“Any talk about why she started staying at the house full time? Any kind of trouble?”
“Was it a personal crisis?” Amanda asked.
Sylvia nodded immediately.
“Exactly. She was going through some kind of personal crisis. You read about it all the time. Your symptoms are,” she ticked off on her fingers, “lots of crying, usually locked up in the bedroom, extra drinking and not only at night, playing your favorite depressing songs at a high volume and less care with regular hygiene, though that girl always looked great no matter how fucked up she might have felt, as annoying as that is.”
“What was the problem?” I asked. “Boyfriend or job?”
She looked at me as if I’d just drooled down the front of my silk shirt.
“It always has to be about guys?” she asked, insulted on behalf of the sisterhood. “Okay, it was probably about a guy, but I told you, I hardly knew the girl, so I wouldn’t know. Angel might, like I said.”
“Not Robert Dobson? He’s not the guy, is he?”
This was amusing to her.
“Bobby? You’re joking, right? I’d’ve pegged him for a fruitcake if I hadn’t heard him and Elaine thumpin’ and gruntin’ every morning, waking me up after an hour of sleep.”
I called a waiter over to order another Absolut on the rocks. I always found an empty glass distracting and wanted my full attention on Sylvia.
“Let me get this straight,” I said. “Elaine was, is, Bobby’s girlfriend. Not Iku.”
“Duh.”
“Bobby didn’t know Iku from Princeton?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe.”
“So who introduced her to the rental?”
Sylvia looked around the outdoor seating area, then back at us.
“Ms. Hot Pants, who do you think?”
I must have looked confused.
“Elaine, Carl’s sister,” she said.
“I’m not getting this,” I admitted.
She shook her wrist, catching the wayward watch with her other hand.
“Sorry. Gotta run. Stephan is probably pissed about me leaving him with the floor.”
“Iku just showed up one day with Elaine?” I asked, trying to keep a grip on Sylvia’s attention.
She shook her head.
“One night. The two of them drunker’n shit. They got to the house right after Carl and I got off. Lots of falling down and giggling and all that shit that looks so lame and stupid to people who aren’t so lucky as to be drunk. Bobby was already in bed, but Zelda was there, pissed off as all hell. Freak job that she is. I’m sorry, that was mean. You can’t blame the girl. Nobody likes getting rousted by a pair of drunks. She really let Elaine have it. Called her a total tramp. I really got to go.”
She abruptly stood up from her seat, smoothing the fabric of her dress back down the tops of her thighs.
“Thanks for talking,” I said.
“Not a problem.”
“One thing, real quick. Did Iku have a computer?”
She looked incredulous.
“Are you kidding me? Lived on her laptop. That’s another thing I don’t understand. Why you don’t go blind after a while.”
Amanda and I watched again as she wound through the tables and back into the elegant old building.
“When I was a kid we had other ways of going blind,” I said.
“The march of progress.”
We spent the rest of the evening pretending to be nourished by the teaspoon-sized portions of unpronounceable but admittedly tasty food. The staggering cost was partly explained by the effort put into arranging things on the plate. Much of this involved a form of construction, using a wad of mashed potatoes, for example, to support a golf ball–sized scoop of tenderloin sprinkled with inedible green twigs. At the Pequot, you got a lot more food on a plate half the size. In fact, you routinely ate most of your meal as it spilled onto the vinyl placemats.
Yet I can honestly say that Roger’s did a better job on the salads. The foundation greens resembled nothing I’d seen before, but I liked the way they stood up to the tangy salad dressing and digestible flowers, and the colorless, chopped-up stems of who-knows-what. The salads at the Pequot, by comparison, were solid slabs of exhausted iceberg lettuce floating in a vinegar soup, though most of the Pequot’s customers were too captivated by the ambience to notice.
The dessert choices showed up on a big platter. I was glad because this meant I didn’t have to ask for a French-English dictionary to make a decision. All the choices were out there in plain view.
After Amanda picked something, I asked if they had ice cream.
“Yes, sir. Pine sorbet and chocolate raspberry truffle. Handmade.”
“Bring me some anyway. One scoop each, with a foot or two in between.”
“You’re a craftsman,” said Amanda. “Ever make ice cream by hand?”
“If it involves a table saw, I’ll give it a try.”
We ordered a few cognacs to help us over the final throes of the meal. Amanda asked for the check, but I’d already slipped a wad of bills to the waiter. She had a lot more money than I did, but I had an archaic, dug-in notion that self-respect meant paying your own way. I’d let her pick up the next tab at the Pequot.
On the way out we passed Angel Valero’s table. I can’t say he was happy to see me. He looked around the restaurant in protest over its failure to properly exclude.
I was pleased to see that the powder dabbed on his cheek had barely disguised a yellow and purple bruise. But I was more distracted by his dinner companion.
“Hey, Jerome. Where’s Marla?”
Gelb half stood, but Angel reached out, and without taking his eyes off me, touched his forearm. Gelb sat back in his chair.
I was about to ask Valero how the soprano lessons were coming, but a better part of me took possession.
“You’re like a bad penny, Acquillo,” said Gelb. “Always turning up and spoiling my mood.”
“I thought your mood was unassailable.”
“That’s because you’d rather talk than think, pal,” said Valero.
“And what should I be thinking about?” I asked.
“Who to put in your will,” said Gelb, which drew a sharp look from Valero.
I had Amanda gripped lightly by the elbow and could feel her tense up.
“I miss the happy Gelb,” I said. “Had a better sense of humor.”
“You just don’t know what’s funny.”
This put Amanda over the brink. She pulled my hand off her elbow and took me by the sleeve, dragging me through the restaurant and out to the parking lot.
“You keep frightening me,” she said,
“Me?”
“You talk about sharing, but all you do is withhold. And you think I don’t notice.”
We ran into Sylvia again before making it out the front door. She blessed us with her ersatz smile.
“How was everything?” she asked, deeply interested.
“Everything was the most,” said Amanda.
“Don’t you know,” said Sylvia, pleased, I think.
On the way back to Oak Point we cracked the windows just enough to let a little wind into the car. Amanda slid down in the seat, kicked off her shoes and allowed the hem of her dress to float on the breeze. I commented on the result, keen on changing the direction of the conversation.
“Fashion is becoming painful,” she said.
“You get out of practice hanging around construction sites.”
“I should try hostessing.”
