“Oh, yeah.”
“What did you do for supper when your mother wasn’t home?”
“The lady who took care of me cooked it.”
“Your father ever take care of you?”
“No.”
We were through eating. I cleared the table and put the dishes into the dishwasher. I’d already cleaned up the preparation dishes.
“Any dessert?” Paul said.
“No. You want to go out and get ice cream or something?”
“Okay.”
“Where should we go,” I said.
“Baskin-Robbins,” he said. “It’s downtown. Near where we ate that time.”
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s go.”
Paul had a large cone of Pralines ’n Cream. I had nothing.
On the ride home Paul said, “How come you didn’t have any ice cream?”
“It’s a trade-off I make,” I said. “If I drink beer I don’t eat dessert.”
“Don’t you ever do both?”
“No.”
“Never?”
I deepened my voice and swelled up my chest as I drove. I said, “Man’s gotta do what he’s gotta do, boy.”
It was dark, and I couldn’t see well. I thought he almost smiled.
CHAPTER 10
It was almost the first day of May and I was still there. Every morning Patty Giacomin made me breakfast, every noon she made me lunch, every evening she made dinner. At first Paul ate dinner with us, but the last week he’d taken a tray to his room and Patty and I had been eating alone. Patty’s idea of fancy was to put Cheez Whiz on the broccoli I didn’t mind that I used to like the food in the army. What I minded was the growing sense of intimacy. Lately at dinner there was always wine. The wine was appropriate to the food: Blue Nun; Riunite, red, white, and rose; a bottle of cold duck. I’d eat the eye of the round roast and sip the Lambrusco, and she’d chatter at me about her day, and talk about television, and repeat a joke she’d heard. I had begun to envy Paul. Nothing wrong with a tray in your room.
It was warm enough for the top down when I dropped Paul off at school on a Thursday morning and headed back to Emerson Road. The sun was strong, the wind was soft, I had a Sarah Vaughan tape on at top volume. She was singing “Thanks for the Memories” and I should have been feeling like a brass band. I didn’t, I felt like a nightingale without a song to sing. It wasn’t spring fever. It was captivity.
While I could get in my miles every morning, I hadn’t been to a gym in more than two weeks. I hadn’t seen Susan in that time. I hadn’t been thirty-five feet from a Giacomin since I’d come out to Lexington. I needed to punch a bag, I needed to bench press a barbell, I needed very much to see Susan. I felt cramped and irritable and scratchy with annoyance as I pulled into the driveway.
There were flowers on the kitchen table, and places set for two, with a glass of orange juice poured at each place. And the percolator working on the counter. But Patty Giacomin wasn’t in the kitchen. No eggs were cooking. No bacon. Good. My cholesterol count was probably being measured in light-years by now. I picked up one of the glasses of orange juice and drank it. I put the empty glass into the dishwasher.
Patty Giacomin called from the living room, “Is that you?”
“Yes, it is,” I said.
“Come in here,” she said. “I want your opinion on something.”
I went into the living room. She was standing at the far end, in front of the big picture window that opened out onto her backyard. The morning sun spilled through it and backlit her sort of dramatically.
“What do you think?” she said.
She was wearing a metallic blue peignoir and was standing in a model’s pose, one foot turned out at right angles, her knees slightly forward, her shoulders back so her breasts stuck out The sunlight was bright enough and the robe was thin enough so that I was pretty sure she had nothing on under it.
I said, “Jesus Christ.”
She said, “You like?”
I said, “You need a rose in your teeth.”
She frowned. “Don’t you like my robe,” she said. Her lower lip pushed out slightly. She turned as she talked and faced me, her legs apart, her hands on her hips, the bright sun silhouetting her through the cloth.
“Yeah. The robe’s nice,” I said. I felt a little feverish. I cleared my throat.
“Why don’t you come over and take a closer look?” she said.
