Homicide My Own - Anne Argula [34]
A week passed. He thought about her as he worked on computer systems. He was experienced with UNIX, AIX, HPUX, LINUX, all those things. He had a girlfriend, Clare, a tenured middle school Spanish teacher, who wanted to get married. She was twenty-nine and not at all unattractive, with rich red hair and a soft plump body and a sense of humor and a big heart and a good head on her shoulders. Houser was anxious that he would eventually marry her.
The next Sunday, in church, he changed his seat so that he better would be in that funny teen-age girl’s line of vision and they could play their game of smiles and looks. Each Sunday after, he made sure to arrive just at the start of the processional hymn and to find a seat close to hers.
One Sunday, after the service, while her mother was chatting on the steps of the church with the pastor, and Houser was standing at a distance watching, the girl came to him, and her walk was girlish and enchanting, and her yellow hair was in the breeze, and her lips were curled in a conspiratorial grin, and all she said was, “Hi,” and all he said back was, “Hi,” and he was gone, in her control, captured by her youth and beauty and innocence. It was a moment he had never imagined and had no defenses against. He adored her.
Before long, she was visiting him at his apartment, in the evenings and on weekends, and that is where Clare discovered them together and was outraged, first confronting Charles, who admitted he was powerless against the charms of this young girl, and soon after filing a report with the police. He was arrested and released on five-thousand dollars bail, put up by his parents. Stacey was at his apartment when he returned, telling him she could not live without him. They ran.
“But you had never had sex?” asked Odd.
“No.”
“You were in love with her?” he asked.
“I was, I am, I always will be,” he said.
“And she’s in love with you?”
“She’s much older than fourteen, in many ways,” he said.
“Sure she is,” said I. “People who are in love express it, physically. I mean, you can’t help it, when you’re in love.”
Listen to me, expressing it physically. Like I knew.
“I know that,” he said. “We kissed.”
“You kissed?”
He looked at me like, what’s wrong with that?
“A kiss is the glory of the universe,” he said. “A kiss is the most beautiful and satisfying of all physical encounters. We kissed all the time. It was like food and drink to us.”
I wanted to spit, but before I could work it up or aim it, Odd asked, “Did you teach her to kiss?”
“We taught each other.”
“What’s to learn?” said I.
“Oh, there’s a world to learn.”
“And…where did you kiss?” asked Odd.
“Everywhere.”
“I mean, did you kiss her…toes?”
“Yes, her toes, all over, every part of each other, we kissed,” said Houser, dreamily.
The chief, who had made himself wood, much like Odd had been trying to explain to me on the trip here, now showed signs of warping and cracking. I was getting a little bent out of shape myself. Kissing where?
“What would you say, Charles,” said Odd, “if I told you that Stacey was only using you, that she has a boyfriend her own age, that what she won’t do with you, she does with him, and that she isn’t a virgin at all?”
What color the broth had brought to Houser’s face now paled, and his hands started to shake, his teeth clamped down, and if he had not been weak and in bed I would swear that mild mannered Charles Houser, half-believer in God and Heaven and Hell, was capable of murder at that moment.
This false scenario Odd used to provoke Houser