“Maybe you do,” I said. The maitre d‘ had our table and we were silent as we followed him to it. The menus were large and done in a stylish typeface. The price of lobster was discreetly omitted.
“But say you do,” I picked up. “Say you understand her problem better than I do. What’s making you mad?”
She looked at her menu. “Smug,” she said. “That’s the word I was looking for, a kind of smugness about that woman’s silly little fling.”
The waitress appeared. I looked at Susan. “Escargots,” she said to the waitress. “And the cold crab.” I ordered assorted hot hors d’oeuvres and a steak. The waitress went away.
“I don’t buy smug,” I said. “Flip, maybe, but not smug.”
“Condescending,” Susan said.
“No,” I said. “Annoyed, maybe, if you push me. But not at her, at all the silliness in the world. I’m sick of movements. I’m sick of people who think that a new system will take care of everything. I’m sick of people who put the cause ahead of the person. And I am sick of people, whatever sex, who dump the kids and run off: to work, to booze, to sex, to success. It’s irresponsible.”
The waitress reappeared with our first course. My platter of hot hors d’oeuvres included a clam casino, an oyster Rockefeller, a fried shrimp, a soused shrimp and a stuffed mushroom cap.
“I’ll trade you a mushroom cap for a snail,” I said to Susan.
She picked a snail up in the tongs and put it on my plate. “I don’t want the mushroom,” she said.
“No need for a hunger strike, Suze, just because you’re mad.” I poked the snail out of its shell and ate it. “Last chance for the mushroom.”
She shook her head. I ate the mushroom.
Susan said, “You don’t know why she ran off.”
“Neither of us does.”
“But you assumed a feminist reason.”
“I should not have. You are right.”
“I’ll take that soused shrimp,” Susan said. I put it on her plate with my fork.
I said, “You know they’re my favorite.”
She said, “And I know you don’t care that much for the mushroom caps.”
“Bitch.”
Susan smiled. “The way to a man’s remorse,” she said, “is through his stomach.”
The smile did it, it always did it. Susan’s smile was Technicolor, Cinemascope and stereophonic sound. I felt my stomach muscles tighten, like they always did when she smiled, like they always did when I really looked at her.
“Where in hell were you,” I said, “twenty years ago?”
“Marrying the wrong guy,” she said. She put her right hand out and ran her forefinger over the knuckles on my left hand as it lay on the tabletop. The smile stayed but it was a serious smile now. “Better late than never,” she said.
The waitress came with the salad.
Chapter 3
I was up early and on my way to Hyannis before the heavy rush hour traffic started in Boston. Route 3 to the Cape is superhighway to the Sagamore Bridge. Twenty years ago there was no superhighway and you went to the Cape along Route 28 through the small southern Mass towns like Randolph. It was slow but it was interesting and you could look at people and front yards and brown mongrel dogs, and stop at diners and eat hamburgers that were cooked before your very eyes. Driving down Route 3 that morning the only person I saw outside a car was a guy changing a tire near a sign that said PLYMOUTH.
As I arched up over the Cape Cod Canal at the Sagamore Bridge, Route 3 became Route 6, the Mid-Cape Highway. In the center strip and along each roadside was scrub white pine, and some taller, an occasional maple tree and some small oak trees. At high points on the road you could see ocean on both sides, Buzzards Bay to the south, Cape Cod Bay to the north. In fact the whole Cape echoed with a sense of the ocean, not necessarily its sight and not always its scent or sound. Sometimes just the sense of vast space on each side of you. Of open brightness stretching a long way under the sun.
Route 132 took me into Hyannis center. The soothing excitements of scrub pine and wide sea gave way to McDonald’s and Holiday Inn and prefab fence companies, shopping malls and Sheraton Motor Inns, and a host of less likely places where you could sleep and eat and drink in surroundings indistinguishable from the ones you’d left at home. Except there’d be a fishnet on the wall. If Bartholomew Gosnold had approached the Cape from this direction he’d have kept on going.
At the airport circle, I headed east on Main Street. Hyannis is surprisingly congested and citylike as you drive into it. Main Street is lined with stores, many of them branches of Boston and New York stores. The motel I wanted was at the east end of town, a big handsome resort motel with a health club and a good restaurant of Victorian decor. A big green sign out front said DUNFEY’S. I had stayed there two months ago with Brenda Loring and had a nice time.
I was in my room and unpacked by nine-thirty. I called Shepard. He was home and waiting for me. Ocean Street is five minutes from the motel, an extension of Sea Street, profuse with weathered shingles and blue shutters. Shepard’s house was no exception. A big Colonial with white cedar shingles weathered silver, and blue shutters at all the windows. It was on a slight rise of ground on the ocean side of Ocean Street. A white Caddie convertible with the top down was parked in front. A curving brick path ran up to the front door and small evergreens clustered along the foundation. The front door was blue. I rang the bell and heard it go bing-bong inside.
