(Story for Writer’s Digest Contest #13 (750 words max)
Prompt: “A man and wife find themselves in reality TV hell.”)
We’d just finished watching the pilot episode of Tustin Heights, and as the credits
and our full names scrolled on the plasma screen, my wife, Candice, rocked and
hugged her legs, clutching a cushion. I slouched and debated whether to get
drunk or get high from the weed my teenage son, I just learned, stashed in his
electric guitar case.
“So, Robby is still smoking marijuana?” I asked.
Candice paused her teetering, nodded, then continued her anxious swaying.
“You smoke with him, don’t you?”
Her eyes closed over her guilt. I’d also discovered, during the show when
Candice and Marilyn, her best friend, were sloshing around drunk in our spa, that
Candice had sexual fantasies about Ramon, our pool guy.
“And, what about Ramon?” I asked.
My wife of 18 years sprang onto her surgically enhanced legs and fled towards
the east wing.
I jammed my fist into my faded khakis, yanked out my cell phone, and powered it
down. I sat on the edge of the couch, bare feet firm on the Italian marble, about
to rip out the main telephone feed when—the phone rang, once, twice, yelling at
me for a third time. I resigned and waited for the machine to pick up.
“Candice? It’s Marilyn. It wasn’t all that bad and you looked fab!” She huffed out a
breath. “Well, don’t forget our tennis date or…is tomorrow pool cleaning day?”
She snickered and hung up.
I chucked a highball tumbler at the answering machine, missed, but it crashed
though the etched glass of the fire place screen. I bit the cork out of a bottle of
Chivas, with what felt like fangs, and spit it at the mirror behind the bar, hitting
myself in the botoxed image of me. I guzzled several jiggers of twelve-year old
scotch, then wiped my dripping mouth with the back of my hand.
The phone rang again. The machine picked up.
“Roger, I can’t believe it. How could you have agreed to participate in that idiotic
television program, after eleven solid years with the firm? I know how our wives
can rope us into these brainless situations, but that wife of yours—”
“Yes, Jeff! What about me?” Candice had obviously listened in. “At least Roger
has the looks to keep a wife like me, you on the other hand are a—”
“Candice,” I screamed, then held out the receiver, sucking on the nipple of the
scotch bottle as if milk fed. I sat the bottle down then asked, “Jeff, are you still
there?” I’d hoped he’d lapsed into cardiac arrest—and died.
“Roger, be in my office at ten sharp and bring boxes.” Slam! He hung up.
I drummed my fingers on the hand-rubbed teak, reminding me of our 45-foot
Ericson, I was too busy to sail.
“Roger.”
Candice called from the hallway. I rolled the butt of the bottle, in a controlled
circular motion, knowing I might grasp and chuck it on the slightest impulse.
“Honey, it’s not what you think,” she said.
Sure it was. I’d live on the boat. She could keep this fricking house and add a
new dimension to our reality show.
Robby burst through the front door.
“Mom! Dad!”
He was out of breath. His worried eyes searched me and my mirrored image.
“Now, we’re chill here,” he took a breath and snuck closer, “about what went
down on that show, right?”
My young man had started to shave. He kept swiping my razor. I’d yelled at him
more than he deserved.
“Roger?” Candice said with a softness I no longer thought her capable of.
“Hey, Dad, let’s get a burger. At your favorite place, okay?” Robby laid his hand
on my shoulder. “Come on, Big Guy.”
“The marijuana, Robby? You’d promised that was over.”
His eyes clutched onto Candice. He detached his hand from me and left my side,
perhaps dreading one of my rants. A drowning sorrow, like a desert torrent,
swept into me, familiar, but this time over powering me. I steadied on trembling
legs, then I choked on a hand-full of gravel I’d apparently swallowed, as I said,
“After tomorrow, my schedule will be clear…and the…the three of us could sail to
Cabo, or even to Puerto Viarta,” I said with a softness I hadn’t said in, perhaps,
years.
The End
Tustin Heights
(2008) (Unpublished)
A Short Story by Russell Traughber
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