Cathy was a very bright woman — that had been the first thing that had attracted Peter to her. It was only later that he redefined his own standards of feminine beauty, which had tended toward bouncy blondes a la the beer ads, to find her jet-black hair and thin lips beautiful. She was sitting on the long couch, two of her coworkers — Toby, was it? And that lout, Hans Larsen — on either side of her, so that she couldn’t get out unless one of them moved first.
Cathy looked up as Peter approached, smiled her radiant smile, and waved. Peter still felt a thrill when she smiled. He wanted to sit next to her, but the current deployment of bodies made that impossible. Cathy smiled again, love plain on her face, then shrugged apologetically and gestured for him to take an unused chair from the adjacent table. Peter did so, and Cathy’s coworkers shifted along to make room for him. He found himself sitting between one of the painted ladies on his left — the secretaries and production coordinators who wore too much makeup — and the pseudointellectual on his right. As always, Pseudo had a bookreader sitting in front of him, the cover of the datacard visible through the window in the reader’s shell. Proust. Ostentatious bastard.
“’Evening, Doc,” said Pseudo.
Peter smiled. “How you doin’?”
Pseudo was about fifty, and slim as the Leafs’ chances in the Stanley Cup. His fingernails were long; his hair, dirty. Howard Hughes in training.
Others acknowledged Peter’s presence, and Cathy gave him another special smile from across the table. His arrival had been enough to momentarily stop the separate conversations. Hans, on Cathy’s right, seized the opportunity to grab everyone’s attention. “The old ball-and-chain won’t be home tonight,” he announced generally. “Off to visit her nieces.” That they were Hans’s nieces, too, didn’t seem to occur to him. “That means I’m free, ladies.”
The women around the table groaned or giggled. They’d all heard this sort of thing from Hans before. He was hardly what you’d call a handsome man: he had dirty blond hair and looked something like the Pillsbury Doughboy. Still, his incredible boldness was appealing — even Peter, who found Hans’s infidelity distasteful, had to admit that there was something inherently likable about the man.
One of the painted ladies looked up. Her crimson lipstick had been applied in a shape bigger than her actual lips. “Sorry, Hans. I’ve got to wash my hair tonight.”
General laughter. Peter glanced at the pseudointellectual to see if the notion that cleaning one’s hair might be a priority had registered on him. It hadn’t. “Besides,” said the woman, “a girl has to have her standards. I’m afraid you don’t measure up.”
Toby, on Cathy’s left, chuckled. “Yeah,” he said. “They don’t call him
Hans smiled from ear to ear. “As my daddy used to say, you can always go ’round the edges.” He looked at the woman with the painted-on lips. “Besides, don’t knock it until — until you’ve been knocked by me!” He roared, delighted at his own wit. “Ask Ann-Marie in accounting. She’ll tell you how good I am.”
“
“Details, details,” said Hans, waving a mittenlike hand. “Anyway, if she won’t vouch for me, ask that blond temp in payroll — the one with the big casabas.”
Peter was growing tired of this. “Why don’t you try dating her instead?” he said, pointing at the woman in the Molson’s poster. “If your wife comes home unexpectedly, you can fold her into a paper airplane and send her sailing out the window.”
Hans roared again. He was good-natured, Peter would give him that. “Hey, the doc made a funny!” he said, looking from face to face, inviting them all to share in the supposed wonder of Peter having told a joke. Embarrassed, Peter looked away, and happened to catch the eye of the young man serving drinks. He raised his eyebrows at him, and he came over. Peter ordered a large orange juice; he didn’t drink alcohol.
Hans wasn’t one to let go, though. “Go ahead, Doc. Tell us another joke. You must hear lots of ’em in your line of work.” He roared again.
“Well,” said Peter, deciding to make an effort to fit in for Cathy’s sake, “I was talking to a lawyer yesterday, and he told me a funny one.” Two of the women had gone back to munching on nachos, evidently uninterested in his joke, but the rest of the group was looking at him expectantly. “See, there’s this woman who killed her husband by hitting him over the head with a cruet of salad dressing.” When the joke had been told to Peter, it had been about a husband killing his wife, but he couldn’t resist reversing the roles in the hopes of planting the thought in Hans’s head that Hans’s wife might not approve of his philandering.
“Well,” Peter continued, “the case finally comes to trial, and the crown attorney wants to introduce the murder weapon. She picks up the cruet off her desk. It still has a little glass stopper in its mouth, and is mostly full of liquid. She begins carrying it toward the judge. ‘Your Honor,’ she says to the judge, ‘this is the very item by which the deed was done. I’d like to enter it as Crown exhibit number one.’ The lawyer holds it up to the light. ‘As you can see, it’s still full of oil and vinegar—’ Well, at once, the defense attorney rises to his feet and pounds the table in front of him. ‘I object, Your Honor!’ he shouts. ‘That evidence is immiscible!’”
They all stared at him. Peter grinned to show that the joke was over. Cathy did her best to laugh, even though she’d heard the joke the night before. “Immiscible,” Peter said again, weakly. Still no general response. He looked at the pseudointellectual. Pseudo made a condescending little chuckle. He got it, or was pretending to have. But the other faces were blank. “Immiscible,” said Peter. “It means they can’t be mixed.” He looked from face to face. “Oil and vinegar.”
“Oh,” said one of the painted ladies, and “ho ho” said another.
Peter’s orange juice arrived. Hans pantomimed a bomb dropping, whistling a descending note as it fell, then making a sound like an explosion. When he looked up, he said, “Hey, everyone, did you hear about the whore who…”
Peter suffered through another hour, although it seemed longer. Hans continued to hit on the women collectively and individually. Finally, Peter had had all he could take of him, of the noise, and of the lousy orange juice. He caught Cathy’s eye and glanced meaningfully at his watch. She smiled a thank-you-for-your-indulgence smile just for him, and they got up to leave.
“Off so soon, Doc?” said Hans, speech noticeably slurred, his left arm now having taken up residence on the shoulders of one of the women.
Peter nodded.
“You should really let Cath stay out later.”
The unfair remark angered Peter. He nodded curtly, she said her good-byes, and they headed for the door.
It was only seven-thirty, but it was already black overhead, although the glare from the streetlights banished the stars. Cathy took Peter’s arm, and they walked slowly along.
“I get pretty tired of him,” said Peter, his words appearing as puffs of condensation.
“Who?” said Cathy.
“Hans.”
“Oh, he’s harmless,” said Cathy, snuggling closer to Peter as they walked.
“All bark and no bite?”
“Well, I wouldn’t quite say that,” she said. “He does seem to have dated just about everyone in the office.”
Peter shook his head. “Don’t they see through him? He’s only after one thing.”
She stopped, and reached up to kiss him. “Tonight, my love, so am I.”
He smiled at her and she at him, and somehow it didn’t seem cold outside anymore at all.
They’d made wondrous love, their naked forms mingling, each attentive to the other’s desires. After twelve years of marriage, seventeen of living together, and nineteen since they’d first dated, they knew the rhythms of each other’s bodies. And yet, after all that time, they still found new ways to surprise and please each other. Finally, after midnight, they had fallen asleep in each other’s arms, calm, relaxed, spent, in love.
But about 3:00 A.M., Peter awoke with a start, sweating profusely. He’d had the dream again — the same dream that had been haunting him for sixteen years now.
Lying on an operating table, pronounced dead, but not. Scalpels and sternal saws cutting into him, his organs being removed from his torso.
Cathy, still naked, awoken by Peter’s sudden movement, slipped out of bed, got him a glass of water, and
