sixteen-year-old girl. What can I say? I love the man. I’ve had two loves in my life, and this is the troubled one. So he’s married. Put me in the jail and throw away the key. I didn’t know he was married the night I met him at a party at the Tulsa Country Club (a party for a golf tournament he won the following day). And it’s not my fault that his fat, rich wife sits in their house in Oklahoma City and lets him roam. Roaming—that would be a good nickname for Kane. And I’ll tellyou something else: he would love me to the exclusion of every other woman on the planet if I would be his mistress, but he’d never leave Arlen Vinci Malloy because of her money and their children. The facts are the facts, but I know damn well he loves me. Everyone in Oklahoma knows it, as well as everyone in Arkansas, where he’s from, and anyone anyplace where old football players play golf, and definitely everyone in heaven, where we have to justify these things.
“W HAT ARE YOU doing in town?” I asked, and sat up straight and pulled my shoulders back and down, à la Pilates class, and pushed my lips out and pulled in my stomach, à la Tahlequah High Cheerleading Squad, 1984, not coincidentally the year I found the photographs and learned my father was the brother of the famous writer Anna Hand of Charlotte, North Carolina. It was the year I began to believe I was somebody special and could do anything I dreamed of doing.
“Selling bonds, baby, and spices for my daddy. Same thing I’m always doing.”
“Don’t give me that. You don’t show up in Tulsa three days before the election to peddle bonds. I know who you run with, Kane. So what’s your role, revving up the old professional athletes in general or just the old football heroes? You could have saved the time and money. This state is all red and it’s sewn up unless the student population surprises me by actually voting, which it won’t except for the born-agains.”
“Oh, baby,” he begins. He takes a step nearer to my desk, andI get a whiff of the pheromones and I might as well go on and take off my clothes, since he can do this to me on the telephone, let alone when he’s standing in my office in his perfectly tailored gray slacks and his soft Italian long-sleeved polo shirt—as if clothes could cover that incredible body, as if anything could hide that power and those reflexes and the sheer unbelievable intelligence of his physical being, not to mention the gentleness and pain and courage and intensity, the stillness and quiet and truth, of his great, sweet heart.
“I’m going to talk to some people for the governor. We need some poll watchers. But that isn’t why I’m here. I came to see about you. Are you still mad at me?”
“Sit down. I was never mad at you. I get mad at myself because of you and then I take it out on you. You’re married. I will not have an affair with a married man. I am not going to spend another Christmas waiting for you to come over in the late afternoon. I’ve done it, Kane. I can’t do it anymore.”
“Well, I love you. You know that.” He hung his head, not that it’s possible for him to hang his head because his shoulders are so perfectly designed that they hold his head up like an emperor’s or a king’s. He is the most beautiful man I have ever seen in my life, and he’s half-Chickasaw, from the tribes in the Mississippi Delta, so I recognize as well as love him. Half-breeds, both of us, Irish, Celtic music running with the Indian blood. Mixed blood, the best, the wildest, purest strain there is.
What the hell, I decided. I might as well go on and fuckhim—carpe diem and all that. Life is short and we’re all doomed one way or the other.
“You’re looking good,” he said. “I love it when you don’t put makeup on your face.”
“I got up at five to come down here. How did you know where I was?”
“You weren’t at home and I know you like to work in the early morning. I couldn’t sleep, knowing I
“W HAT ARE YOU doing in town?” I asked, and sat up straight and pulled my shoulders back and down, à la Pilates class, and pushed my lips out and pulled in my stomach, à la Tahlequah High Cheerleading Squad, 1984, not coincidentally the year I found the photographs and learned my father was the brother of the famous writer Anna Hand of Charlotte, North Carolina. It was the year I began to believe I was somebody special and could do anything I dreamed of doing.
“Selling bonds, baby, and spices for my daddy. Same thing I’m always doing.”
“Don’t give me that. You don’t show up in Tulsa three days before the election to peddle bonds. I know who you run with, Kane. So what’s your role, revving up the old professional athletes in general or just the old football heroes? You could have saved the time and money. This state is all red and it’s sewn up unless the student population surprises me by actually voting, which it won’t except for the born-agains.”
“Oh, baby,” he begins. He takes a step nearer to my desk, andI get a whiff of the pheromones and I might as well go on and take off my clothes, since he can do this to me on the telephone, let alone when he’s standing in my office in his perfectly tailored gray slacks and his soft Italian long-sleeved polo shirt—as if clothes could cover that incredible body, as if anything could hide that power and those reflexes and the sheer unbelievable intelligence of his physical being, not to mention the gentleness and pain and courage and intensity, the stillness and quiet and truth, of his great, sweet heart.
“I’m going to talk to some people for the governor. We need some poll watchers. But that isn’t why I’m here. I came to see about you. Are you still mad at me?”
“Sit down. I was never mad at you. I get mad at myself because of you and then I take it out on you. You’re married. I will not have an affair with a married man. I am not going to spend another Christmas waiting for you to come over in the late afternoon. I’ve done it, Kane. I can’t do it anymore.”
“Well, I love you. You know that.” He hung his head, not that it’s possible for him to hang his head because his shoulders are so perfectly designed that they hold his head up like an emperor’s or a king’s. He is the most beautiful man I have ever seen in my life, and he’s half-Chickasaw, from the tribes in the Mississippi Delta, so I recognize as well as love him. Half-breeds, both of us, Irish, Celtic music running with the Indian blood. Mixed blood, the best, the wildest, purest strain there is.
What the hell, I decided. I might as well go on and fuckhim—carpe diem and all that. Life is short and we’re all doomed one way or the other.
“You’re looking good,” he said. “I love it when you don’t put makeup on your face.”
“I got up at five to come down here. How did you know where I was?”
“You weren’t at home and I know you like to work in the early morning. I couldn’t sleep, knowing I
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