‘First Heat’ by Peter Taylor

First Heat by Peter Taylor, 1968

The magic trick:

Driving the story at the notion of something salacious before revealing a problem far more complicated

P is for Peter Taylor.

“First Heat” takes us inside the hotel room of a state senator. Even scarier, it puts us inside the thoughts and worries of said senator.

He is feeling uneasy and guilty. The story does an excellent job of teasing the reader with the source of that guilt. Is it a political scandal? Corruption? Is he cheating on his wife?

Turns out, it’s probably something less salacious and yet all the more difficult.

And that’s quite a trick on Taylor’s part.

The selection:

He could hear his own voice in the Senate Chamber that afternoon. Not his words, just his guilty voice. Suddenly he got up off the bed, pulled back the spread, the blanket, the top sheet. He threw himself down on his back, stuck his legs in the air, and pulled off his shorts. They were wringing wet with his damnable perspiration! He wadded them into a ball and, still lying on his back, still holding his legs in the air, he hurled the underwear at the ceiling, where it made a faintly damp spot before falling to the carpeted floor. And she – she would already know what his voice in the Senate Chamber had said. (His legs still in the air.) And knowing how the voting went, know who betrayed whom, who let whom down, who let what bill that was supposed to go through intact be amended. It would all have been reported on the local six o’clock state news, perhaps even with his taped voice uttering the words of betrayal.

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