Girl on the Best Seller List by Vin Packer Page B

the racket to Dave Pompton. Pompton was a huge fellow, Mickey Lewis’s age, with muscles that were short and bunchy like a weightlifter’s or a furniture mover’s. He was a good baseball player, with ambitions to become a professional, but with all the quick stops and starts in the game, he was always pulling and tearing the muscles. Milo had gotten him to take up swimming for his arm and leg muscles, pushups for his back, and tennis to coordinate everything.
    “How’s everything coming now?” said Milo.
    “I think I’m getting there. I feel loose, no kidding.”
    “You’ll be fine, Dave. You know Moose Skowron had your trouble.”
    Dave Pompton laughed. “You mean
I
had his trouble, don’t you?”
    “You’ll be better than Moose if you hit the way you did last Monday!”
    “Thanks, Mr. Wealdon,” Mickey Lewis called as Milo walked away from the inside of the court. Dave’s thanks echoed Mickey’s. Then before the pair resumed their game, Milo heard Mickey say, “He ought to have kids.”
    “With her?” was Dave’s answer.
    • • •
    Milo went back by the benches and continued to watch Mickey. He watched him charge the net a few times, and saw him handle the racket shift adequately. He watched Dave’s muscles flex as he reached for the high balls, and while he watched, he kept hearing the last words Dave had spoken: With
her?
Like a broken record: With
her?
With
her? Her?
    He wished, in some ways, that Gloria had consented to have a child with him. He knew all the psychologists and moralists and arm-chair philosophers claimed a child needed the love of both parents, parents who were in love; but when he thought of Freddy Fulton and his daughter, he wished he had a son or a daughter himself. In many ways, Freddy’s kid was more similar to Edwina Dare in her personality than she was to Fern. Virginia was bright and shy and retiring, and probably never going to be very pretty — but she
was
real. Milo supposed it was particularly unkind of him even to have the thought that Freddy’s daughter was like Freddy’s ex-love. (Ex? No, that was just a convenient way of stating the fact she was no longer visible in Freddy’s life, but she would always be there, Milo guessed.) But Milo often wished he had even that much, some human reminder that his personality had been integrated into something more than soap sculptures, or shrubbery, or kids that came back after they’d been graduated from college and said, Do you remember me, Mr. Wealdon? and shook his hand and were glad to see him again.
    Gloria had always said very bluntly, “I wouldn’t be afit mother, Milo. I hate children,” and he could hardly disagree with her about the impracticality of their having any. But he quite often mourned the missed opportunity, and though he was not one to really brood over past mistakes, occasionally, when he reflected on his own shortcomings, he was sorry that he had never discouraged that trait in him which was responsible for his having confused love and pity to such an extent.
    He had read somewhere that love and hate had the same opposite — indifference. He had never been able to be indifferent to Gloria, not from the first moment he had seen her standing alone in that crowd at Cornell, looking sullen and sadly neglected. He supposed that what he felt even now, whenever someone laughed at her or showed her up, or even thought of him as a fool to stand by her — whatever made him still want to shield her, made him feel the inner twinge of anger at others’ abuse of her — must no longer have to do with his love for her; rather, now, it had to do with his hatred for her. Because the fact remained, he was not indifferent to Gloria.
    He was standing there pondering this when Roberta Shagland drove up in her tiny Volkswagen. It was an old model, not a convertible, and Milo didn’t know why he felt sorry about
that,
but he did. She looked all the more large (though she was really not a big woman) as she got out