The Whore's Child by Richard Russo

remembered how he and his junior high friends—all of them shy, self-conscious, without girlfriends—used to congregate in the shadow of the bleachers to evaluate the girls at Friday night dances. The best ones were taken, naturally, which left the rest. “She’s kind of pretty, don’t you think?” one of his friends, or maybe Martin himself, would venture, and then it would be decided, by popular consensus, if she was or she wasn’t.
    That they were leaving in the morning was a relief to Martin. He preferred the West Coast, and he was looking forward to working on Peter’s new picture, which was to star an actress they’d both worked with shortly after Laura’s death. That script had called for partial nudity, and the actress, who’d recently had a baby, fretted constantly about how she would look. “Trust me,” Peter had told her. “Nobody’s going to see anything. They’re just going to think they do. Because this man”—he pointed to Martin—“is an artist.”
    The next evening, the three of them sat on folding chairs watching the dailies of the scene that had so frightened her. They’d shot only three takes, and midway through viewing the first the actress—she
was
one of the most beautiful women Martin had ever laid eyes on, and never more beautiful than right then—began to relax, intuiting that it was going to be all right. Still, he couldn’t have been more surprised when she took his hand there in the darkness, leaned toward him and whispered, without ever taking her eyes off the screen, “Oh, I love you, I love you, I love you.”

The Farther You Go
    I’ve cut only a couple of swaths when I have to shut the damn thing down because of the pain. It’s not dagger pain, but deep, rumbling, nausea pain, the sort that seems to radiate in waves from the center of my being. There are those who think that a man’s phallus
is
the center of his being, but I have not been among them until now.
    From inside the house Faye heard me shut off the mower, and now she’s come out onto the deck to see why. She shades her eyes with a small hand, scout fashion, to see me better, though the sun is behind her. Ours is a large yard and I’m a long way off. “What’s wrong?” she calls.
    I’d like to tell her. It’s a question she’s asked on and off for thirty years, and just once I’d like to answer it.
My dick
is throbbing,
I’d like to call out, and if we had any neighbors within hearing, I believe I would, so help me. But to prevent that we’ve bought two adjacent lots. Regrets? I’ve had a few. I mow their yards and my own.
    “Nothing,” I call to Faye. It’s my standard line. Nothing is wrong. Go ahead, just try to find something that’s wrong. If something were wrong, I constantly assure her, I’d say so, always amazed at how readily this lie springs to my lips. I’ve never in my life told her when anything was wrong, and I have no intention of telling her about my throbbing groin now. She already spent a thousand dollars we didn’t really have on a riding mower simply because the doctor insisted I not “overdo it” so soon after the operation. It didn’t occur to her that for a man recovering from prostate surgery, sitting on top of a vibrating engine might not be preferable to gently guiding a self-propelled mower. I can hardly blame her for this failure of imagination since it didn’t occur to me either until I was aboard and in gear.
    I start up the mower again and cut a long loop back to the base of the deck, stopping directly below her and turning the engine off for good.
    “You’re finished?”
    “You can’t tell?” I say, looking back over the yard. I appear to have cut a warning track around a fenceless outfield, and am now sitting on home plate.
    “Why are you perspiring?”
    It’s true. There is autumn in the air, and no reason whatsoever to be sweating, cast about as I might. “It’s a beauty,” I say, slapping the steering wheel affectionately. “Worth every