Delmarva Review: Gold Digger by Leslie Pietrzyk

Author’s Note: “Gold Digger” explores how two characters met and ended up together, with the twist that each is a “type” we think we understand: the beautiful woman and the elite athlete. Reader sympathy often doesn’t extend to wealthy, accomplished people who seem to skate through life problem-free, so that’s the challenge: how to find the way into a core vulnerability that’s present—if hidden—that makes us all human?

Gold Digger

IT’S FOUR A.M., which someone told you is the loneliest hour, when people are most honest. His footsteps stalk the hallway, heading from his recliner in the den to the kitchen for more chips to another day. Heading from pills to booze, booze to pills. Heading into the end or the beginning of the end or maybe only the middle of whatever this love is. 

Once upon a time… 

“I LIKE YOUR SENSE OF DISCOVERY,” is the first meaningful compliment he gave, or maybe the first you remembered. The words flushed and warmed martini-tipsy you. 

“Sense of discovery,” you said, leaning forward, letting him discover cleavage in the dress you’d bought that afternoon, exactly for this moment tonight. 

“Really,” he said. 

This was your second time out, and the first was only a fix- up by one of his old girlfriends, your yoga instructor. “I have a feeling,” she’d said. “You two need each other.” 

“Not much of a basis for a relationship,” you joked, but she raised one hand: 

“Au contraire.” She’d lived eight years in Cannes—she place-dropped constantly. So pompous, which made you trust her. She said, “Need is the basis of everything.” 

You agreed: give him your number. A month later, a text asking to meet for a drink that night at a hotel bar you knew. Fascinating. Who’d be so rude? On purpose? Or unintentional? You immediately typed back one letter—a lowercase k—an obnoxious response, chosen purposefully. 

You were fourteen minutes late, prepared to enjoy a martini on your own, but there he was, beside the maître d’ stand: “I was ready to wait all night,” he said, “but thanks for not making me.” 

Everyone in the place recognized him. People interrupted continuously for pictures and stories, so real conversation never got going—surely intentional, how to hide in plain view. His way to not-fail, same as the ridiculous last-minute invitation, setting up things that by design shouldn’t succeed. It was a juicy thought, that you both valued the sensation of feeling successful—yet went about achieving success in entirely different ways. You remember staring in the bathroom mirror in the ladies’ room that night, thinking, I’m not bored yet. When you returned to the bar, he looked straight at you and said, “I’m not bored yet.” 

This second venture was more complicated: dinner for two in a private wine cellar room in a buzzy steakhouse. He was there when you walked in, exactly nine minutes late, though he hadn’t passed through the front door because you arrived twenty minutes early, paying the Uber driver to sit and wait while you watched from the backseat, feeling stood up. Startling to see him when you walked in, though you arranged your Mona Lisa smile as you murmured, “So sorry I’m late. I’m terrible.” 

He stood, seeming to fill the room. “Are you?” he said, and you wondered, was the question are you late or are you terrible? 

You said, “I’m both.” 

On the table: a martini shaker nestled in a bowl of crushed ice, decanted wine, a cold seafood tray. No waiter would appear for a while. You couldn’t have planned it better yourself, and you had the sensation of being here for a job interview, not a date. 

He gestured you into the seat opposite where he sat, the two of you directly across from each other, centered at a long, narrow table that could have been set for twelve. Candles flickered. Your heart thumped. You wanted this job, you suddenly thought, no, needed this job, whatever it would turn out to be. 

Not that it would do to say so.

You said, “Looks like you’re trying to impress me.”

“Are you?” he said. “Impressed?”

Your almost-imperceptible shrug. “I’d be a fool not to be, right? Big-deal football star, candles.”

He frowned, and you narrowed your eyes. Where was the miscalculation?

“That’s who I am,” he asked, “a big-deal football star?” 

“Who am I? A pretty face?”

“You are pretty,” he said.

“You did play football.” You recited the outline of his career: Nebraska, Super Bowls, the long career that trailed off into irrelevancy on the sidelines, the fans begging him to quit, his defiant refusal to leave the game, the career numbers that only almost add up to Canton. 

“Most people only talk about the Super Bowls,” he said. “Or the scandals.” There was his famous smile. Heady. An invitation to peg him as the naughty boy. Of course you knew the scandals. Barely scandalous by today’s standards, you argued in your head. You liked his pride in the scandals, his steakhouse extravaganza. Both earnest and ironic, a nifty trick. 

“Why’d you keep playing?” you asked.

He sighed.

“How could you be happy as the backup after being the man for years?”

“Who says I was happy during any of it?” he asked.

The silence wasn’t uncomfortable.

“Are you bored yet?” he asked with a charming smirk. 

“You’ll know when I am.”

On like that as you both peeled shrimp and slurped oysters—“I bought the GQ with your fashion spread,” you confess, “and taped the cover in my locker”—this faux rom-com banter passing for conversation and wit. “I always win,” he said. And you said, “But I never lose.” You could do this in your sleep, and surely so could he. 

Finally, you said, “Tell me one thing I wouldn’t know unless you told me, one thing not found off a Google search.” 

“Did you do a Google search?”

“Didn’t you?”

“Nah,” he said. “Sometimes I like to let what’s going to happen, happen.”

“Even if I’m an axe murderer?” you say.

“That doesn’t scare me,” he said.

“Then what does scare you?” you asked.

“Questions like that,” he said.

You shrugged. “I don’t have to ask them.”

“I didn’t say stop,” he said. “I said they scare me. What scares you?”

You paused. People rarely turn questions backward. People like talking about themselves; you rely on that.

Just as you were about to respond with “mice,” he said, “Go ahead, give some bullshit answer like most people.”

“I try not to be most people,” you said.

“Same,” he said.

You clinked his martini glass with yours. Proper gin martinis: clear, not cloudy, no tiny ice chips. That clarifying jolt. 

“Is this going well?” he asked.

You nodded, said lightly, “I see great things ahead.” 

“That’s what scares me,” he said. “When everything’s going too good.”

The waiter came. More martinis. Salads. Steaks ordered. And then:

“What scares me,” he said, the now empty martini glass couched between his two middle fingers, mesmerizingly so, “what scares me….” His pupils seemed to grow and grow in the middle of those ice-blue eyes; his eyes felt so large that you almost gasped. Yes, you were drunk. Yes, you were going to go somewhere and fuck, or maybe that was going to be right here, in a minute, soon—you breaking all your careful rules. Like grabbing a fish with bare hands instead of a hook, bait, a net; instead of carefully reeling in the line. Just diving right in. You weren’t someone who dove right in. You’re about to dive in. The feeling was intoxicatingly breathable: like cool air. 

“What scares you?” you whispered, afraid he’d break the spell by chirping that you scared him, hoping he would, so you could carefully slip back into banter and more banter. Really, weren’t you here to edge predictably and safely into his money and his life? Wasn’t that the task at hand? Stay until you got bored, then move yourself on to a better thing after getting a baby and a settlement. (No shame in taking care of yourself.) Your muscles turned as taut as a cat’s. Don’t screw this up, you thought, don’t talk, don’t talk.

“What scares me is that without football, I’m no one,” he said. “That’s what I’ve been afraid of my whole fucking life without the balls to admit.” He looked straight at you, into you, a dare. 

The right things to say were heat lightning, empty flash charging through you: sympathy, empathy, comfort, brisk words to fix-it-all-up-and-wrap-it-with-a-bow; me too! That’s what we’re all afraid of, even if we don’t admit it. 

There’s a job at hand, you think, do your damn job. 

You match the intensity of his pale eyes and say, “You can tell me anything. You can tell me who you really are. I’m not afraid of you.” 

And that’s when he gave the line about discovery. That’s when he admired your cleavage. That’s when you bent over that long table, hiking up your new dress, hoping he was worth smashing all your rules for, not his money and his life, but him. The man who dared admit such a fear, who needed someone to know who he really was. How did you, of all people, not know that what you needed was to care about someone? To say, for once, fuck the job. 

♦

Leslie Pietrzyk is the Featured Writer for Fiction for the 16th annual edition of the Delmarva Review. Her awards include a Pushcart Prize in 2020, and her flash story, “Gold Digger,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2023. A collection of linked stories set in DC, Admit This to No One, was published in 2021 (Unnamed Press). This Angel on My Chest, her first collection of stories, won the 2015 Drue Heinz Literature Prize. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in Gettysburg Review, Story Magazine, Hudson Review, Southern Review, , Iowa Review, Ploughshares, The Sun, The Washington Post Magazine, and Delmarva Review, among others. Website: https://www.lesliepietrzyk.com/ 

Delmarva Review is a literary journal with strong local roots. With a national and local presence, it gives writers a home in print and digital editions for the most compelling new prose and poetry at a time when many commercial publications have closed their doors or are reducing literary content. Editors cull through thousands of submissions annually to select the best of new poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. The review is available from major online booksellers and regional specialty bookstores. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org

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