she says. “I think it might be better if we didn't try to clean up this mess until you get back.”

Sam can't think of anything to say that won't make things worse. Finally, he finishes packing and goes downstairs to get his fishing equipment.

Nancy hears Bobby Dance's truck as it turns into the driveway, throwing gravel on the patio bricks. She goes to the window to see Sam as he leaves. Bobby and Dave Faris are in the front, both with longneck beer bottles in their hands. Bobby blows the horn.

Nancy sees movement out of the corner of her eye and turns to see Sam, wearing the flannel L.L. Bean shirt she bought him for Christmas. His eyes are red.

“I do love you,” he says hoarsely.

Nancy stares at him, a cool, neutral look, as he turns and heads down the stairs and out the door. It occurs to her that it's the first time Sam has said those words since they moved to Monacan, and she wonders if even the worst disasters don't have their up sides.

She'd considered, briefly, telling Sam about her fling with Buddy. She was halfway resolved to tell him about it anyhow, when she approached him just an hour before. Sam's guilt, which she mistook for pure lack of interest, had driven her to the point where she felt any change would be for the better.

But now, with something maybe worth saving after all, she knows that Sam might not forgive her for the very same thing of which he's been guilty. She thinks that she really does want to save their marriage, if she can resist cutting Sam's throat in a fit of jealousy when he sleeps. Well, she tells herself, I've got a weekend to figure out whether to change the locks or not.

She remembers something her mother told her after Suzanne found out she and Buddy were separated.

Suzanne had discovered her crying quietly in her and Pat's bedroom and soon ferreted out the truth, so she told her a story, one Nancy hadn't heard before. It happened when Nancy was six and the younger girls were 3 and 1, Suzanne said. She'd found out that Pat had slept with another woman, at least once while Suzanne was still in the hospital after giving birth to Candy. She told Nancy how Pat had cried and begged her forgiveness when he was confronted, and how loving he'd been afterward, almost a different person from the rough brawler she'd married.