'Weil, how do all of you explain it then?” Nelson said hotly. “How do—'
'Suits me,” said Maggie.
Rudy held up his hands, palms forward. “Hallelujah and amen to that.'
Nelson stared out the window and grumped an inaudible response.
Nick eyed John. “You too? Can we talk about something else for a while?'
John threw in the towel. “Okay. As long as it's not coffee.'
'Fair enough.” Nick settled comfortably back. “Ah, I always look forward to seeing that lovely bride of yours. You really lucked out there, old son.'
'I'm not gonna argue with that,” John said.
Nick laughed fondly. “It's always a treat seeing what she comes up with for dinner. What's it going to be this time, do you think—boiled tofu, maybe?'
'Don't laugh,” John said grimly.
'Oh, come on, you guys,” Maggie said generously, “it's not going to be as bad as all that.'
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Chapter 6
* * * *
That depended on who was asked. Dinner was rice cakes topped with pecan-garbanzo paste, grilled-eggplant- and-feta-cheese salad, and spicy squash-and-orzo stew, all of it perfectly cooked and beautifully served, but still, from John's point of view, rice cakes, eggplant, and squash.
Rudy uncomplainingly if inattentively consumed whatever was put before him, as he usually did. John sometimes wondered if all that coffee-tasting had burned out his taste buds and immunized them against anything else. Excepting wine, of course. Nelson, whose French-born wife had taught him to like creamed dishes and elegant sauces, picked at his food and filled up on mango-pumpkin bread and apple-fig chutney. Only Maggie ate with any enthusiasm, but then John had once, with his own ears, heard her say that the happiest she got when it came to food was when she sat down to a steaming plate of organic brown rice and poached carrots.
Nick, like John, ate moderately and with an occasional polite murmur of appreciation, but John knew his secret. Whenever Nick knew he was coming to dinner at the Lam’ he first fortified himself with a four-course restaurant lunch, usually of prime rib and butter-drenched baked potato. (On company-dinner nights, John did exactly the same, except that he usually made it T-bone steak and butter-drenched baked potato.)
One of Marti's missions in life was to stamp out what she thought of as junk food (which included nearly everything John loved), and most of her menus, John swore, came from TV cooking shows hosted by onetime gourmet chefs who had suffered heart attacks, seen the light, and were now fanatical preachers of low-fat, sodium-free living. Fortunately for the happy state of their marriage, Marti's job as a nutritionist kept her at the Virginia Mason Clinic until late in the afternoon, zestfully dishing up fatless, saltless recipes to hapless patients unable to defend themselves, and Marti and John themselves had to eat out most evenings.
But once a week or so, there was an unavoidable meal like this, which John, grateful for Marti's many other virtues, considered a small price to pay. The fact that wine, not on her list of forbidden matter, flowed freely made it all the easier. This evening's had been brought by Rudy, three different California Cabernets, to be drunk (naturally) in a meticulously prescribed order.
By the time the third bottle was opened, Nick, the natural and uncontested focus of family gatherings, was in high gear with reminiscences of his days as a young soldier in the South Pacific—he had illegally joined up at sixteen—during World War II.
'Then there was this miserable, no-name island in the Solomons,” he was saying expansively, hands clasped behind his neck, “all of about half a mile square, but, God, did the Japanese put up a fight.” He shook his head, remembering, and after half a moment went off on a slightly different tack.
'We used to do a lot of gambling, you know? Poker, craps...I mean, what else was there to spend your money on? And I had this natural talent I didn't even know I had. I don't have it anymore, but I had it then. Well, a lot of money used to change hands and a few people won big, including me. I had over ten thousand bucks at one point. Well, with everything going on, you'd have to be crazy to carry all that money on you in one place. So we used to split it up and give it to ‘carriers'—these would-be buddies who'd keep it on them for you for fifty bucks a day. So —'
His blue eyes swung around the table. “Did I ever tell you this story?'
Maggie laughed affectionately. “Once or twice.'
'You never let that stop you before,” John said, pouring him some more wine. Everybody enjoyed hearing Nick tell his stories. Even Nelson was wearing his pinched smile.
'Well,
Which was all the convincing Nick needed. “So. This one morning I've got maybe three thousand dollars on me, and another seven thousand split between two carriers, and my unit's out on patrol, and suddenly everything around us is splintering with machine gun bullets. We all jump into the trees and most of us make it, but I see one guy hit in the leg and pinned down behind this tree trunk. Well, I panicked because this is the guy with four thousand dollars of my money. So I make a run for it under fire, I get to him, and I actually make it back with him with my heart in my mouth, and the first thing he says is: ‘You gotta go back. They got Julio too.’ What are you laughing at, John?'
