the jets landed directly over their heads.
“Can you tell me what we are doing here at 2:48 A. M. in the morning?” she asked Arlo. He said nothing. She rolled down the window. “Can
“Tell me about yourself,” Arlo gambited.
“This theatrical pose I wear is merely a snare and a delusion. I am, in reality, Anastasia, true Czarina of all the Russias, and I’m wearing a plastic nose. My father was Lamont Cranston, and he met an untimely end via the worst case of Dutch Elm Blight ever diagnosed at Johns Hopkins. He contracted it from Lupe Velez during a mad, passionate night deep in the heart of Mt. Etna, where my father was conducting guided tours. I am engaged to a Doberman Pinscher.”
“Stop edging closer,” she suggested violently.
“Look!” Arlo said, “Here comes one.”
The Boeing 707 came out of the night like Sinbad’s roc, screaming shrilly, and Anastasia screamed shriller.
The great silvery bulk of it, totally obscuring the sky, sailed out of the blackness mere feet above them, all vastness and terror, like a flat stone two blocks long, skimmed over water, and shred their silences past them. The 707 touched down almost as soon as it passed over them, and an instant later was a half mile down the runway.
Anastasia had pulled closer to Arlo. She was now wrapped in his arms.
“Scary, isn’t it?” Arlo smiled.
“I wet myself,” she said. She did not seem delighted with Arlo.
He leaned across slightly and kissed her. “Easy,” she said, inserting an elbow into the conversation. “ And that’s an order, not a description.”
He started the car and made a U-turn.
“That was a helluva whimsical thing you said, when the plane passed over,” Arlo chuckled.
“Which?”
“About what you did when the plane—”
“It was a statement of fact.”
At Arlo’s apartment, after she had hung things up to dry, he offered her an omelet. “I can make seven different varieties, all delicious.”
She aimed a finger at him. “You’re lucky I share an apartment with a light sleeper, because underwear or no underwear, I wouldn’t have let you con me into coming up here.”
“Spanish, Viennese, Ranch-style, Albanian—”
“You have an indomitable will. Nothing seems to get to you. Brick walls and your head have much in common.”
“Corsican, Paraguayan—”
“Look: I’m very hungry, mostly because you had the bad taste to remind me, and I’d like nothing better than a good omelet; but when I say
Arlo grinned infectiously. “Like a call from the spirit world. My father taught me. He was a master chef in New York hotels most of his life, except for a couple of years when he was captaining the kitchen of a luxury liner. Spanish, Corsican, Tibetan, German-Bavarian—”
She sat down on the arm of an overstuffed Morris chair, courtesy of the landlord. She pulled his blue bathrobe closer around her. A flash of leg reminded him there was nothing between them but the robe. “You know, Arlo, I have to tell you, concisely, I think you are the bummest trip I have ever been on. Not only are you funny looking, but there is a perceptible animal cunning in your face, and very frankly, but
He moved in and kissed her. It was an act of humor on his part, an act of politeness on hers. “Now that we have that out of the way,” he smiled, “one Albanian omelet coming up.”
He vanished into the utility kitchen, tiny for the white stucco unit (furniture courtesy of landlord and Thrift Shops; what might have been termed Early Impecunity) but more than sufficient for his needs. He proceeded to make a Spanish omelet, which was, in actuality, the
He threw in a palmful of paprika and brown sugar and oregano.
“You collect coins,” she called from the other room.
“My father did,” he answered, without turning from the stove. He had no need to go in the other room to see what she was doing. He could picture it perfectly. The picture was always the same, because it always happened just this way. She was standing before the flat, glass-covered case about the size of an opened newspaper. It stood on its own black wrought iron pedestal, a Herman Miller design that had been bolted to the underside of the case. The little Tensor lamp was turned in such a way that the beam fell directly on the arrangement of coins lying on their black velvet pad in the case.
“They’re very handsome,” she called.
“Yes, they were Dad’s pride and joy,” he said, not turning from the stove.
“They must be valuable,” she said.
He turned from the stove, smiling a secret smile. Then he turned back to the stove, and scraped the ruined omelet into the sink disposal, started over again with gritted teeth, and knew he shouldn’t have turned from the stove.
When he brought out their plates, and set them on the coffee table, she was still leaning over the case, mesmerized, hands behind her back, not wanting to put fingerprints on the carefully polished glass. Arlo smiled his own Spanish omelet of a secret smile.
She looked at the omelet uneasily as he went back to get the quart of milk from the refrigerator. She was back at the coin case when he returned with it. “Your omelet’ll get cold,” and she came over to the sofa, sat down and addressed herself to the egg without realizing Arlo was looking at the exposed left thigh.
“You keep them out where anyone could steal them?”
Arlo shrugged and ate a bite of omelet. It was awful. She wasn’t saying anything about hers, however. “I seldom have people over,” he explained. And mused that while he had just lied outrageously, the usual modus operandi had not been like this evening’s. Underwear. He’d have to examine the ramifications of that ploy, at his leisure.
“It took Dad over thirty years to find all those. Myself, I could never understand the kick he got out of it. They never meant much to me—until he died…”
He choked up. She paused with a forkful on her way to mouth. The appraisal she gave him was the crucial one: if he could pass the sincerity test, the rest was downhill.
“But when he died… ?” she prompted him.
Arlo plunged on. “It was all he left me. All those years he worked so damned hard, and he had so little to show for it. Just those coins. He left them to me, and well, it may have seemed a dumb way to spend time, collecting coins, when I was younger and he was around. But when he was gone, they became very important. It was like keeping a little bit of him with me. He was a good guy—never really understood me, but I suppose that’s typical with the parents of our generation.”
