Perfect on Paper (36 page)

“Dana,” I said, shaking hands. “But what made you decide…?”

“You’re not wearing mom jeans,” Kevin said.

“Or gingham.” Patrick shuddered. “
Where
do these people
shop
, anyway?” He took a sip from his glass of red wine. “I take it you’re a rookie.”

“Well, I will be, if I can bring myself to come back here tomorrow.”

“Don’t worry—you’ll do fine. Just watch out for the Five,” Patrick said.

Kevin took note of my confusion. “The fifth puzzle,” he clarified. “It’s by far the hardest. Although the Three can trip you up, too.”

“But not like the Five.” Patrick took another sip. “God, remember last year’s? Worst puzzle I’ve seen in nine years of competing.”

“Some people were lucky to score twenty points on it, and that was only because they knew to put an
S
in any square where the clue implied a plural.” Kevin rolled his eyes. “Of course, the constructor was W. W. W. Moody.”

“Billy didn’t tell me he had a puzzle in last year’s tournament,” I said, causing both men to regard me with renewed fascination.

“You know him?” Kevin half rose in his seat. “Bartender—another drink for our new best friend here.”

“Both of us would kill to fuck him,” Patrick confided. “Would you happen to know if he’s…?”

“Sorry. Straight.”

They leaned forward in unison. “Would you mind telling us how you know that?”

“Yes. Yes, I would mind.”

Patrick nudged Kevin. “I
love
this girl.”

Their line of questioning had gone on long enough, I decided, changing the subject to the puzzles. “I get that the Five is the hardest one, but why should I fear the Three?”

“There’s invariably a word that seems right, but it’ll have a misleading clue that might make you enter a wrong letter—like ‘lie’ for ‘pie,’ or ‘scrabble’ for ‘scramble.’ ” Kevin waved his hand. “There goes your perfect-puzzle bonus.”

An hour or so flew by while I was schooled on the fine points of the A, B, and C rankings, the nerve-wracking digital-countdown clock that
loomed in a corner of the ballroom, and other matters of no interest whatsoever to the vast majority of the population.

Finally Kevin turned and looked out the bar’s window to the lobby. “Oh god. Game night’s letting out. Hurry! Order another round before they swarm!”

I laid a twenty on the bar. “Thanks, but I’m good.”

And I was going to stay good, and get out of there before Billy Moody showed up. I’d had enough excitement for one night.

Besides, I had a feeling I needed all the sleep I could get before tomorrow.

“Come find us between puzzles,” Patrick called after me as I was walking out. “We’ll be outside—the ashtray on the right.”

I made my way to the Borough Hall subway station, where I boarded a Manhattan-bound 4 train and opened the yellow folder I’d been handed at registration. A welcoming letter, a schedule of events, and the rules I’d seen on the tournament Web site filled the right pocket, along with the word counts of each puzzle and a list of constructors—Billy among them. The names appeared in alphabetical order, so there was no way to tell who was responsible for which puzzle, but they read like a who’s who of crossword titans.

I reached into the left pocket, which contained a roster of all preregistered contestants, divided by geographical region.
Wow,
I thought, leafing through the pages. People had come all the way from Oslo and Winnipeg and Caracas for this event. Based on the number of names per sheet, I’d be competing against roughly six hundred others.

And what careers they had. There were slews of computer programmers, an army of teachers, attorneys galore; even a hip-hop impresario. I turned to the section for New York City, which ran nearly four pages long, and found my name. Billy had chosen to list my occupation as “Muse.”

It was official. I was doing this, no matter what the outcome.

I called Hank as soon as I got home. “I’m sorry for running out on you like that.”

“Heck, Dana, I’m glad you did. We shouldn’t both of us had to suffer.” He let out a sigh. “Guess you figured out why I didn’t invite you to that wedding, huh? I had a bad feeling about that guy. Turns out I was right.”

“I wish you’d said something earlier. I’d have understood. I mean, Gordo’s not your kid.”

“No, but he’s married to my kid. That’s plenty bad enough.”

“You know, maybe if you had a talk with Jolene—”

“Ain’t nothing I can say. She’s grown. She made her choice. All’s I can do now is hope that as time goes by, she gets a whole lot more smarter.”

More smarter,
I silently repeated, slowly shaking my head.

We lapsed into silence. Apparently Hank didn’t want to tell me how the rest of the evening had gone any more than I wanted to hear about it.

“So… where are they now?” I asked.

“The back bedroom. Reckon they’re in there watching television.”

“Where are you sleeping?”

“The couch in the front parlor.”

“Do you want to spend the night here instead?”

Finally he managed a laugh. “Scared to. Old Gordo might decide he’s doing me a favor and tear out your staircase while I’m gone.”

“I’m glad you called him,” Elinor Ann said as I made my way to the Union Square subway at a quarter to ten the next morning. “It was the right thing to do. Now, please do yourself a favor and keep up the good behavior.”

“Will you stop worrying?”

“I promise, just as soon as this tournament is over and I hear you’ve managed to stay away from Billy Moody.”

My new best friends weren’t at their designated ashtray when I approached the hotel, so I returned to the grand ballroom and took a seat at the end of a table toward the back. I consulted my watch: twenty-five minutes before Puzzle One was scheduled to begin. Maybe I’d make a quick trip to the ladies’ room to run cold water on my wrists. As I stood to leave, a man strolled by wearing a wedding dress, the fabric of which had been turned into a satin crossword puzzle with the aid of a felt-tipped pen.

I spotted Billy in the center of the lobby when I passed through. He was surrounded; a rock star among mortals.

Perfect,
I thought.
He’ll be far too busy with his groupies this weekend to have any time for me.

But when I exited the ladies’ room, I found him waiting outside the door.

“What happened to you last night?”

“I decided to be smart and get some sleep.”

“Good. Then I can keep you up late tonight.”

“Billy, can you just—give it a rest? I’m nervous enough as it is.”

“Don’t be. You’re going to do just fine.”

And I was fine, as soon as I flipped over Puzzle One a few minutes later. Kevin had assured me it would be easy—“like a Monday”—and when I finished in five minutes and looked up to discover row after row of heads still bent over their papers, my spirits rose.
Maybe I won’t do so badly after all,
I thought.

Until I entered the lobby and encountered a multitude of my fellow solvers, most of whose conversation consisted of phrases such as “Two minutes” and “Three minutes.”

Oh crap.

“Don’t panic,” Kevin said when I found him at the ashtray. The abbreviated length of his cigarette made it obvious he’d finished well ahead
of me. “Those elite solvers can whip through a Sunday puzzle in the time it takes you to finish a Tuesday. You can’t let them psych you out.”

“I’ll try not to. Where’s Patrick?” I said, just before he burst out the door with an agonized
“Fuck!”

“Jook. I can’t
believe
I wrote ‘jook’ instead of ‘jock.’ What the
fuck
is a jook?”

I quickly determined that the ashtray was an excellent spot for allaying—or confirming—one’s deepest fears. By the time I’d completed the Two puzzle with a twelve-minute time bonus, I rushed to the gathering and called out, “Alioto?” How was I supposed to know who the mayor of San Francisco had been in the 1970s?

“You got it—I lived in the Haight back then,” an elderly man wearing a crossword-patterned tie responded, setting off a smattering of groans among the contestants.

“You’re doing great,” Kevin said just before we went in to confront the hazardous Three. “Just don’t forget to cross-check your fill on this one.”

I was glad I’d heeded his advice when I walked out nineteen minutes later—and into the great J-bar kerfuffle.

“There’s no such thing as a J-bar,” Kevin was insisting as I approached.

Of course there is,
I thought. It was a bar, shaped like the letter
J
, used to transport skiers up mountains. Granted, the T-bar was much more common, especially as a fill word, but…

“Then how do you justify ‘toke’ instead of ‘joke’ for ‘It might get a giggle’?” another smoker parried.

“
You
know.” Kevin held two fingers to his lips in the manner of potheads everywhere, setting off gales of laughter—and more than a few impassioned expletives.

“Nice try,” said a bespectacled man with salt-and-pepper hair and a judge’s yellow name tag around his neck.

I exhaled for the first time all morning.

I couldn’t eat during the lunch break, choosing instead to wander up and down nearby Fulton Street in a futile endeavor to clear my head. When I got back to the hotel, the smokers welcomed me as if they’d paid ransom for my safe return. By now we were family. I would have willingly donated a kidney—or, more appropriately, a lung—to any one of them.

Speculation began to brew as we gathered up our folders and went inside to begin the afternoon round.

“Scuttlebutt has it the Five’s a Moody.”

“That’s impossible. He did the Five last year.”

“Well, his name’s on the list of constructors.…”

But Billy wasn’t responsible for the dreaded fifth puzzle. Not that it wasn’t challenging. I stared blankly at the clues for several minutes, refusing to look at the countdown clock, before I cracked the northeast corner. Kevin had been right. It was hard.

But not all that much harder than a typical Saturday puzzle. I filled in the last of the squares with two minutes remaining on the clock and a strong hankering for a cocktail—or twenty.

Billy had been hovering on my side of the room, collecting papers from contestants, for the duration of the tournament, but he always retreated to the judges’ chambers to score puzzles in between rounds. Finally, when I finished the Six—which wasn’t by him, either—with a respectable time bonus, he dashed over to retrieve it.

“Don’t disappear on me tonight,” he whispered. “You hurt my feelings yesterday.”

“We’ll see.”

With a sly smile, he leaned in closer. “By the way, I checked into my room just after lunch—2611, in case you felt like stopping by.”

I walked out of the ballroom, reeling off sets of random numbers in my head in a desperate attempt to addle my memory. No good could come from retaining the information I’d just been given.