a beer night rather than a wine night. I didn’t disagree. I drank a can and a half of Schlitz but was too full to finish the rest.
Wendy had allowed me to bring my cats from my apartment, the ones I was allegedly still keeping for the old friend of mine who’d gone to L.A. to become an actress. The last I’d heard she was married to a cop and living in the valley with their first child. Tasha, Crystal, and Tess were thus mine. I told Wendy that they were my dowry.
The three of them sat on the far end of the dining room table watching us eat.
“Do you ever wonder what they’re thinking about, Sam?”
“I know what they’re thinking about.”
“Oh, right.”
“They’re thinking how can a woman this gorgeous put up with a loser like McCain.”
“That’s funny. That’s what I thought they were thinking, too. They’re very perceptive.”
She sipped her beer. I liked to watch her wrists. They were delicately wrought and charming all by themselves. Of course it would be difficult to date just a pair of wrists. People would talk. “God, you’d think Eve would be more careful.”
“Maybe she’s a nympho,” I said.
“Nymphos are only in all those paperbacks you read.”
“Well then she’s super horny.”
“Or something. Maybe she’s going through the same thing I was when I was running around. I’m sure people called me a ‘nympho,’ too. But I wasn’t married. I was only hurting myself and my mother and sister. She’s hurting a husband.”
“I wonder what kind of agreement they have about money. In case of a divorce.”
“She wouldn’t be in a position to say much if he just cut her off.”
“Not unless there was some kind of cruelty going on, physical cruelty, and even then the judge would ask her why she hadn’t reported it. He’d also tell her that running around was no way to deal with marital problems.”
All three cats looked toward the front of the house when the doorbell rang. Tasha yawned, indicating that she thought whoever had come calling was bound to be boring.
“I’ll get it.” She was up before I could offer to do it, giving me a prolonged gape at her smooth tanned legs in white shorts. The red cotton blouse accented her small perfect breasts. She was still talking. “You don’t really think Eve killed Vanessa and the Cameron boy, do you?”
“It’s worth considering, anyway.”
When she got the door open, she said, “It’s Kenny.” She did her best to pack excitement into those two words. She still wished Kenny didn’t write soft-core sex books for a living, but he’d won her over with his wife Sue and his daughter Melissa. I think she liked Kenny without quite approving of him.
“Hi, Wendy. I hope I’m not interrupting dinner.”
“No, not at all. We’re finished. Come on in and have some coffee.” An afterthought: “Or a beer.”
Kenny had been here many times to see me. He was careful with his cigarettes (Kenny was an ash-flicker, and ashes on couches and chairs can mightily displease the hostess) as well as his language. “Coffee’s fine,” he said as he seated himself at the table. He was, in his words, “duded up.” Starched white short-sleeved shirt with a red-and-black striped tie. And it wasn’t a clip-on. I wondered where he’d been or where he was going. As Wendy was pouring him a cup of coffee, he said, “How much would you charge me to sue somebody for slander?”
“Are you serious?”
“Very serious.”
“Who’s slandering you?”
“From what I’ve been told, Reverend Cartwright is going to do it tonight in that moronic hippie play he’s giving in the park.”
“Who told you he was going to do it?”
“You know Mrs. Windmere from his church?”
Wendy laughed. “That old gossip? She used to help my mother clean house. We had to let her go because she made up these stories about what a sinful family we were. She even got Cartwright to show up one night and tell my dad that he was going to save our souls. My mother thought it was hilarious. My dad was so mad he grabbed Cartwright and threw him out the open doorway. I wouldn’t believe a word she said, Kenny.”
“How did you get hooked up with the Windmere woman, anyway?”
“I was having a cherry Coke at the Rexall fountain and she came up and told me that somebody was finally going to stand up to me. It took me a few minutes but then I remembered who she was. She was the old bag who chased me down the street one day. She kept screaming, ‘Repent! Repent!’ So here she was again. Of course I didn’t have any idea of what she was raving on about. I was so embarrassed I could barely hear her anyway. You know how I hate scenes. All these people were standing around watching and listening now and then she said it: ‘Reverend Cart-wright has written you into his play. Finally, a man of God is going to treat you the way you deserve to be treated.’ Then she looked around at everybody and pointed to me and said, ‘This man is a pronographer.’”
“‘Pronographer’?” I said.
Wendy giggled. “Oh, God, that’s right, Kenny. I forgot. Mrs. Windmere is always mispronouncing words.”
“So I want to sue him.”
“How about we wait until you see the show?”
He sat back in his chair, calm for the moment. “That’s what I wanted to ask you two about. I really don’t want to go alone. I even dressed up for the occasion so nobody could call me a hippie.”
“Won’t Sue go with you?”
“She would have, Wendy, but she doesn’t want to take Melissa out into all that heat. You know, with the bugs and all.”
“I’m sort of a baby myself, Kenny. I kind of like it here, you know, with the air conditioning and all. And the TV set and the indoor plumbing and the nice cold beer. But I’m sure your friend and mine Sam would love to go with you.”
“Really? Damn it, Kenny, I don’t want to go see that stupid show. It’ll probably be crowded.”
“You really think it’ll be crowded?” Wendy said.
“Sure. All of Cartwright’s people’ll show up and then all the hecklers. Cliffie’ll have a couple cops there to keep the hecklers in line but they have a way of getting heard no matter what.”
“I don’t want to remind you of all the information I get for you, McCain. And I do it free gratis.”
“Oh, that’s right. You’d never want to remind me of that, would you?”
“Maybe it’ll be fun.”
“Well, if you think it might be fun, Wendy, why don’t you go?”
“I miss out on all kinds of fun, Sam, and you know it. And at my advanced age it doesn’t bother me.”
“If he slanders me, McCain, we can sue him for millions.”
“He doesn’t have millions, Kenny.”
“Well, maybe we can at least get him off the air.”
Knowing I was going to go, I said, “That’s the first real incentive you’ve given me all night, Kenny. Let me change my clothes.”
As I was closing the bathroom door, I heard Wendy say, “I knew you could talk him into it, Kenny. He’s a pushover. But that’s why we love him.”
There’s a librarian named Trixie Easley who sets up displays of old photographs from time to time. Generally these deal with our town from the 1870s to today. The pictures of the stage next to the bandstand in the city park are especially helpful for time traveling because in the various shots you see the town, the people, the clothes, the transportation, and the plays themselves as they fade era into era.
For the dapper, for instance, homburgs gave way to straw boaters and eventually to felt hats such as fedoras. For women, hats ranged from bonnets to fancy straw to cloche to pillbox and variations thereof. The vehicles were equally interesting-from wagons to surreys to comic-looking early automobiles to family Fords to flivvers to the sedans of today. When I was young I’d look at the people in these photographs and think how easy life had been for them psychologically. There was always so much flag-waving and spirited talk about hardy souls and all that they seemed like a different species. But as I got older I knew that these mythic generations were just
