They played for another twenty minutes. Then Pellam saw motion across the street. Hard to say, vague in the dusk, but it might have been a pretty blonde in a white blouse wearing too much pancake makeup and fleshy panty hose, locking up a small-town real estate office at dusk. He looked at the three jacks in his hand and folded. He stood up.
Everyone at the table looked at him.
“I’m beat.”
Fred said, “Tough work losing money.”
Nick frowned. It was too early to leave. Pellam was breaking gambler protocol. “Suit yourself.”
“Maybe sit in tomorrow.”
Pete said, “Come by sometime. Anytime. I’d like to get your opinion on what we were talking about before. You know.”
Pellam had no clue. “Sure thing. Evening, gentlemen.”
By the time he got to the sidewalk Meg had finished locking the door and was moving toward her car.
He felt a presence at his side. It startled him. Someone took his arm.
Janine kissed his neck. “It’s Cecil B.” She squeezed his biceps into her breast. “I just closed up shop and was going to stop by your camper and say hi. How are you, darling?”
“Doing good,” Pellam said, forcing himself not to look toward Meg’s receding form.
She squeezed his thigh, mindful of the bruise, and said, “You don’t look as sore as last night.” A sly grin. “I was thinking, love, you still haven’t seen my house. Come by and I’ll make you dinner. I’ll even cook meat, you want.”
“How about a rain check? I’ve got to send a package off to my studio. I’ll be working all night.”
“I’ve got an awareness group tomorrow and women’s crisis intervention the day after. Maybe I can . . . Oh, hell, then my old man’s coming by. He’s bringing his new cycle over to show me. . . .” She stood back and examined his face. “Hey, you’re not jealous, are you?”
“Not a bit.”
“That’s a good boy.” She held his eyes in a vise grip, then leaned forward suddenly and kissed his mouth. Hers was partly open. He recoiled for an instant in surprise, then returned the kiss.
Janine said, “Then the Apple Festival’s on Saturday and I’m working a booth. How would Sunday be?”
“Sure. Good.”
Where was Meg? He’d lost her. Goddamn, why’d she worn a black jacket? He couldn’t see her. He
looked back at Janine, who was saying, “You better not get cramps anywhere but in your writing hand.” She punched him playfully on the jaw, though bone connected with bone and he blinked. She said, “And you better not stand me up. Mama doesn’t like to be stood up.”
“Yes, dear.” He smiled and stood hard on the sarcasm.
Not far away Meg’s Toyota fired up. He heard the bubble of the exhaust and saw the gray car back out of its stall. He said, “Well, much as I hate it, better go do some work. Sunday, then?”
“I close the shop at four. Why don’t I come by the camper after? We’ll drive home together. How’s that?”
“Sounds great.”
He kissed her cheek, broke away. As he started toward the Toyota he saw the little car speed away. The brake lights flashed as it made a fast turn and then was gone.
“Damn.”
Pellam slowed his walk. Stopped and headed back toward the camper.
Thinking about junkyards.
He walked to the end of the deserted block and turned the corner onto the side street where the Winnebago was parked.
Thinking about getting something to eat.
Thinking about—
He nearly walked into the car. The little gray Toyota, idling at the curbside.
When he put his hands on the roof and bent down to the window, where she sat holding the wheel in
both hands, staring straight ahead, she said, “You’re alone.”
“Nope. I’m with you.”
“I thought you maybe had a date.”
“Date?”
“Weren’t you walking with . . .” She debated and the catty side won. “. . . Ms. 1969?”
“Business,” he said.
“Ah. Business.”
Pellam asked, “How about a drink?”
He knew she was going to say no but he was curious what form it would take. There were a thousand different ways a woman says no to a man and they all have different meaning.
“I can’t. I’m going out with the girls tonight. Bridge.”
“How about poker? I can get us into a game up the street.”
She laughed. A moment passed. “I wanted to say I was sorry about your friend. I heard about the accident.”
“Thank you.”
“I also wanted to apologize.”
He cocked an eyebrow toward her, and she added, “For the other day. In the hospital.”
“Naw. I was out of line,” Pellam said. “I hate hospitals. They put me in a bad mood.”
“No . . .” She studied the tachometer. “I was rude.”
A muscle car went past, exhaust popping as it slowed for a stop sign, then took off again.
She said, “There’s something else.”
He smiled. “Is there?”
Meg swallowed and tried to put up a shield against
the flirt. “It’s kind of last minute. But you interested in coming over for dinner?”
“You cook like you drive?”
She blinked and tried to think of a comeback. He could see her thoughts racing. But she decided not to play the wittiest-comeback game. “About eight. That’s extremely fashionably late around these parts. In fact, it’s about bedtime.”
“I’ll bring some wine.”
“No, you don’t have to.”
“No bother.”
Meg gave him directions. He memorized them and repeated them out loud. He said, “See you then,” grinning. She gunned the engine. He stepped back and she spun the car into the intersection, scattering gravel. She’d kept it in gear, the clutch depressed, while they’d talked. Planning a fast getaway.
Meg glanced back and, unsmiling, waved. She drove into the darkness.
MEG TORRENS, MIXING
fresh dill weed into sour cream, heard her husband upstairs, moving slowly.
Keith Torrens liked to dress for dinner.
He’d be laying out his clothes on the bed. He’d picked that up from some episode of
Masterpiece Theater.
Almost anybody else in Cleary mentioned that they are going to dress for dinner, it’d make them sound like an idiot. Or it’d be a joke about changing out of sweats. But Keith was a natural at that kind of formality. Meg found it charming. He was moody some and quiet. But he was a scientist. He was brilliant. His mind was different from everybody else’s.
Meg liked smart men.
She liked formal men.
She liked successful men.
And Keith was that. She’d never met anyone so devoted to his own business as her husband. He’d always wanted one, a business of his own. Keith the dreamer. Even as head of research and development at Sandberg Pharmaceutical outside of Poughkeepsie (not a job to shake a stick at, she’d reminded him on the dozens of occasions when he wanted impetuously to quit), he’d obsessed about being an entrepreneur.
At first he hadn’t been sure how to go about it. First, he’d considered a consulting firm. But that smacked of laid-off middle management. Then he considered a for-hire research laboratory. But that was pretty much for losers and academics and—more troublesome—it wouldn’t give Keith the income he wanted as badly as he wanted his name on a corporate office.
Then one day, two years ago, he came home and announced he was going to do it.
“Do it?” Meg had asked uneasily.
“I’m quitting.”
“We’ve been through this a dozen times,” she’d reminded.
“Dale’s got cash.”
Keith’s friend from Sandberg and his intended business partner.
“How much cash?” Meg had inquired.
“Enough.”
And she knew there was no deterring him.
So with a $185,000 mortgage, a son destined for MIT and a wife who in a good year made twelve thousand in commissions, Keith took the plunge.
In a whirlwind of eighty-hour weeks, Keith, Dale and their lawyer bought their way out of stiff non-compete contracts with Sandberg, and opened a company.
It hurt her some that he wouldn’t let her in on the deal. Not that she wanted to have anything to do with the technical part, of course: setting up the factory, the financing, hiring employees. She knew she wasn’t smart in those ways. But Meg thought she was a pretty good broker and when Keith bought property through another company it really stung. Why, one night she’d
even taken a phone message from the bastard, a competitor.
Another broker!
“Honey,” she’d said, “that’s what I do for a living. Why didn’t you ask me?”
And he’d looked at her, surprised, and then forlorn. She could see that he hadn’t even thought about using her. He’d confessed that he’d blown it. He’d apologized, looking miserable. Like a boy who’d forgotten Mother’s Day. Oozing contrition. She’d smiled and forgiven him.
Brilliant. But sometimes he just didn’t
think.
That was so peculiar. How could that be?
Sam wheeled through the kitchen. “Hey, Mom, you know why the dinosaurs went extinct? An asteroid crashed into the earth and this poison gas killed them all.” He sniffed the dip. “Yuck.” He vanished.
Did that really happen? How could all the animals on an entire planet get killed at once? Did we have to start over again in evolution? Maybe civilization would be millions of years more advanced if not for a single asteroid. . . .
Meg filled the dip bowl and set out crackers like flower petals on the plate. She finished setting the table and wandered through the downstairs rooms.
She’d decorated the house herself. Laura Ashley wallpaper—tiny flowers like an airbrushed spray of blue. A three-inch border of burgundy paper around the walls, below carved molding. Braided rugs. Most of the antiques had been bought on a single occasion, at an auction in Vermont. Country rustic some of them, painted and distressed, and a lot of Victorian. (And a whorehouse of a bathroom, she kept thinking.
Gotta change that.) Dried flowers, wreaths, vases and doilies were everywhere. On the living room walls were photographs from the 1800s, mounted on sepia paper. She’d bought them in a local antique store for a dollar each and mounted them in old frames. She sometimes told visitors they were her ancestors and made up elaborate stories about them.
Meg dimmed the lights in the sconces and stood looking for a moment at the romantic ambience. She shook her head. She turned the lights back full and trotted up the stairs.
Keith was sitting on the bed, putting a shine on his shoes. Now he examined the loafers like a diamond cutter.
Until she began to undress. One glossy shoe dropped in his hand. He was grinning.
“Hey, boy,” Meg said, “we got a guest in twenty minutes. Get that thought out of your mind.”
He dropped his shoes, stepped into them, kissed her chastely. Left the bedroom. Meg tossed her clothes onto the hamper, slipped into her robe.
Do Do a Do. . . .
She stepped into the bathroom.
Don’t Do a Don’t. . . .
In the shower, her hair protected under a translucent shower cap printed with somber seagulls (a Christmas present from Sam), Meg felt the stinging water and wondered about the Don’ts for this evening.
It became a private joke, Meg’s and Keith’s, after she’d told him about a movie she’d seen in high school hygiene class. “Don’t Do a Don’t, and Do Do a Do” was the theme of the film, which warned
about sexual risks in such delicate euphemisms that nobody could figure out exactly what the Don’ts were.
She decided that tonight’s Don’ts were: Don’t talk about the movie, about his friend’s death, about Hollywood. . . .
Which made her wonder why she’d invited him in the first place.
When she got out of the shower she heard the comforting sound of her husband flipping through the Moebius strip of TV channels downstairs.
She laid out a black angora sweater with a star in pearls above her left breast and black slacks. She sat at her dressing table. She spread the heavy foundation powder over her face and began working with blue eyeshadow. Her hand paused.
What’s so Cleary about me?
Five years, not ten, Mr. Pellam.
Bzzzzt.
Meg walked into the bathroom and cleaned off the makeup with Ponds. From the back of the toilet, she pulled a recent
Vogue
magazine and began flipping through it.
“
HEY THERE,” JOHN
Pellam said.
In her heart, Meg knew that every man from Hollywood believed fidelity to one’s wife was an idea so odd it could be a headline in the
National Enquirer.
But Pellam’s weak handshake and chaste cheek kiss told her she might have found an exception.
His eyes, however, did a complicated reconnaissance of her face and she almost laughed as he tried to figure out exactly what was different about her.
She could tell he decided it was the French braid of her hair.
Keith did the same scan and said, “New sweater, darling. Looks super.” He’d given it to her two Christmases ago.
Pellam was wearing black jeans and a gray shirt, buttoned at the neck, without a tie, and a black sports jacket.
He was smiling steadily, looking around the house and talking to Keith. She heard her husband say, “You look like you’re recovering pretty well from your little run-in with my wife, excuse the expression. Ought to be a town ordinance. Everybody
else’s
got to wear crash helmets when Meg drives. . . .”
“All right, buddy boy,” she said, offering a wry smile, “you want to talk fenders? You want to talk body work.”
Keith rolled his eyes. Said, “Okay, sometimes I run into things, true.”
“You found the place okay?” she asked Pellam.
“Perfect directions.”
Keith was looking out the door. “Oh, a Winnebago?” He stepped out on the porch.
“Home sweet home.” To Meg, Pellam said, “Brought you a present.” He handed her a small, flat bag. “Oh, yeah,” he said. He added to it a paper-wrapped bottle, which turned out coincidentally to be one of her favorite merlots.
Meg looked at the small bag. “What’s this?”
Pellam shrugged.
She opened it and began to laugh. “Honey!” she called to Keith. Pellam cracked a grin. She held up a bumper sticker:
So many pedestrians. So little time.