'Yeah,' said Anna. 'But they're like, 'So somebody took a shot at you. So what's the problem?' '
'Geez, it has to be scary, not knowing who did it.'
'Or if they're coming back.'
'You think they will?'
'I don't know. But I get the feeling my husband knows something he's not telling me. He's been acting weird, even for him. He left last night and he wasn't back this morning. Which is actually fine with me, although I promise I'm not gonna start dwelling on that subject again.'
'It's OK,' said Eliot. 'Dwell away.' He kind of liked it when she dwelled on that subject.
'No,' she said, 'no more talk about me. Let's talk about you. What do you do?'
'Advertising.'
'What kind of advertising?'
'Well, today I did a gazomba ad.'
'A what kind of ad?'
'Gazomba. As in, Get a load of those gazombas.'
'Ah.'
'Maybe we should go back to dwelling on your marriage.'
'No, I want to know about the gazomba ad.'
And so he told her about Hammerhead Beer, and the Big Fat Stupid Client From Hell. He told her about the CPA next door who hated him. He told her about the rise and sudden fall of his journalism career. He told her about how he and Patty met in college and fell in love and went dancing all the time, and then Matt was born and that was wonderful, but they didn't dance as much, but they swore they would, one of these days, when Matt got a little older, but they never did, and after a while they stopped talking about going dancing, in fact they stopped talking about pretty much everything, and they made love only when neither of them could immediately think of an excuse not to, which happened very rarely, because any excuse would do, starting with 'I'm kinda tired tonight,' which they both were, every night. He talked about the slow, agonizing slide down the slope of divorce, and how guilty he felt, and how understanding Matt had been, and how that made him feel guiltier. He told her that he drove a Kia.
'Now you,' he said.
She told him that she had been married twice, the first time to the guy she dated for her last two years at the University of Florida, who was captain of the tennis team and came from a very wealthy family and was so incredibly handsome that everybody, particularly her mother, drilled into her brain that she would be crazy not to marry him, because they made such a Beautiful Couple.
'We had a really great marriage, no problems at all,' she said, 'until maybe the second hour of the wedding reception, which is when my maid of honor told me in the ladies' room that my new husband had just put his tongue into her mouth all the way down to her tonsils. This guy just could not keep his wee-wee in his pants. He was like Bill Clinton, but without any domestic policies.'
But she stuck with him, she said, because her mother told her that you have to Make the Marriage Work.
'The thing was,' she said, 'while I was trying to make the marriage work, he was trying to make every woman in Dade and Broward Counties, and generally succeeding. Never marry an incredibly handsome man.'
'I won't,' Eliot promised.
'So,' she said, 'after Jenny was born, maybe the fiftieth time it took him three hours to get back from taking the baby-sitter home, I filed for a divorce. That was when I found out that his family became very wealthy by not letting anybody, ever, get a nickel.'
'Didn't you have a lawyer?' asked Eliot.
'Oh, sure, I had a lawyer. But my ex-husband had like the entire Supreme Court. So he got basically all the money, and I got Jennifer. Which is why we ended up living in a dump of an apartment, which is why Arthur looked good to me, which I promise I am not going to start dwelling on again.'
The lunch lasted for four iced teas. On the way out of the Taurus, Eliot and Anna were accosted by two disabled homeless Vietnam veterans. Except they weren't really disabled homeless Vietnam veterans; they were Eddie and Snake, who were ages nine and six, respectively, when the Vietnam War ended. Snake's ankle injury had given them the idea of being disabled vets; they hobbled around the Grove, hassling people for money, and on some days it was more lucrative than helping people park. Eddie saw it as a potentially important career move.
'Hey, man,' he said to Eliot, 'can you help out a disabled veteran?'
'No,' said Eliot, who recognized Eddie from around the Grove.
'Fuck you,' said Eddie. 'How about you, pretty lady?' he said to Anna. 'You wanna give me something?'
Snake grabbed his crotch and said, 'Hey, I'll give you something.'
Anna and Eliot kept walking. She said, 'And people have the nerve to say romance is dead.'
When they reached Anna's car, she said, 'Thanks for lunch.'
'Hey, my pleasure,' Eliot said. 'You want to keep my reading glasses, so we could do this again?'
Anna laughed, but didn't answer. She started looking in her purse for her car keys.
Eliot said, 'Do you think I'm incredibly handsome?'
She looked up from her purse and studied his face for a moment.
