by Al Riske
She said, “You know, we have a good thing going. We may not see each other very often, but when we do …”
SHE WAS RIGHT, of course. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it that way sooner. There were certainly things she didn’t tell me about (other guys) and things I didn’t tell her about (other girls), but none of that seemed to matter much in the long run. The only real difference between us was that when I started seeing someone else, I stopped seeing her. Which was hardly the high moral ground I once thought it was.
I SAW HER again a few weeks later, at another party. She avoided me at first, chatting with Mark and Karen and Dave before she would acknowledge my presence. She made it seem natural, not spiteful, though I knew she was doing it on purpose.
I too pretended to be uninterested, but I always knew where she was in the room. More than once I pictured myself leaving her dorm with my shirttails out to hide the wet spot on my pants. The memory used to make me blush, but now I only smiled. I had made her come in the front seat of my mother’s Malibu, and I hadn’t even been breathing hard.
Around midnight, after all the snacks had been devoured, I watched her run her finger along the inside of a bowl, lick garlic dip from her finger, and do it again.
“Hungry?”
“Me?” she said. “Not at all. Why do you ask?”
I told her I knew a restaurant that was open all night.
“Sounds good. Just let me tell the girls I won’t be needing a ride home.”
By the time we got there, the restaurant had been closed for over an hour. I tried to act surprised.
Rachel said, “Honestly, Gene, you come up with these straight lines sometimes and I never know when to believe you.”
Yeah, right.
I drove her out to the cape and parked on the south lookout. I was unbuttoning her blouse when she said, “Why are you doing this?”
“Because I want to,” I told her.
I was not that conflicted guy anymore. I was someone else.
She grabbed my wrist.
“Maybe you’d better take me home,” she said.
Disengaged
SOMEONE TAPPED JOEL on the shoulder, and when he swiveled around to see who, there was Ed Cooper, his old boyhood friend, looking totally exhausted and full of pent-up energy all at once.
“Hey, man, you look terrible. Sit down. You can buy me a drink.”
Ed forced a smile, shook his head.
“Thought you might like to take a little drive over to Big Sur,” he said. “What do you say?”
“Now?”
The coastline around Big Sur was amazing, but it would be dark before they could get there, so Joel couldn’t see the point.
“Humor me.”
“Okay, sure.”
Joel left a twenty on the bar and said so-long to his colleagues.
“It’s been an honor,” he told them, “and a privilege.”
Ed’s dark green Triumph was just outside, and as they folded themselves into the tan seats, Joel said, “You going to tell me what this is all about?”
Ed slammed the shift into reverse and wheeled the convertible around, ducking his head a little to see under the roll bar. Joel was still fastening his seat belt.
“You and Lindsey have a fight or something?”
“You could say that.”
Ed went through all the forward gears before he would say any more. They were quickly out of town on the two-lane to the coast. Noise from the engine and the rush of hot August air made it necessary to shout.
“The wedding is off!”
“I just got the invitation yesterday.”
“It’s off.”
“Why? What happened?”
Ed’s short blond hair looked like wheat in a windstorm.
“That’s the way—that’s what she wants,” he said.
“I don’t get it.”
Ed concentrated on the coming series of turns indicated by a squiggly black line on a yellow diamond-shaped sign. The sun was already going down.
“She just hit me with it tonight. Says she can’t … she can’t go through with it.”
Car and driver handled the curves beautifully, and it was clear to Joel that their destination was irrelevant. Ed just needed to drive—and talk.
Ed glanced over, downshifted, and then accelerated through another graceful arc.
“You want to hear what she said?”
Joel was still coming to terms with the fact that he and half his colleagues at the brokerage no longer had jobs, but that bit of news could wait. He rubbed his temples and nodded.
“She said she can’t talk to me.”
“How so?”
“Can you believe it!”
Joel’s shirt collar was flapping in his ear. He grabbed it and held it still.
“Why can’t she talk to you?”
“Damned if I know.”
Ed took his hands off the steering wheel for an instant, then grabbed on tight for yet another turn. Joel’s body shifted left, then righted itself as the road straightened. Ed looked over at him, saw that he was trying to read the speedometer, and eased off the accelerator a bit.
“Want to know what she said then? Want to know the last thing she said to me? The last thing?”
Joel knew Lindsey was a woman of few words, and when she had something to say, it was usually good. But—
Up ahead, red lights blinked back and forth. Railroad crossing. Ed’s first impulse was to hit the accelerator, but he thought better of it. The gate was already on its downward arc. He slammed on the brakes.
The Triumph came to an abrupt stop, and the two men just sat there, staring straight ahead, beyond the bold diagonal stripes of the crossing gate to the dark, distant trees. It was like one of those nights when they were boys: Late summer. A never-ending game of Kick the Can. All sense of time lost among the stars.
Suddenly the train burst through the beam of their headlights—bigger, louder, and heavier than anything Joel could remember. He flinched.
They hadn’t seen it coming because its headlight was broken, hadn’t heard it because they weren’t listening. When it was gone, Ed laughed and said, “You’ll like this. This is good. The last thing she said? ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’”
Double or Nothing
THERE WAS A little cove just below the old cedar-shake cottage we were renting on the Cape, and it was supposed to be good for clamming, so one morning during a minus tide, the four of us went down there with shovels and pails. It was barely daybreak and already half a dozen other people were digging in the wet sand for quahogs, cherrystones, and steamers. We left them at one end of the beach and trudged off in the other direction, Luke leading the way.
“What’s wrong with right here?” Sara asked.
“Shhh … you have to sneak up on them,” Luke said.
Though they had been seeing each other, off and on, for a year, she could never seem to tell when Luke was serious and when he was putting her on, so she looked to me—the trusted friend—for some sort of clue. As she did, she banged her knee on the empty metal bucket she was carrying. It made quite a racket and she let out a sharp cry.
Luke shot her a dirty look.
“Well, it hurt,” she said, rubbing her bare knee and looking for damage. It was really too cold for shorts, but it would be a sin to cover legs like hers.
“Just try to hold it down. They’ll hear us coming.”
“I’ll probably have a bruise tomorrow,” she said. And then: “Wait a minute, clams don’t have ears.”
“Of course they do.”
“Where?”
A good question, I thought.
Luke said, “Tell her, Frank.”
“Uh, sure,” I said. “As any marine biologist will tell you, a clam’s ears are, uh, on either side of its nose.”
Luke stopped, held up his hand. In the sand at his feet I could see four small depressions. To my right were two more. One of them bubbled.
“This is it,”
Luke said.
He and I started digging like crazy; Sara and Nicole followed suit. Sara wasn’t much good with a shovel, though, and was the first to give up. Luke was the last. Going after an elusive razor clam, he got so deep that we could only see him above the rib cage—and I happen to know he doesn’t even like razor clams.
“I thought you knew where to find them,” Sara said.
Luke jammed his shovel in the sand, put his hands on his hips.
“I do,” he said, “and they were right here. But thanks to you, Sara, they got away.”
“Thanks to me?”
“They could hear you coming a mile away.”
Luke was just fooling around, pretending to be a hard ass, but Sara was really getting steamed.
Nicole pointed to a spot farther down the beach and suggested we might have better luck over there—“if we tiptoe very quietly and their little noses don’t pick up our scent.”
We followed, then wandered apart. I stopped digging to watch the wind carry the last of the morning fog up through the hills and over the tops of the trees.
“Having any luck?”
I turned to find Nicole beside me. She looked great, even in rolled-up jeans and an old gray sweatshirt. We had only been going out for a couple of months, but I liked her a hell of a lot. She said she wanted to go slow, though I was hoping things might speed up a bit on this trip, our first together.
I shook my head, leaned on my shovel.
Nicole started to say something, but we both turned our attention to Luke and Sara, who were bickering again a short way off. We could easily hear Luke saying, “Of course they are. They’ve got special equipment. All I’ve got is this lousy shovel—and you telling me what to do.”
In the distance we could see a group of serious clam diggers using specialized tools—sharp-tined rakes, hoes, and metal cylinders that they’d push down into the wet sand. Along with the muck, they pulled up quite a few clams.
Nicole turned to me.
“Do they always get along this well?”
“Oh, no, sometimes they fight,” I said.
As we continued down the beach, I took a peek in her bucket.
“Why, you’ve got enough there for all of us,” I said, “if you and I split one.”
She told me she didn’t really like clams.
“Then what are we doing here?”
“I thought it might be fun. You like clams, don’t you?”
“Sure, but … Oh, what the hell, we generally go away empty-handed anyhow.”
We sat down on a nearby log.
“Then it’s a good thing you brought me along,” Nicole said.
Sara joined us so quietly that I wouldn’t have noticed her if she hadn’t sighed when she sat down. Then I heard Luke’s voice from somewhere to my left:
“I’m telling you they can hear.”
Splattered with mud from fast and furious digging, he stood before us and insisted clams had ears.
“They’re like birds’ ears—you can’t see them, but they have them.”
He winked at me and Nicole.
Sara was staring at her feet, squeezing the sand between her toes.
In a hale and hearty voice, Luke said, “Let’s get back to work then, shall we, mateys? Time’s a-wastin’.”
I looked at Nicole, Nicole at Sara, Sara at me. None of us could muster much enthusiasm for clam digging.
“I have an idea: Let’s go into town and get some breakfast,” Sara suggested. “I’m dying for an omelet with everything in it.”
Nicole shrugged agreeably but eyed Luke, who would need a shower and a change of clothes first.
“Hey,” Luke said, “can’t have an old-fashioned clam bake without some old-fashioned digging.”
IN TOWN, WE discovered that many of the art galleries and antique stores were still closed for the season. But there were more than enough places open and not too many people. The weather was balmy—best of the year, so far, according to one shopkeeper. Luke and I tried to make the most of it, sitting on the bench outside, while Sara and Nicole continued their quest for the perfect seafaring souvenir.
Luke said, “What’d you have to tell her for?”
I raised my shoulders and let them drop.
“I had her believing we never came back with less than two dozen.”
“You were being a jerk,” I said, looking down the street to the harbor.
“Oh, thank you very much. I’m glad I can count on you to point these things out.”
“Hey, what are friends for?”
He stroked his chin and smiled sardonically. We had been friends for ten years, ever since college, and we knew what to expect from each other.
I said, “You don’t have to play the tough guy with Sara all the time, you know.”
We watched a pair of teenage girls walk past in denim shorts and brightly colored halter tops. They whispered and giggled to each other, which made me feel old.
“You act like she’s made out of glass,” Luke said. “Sara’s a lot tougher than you think.”
ORDINARILY, I DIDN’T mind Luke and Sara’s fighting—I think even they found it entertaining—but I had a special reason for wanting them to be on good terms just now. I had been offered a job as editor of a slick new magazine in Phoenix. I wanted Luke, the best designer I knew, to join me. Luke was game. The big question was how Sara would react. I thought I knew, but Luke was uncertain—about Sara and perhaps about his own decision—and so he was not his usual charming self.
Nicole was another question altogether.
WE DROVE UP to Provincetown to see a movie that night. Sara looked sensational, as usual, in high heels and a short dress. The curve of her spine was unusually pronounced—a defect, she would say, but very appealing. She stood out in the crowd. And yet Nicole, who blended in easily, was in many ways better looking—or could be if she tried. She wore her straight black hair in a simple ponytail that revealed her long, delicate neck, and her green eyes didn’t need makeup. She had a tendency to dress plainly, though—jeans, topsiders, and loose-fitting sweaters—like an actress who doesn’t want to be recognized. All she needed was a cap and dark glasses.
On the way back, Sara said that, although she enjoyed being an architect, her ideal job would be film critic for the Globe. She had evidently seen an awful lot of shows—old and new—and could remember the names of supporting actors the rest of us could only recall enough to say, after considerably prompting, “Oh, yeah, that guy.”
When none of us could place Ralph Bellamy, she said, “You know, in His Girl Friday, when Cary Grant says, ‘He looks like that actor, Ralph Bellamy’? Well, the character he’s talking about is played by Bellamy.”
I kept catching Luke’s eye in the rearview mirror. Some of the faces he made—the big yawns, the Chevy Chase-style mimicry—nearly cracked me up.
As I drove south, the road grew darker and rain began to fall. I liked the sound of it hitting the taut vinyl roof of the Cabriolet. We all listened to it, along with the rhythmic swish of the windshield wipers and the hiss of water through the tire treads.
Then Nicole mentioned Serpico. A friend had loaned her an old copy of the book recently, about the cop who couldn’t be bought, but she’d never seen the movie.
“Too bad,” Luke said. “Hoffman was great in that.”
“It was Al Pacino,” Sara corrected.
“Pacino? Uh-uh. Dustin Hoffman. You didn’t recognize him with the beard?”
“Well, you know, their voices do sound a lot alike, but I’m sure it—”
“You want to bet?”
Sara looked at him like, Where did that come from?
“What’s the matter?” he said, “Not as sure as you thought you were?”
Nicole and I exchanged glances.
“Oh, I’m sure,” Sara said.
“Well, then?”
“You can name it, because I know I’m right.”
“Even …” He whispered in her ear.
I ad
justed the mirror so I could watch her face, and her eyebrows told me the stakes were high.
“And if I’m right?”
“I don’t think we have to worry about that.”
“Oh, yes, we do,” she said.
He whispered to her again.
“No,” she said and whispered to him.
It was a long description, and I think it was beginning to dawn on Luke that he might actually have to do what she was saying. He hesitated.
“What’s the matter? Not as sure as you thought you were?”
Luke took a deep breath and said, “You’re on.”
LUKE AND I were the first ones up in the morning.
“You knew it was Pacino, didn’t you?”
I poured myself a cup of coffee.
“Yeah, I knew.”
“Why didn’t you stop me?”
“I never had a chance.”
“Listen, next time I go shooting my mouth off like that, just tell me to put a sock in it.”
The coffee was ridiculously strong—the only way Luke drank it—so I added more milk to my cup.
“Why? What’d you bet her?”
“Never mind what I bet her. It’s your job to keep me from doing that.”
“I’ll keep an extra sock in my back pocket,” I said. “What were the stakes?”
He walked into the living room and took in the view through the picture window. What there was of it, that is. The fog was pretty thick just then.
“She wants me at her beck and call for a whole day,” he said. “I’m supposed to go along with whatever she wants.”
“Doesn’t sound too tough.”
“You want to do it?”
“Would this be all day, like twenty-four hours?”
“Never mind, Frank.”
I SAT NEXT to Nicole on the sofa, leaned close, and inhaled deeply. “Why didn’t you wear the perfume I gave you?” I asked.
“I did.”
“Really? It doesn’t smell the same.”
“Perfume always smells different when you put it on than it does in the bottle,” she said.
Sara came in with a tray of crackers, crab dip, and Kalamata olives. Luke followed with a bottle of Chardonnay and a movie he popped into the machine.