anything.”
Chester gets up, drinks the last of his bourbon, puts the glass in the sink. He looks around his kitchen as if it were unfamiliar. At one time, it was. Holly had it painted pastel green while he was at work. Now it’s pearl- colored. Her skin was the color of the kitchen walls when they wheeled her out of the recovery room. He put his hands on her feet, for some reason, before she was even able to speak and tell him that she was cold. Sometimes in the winter when they’re in bed, he reaches down and gets her feet and tucks them under his legs. Drew met Holly before he did, fifteen years ago. He went out with her once, and he didn’t even kiss her. Now, when he comes to dinner every month or so, he kisses her forehead when he comes and when he goes. “I’m persuading her,” Drew sometimes says—or something like that—when he leaves. “Fifteen years, and I’m still giving her every opportunity.” Holly always blushes. She likes Drew. She thinks that he drinks too much but that nobody’s perfect. Holly’s way of thinking about things has started to creep into Chester’s speech. A minute ago, wasn’t he talking about God Almighty? Holly’s the one who seriously believes in God Almighty.
Drew stands beside Chester at the kitchen sink and splashes water on his face. He’s tan and he looks good. Hair a little shaggy. There’s some white in his sideburns. He wipes his face on the dish towel and swirls water in his mouth, spits it out. He pours a glass of water and drinks a few sips. The five minutes were up ten minutes ago. They go out to the hall and get the keys off the table. They’re on a Jaguar key chain. Chester’s car is a ’68 Pontiac.
“Who’s driving the Indian?” Chester says.
Drew reaches for the keys. In the elevator, he sees coronas around the lighted buttons with the floor numbers on them and tosses the keys back to Chester. Chester almost misses them because his mind is elsewhere. He has to remember to wash the glasses; he promised Holly he’d fix the leaking faucet. He’ll have one drink at the bar, say hello to Charlotte, and do some work around the apartment later. The elevator is going frustratingly slow. If they can have a child and if it’s a girl, Holly wants to name it for a flower: Rose or Lily or Margy—is that what she thought up? Short for Marigold.
Drew is thinking about what he can say to Charlotte. They were together for two years. There was a world between them. How do people make small talk when they’ve shared a world? And if you say something real, it always seems too sudden. There are a lot of things he’d like to know, questions he could probably shoot out like gunfire. She really loved him, and she married somebody else? She got tired of trying to convince him that she loved him? She read in some magazine that people who’ve had an unhappy childhood, the way he did, stay screwed up? He remembers his father: instead of walking him through museums and taking trips to see statues and to eat in dim taverns with pewter plates, places that had been standing since the nineteenth century, he could have done something practical, like teach him to shoot. Just put your arms outside the kid’s, move his fingers where they should go, line up the rifle and show him how to sight, tell him how to keep the gun steady, if that isn’t already obvious.
Drew slides into the car, bangs his knee on the side of the door as he pulls it shut. In another second, Chester has opened the driver’s door and gotten in. But he doesn’t start the car.
“You know, friendship’s really what it’s all about, isn’t it?” Chester says, clamping his hand on Drew’s shoulder.
Drew looks over at him, and Chester looks sad. Drew wonders if Chester is worried about Holly. Or is he just drunk? But that has to wait for a second. What Drew has just realized is that what felt like panic all day is really excitement. A drink with Charlotte—after all this time, he’s seeing her again. What he wants to say to Chester is so difficult that he can’t bring himself to look him in the eye.
“Ches,” Drew says, looking through the windshield, rubbing his hand over his mouth, then resting it on his chin. “Ches—have you ever been in love?”
Television
Billy called early in the week to tell me he’d found out that Friday was Atley’s birthday. Atley had been Billy’s lawyer first, and then Billy recommended him to me. He became my lawyer when I called Billy after my car fell into a hole in the car wash. Atley gave me a free five minutes in his office so that I could understand that small claims court would be best. Billy had the idea that we should take Atley to lunch on his birthday. I said to him, “What are we going to do with Atley at lunch?” and he said that we’d think of something. I was all for getting some out-of-work ballerina to run into the restaurant with Mylar balloons, but Billy said no, we’d just think of something. He picked the restaurant, and when Friday came we were still thinking when the three of us met there and sat down, and because we were all a little uptight the first thing we thought of, of course, was having some drinks. Then Atley got to telling the story about his cousin who’d won a goldfish in a brandy snifter; he got so attached to the fish that he went out and got it an aquarium, but then he decided that the fish didn’t look happy in the aquarium. Atley told his cousin that the brandy glass had magnified the fish and that’s what made it look happy, but the cousin wouldn’t believe it, so the cousin had a couple of drinks that night and decided to lower the brandy glass into the aquarium. He dug around in the pebbles and then piled them up around the base of the glass to anchor it, and the fish eventually started swimming around and around outside the top of the submerged glass in the same contented way, Atley said, that people in a hot tub sit there and hold their hands next to where the jets of water rush in.
The waiter came and told us the specials, and Billy and I both started smiling and looking away, because we knew that it was Atley’s birthday and we were going to have to do something pretty soon. If we’d known the fish story beforehand, we could have gotten a fish as a gag present. The waiter probably thought we were laughing at him and hated us for it; he had to stand there and say “Cotelette Plus Ca Change” or whatever the specialty was, when actually he wanted to be John Travolta in
Billy said, when he was eating his shrimp, “My parents had a New Year’s Eve party the last time I visited them, and some woman got ripped and took my father’s shoe and sock off and painted his toenails.” At this point I cracked up, and the waiter, who was removing my plate, looked at me as if I was dispensable. “That’s not it, that’s not the punch line!” Billy said. Atley held his hand up in cop-stopping-traffic style, and Billy made a fist and hit it. Then he said, “The punch line is, a week later my father was reading the paper at breakfast and my mother said, ‘What if I get some nail-polish remover and fix your toes?’ and my father said, ‘Don’t do it.’ She was
“I had such a happy childhood,” I said. “We always rented a beach house during the summer, and my mother and father had one of each of our baby shoes bronzed—my sister’s and mine—and my parents danced in the living room a lot. My father said the only way he’d have a TV was if he could think of it as a giant radio, so when they finally bought one he’d be watching and my mother would come into the room and he’d get up and take her in his arms and start humming and dancing. They’d dance while Kate Smith talked or whatever, or while Gale Storm made her
Atley squinted and leaned against the table. “Come on, come on, come on—what do two people who have money do all day?” he whispered. That was when Billy kissed me, which made it look as if what we did was make love all day, which couldn’t have been farther from the truth. In the back of my mind I thought that maybe it was part of some act Billy was putting on because he’d already figured out what to do about the birthday. The waiter was opening a bottle of champagne, which I guess Billy had ordered. I knew very few facts about Billy’s ex. One
