This Blue Ball | Page 4

notion that he was hungry for human contact, a treatment that this experiment provided in droves.
One day the payoff came. He was talking to a woman, almost his age, dignified and haggard from work and single parenthood, and she smiled at something he said, and Gary let fly: "Would you mind if I came by sometime and took you and your son to dinner?" She looked at him in a moment of surprise and suspicion, as if he might already be showing signs of regretting his invitation. But when she saw nothing of the kind, perhaps even a bit of pride in himself, she relented and said that that would be nice. Playing them over in his mind, Gary felt that there had never been more powerful words spoken -- quite a while, for a good hour, until he found himself repeating them ad naseum on the drive home, and sensed that irony was mixing itself in. He turned up the radio and tried to think about something else.
He didn't know how to prepare for such an unusual outing, so he didn't. He made it out in his mind to be an everyday occurrence to take out a fellow parishioner and her young son. They had agreed on a Thursday dinner. On Wednesday, he swore that he would reduce the dissonance between the church persona and that fatuous, porno-watching, beer-guzzling bachelor that inhabited his home. At work, his new moral outlook led him to book the tickets to see his mother and his senile grandmother in Los Angeles sometime later that spring. But the promise dissolved that very night into a decision that he was better off following routine. He fell asleep to the sights and sounds of a tired, listless humping on the big screen TV in his living room.
No. 3 -- Flash forward two years. Gary Corinth was working, but also following a bit of virtual seduction in a chatroom -- someone playing the role of a young female being seduced for the first time -- when the phone rang. It was about 10 in the morning, on an unremarkable workday. The caller ID was blocked so he figured it was a cold-call sales pitch, and he picked up the phone expecting to fling a curse at the other end and hang up. He barked his usual greeting, "Corinth," and waited for the beginning.
There was a pause. "Gary?" said a voice suddenly.
The mind, you discover in moments like these, is an incredibly dull version of a sharp, sharp tool. Gary knew in an instant who it was, but he felt unable to place it: 'Alice? She can't be calling me. We haven't spoken in almost two years, and unless she has my grandmother standing in her doorway, she has no reason to call me.' He waited until something made more sense to him.
The voice said, "I know you're surprised to hear from me."
"No," he replied, hoarsely, "it's great to hear from you."
His mind zoomed through a hundred possibilities but came to rest on the least likely -- Alice had missed him terribly, all this time, and wanted him, and was on her proverbial knees asking his forgiveness...
"I'm calling for Andrew," she said, anticipating the ambiguities the call might bring up but unable to bring herself to lead with this.
"Okay -- no problem," he said with his voice trailing off. After a moment, when he realized that his expression couldn't give him away, he asked: "How is he?"
"Andrew is fine," she replied, in a tone to indicate that the quality of his care was not at issue.
"Good. -- Good."
In the brief moment before she continued, Gary could hear her inhale, even through the telephone's thin connection. That already told a great deal about the misgivings and pressure she felt. She was calling on Andrew's behalf, but about something that worried and concerned her. Only her interest in Andrew could resurrect Gary from the ash heap of her personal history -- Gary understood that much about her.
"Something very strange happened last night with Andrew's computer, and you are the only person I could think of" -- another chance to distance herself -- "whose opinion I could trust." The last word was the point of this conversation, a declaration of need most of all, but it still felt good, and reduced the size of a lump forming in his throat. She went on: "Last night, about 3 in the morning, Andrew woke me up -- I thought that he was sick. He was all sweaty and his eyes were red, but he wasn't warm and he said he felt fine. He asked me to come look at his computer monitor --" She paused again, this time not for her sake. "The monitor was glowing, Gary, just glowing, in a way I've