bespectacled secretary Reena reaching toward each other across a mahogany desk, folders, pens and other office paraphernalia captured in mid-flight after having been pushed off by greedy, impatient hands. The excerpt read, “She touched his beefy chest, slid her hand down the front of his $300 Brooks Brothers dress trousers. ‘Looks like the stock market is up,’ she purred.”
Wild Card is about Jack, a handsome card sharp with unnaturally large biceps, and Keira, the casino owner’s daughter, a dark-eyed brunette who for some reason has playing cards spilling from her cleavage as she turns from his embrace. I tried to predict what the excerpt would say as I shuffled to the kitchen for another beer: “Jack stared at Keira’s bosom for a moment before saying, ‘That’s quite a pair’” or “Keira slid her tongue across Jack’s throbbing abs and said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll raise you.’”
I MET SHELBY WHEN SHE brought her car into Merrick Chrysler where I manage the body shop. Normally I don’t pay much attention to traffic in the garage, but I heard her car before I even saw it. It was a new Sebring, its front and back so far out of alignment they should have been on separate vehicles. The metal, twisted beyond even my comprehension, groaned as she slowly wheeled into the fifth bay. Everyone in the shop turned and stared as she clacked toward the intake station in her too-tall heels, one of which promptly caught in a drainage grate, tipping her forward onto the oil-stained concrete.
“Easy,” I said, not to her but as a warning to the porters—a couple of high school punks who spent their lunch hours smoking weed out back–not to let her see them laughing. I helped her up, and what amazed me most was that she wasn’t the least bit embarrassed, a trait, I now realize, not uncommon in romance writers. She said that she had locked her brakes on I-84 after looking up to see a jackknifed semi before her, sending her car into three spins before it settled neatly against the median. Who doesn’t notice a flipped semi on the freeway in front of them?
She asked if I could fix the car and I scratched my head because I was confounded not only by the car—how had she driven it from the accident site to the dealership?—but by her. “How long will it take?” she chirped.
“Well,” I said, “we’re going to have to look at that frame, see if we can get it on a straightener—”
“Will it be done today?” She smiled. “I have a blind date tonight!”
This was Shelby, a woman who could not see a crisis if it slammed her in the head and then rode over her. A fire in the kitchen? We’ll eat out! A sick friend? I’ll donate a kidney! An earthquake? I’ll get a broom! I was drawn to her immediately, her confidence, her cheerfulness, her limping around her mangled car with a broken heel, pointing out the obvious: This door won’t shut! This wheel is bent! It’s all crooked! She was unlike the other women I had dated, whose dispositions collectively suggested that the world had offended them in extreme and unforgivable ways. I offered to drive her home, I made her vehicle a top priority, I even gave her a box of tree-shaped car fresheners. Who had I become? For the first time in my life, an optimist. To the dismay of my mechanics, I demanded they put the lopsided Sebring on the straightener and pull that little car like taffy. This was no small task as the car seemed to have taken to its deformity and put up a damn good fight.
I asked her out to dinner that very night, surely a poor substitute for her blind date, one I would work to keep her from rescheduling. Sure, I’d just been dumped by the latest in a long line of girlfriends who had ultimately found that I was either too boring or too distant, which when you think about it is really the same thing. But Shelby’s optimism, viewed against the darkly brooding women I’d recently dated, was attractive, contagious even. So we went to Joe’s Crab Shack and watched apathetic teens sing uninspired versions of “Happy Birthday” to tables of screaming kids and senior citizens who looked by turns confused and ecstatic. Then I drove her home to an apartment building about three miles from my house, the Garden Arms, which, from what I could tell, had neither.
“This was really nice of you,” she said.
“Well, I had to eat.”
“Still.”
“Maybe I could pick you up in the morning, drive you to work.”
“Oh,” she said before staring at me as if looking at my face long enough would reveal whether I was a serial killer. Finally, she asked for my number. “Can I call you later and let you know?”
“Not a problem,” I said.
She did call that night, and the night after and the night after that. For the next week I drove her to At a Fast Clip where she bleached hair and cut bangs and generally made women happy for what remained of their day. When her car was ready I didn’t tell her, instead making up stories about a faulty part or a failed alignment test. Sure, I was starting to like her, even if she was short and about ten pounds over the red line on the imaginary scale in my head. She was perky and consistently interested in everything I said.
Before long Shelby and I were inseparable, spurring each other on to new heights of buoyancy. The mechanics eyed me suspiciously as they chewed on the donuts I brought to work each morning, and my mother was convinced I’d been diagnosed with a terminal disease when I started calling her twice a week to inquire about her bunions. My friends stopped inviting me for beers when I proved to be too cheerful in the face of their personal calamities: nagging wives, spiteful bosses, ungrateful kids. I didn’t care; I had Shelby, my mainline to euphoria. If someone had told me that I would one day be reading my ex-girlfriend’s romance trash on the Internet, I would have clapped him on the back and bet my life savings he was wrong.
But there I was, staring through the saloon doors spanning the cover of Three on a Stallion, which featured a bosomy, befeathered redhead posed between a half-dressed cowboy and a Boss Hogg type replete with bolo tie and gold-encrusted pinkie ring. Where’s the horse? I wondered.
The double meaning of No Man’s Land was not lost on me: a defiant blond in full camo, hands on hips, looking haughty and disinterested as men dressed in sailor suits, dress blues, olive drabs, Flak jackets and riot gear gaze from a confusing collage of desert, ocean and sky in the background. The tagline for this one read, “It had been years since a man had crossed Terra’s border and that’s just the way she liked it. That is, until Malkham invaded.”
I tried to read some of the excerpts on her site, but when I saw the words “Tanner pulled the coverlet down to reveal Ciara’s shapely legs, his eyes tracing their curves up toward her womanhood,” I slammed down the last of my Bud and stumbled into bed. I didn’t dream of her, but if I had it would have gone something like this: Shelby glaring at me, disappointment spilling from her pores before the machete in her hand cleaves off my penis. You don’t need a Freudian therapist to unravel that.
When I went to my mother’s the next day she accosted me before I had even removed my jacket. “I have a thought,” she bellowed.
“What’s up?” I asked as I plopped onto a kitchen chair, resigned to cold rigatoni and an unfailing exuberance that was hard to bear without Shelby beside me, smiling, encouraging my mother to share bodily emission updates, coupon-savings totals, the escapades of Mr. Bojangles, a flea-bitten, imperious cat that seemed intent on disfiguring my face.
“You remember Mrs. Candello?”
I searched my memory banks, knowing it was entirely possible that she did not exist there. Lately my mother has grown forgetful, repeating the same stories, misplacing her thyroid pills, believing that our shared history is so entwined that our list of acquaintances must be identical. “No,” I said, “can’t say that I do.”
“From the grocery store?”
I shook my head.
“Bingo?”
This went on for several minutes until I deduced that Mrs. Candello had a daughter near my age who was in dire need of a date.
“Mom, I don’t want to go on a date.”
“Well, of course you do!”
I