The Bachman Books

The woman in the black dress kissed him warmly on the lips, her ample breasts pushing against his chest. Some of her martini fell on the floor between them.

'Hi,' he said. 'Who's you?'

'Tina Howard, Bart. Don't you remember the class trip?' She waggled a long, spade-shaped fingernail under his nose. 'NAUGH-ty BOY. '

'That Tina? By God, you are!' A stunned grin spread his mouth. That was another thing about Walter's parties; people from your past kept turning up like old photographs. Your best friend on the block thirty years ago; the girl you almost laid once in college; some guy you had worked with for a month on a summer job eighteen years ago.

'Except I'm Tina Howard Wallace now,' the woman in the black dress said. 'My husband's around here . . . somewhere . . . ' She looked around vaguely, spilled some more of her drink, and swallowed the rest before it could get away from her. 'Isn't it AWFUL, I seem to have lost him.'

She looked at him warmly, speculatively, and Bart could barely believe that this woman had given him his first touch of female flesh-the sophomore class trip at Grover Cleveland High School, a hundred and nine years ago. Rubbing her breast through her white cotton sailor blouse beside . . .

'Cotter's Stream,' he said aloud.

She blushed and giggled. 'You remember, all right.'

His eyes dropped in a perfect, involuntary reflex to the front of her dress and she shrieked with laughter. He grinned that helpless grin again. 'I guess time goes by faster than we-'

'Bart! ' Wally Hamner yelled over the general patty babble. 'Hey buddy, really glad you could make it!'

He cut across the room to them with the also-to-be-patented Walter Hamner Party Zigzag, a thin man, now mostly bald, wearing an impeccable 1962-vintage pinstriped shirt and horn-rimmed glasses. He shook Walter's outstretched hand, and Walter's grip was as hard as he remembered.

'I see you met Tina Wallace,' Walter said.

'Hell, we go way back when,' he said, and smiled uncomfortably at Tina.

'Don't you tell my husband that, you naughty boy,' Tina giggled. ' 'Scuse, please. I'll see you later, Bart?'

'Sure,' he said.

She disappeared around a clump of people gathered by a table loaded with chips and dips and went on into the living room. He nodded after her and said, 'How do you pick them, Walter? That girl was my first feel. It's like 'This Is Your Life.' '

Walter shrugged modestly. 'All a part of the Pleasure Push, Barton my boy.' He nodded at the paper bag tucked under his arm. 'What's in that plain brown wrapper?'

'Southern Comfort. You've got ginger ale, don't you?'

'Sure,' Walter said, but grimaced. 'Are you really going to drink that down-by-de-Swanee-Ribber stuff? I always thought you were a scotch man.'

'I was always a private Comfort-and-ginger-ale man. I've come out of the closet. '

Walter grinned. 'Mary's around here someplace. She's kinda been keeping an eye out for you. Get yourself a drink and we'll go find her.'

'Good enough.'

He made his way across the kitchen, saying hi to people he knew vaguely and who looked as if they didn't know him at all, and replying hi, how are you to people he didn't remember who hailed him first. Cigarette smoke rolled majestically through the kitchen. Conversation faded quickly in and out, like stations on latenight AM radio, all of it bright and meaningless .

. . . Freddy and Jim didn't have their time sheets so I

. . . said that his mother died quite recently and he's apt to go on a crying jag if he drinks too much

. . . so when he got the paint scraped off he saw it was really a nice piece, maybe pre- Revolutionary

. . . and this little kike came to the door selling encyclopedias

. . . very messy; he won't give her the divorce because of the kids and he drinks like a

. . . terribly nice dress

. . . so much to drink that when he went to pay the check he bar all over the hostess

A long Formica-topped table had been set up in front of the stove and the sink, and it was already crowded with opened liquor bottles and glasses in varying sizes and degrees of fullness. Ashtrays already overflowed with filtertips. Three ice buckets filled with cubes had been crowded into the sink. Over the stove was a large poster which showed Richard Nixon wearing a pair of earphones. The earphone cord disappeared up into the rectum of a donkey standing on the edge of the picture. The caption said:

WE LISTEN BETTER!

To the left, a man in bell-bottomed baggies and a drink in each hand (a water glass filled with what looked to be whiskey and a large stein filled with beer) was entertaining a mixed group with a joke. 'This guy comes into this bar, and here's this monkey sitting on the stool next to him. So the guy orders a beer and when the bartender brings it, the guy says, 'Who owns this monkey? Cute little bugger.' And the bartender says, 'Oh, that's the piano player's monkey.' So the guy swings around . . . '