Playing Himself by Glenn Deutsch

I’m watching an old TV movie with my daughter, Kira, who’s five and wedged next to me in the easy chair. My wife is reading the Sunday papers in our bedroom. She’s Hilda in Spanish but goes by Ilda because few Minneapolitans understand the H is supposed to be silent. At least our daughter’s name, Kira Garcia Rogoff, gives Ilda three places to trill. Mock-stern, head wagging, hands on her hips, she’ll say, “Kirrra Garrrcia Rrrogoff, I am talking to you.”
    Ilda comes into the living room. “What are you watching?”
    “Tom Sullivan is this blind singer—he’s playing himself.”
    “Yeah. What time will it be over? I’ll have lunch ready.”
    About ten minutes, I say. A second later, as Ilda shuts the bedroom door, a little girl in the movie falls into a swimming pool.
    “I’ll be right back,” I tell Kira, butterflies swarming my gut. I should watch this scene with her, but I go to the kitchen. Something’s up, and I want to hear it.
    I carefully lift the handset on the wall phone.
    A man’s voice, saying, “…you can’t or you don’t want to?”
    “God, I want to,” my wife replies, “but I can’t—not tonight.”
    “Tell me the difference.”
    Stretching the phone cord I check on Kira from the doorway. She hasn’t moved. Sullivan is in the pool trying to rescue the little girl. I turn away, slink back into the kitchen.
    “I want to come over, to be there.” There’s sex in my wife’s voice. “I need it. I haven’t seen you since Wednesday.”
    “I’ll be home around two-thirty,” the man says. He sounds white, educated, about our age, like he could’ve gone to school with me. “The key’ll be in the mailbox. Try to sneak over. I really miss you, babe.”
    “I know, I want you, too. I’ll try, okay?”
    Her declaration turns my stomach chill.
    “Yes,” he says. “Hope to see you you-know-where.”
    Ilda’s “Oh, God” drives the chill into my balls. Then the cold, hollow pain circles up into my bowels.
    I return to my seat in the living room. Kira replants herself between my hip and the chair’s upholstered arm. She rests her head on my chest. The movie is ending. There’s an epilogue. The words crawl up the screen.
    “What’s it say?” Kira asks.
    I start reading. “The incredible swimming pool incident….”
    When the last sentence has rolled by I reflexively pump a jab into the air. I have no idea where the impulse came from, or why I now cry, “Go for it!” But then I realize I do. I’ve just rooted for a blind guy in a sentimental movie. It’s called If You Could See What I Hear. I feel tears prick the back of my eyes, and then I smile a big smile.
    “Daddy,” Kira says.
    “Yes, Kira.”
    “Being a kid, you know, you can’t read—it’s like being blind.”
    I give Kira a concerned look.
    “What?” she says.
    “I think you’re the smartest kid in the whole world.”
    “Mm-hmm, me too,” says Ilda, joining us in the living room.

About the author:
Glenn Deutsch is a doctoral associate in fiction at Western Michigan University. He recently completed a three-year stint as editor of WMU's Third Coast. His short stories have appeared in the New Delta Review, Notre Dame Review, and River City.