“Poor dear. It’s always such an ordeal going to the dentist. You’d better have a drink at once.”
“I could use one, all right.”
He signaled a waiter and asked for bourbon and water. When it arrived, he drank half of it quickly and sat looking down into the remainder, turning the glass with fingertips around suspended cubes.
“I’ve been looking for a good dentist myself,” she said. “Would you recommend yours?”
“I think he’d do. I’m very particular about dentists, and I had this one investigated thoroughly.”
“What’s his name?”
“Foresman. Norton Foresman. He’s in the Clinical Center Building.”
“Perhaps I should arrange an appointment with him.”
“It might be a good idea. I’m sure he’d appreciate it. He needs the money.”
“Yes? I thought dentists were generally prosperous.”
“Oh, his income’s good enough, but his expenditures are out of proportion. Unfortunately, he has expensive tastes.”
“Such as?”
“Such as women and horses and the Riverview Casino.”
“Has he been losing?”
“He and the horses. The women and the casino are way ahead. You know Jeb Shannon? He owns Riverview, and he’s holding a bundle of Foresman’s paper. About eight grand’s worth. I’ve dropped some to Shannon myself, and I know how he operates. He’s a tough guy with connections, and he doesn’t like to wait too long. With Foresman, it’s getting to be almost too long.”
“I see. It means the doctor would probably be susceptible.” She drained her glass and sat smiling quietly at the exposed olive. “What does he look like, Peter? Tell me some more about Dr. Norton Foresman.”
“He’s tall. About two inches taller than me. He’s vain and arrogant, and I have a feeling that he could be dangerous. Ladies’ man, as I said. Wavy blond hair and rather florid complexion. He has good shoulders, and he carries himself as if he might have done some amateur boxing, but he’d run to fat if he ever let himself go. Handsome, if you like the type. Too handsome, maybe. Maybe handsome enough to make persuasion fun.”
Moving her smile from the olive to him, she reached past her glass and his and touched his hand with long fingers, and under the table below the intimacy of fingers, he was aware of the simultaneous intimacy of knees. He felt again, as he had felt a thousand times, the dark hunger for her that was often fed but never satisfied, and he knew, as he had known from the first, that there was nothing at all that she wouldn’t do for whatever she wanted, but he knew also that he would never care so long as one of the things she wanted was Peter Roche.
“Don’t worry, Peter,” she said. “Don’t worry for a minute. Persuasion may be fun for Dr. Foresman, but not for me, because the only fun for me is you, and anyhow it can’t be helped. Tell me, darling, how much do you think he’d charge to look at my molars?”
“Offhand,” he said, “I’d guess about ten thousand dollars.”
CHAPTER 4.
Same bar, same booth, but the year in a quarter turn had changed its season. The sun had lost is warmth and was a pale wash in the street outside, cut by a chill wind.
Peter sat over a bourbon and watched the door. A bright scrap of paper danced across the concrete walk and was trapped for an instant against glass.
A man opened the door and went out.
Another man opened the door and came in.
A man and a woman came in together.
The woman was dressed in a navy blue suit and wore a silver fox around her shoulders. She had short mahogany hair under a chip of a blue hat with a tiny red feather on it, and she was the most beautiful woman in the world, and very shortly she would order a very dry martini. The man was tall and blond in expensive tweed, and there was arrogance in the carriage of his head and elastic in his walk. He looked like he would order Scotch.
He did. Peter could see it all from his position. He gave the martini and the Scotch time to diminish by half, and then he went over to the table where the man and the beautiful woman sat.
“Hello, Etta,” he said.
She looked up and smiled and said, “Oh, hello, Peter,” and Dr. Norton Foresman stood up politely and permitted his face to express a nominal amount of interest when Etta introduced them.
“Oh, yes,” he said. “The stepson.”
Peter nodded. “It’s very funny, isn’t it? My being Etta’s stepson, I mean. People always get a laugh out of it.”
“I’d say that it’s more fortunate than funny. For you, that is. Will you sit down and have a drink with us?”
Peter smiled and thought, If you only knew how fortunate it is for me you Goddamn molar mechanic. If you only knew!
He said, “No, thanks. I just had one. See you at home, Etta.”
He went out into the sun that had no warmth and turned down the street two blocks to the slot where he’d left his car. Behind the wheel, he lit a cigarette and looked at his watch. Five-thirty, she’d said. It was five now. He finished the cigarette and lit another from the butt and was acutely conscious of the drag of time.
The wind was stronger in the street. Pedestrians leaned into it, or scurried before it, and made what breaks they could of one another.
Autumn, he thought. Another little tag of time. The tags change, but time stays fixed forever. In the meanwhile, you sit in the static forever and suck cigarettes. In the meanwhile, you sit over endless bourbons and wonder endlessly how persuasion is going, and what forms persuasion takes, and you curse with stale impotence the louse that persuasion profits.
At five-twenty-five he started the car and swung out into traffic. Driving slowly, killing five minutes, making three right turns that brought him back to the street above the bar, he saw then with the inevitable visceral disturbance that she was already waiting for him
