Smoke

very pretentious places with dim echoes of Maxim's, with tassels on the huge menus and too much flour in the sauces and too much sugar in the salads, and that's where everybody takes Mother on her birthday.

It wasn't Freddie's birthday, but here they were. It was true the maоtre d' was in a tux, and true the busboy sported a bow tie, and true the waitress was dressed like Marie Antoinette in her milkmaid phase, but these were people who were used to making mothers feel at home away from home on that special day, so they were very good with an explosion victim, hardly looking at Freddie's gloved hands at all, not acknowledging by word or glance that there might be anything odd about his face, and not even acting surprised when he moved and talked like a normal human being.

They were shown to a dim booth in a corner, high-backed purple plush seating, dark paisley tablecloth, and a low candle inside a gnarly glass chimney of such thickness and such dark amberness that the light it produced looked mostly like the last sputtering effort of energy from a galaxy that had died long long ago, on the other side of the universe.

'We can be happy here,' Peg decided.

'I can't see my menu,' Freddie complained.

'Good. That means your menu can't see you, either.'

'Aw, Peg, is it that bad?'

'No, Freddie,' she lied, reaching out to take his Playtex and give it a squeeze. 'I was just doing a gag.'

Through experimentation, they learned that if they held their menus just so, there was almost enough illumination from the indirect lighting in troughs up near the ceiling so they could make out a lot of the words flowingly scripted there. But then it turned out, when Marie Antoinette came back, that they hardly needed to think about the menus anyway, since she had forty-two specials to describe.

Slowly, Peg relaxed, grew easier in her mind. Slowly, she got back into the swing of things, the idea of being out at a restaurant for a nice dinner with your guy, and candlelight, and even pretty good music piped in, ballet stuff, Delibes, and like that. They ordered drinks, and they ordered wine, and they ordered special appetizers and special main courses, and they began to talk together like any normal couple out on a date, discussing the house they were living in, and how the summer was shaping up, and what they might do the next time they dropped in to the city to develop some fresh cash, and the whole evening was just being very nice.

Their drinks came. An extra special little treat from the chef came, being a kind of pвtй on toast points that wasn't half bad. Their wine came, and Freddie forgot to be self-conscious while he went through the tasting-and- approving ritual. They toasted one another, and Freddie said, 'I'm glad you talked me into this, Peg.'

'Me, too,' Peg said. 'I love to be with you, Freddie, but not in the same place all the time.'

'To getting out and about,' he said, gripping his wineglass with some little difficulty. They clinked glasses, and drank.

Their appetizers came. They ate; they had a little more wine; they made funny remarks and laughed at them. The bus-boy in the bow tie cleared, and here came the main courses. Everything was just great.

Peg looked up, at the wrong moment. Halfway through the meal, eating and drinking had by now removed almost all of Freddie's lipstick, plus some of the makeup around his mouth. When Peg looked up, therefore, at precisely the wrong moment, with Freddie's mouth open and a forkful of food on its way, what she saw was a guy with a hole in the middle of his face, and in the hole she could just make out, way back there, the inside of the wig.

Peg closed her eyes. For good measure, she put one hand over her eyes. I'll forget that sight, she promised herself. Sooner or later, I'll forget what that looked like.

In the meantime, there were other considerations to consider. 'Freddie,' Peg said quietly, 'when the waitress is around, keep your head down.'

Instead of which, startled, he lifted his head. Amber candle-glow glanced dully off those dark sunglasses. Peg refused to look lower than the sunglasses, as Freddie said, 'Peg? A problem?'

'A little. We'll take care of it. You go ahead and eat.'

'What is it, Peg?'

'You're losing a little makeup, not bad. No point fixing it now, we'll do it when we're done eating.'

'Now I'm nervous,' Freddie said.

'We're both nervous, Freddie.'

'No no,' he said, 'that's not what I mean. I'm not used anymore to people seeing me, Peg, you know? I'm like a teenager again, self-conscious, afraid people are staring at me.'

'Nobody's staring at you,' Peg promised him. 'Believe me, if anybody was staring at you, we'd know.'

'I don't want to know what you mean by that.'

'Just eat,' she advised.

Neither of them had much to say after that, though they both tried to recapture the spirit. But awkwardness had taken a seat at table with them, and wouldn't get up.

Peg did the talking with the waitress after that, saying the meal had been delicious, thank you, politely refusing dessert and coffee, asking for the check. All while Freddie posed like The Thinker with his gloved fist against his jaw on the waitress's side.

After Marie Antoinette went away to get the check, Peg slipped Freddie the little zipper bag containing his lipstick and makeup, and he went off to the gents' to reconstruct himself. That's what the girl does, Peg thought, not the guy, and decided not to pursue that thought, and then Marie brought the check.

Peg was counting out cash into the little tray when Freddie returned. Standing beside the table, he said, 'Okay now?'

She considered him, squinting a bit. 'It'll do to get to the car,' she decided.

Freddie gave her back the makeup bag. 'A guy in there saw me putting on the lipstick,' he said.

'Did he make a remark?'

'I think he was going to, so I smiled at him, and he went away.'

'I bet he did.'

Freddie sighed. 'Peg,' he said. 'I'm turning into something you scare little kids with.'

Not just little kids, Peg thought, but she wasn't mean enough to say that out loud. 'So we'll keep you away from playgrounds,' she said instead. Getting to her feet, the bill paid, she said, 'Lighten up, Freddie. Didn't we have fun tonight?'

'Yes,' he said, without enthusiasm.

She took his long-sleeved arm, twined hers around it. At least he still felt like Freddie. 'Pretty soon,' she murmured, as they headed toward the exit, 'we'll be back in our own bed, in the dark, without a care in the world.'

'That sounds good.'

The maоtre d' wished to bid them farewell, and wanted to know how they'd enjoyed the experience. 'Let me do the talking,' Peg muttered out of the side of her mouth, and then she praised the matter d' and the ambiance and the food and the service and the thoughtfulness of everybody concerned, until the matter d' squirmed all over with pleasure, like a heat shimmer. Then they left the place and crunched across the gravel parking lot in the dark, and at last got into the van.

'Oh, boy,' Freddie said, sighing, sagging back against the passenger seat.

'It was worth the try,' Peg said.

'I guess it was. Yeah, you're right, it was.'

'Needs fine-tuning,' she suggested.

'Back to the drawing board,' he agreed.

'But we proved it's possible.'

He thought about that. 'Okay,' he decided at last. 'Not probable yet, but possible. But I tell you, Peg,' and before she could react he'd reached up and whipped the wig right off his head and into his lap, 'this wig here is hot.'

There wasn't much light in the Auberge's parking lot, but there didn't have to be. Peg looked at him, at the makeup and the lipstick and the eyebrow pencil and the sunglasses, and then above that at nothing, and all at once, astonishing herself, she started to laugh. Then she couldn't stop laughing.

Freddie looked at her. 'Yeah?' he asked. 'What?'

'Oh, Freddie!' she cried, through her laughter. 'I do love you, Freddie, I do love to be with you, but oh, my