cocktail hour, and I was about to fill the aluminum tumbler I usually brought with me into the outdoor shower when she called me on the phone.
“Don’t you have to give me a credit card number if you’re going to talk to me in the nude?” she asked.
“I got rid of those things. I’ll have to send you a check.”
“Just bring it over when you come tonight.”
“Tonight?”
“I have some research findings to share. We have a deal, and I have an assortment of hors d’oeuvres, a patio and a full liter of that industrial solvent you drink on the rocks.”
“Okay.”
“Come as you are.”
The evening was warm enough to keep the windows down in the Grand Prix on the way over to Rosaline’s condominium on the east side of the Village. The sky was mostly deep blue with a bank of charcoal-gray clouds along the eastern horizon. It made for a theatrical backdrop behind the oak trees, whose fresh, light green leaves were lit up by the low angle of the sun. As I passed Hawk Pond, I could see the flags at Hodges’s marina hard out behind a stiffer easterly than the movement of the oak leaves would suggest. The surface of the water in the shallow harbor was filled with miniature blue-gray, chrome-tipped waves on which a small flock of seagulls bobbed in place as if tethered to tiny moorings.
The fresh spring air reminded me I was out of cigarettes, so I stopped at the convenience store on County Road 39. The Asian guys who ran the place had two registers going serving a steady crowd of lawn cutters, group renters and plutocrats out picking up toothpaste, six-packs of beer and quarts of half-and-half.
Back when I used to visit the Arnolds, I got in the habit of bringing the old man a magazine or a newspaper —a different one every time. I visited enough that it got difficult to be original. That’s why I had my head buried in the magazine racks until I came up with a copy of the
He had a large cup of coffee and a gigantic sugared confection. Looked like road food, but before I could wish him a good trip back to the City, he was engaged with the guy at the register. He put the coffee cup and heart- choking cinnamon roll on the counter and then dropped a twenty-dollar bill on top of the cup’s plastic lid. After the guy at the register starting ringing him up, Hayden interrupted him and asked if he could throw in a roll of Tums. When the guy turned around to pluck the Tums out of a small display behind the counter, Hayden slid the twenty off the coffee lid and replaced it with a ten. The guy put the roll of Tums down on the counter and punched at the register.
“Out of twenty,” he said, palming the ten without looking at it and pulling another ten and a few small bills out of the drawer.
Hayden busied himself collecting his booty and making a quick break for the door, so he still didn’t know I was there until I caught up to him climbing into one of those weird little SUVs that remind me of a Reebok sneaker.
Before he could snap on his seat belt, I jumped into the passenger seat and shut the door.
“Did I ever tell you about my mother’s theory on littering?” I asked him, reaching over and sliding his keys out of the ignition.
“Whoa, Sam,” he said. “You startled me. And no, never a word about your mother. And what’s with the keys?”
“Her theory was that anyone who litters is an incipient murderer. Killers in training. She thought if a person had so little concern for common civility that he’d throw a piece of trash on the ground, that he’s on the path to sociopathic disregard for the consequences of his behavior. And the trip from common thoughtlessness to depravity is little more than a short hop.”
“Interesting,” he said, still eyeing his keys in my hand. “I think there’ve been studies along those lines. None of which would support your mother’s hypothesis.”
“Yeah, well that’s the kind of shit they used to say about Sigmund Freud, and look at him now.”
“Disgraced?”
“He agreed with my mother that people could represent themselves as one thing, even to themselves, while actually being something entirely different.”
“You seem to have given this a lot of thought,” said Hayden.
“Just in the last couple minutes. People used to tell me that I’d never make it to the top if I didn’t play golf. Even though I never had time to learn, I always liked the idea of the game. Nice landscaping, not a lot of sweat, nobody trying to knock your block off like they did in the sport I was more familiar with. Plus it involved hitting a ball into a hole, something I’d learned as a kid hanging around pool halls. A little different, but maybe there were some transferable skills.”
“I’ve played golf. Nothing like pool. Sorry.”
“Then you’re probably a scratch golfer. A lot of pool hustlers are.”
“I didn’t think that cue ball aimed at my head was an accident.”
“Reflexes never lie.”
“No harm in letting my lover win a few games of pool.”
“Don’t make the mistake of thinking he doesn’t know,” I told him.
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Just what I said. Give me that ten in your pocket so I can bring it back to the guys in the convenience store. Then I’ll give you back your keys.”
“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” he said, rearing back in affront.
I gestured to him to fork over the bill, which he did, despite the look on his face.
“This doesn’t mean that things won’t work out for you,” I told him as I climbed out of his ridiculous vehicle. “Just don’t forget, I’m watching.”
“Until they send you to prison for the rest of your life,” he called to me as I walked across the parking lot.
I turned and walked backwards, tossing him his keys which he caught with his left hand.
“That’s right,” I told him. “Nothing to lose.”
——
Rosaline’s condo was in a complex they’d built in the late seventies not far from the high school. The landscaping had matured nicely, but the exterior trim looked dated and ground up by the corrosive air blowing off the ocean a half mile to the south. The cars in the lot were a mix—Volvos, Mercedes and BMWs along side pickups and sloppy Chrysler four-doors from the late eighties. Testimony to the skyward trend of real-estate values, inexorably displacing the kind of people these condos were originally built for.
She answered the door in an oversized work shirt with the MIT seal embroidered over the heart. And nothing else, unless you counted her glimmering earrings, which hung almost to her shoulders.
I handed her the
“Oh, goodie, now I’m all set for the track,” she said.
“It was either that or
“What do you think?” she asked about her shirt, doing a single spin, which challenged what remained of the outfit’s mystery. “I thought it would make you feel at home.”
“Always ready to give one for the team.”
“Not yet. Have a drink first.”
Her apartment was like a favorite shoe. Worn, out of fashion and form fitting. There was a fireplace with a stack of fully engaged hardwoods, the wood smoke mingling subtly with scented candles burning on the mantelpiece and strategically arrayed on side tables and built-in bookshelves. It was clean, in the way places can be clean when scoured by someone who takes the term seriously. The decor spare and balanced, eternal. Duke Ellington was on a stereo that came out of nowhere, filling the room like the aroma from the candles. Pervasive, unobtrusive, enveloping.
One wall of the living room was covered in photographs, some in the self-conscious formality of the turn of the century, a few sepia tones going further back, others from the mid-twentieth century, with oversaturated colors and shaggy haircuts. All more or less predictable and homey, but for the recording of nose types, staggering size
