Free Aphrodite by Russell Andrews Page B

party. About that he had no illusions. On the other hand, he was always invited to the party because he was appreciative of good food, could talk about the latest novel, was a very good listener, and almost always had a benign smile on his soft and pleasant-looking face.
    That was the surface.
    Inside, he hated smiling while he was bombarded with a constant stream of drivel. He hated all the novels he read and all the food he forced himself to eat at obnoxiously trendy restaurants. He hated almost everything and everyone. Inside, Wallace P. Crabbe was a roiling storm. Had been since he was twelve years old and Tony DeMarco knocked his schoolbooks out of his hands into a big patch of mud, then shoved him into the same mud patch and left, laughing, with his arm around the beautiful and bewitching eleven-year-old Abigail Winters. Wallace had been just about to ask Abigail, who had the most appealing ponytail, to go out to the movies with him. Instead, she went to the movies with Tony DeMarco, and that was when Wallace decided that life was basically unfair and that he was one of the unlucky majority who were going to get screwed over and over again by that very unfairness. But he saw no advantage to griping about it. The more he complained, the greater the chance, he figured, of being shoved into ever deeper and ever dirtier patches of mud.
    By the age of forty-nine, Wallace P. Crabbe had managed to do everything he could to quietly prove his theory to himself and to show that he had zero chance of achieving the slightest bit of happiness. And with each additional proof, Wallace got angrier and angrier.
    Inside.
    He’d been married once, some years ago, and it had lasted six years, until his wife came home and told him she’d been seeing his best friend on the side. Wallace was not happy about losing his wife—she was fairly quiet and easy to be with—but he had to admit he was even unhappier about losing his friend, since he didn’t have all that many to spare. On the outside, he was understanding and rather gracious during the entire divorce process. Inside, he began having fantasies of his ex-wife and ex-friend in combination with such things as meat grinders and crossbows and hunting rifles. At age fifty-two, after his publishing company was absorbed by a huge German conglomerate, he was offered—and told to accept—early retirement. He accepted it gratefully and unhesitatingly and was well paid off. But ever since, he had had dreams about the human resources director who gave him the bad news in which his own hands were wrapped around her pale, too-thick neck and he choked the life out of her.
    Since he’d been laid off, he’d sold his one-bedroom Upper West Side apartment, making a tidy profit, as it was nearly mortgage free, and moved out to Long Island. Not one of the chic places, one of the suburban areas half an hour from the chic places. He got a small ranch-style house with a patch of a backyard and set himself up. Why not? What was in the city for him now? That was an easy one to answer: not much. The move didn’t affect whatever work came his way. He could still get his occasional freelance copyediting assignments, that was no problem. There was less noise, less hassle, less pretension in suburbia. His social life had suffered, no question about that; it was a lot harder to meet people, especially women, but even in the city his social life had been moderately successful at best. Currently, he was seeing a woman who worked at a magazine geared for home gardeners. He found her too angular to be attractive and too obsessed with various subspecies of daylilies to be interesting, but he saw her two or three times a week. Either she cooked a bland meal that he didn’t like or they went to a restaurant where the maître d’ kept them waiting too long before seating them. Through it all, Wallace P. Crabbe kept smiling. But slowly, he began retreating into the world within his 1950s two-bedroom ranch house.
    His