“Quarry,” I said. I don’t know why I gave her that name. The moment I said it, I wished I hadn’t.
“Let him go, Quarry.”
“I’m not holding onto him.”
“You know what I mean.”
I said to the guy, “Okay. You can go.”
It took him half a minute to get to his feet. He looked at the girl for a second, then glanced at me, then took off running, in a limping, just-kicked-in-the-balls sort of way. He was up on the corner of Cyprus after a moment. He stopped there and yelled back, “Bitch! Cunt!” and limped quickly out of sight.
“He means you, I guess.”
She grinned. “Well, actually my name’s Peg. Peg Baker. Come on in and have a cup of coffee.”
“I don’t know.”
“What don’t you know?”
“I don’t know if it’s safe to hang out with somebody who drives a pink car and sleeps with something like that.”
“He slept on the couch. That’s where I made him sleep after he couldn’t get it up. You want coffee or don’t you?”
21
I studied her face and wondered how it could look so hard and so young at the same time and she said, “How about a grapefruit?”
I said, “What?”
“A grapefruit. How about a grapefruit.”
She was standing there in the kitchenette, her robe loose enough toward the top for me to get a look at the start of the swell of those Bunny breasts. I sipped my coffee and wondered whether her sexual allusion had been intentional and said, “Yes, I’d like a grapefruit.”
“Maybe it’s a little late for breakfast-type stuff, what the hell time is it, anyway?”
There was a clock above the window over the kitchen sink but it wasn’t running. I checked my watch. “Quarter till ten,” I said.
“I suppose you already had breakfast.”
“No, I just got up a little while ago myself.”
I sat at the table sipping the coffee and watched her as she went to the refrigerator and got out a big yellow softball of a grapefruit and sliced it in half on the counter with a long shiny knife. She sectioned the grapefruit halves and lightly sugared them, served them up in bowls and brought them over. She put one in front of me, leaning over so that I got a good look at what was happening under the robe. I took a bite of grapefruit.
“You keep eating,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”
She walked from the kitchenette to a cubbyhole hall and went in a door and closed it after her. I turned to the grapefruit and continued eating, slowly, looking around the room as I did.
The room was horrifying. It made no sense that this supposed sexpot from the pages of Playboy lived here. This was an old woman’s apartment, loaded with memorabilia of decades past. Against the lefthand wall were two oak cabinets that nearly touched the pebbled plaster ceiling, the cabinets crammed full with china and cut glassware. Against the opposite wall was a sofa with doily-pinned arms, as were the arms of the several lounge chairs in the room, and over the sofa was a big mirror with a wooden frame painted gold and carved with cupids and flowers, the mirror reflecting the china cabinets back at themselves. The stucco walls were hung with plates picturing churches and dead presidents. Only the television seemed of this era, a new RCA Color job, but above it, in the corner it took up, was a knickknack rack whose shelves were filled with a salt and pepper shaker collection consisting mostly of little animals and miniature fruit, such as a white and a black lamb, and a pair of plump porcelain strawberries. The front two-thirds of the long room was living room and filled with this chamber of elderly horrors, and the back third was kitchenette. Two waist-high bookcases, with space between to walk through, divided the room. The books in the cases were not the sort you might expect from the girl behind Bunny’s; they ran to Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, a Collier’s Encyclopedia, occasional hardcovers, the raciest of which was Forever Amber, and scattered romance paperbacks. The kitchenette seemed largely spared of the senior-citizen school of interior decorating, outside of the clock above the sink which was a Felix the Cat clock with jeweled eyes and a tick-tocking tail, which was silenced now because the plug was pulled. Also, atop the refrigerator was a cute stuffed toy: a furry pink and black spider about the size of a healthy rat.
She came back wearing the blue sweater I’d seen her in a few nights before at Bunny’s, though now she was also wearing matching blue hotpants. Her legs were pale white and slender but shapely and looked delicious, and her breasts bobbed up and down as she moved toward the table, where she sat and began eating her grapefruit, taking small but greedy little bites, as though she got a sensuous enjoyment out of every nibble.
“Nice place you have here,” I said.
“Pretty fucking grim, isn’t it?” she said.
“Looking around I get the feeling you’re older than you look. Who are you, anyway, some hundred-year-old hag who discovered a fountain of youth?”
“Not exactly. My mother lived here with me, up until last month.”
“What happened last month?”
“She died.”
“Oh.”
“Aren’t you going to say ‘I’m sorry to hear that’?”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“The hell you are.”
“Terrible of me to behave so coldly, when your mother and I were such close friends.”
She laughed. “I think I’m going to like you… what was your name? Quarry, is that it, Quarry?”
“That’s right.”
“You got a first name?”
“Do I have to?”
“Sure.”
“Make you a deal.”
“What kind of deal?”
“You don’t ask me my first name and I don’t call you Bunny.”
“Deal.”
“You don’t seem overly upset about your mother’s death.”
“I’m over it. Anyway, it was a blessing, she was senile as hell. I mean, look at this place, that ought to tell you where her mind was.”
“Why don’t you move all this stuff out?”
“Where to?”
“You got money. Rent some place and store it.”
“Oh, I got money, do I?”
“Sure. You own a restaurant or a bar or whatever you call it, you must have money.”
“I call it a club and I own half of it. I’m working on owning it all.”
“Oh?”
“All or none of it. See, when we started the place we had no idea it was going to go like it did. Business started out big and got bigger. But the business arrangement I got isn’t the best.”
“Why’s that?”
“Well, when I got this idea for a club, I had some money, but not a whole hell of a lot. My mother was getting bedridden and like I said, sort of senile, and the big house we had on the hill we sold.. ”
“You had one of those houses on the hill?”
“Yeah, ours is a Port City family that goes way back. My old man was in the pearl button business, which
