The Risk Pool

kitchen like a third base coach. “The week after, then,” I said before handing the phone over to Leigh.
    “Whenever. There’s a little something I want to tell you about, but it’ll keep.”
    I handed the phone to Leigh, but stayed there, thinking about his last elliptical remark and wondering what it could mean. Coyness wasn’t among my father’s usual vices.
    “Are you as sexy as your voice?” I heard him ask Leigh, who motioned for me to go away. Since she’d moved in with me tenmonths before, they always talked when he called. Frequently her conversations with my father were longer than my own. It had taken her a while to get the hang of him, but she thought she had his number now.
    “Sexier,” she said.
    I went into the kitchen and made myself an iced tea.
    “Right now?” I heard her say. “Nothing but a robe. I just got out of the shower … well … don’t ask if you don’t want to know. It’s not my fault if you have a weak ticker.”
    She rolled her eyes at me. It was their usual contest to see who’d get embarrassed first.
    “I don’t know,” she said. “Let me ask.”
    “What?” I said.
    “He wants to know if you’ll take some dirty pictures if he springs for the film?” Then, whispering urgently, “How do I get out of this?”
    “My mother had to move to California.”
    She was listening again, though, and her expression had become serious before she turned her back to me. “No,” she said, then, “I will.”
    I took a sip of tea, added another half teaspoon of sugar, watched Leigh wind strands of wet hair around her index finger. After a minute she turned around again and waved me back in. “He wants to talk to you again.”
    “Do you play golf?” he wanted to know.
    “What?”
    “Golf, dummy, golf.”
    “Yes,” I said, then added. “Not really.”
    “You got clubs?”
    I said I did, as if to prove that he could not so easily diagnose what was wrong with my game.
    “Bring them when you come,” he said.
    “Don’t tell me you’ve taken up golf?”
    “Nah,” he said. “Just some of these guys I’m hanging around with. Couple of them are your age. We ride around in carts, have a hell of a good time.”
    I tried to envision this. “Really?”
    “Just if you want to,” he said. “That’s all.”
    “Incredible,” I said after we’d hung up.
    Leigh came over and sat on my lap. “Share?”
    “Yes. Everything I have.” I gave her the iced tea, which she drained.
    “Why don’t you want to go see your father this weekend?” she said, handing me back the empty glass. “You’ve been busy saying no to parties all week. You’ve never had a freer weekend.”
    Her robe had gapped open at the throat, and I slipped my hand in. “I have every minute planned. By the end of the weekend you will have come to your senses. In short, reconsider the folly of your present position.”
    “Which position is that? The one where I’m sitting on the lumpy lap of a certifiable sicko, or my reluctance to marry said sicko?”
    “The second,” I said, working clumsily at the sash of her robe. “Who taught you how to tie a seaman’s knot?”
    “The other sicko. The one I was married to. He was an expert knot tier.”
    “He tied you up? You never told me things got kinky.”
    “Metaphorically kinky. Because he thought of me as bound, he concluded I couldn’t get away.”
    “You sure showed him,” finally succeeding with the knot and slipping the robe off her shoulders.
    “If you’re planning on taking any pictures for your father,” she said, looking down at her abdomen, which was showing the first signs of swelling, “you better do it soon.”
    Between New York’s Port Authority and the bus station in Poughkeepsie, I sat next to a pugnacious woman from Brooklyn who was visiting her grandchildren. When I made the mistake of telling her that I worked for a publishing house, she immediately tried to pick a fight. “I never read the new books,” she said.
    “It’s a free country,” I said, smiling as sweetly as I knew how and wishing I’d taken the plane. The only reason I hadn’t was that my father would have had to pick me up in Albany. I didn’t know if he still had the killer Subaru, but I wasn’t taking any chances.
    “Too free,” said my companion. “There ought to be a law against these young ones writing about us. They think we were like they are now, jumping from one bed to another. World War Two. Imagine. Jumping from one bed to