Smoke

She giggled. 'You did? What'd he do?'

'He jumped, and hit his head on the steering wheel, and sat up, and looked all around, and then he decided it wasn't anything and he was gonna go back to the radio again, so I tapped him on the shoulder and when he looked back I poked him in the eye.'

'Ooh,' she said. 'That wasn't nice.'

'He's boosting our radio, Peg.'

'Well, then what?'

'He still didn't get out of the van,' Freddie said. 'He had one hand up over his eye, like he's reading the eye-chart, and he's lookin around and lookin around with the other eye, and I figured, time to make this guy get out of here, so I slapped him on both ears at the same time. The palms, you know, whack against both ears. You know what that's like?'

'I'm not sure I want to know.'

'It's like a firecracker went off in the middle of your head,' Freddie told her. He didn't sound at all penitent. 'So then he got out of the van.'

'I bet he did.'

'And took off running. I bet he's halfway to New Jersey by now. What's in the bag, Peg?'

'I'll show you when we get home,' she said, and shifted into 'drive,' and steered out of the parking lot.

'Pretty crummy wallet that guy had,' Freddie commented from the back, once they were on the road. There came the sound of money rustling, and then, his voice disgusted, Freddie said, 'Twenty-seven dollars.'

'I was just thinking,' Peg said, as she watched the road, 'we'll need more money soon.'

'Off of radio-stealing guys at the mall is not where we'll get it,' Freddie commented. 'We'll make another trip to the city. Open your window a little, will you?'

She opened her window a little, and a pretty crummy wallet sailed past her ear and out onto the roadway. She shut the window, and they drove on.

He did not want to wear the wig, just as she'd expected. 'It looks like a horse's tail,' he said. 'And the horse's tail goes on top of the horse's ass, and that ain't me.'

'It isn't that bad, Freddie,' she insisted, even though his description was more or less accurate.

The thing is, for women, but not for men, there are inexpensive wigs for sale in low-cost department stores, many of them with a famous person's name attached, like Zsa Zsa Gabor. Most of these wigs are short and curly, like the Zsa Zsa Gabor, but a few are long and straight, like the Cher. The one Peg had chosen was long and straight, shoe-polish black, thick coarse fake hair coming down from a narrow almost invisible part in the middle. If you were to cut it a little shorter, and wear it with armor, you could look like a roadshow Prince Valiant.

'I am not,' Freddie announced, 'gonna wear that thing. I'd rather make believe I was scalped by the Indians.'

'They don't do that anymore, Freddie,' Peg said. 'In fact, I think it hurts their feelings if you remind them.'

'I am not gonna wear that thing.'

'Listen to my idea, will you?'

'I'll listen,' Freddie agreed, 'and then I still won't wear it. But I'll listen.'

'Thanks, Freddie,' she said, once again wasting sarcasm on an invisible man. 'What we'll do,' she told him, 'we'll make up your face first, and then we'll fit the wig to see how it works, with these Velcro things on the inside here to get the size right, see them?'

'Oh, God, Peg.'

'Then,' she insisted, 'I'll cut some of the hair off, to shape it a little, and we'll put it in a ponytail, with a rubber band. There's a lot of guys going around with ponytails.'

'Wimps. Nerds. Guys with peace signs on their four-by-fours.'

'Not all of them. Now, come on, Freddie, cooperate with me on this. It's worth a try, isn't it?'

'If I'm gonna look like an idiot,' he warned her, 'I won't do it.'

'Freddie,' she said, 'if you look like anything at all, it'll be a step forward. Now sit down, and let me start.' She waited, hands on hips. 'Go on, don't argue anymore, just sit down.'

'I am sitting down,' he said.

Slowly, stroke by stroke, the face began to appear. It was like magic, or like a special effect in the movies. Cheeks, nose, jaws, all emerging out of the air, the slightly woodsy tan color of Max Factor pancake makeup. Freddie complicated matters by flinching away from the brush a lot, and even sneezing twice, but nevertheless, slowly and steadily, they progressed.

Partway along, with just the major areas roughed in, the forehead and on down, Peg reared back to study him, and said, 'I don't remember you like that.'

'Like what?'

'That that's the way you look. Freddie? I think I'm beginning to forget what you look like.'

The parts of the face that now existed contrived to express surprise. 'You know what?' he said. 'Me, too. I was just thinking this morning, when I was shaving. I'm not sure I really remember what I look like, either. If I saw me on the street, I don't know that I'd recognize me.'

'This is really strange, Freddie.'

'It is. You don't have any pictures of me, do you, Peg?'

She shook her head. 'Of course not. You never wanted any pictures, remember? You said they didn't go with your lifestyle.'

'Well, I guess that's true, they didn't.'

'Maybe what we'll do,' she suggested, 'when we get you all set here, I'll take a Polaroid.'

The partial face now conveyed extreme skepticism. 'It's gonna come out that good, huh?'

'Let's wait and see,' she said, and went back to work with the brush.

'It doesn't look half bad,' she said.

Then I must be looking at the other half,' he told her.

They were standing together in the bedroom, in front of the floor-length mirror on the closet door, Peg and the Creature from the Fifties Horror Movie. With that sandalwood skin color, and sort of pinkish-gray lips, and bristly dark eyebrows (the paint had stiffened the eyebrow hairs), and the black fake hair swagged around his ears — the ears were a bitch to make up, with all those curls and convolutions — and the dark dark sunglasses, he didn't actually appear to be a human being at all. The way drag queens manage to stop looking like men without ever really looking like women, Freddie now looked as though he might be some sort of extraterrestrial in human drag. Or as though the Disney people had decided, next to their moving lifesize Abraham Lincoln doll at Disneyland, to put a Bobby Darin doll.

Peg was determined to put the best possible face on things, even if the best possible face was this store- window Freddie. 'We're talking about after dark,' she pointed out, 'in a restaurant. Freddie, we've got to at least give it a try.'

'Well, I'm all dressed up,' he acknowledged, the pancake furrowing on his brow. 'Might as well go for it.'

'Thank you, Freddie.'

'But, Peg.'

'Yeah?'

'We can skip the Polaroid,' Freddie said.

Peg called five different restaurants before she found one that sounded like it would work out okay. Yes, they prided themselves on their dim candlelit romantic atmosphere. Yes, they had high-backed booths, if that was what madam would prefer. Yes, they understood that madam's husband had been in an industrial explosion recently and was self-conscious about his appearance these days, and this would be his first time out in public since he came home from the hospital, and they would bend every effort to make his dining at the Auberge a pleasant and relaxing experience. And would that be smoking or nonsmoking? 'Are you kidding?' Peg asked. 'After my husband's explosion?'

'Nonsmoking, then. See you at nine, madam.'

There are three kinds of restaurants in the country. There are the joints that are really just bars with kitchens, and that's where the local citizenry goes. There are places that try to be trendy by doing what the city restaurants were doing ten years ago, and that's where the weekenders and the summer people go. And there are