See? she told herself. No one is here. Her apartment door was locked when she came in just now. The front door was locked downstairs.
What could he possibly want with her out of all the women in the world anyway?
She was no longer the beauty she'd been at eighteen. She didn't want to be pretty and mostly avoided the temptation of trying to be.
Pretty had ruined her life.
She walked through the bedroom door.
1
On the morning of what was going to be his first day at his new job, a good-looking, well-built man with his hair trimmed to just over his ears stood in front of his bedroom closet in a pair of Jockey shorts. He pulled a T-shirt from the top of a large pile of them on their special shelf. Putting it on, he checked himself in the dresser's mirror, sucked in an imagined gut, then turned around with a small flourish. The T-shirt read: SHOTGUN WEDDING: A CASE OF WIFE OR DEATH.
"No." His girlfriend sat up against the bed's headboard. "Absolutely not."
"I like it," he said.
"Wes, you like them all."
"True. It's a foolish man who buys a shirt he doesn't like."
"It's a more foolish man who goes to work as the district attorney of San Francisco wearing a shirt that can only be misinterpreted, and will be."
"By who?"
"Everybody. And all for different reasons."
"Sam." Wes walked across the room, sat on the bed, and put a hand on her thigh. "Nobody's going to see it. It's not like I'm wearing it outside with my tie. And besides, if I have a heart attack and they have to rip open my dress shirt and somebody sees it, so what? It's not exactly inflammatory. It's just a pun, for God's sake."
"It's not just a pun. It's a political statement."
"Saying what?"
"That you're in favor of shotgun weddings. That getting married isn't sacred. That you don't think women are equal. Pick one. That you're not sensitive enough in a general way."