1 Breakfast at Madeline's

by Matt Witten

  I turned on my heels and strode toward the front door. I had a quick mental image of Gretchen pulling a gun from the pocket of her bathrobe and shooting me in the back. When I had my hand on the doorknob, she stopped me. "Wait."

  I waited.

  "I'll get you the damn application," Gretchen said.

  "Thank you," I answered.

  20

  About a minute later, I left Gretchen's house with The Penn's NYFA application in my hot little hands. Gretchen and I were pretty sick of each other's company by now, so I told her I'd read it at home and call her if I had any questions. "I'll certainly look forward to hearing from you," she said dryly.

  As I set the application down next to me in the Camry, I realized I'd forgotten to ask for one of Gretchen's shoes, to check the size. I thought about going back, but decided I'd already harassed the poor woman enough for one night. I could always go back later.

  So I drove off. The street was dangerously slick, but it wasn't raining anymore; we were having one of those quick weather changes you get sometimes in the Adirondack foothills. The wind had chased the clouds away, and a thin crescent moon shone through the windshield.

  I started feeling melancholy. The adrenaline rush of interrogating someone just like a real Humphrey Bogart-type private eye was wearing off. The truth was, Gretchen was good people. Okay, I wasn't wild about her bribing the mayor, but it wasn't like she'd done something really horrible, like rooting for the Yankees. In a way, the fact Gretchen cared so much about the Arts Center that she committed a crime in order to get it built made me like her even more.

  My liking her, however, didn't make her innocent of murder, as I well knew. When I taught a screenwriting course in prison a couple of years back, I took a particular liking to an affable fellow named Marvin Melrose who, I later learned, had murdered three young women in cold blood while robbing a bridal gown shop.

  Well, what the hell, maybe I'd get lucky and Gretchen's criminal activities had stopped short of murder. Maybe Penn's killer had actually been...

  ...the mayor?

  That idea flustered me so much I didn't see the red light until I was practically underneath it. A purple minivan whizzed past less than a foot in front of me while I screeched to a halt. The driver blared his horn at me and I backed up, feeling like an idiot. So now I was suspecting the mayor of killing Penn? Absurd. I shook my head, annoyed at myself. The heck with this Columbo nonsense, I'd never in a million years be able to solve The Penn's murder—if that's what it was. I should just throw that NYFA application out the car window and forget the whole thing, go back to being a hack movie writer. Mutant beetles, here I come.

  But high above me, through the windshield, I could see what looked like thousands of tiny stars. Maybe The Penn was somewhere up there with them. The light changed and I drove on, so spaced out that when a long white Cadillac drove past me with a long white goatee hovering above the steering wheel, I didn't recognize it at first. But then it hit me. Ersatz Uncle Sam. With another screech of my brakes, I pulled over to the side and craned my neck.

  Ersatz's Caddie stopped at the red light. Nice car, I reflected—and paid for largely by that New Zealand cash Gretchen hustled for him. Then the light turned green, and Ersatz took the left fork up North Broadway... toward Gretchen's house.

  Hmm. So was this how Gretchen amused herself during her husband's long business trips? I grinned. I had to admit it—this private-eye stuff could be a lot of fun.

  The clock above the Saratoga Trust Bank said 10:20 when I got out of the car and headed for Madeline's, carrying The Penn's grant application. I wasn't ready to go back home and do the whole husband-and-father routine; I wanted to read this application already. Andrea had said that Dave would stay at the house until I got back, and they weren't expecting me until around 10:45, and I figured I could stretch that to 11:00. So I was footloose and fancy free... for forty minutes, anyway. Married life.

  Madeline's was jammed, as it always was on weekend nights. Madeline and Rob were nowhere in evidence, but Marcie was working behind the counter along with three college kids. She was wearing a low-cut red dress, held up—barely—by two skinny little shoulder straps. Spaghetti straps, I think they're called. As usual, I forced my eyes modestly away from her. Or tried to.

  While I waited to buy coffee I looked into the back room, which was packed with teenagers and twenty-somethings listening to a long-haired guitar plucker singing about how the answer was blowing in the wind. I always found it reassuring to go in there at night and find that the 60s still ruled. Or at least, they still ruled in the back room of Madeline's on a Friday night.

  The front room was full of folks of various ages discussing whatever movie they'd just come back from, The Postman or Scream 2 or some other junk. Sometimes it gave me a thrill that only eight months from now people would be sitting in this very room, and rooms much like it across the world, discussing my movie, The Gas that Ate San Francisco; but sometimes I didn't really give a hoot. I mean, I'll take the dough, thank you very much, but Gas is not exactly going to be a modern screen classic.

  Jonas, a Skidmore sophomore whose passion was collecting memorabilia from local minor league sports teams, took my order. They hadn't made Ethiopian that night—I guess no one expected me to show up—and I was relieved. I was getting sick of the stuff. Give me good old-fashioned Colombian any time.

  I looked around for an empty table but couldn't find any until someone got up from the corner table in the back room, by the basement stairs. Donald Penn's old spot again. Must be fate. I sat down just as the guitar plucker went on break and everyone applauded, chanting "Yo! Yo! Yo!" That chant is one of the few entertainment innovations of the past twenty years that I approve of.

  I put The Penn's application on the table in front of me, took a deep breath, and eagerly started to read. "Spill it, Donny baby," I whispered. "Who did you think would kill you?"

  Name: Donald Penn.

  Category: Writer.

  Amount Requested: $5000. Whoa, five grand? A far cry from the $172.38 he'd asked for the last two years. Why so much all of a sudden?

  "Hi, Jacob," breathed a silky voice right next to my ear.

  I turned. I gulped. Lord, those teensy spaghetti straps would be so easy to lift off. "Hi, Marcie," I managed.

  She was carrying a huge coffee sack, one of the 50-pound jobs. "Could you help me?" she asked. "I'm supposed to carry this downstairs, and it's so heavy."

  "Sure," I stuttered. Forget about cooking; the best way to a man's heart is asking him to carry something heavy for you. (Asking him to open a jar also works well.)

  I put Penn's application in my back pocket and watched Marcie's chest muscles tense up as she handed me the sack. "You sure it's not too heavy for you?" she asked.

  "No problem," I answered, trying not to groan audibly beneath the weight. Mr. Macho Man. She opened the gate to the stairs and stepped aside. I bumped into her right hip as I went by, and shock waves trembled through me.

  I headed downstairs with Marcie and her smoky scent following. As we descended into the darkness, with the noises from the espresso bar fading away, her smell was almost overpowering. What was it about this girl that seemed to activate all my illicit fantasies at once? I tried to stop the growing tightness in my jeans by focusing on the task at hand. "So where do you want this bag?" I said gruffly.

  "In the back. I'll show you." She pointed ahead of me to the end of a long dark aisle filled with coffee sacks and old coffee machines. I walked up the narrow aisle, with Marcie again right behind me, close enough to touch. If I stopped short, she would rub up against me. My body tingled with the thought.

  "Don't you love the smell?" she said. I looked back at her, startled. Then I figured it out. She was talking about the smell of coffee, not the smell cascading from her body. I could barely even smell the first thing, I was so overwhelmed by the second.

  I felt hot blood rushing to my face, and other parts of me too. "Yeah, it smells good," I said
lamely, and turned away.

  The 50-pound sack, and Marcie's body, were leaving me breathless, but I made it to the end of the aisle without fainting and found an empty shelf at around chest level. "Up here?" I asked.

  She nodded. "I'll help you."

  "No, that's okay."

  But she came up next to me anyway, and took hold of part of the sack. Our hands touched. As we strained to lift it, our arms brushed against each other, and then our legs. I gasped, and not just from the physical effort.

  As we hoisted the sack up onto the shelf, a corner of it brushed against one of her shoulder straps. The strap came right off, just like I'd pictured, leaving her shoulder bare and her dress barely hanging on. She wasn't wearing anything underneath it that I could see. And God knows I looked.

  With one last push, we got the sack all the way onto the shelf. That push did something else too. It brought her left thigh into contact with a part of my anatomy that I had tried to keep politely pointed away from her. My face turned flaming red. Marcie gave me a look, her eyes shining. Her lips parted. I gasped again.

  She took hold of my hand and brushed the other shoulder strap with it. The strap came down, she did a little snakelike move with her arms, and her dress fell completely off.

  I was right. She was totally naked under it. Oh, my God.

  Then she slid her hand under my shirt and felt my chest. My heart felt like it would jump right out of my body. Her nipples rubbed my arm as she came closer. My goose bumps were about ten inches long. Or maybe that was something else.

  No one will ever know. You'll never get another chance like this again in your life.

  Marcie's fingers were circling my belly button.

  This is something you'll smile about in your old age. You'll be sitting in a rocking chair with Andrea...

  She knelt down.

  Oh God oh God... Three more seconds and it'll be too late...

  Her hand reached down to undo my belt buckle. I moaned, anguish and ecstasy combined.

  Two seconds...

  She unzipped my fly.

  One second...

  I bit my lip so hard I drew blood.

  And jumped backward.

  She looked up at me in surprise, her blue eyes glittering in the darkness. I took one last longing look at her gorgeous perfect breasts, mumbled "I'm sorry," and escaped down the aisle, up the stairs, and out the front door.

  Out on the sidewalk, I gasped for breath yet again. The crisp night air helped to evict Marcie's smoke from my nostrils, and I started to wake up from this whole wild dream. My hard-on began subsiding, and I shifted it around under my jeans to get more comfortable. But then a woman's voice behind me called out, "Jacob!"

  I almost fell down, my legs got so weak. Great Scott, was Marcie going to follow me through the streets? I instantly started bursting out of my jeans again. I wanted to run away but I was glued to the sidewalk. Lord have mercy, how much more of this could I take without giving in?

  Not much.

  My heart pounding out some fast primitive melody, I turned around. But it wasn't Marcie; it was Bonnie Engels. She must have come out of Madeline's right behind me, and now she was heading straight for me, arms wide, preparing one of her patented boa constrictor hugs. I cringed. I didn't want Bonnie hugging me close and getting the idea that the little guy between my legs was meant for her. That was one complication I didn't need.

  I put my arms up to stop her. But she was coming at me so fast, my hands banged up against her breasts. As it turned out, Bonnie wasn't wearing a bra either, which made her the second woman I'd felt up in the past two minutes. My lucky night.

  I pulled my hands back, and Bonnie stepped back too, her eyes shooting darts at me from out of her angular face. I reddened. "Sorry, didn't want you to catch my cold." I sniffed my nose to try and make it sound legit.

  Bonnie didn't buy it for a second. "Jacob," she said, "I've noticed a certain tension between us lately."

  I couldn't think of what to say, so I focused on a blue vein that was sticking out on Bonnie's right temple. This boxing regimen of hers was something else; unless it was my imagination, even her face was growing more muscular. And her neck was filled with more of those thick, pulsing blue veins; they stuck out of the ungainly looking muscles that poured out of her T-shirt. How was she getting so big so fast? Every time I saw her, she looked more and more like Mike Tyson. Was this really healthy, or would she soon start going around biting people's ears off and giving away large cars to total strangers?

  "Jacob?"

  I snapped back to attention. This ability of mine to remove myself mentally from whatever is going on in my life is why I became a writer in the first place.

  Looking back, maybe I should have gone into therapy instead. "Yes?"

  "Am I right?"

  About what? Oh yeah, tension between us. I attempted a nonchalant shrug. "I haven't noticed any. I'm just a little sick, that's all."

  Bonnie's jaw thrust forward, and hard green light flashed from her irises. "Look, we need to talk. Get everything on the table."

  I recognized that look, all right. It meant she was about to push me to invest in her video again. "Hey, I'd love to talk, but I really need to get home—"

  "I don't mean right now." She paused. "We'll get the whole grant panel together."

  If she was examining my face for a reaction, she got one. The whole grant panel. What was Bonnie saying to me? Was this something about The Penn?

  I didn't want her to realize how ignorant I was, so I just said, "Good idea," and nodded my head knowingly. From watching Hollywood executives at work, I've learned that nodding your head knowingly usually works just as well as actually knowing something.

  "How about tomorrow morning at ten?" Bonnie suggested.

  Great. After being away from home all day today, tomorrow I'd have to leave again first thing in the morning. On a weekend, no less. Andrea would read me the riot act. No way could I say okay.

  "Okay," I said.

  "How about we meet at Madeline's?"

  Between Penn's death, Marcie's near-seduction, and that lousy Ethiopian, Madeline's was starting to fill up with bad vibes. But I was too tired to argue, so we agreed on Madeline's and said good-bye without a farewell hug, though it would have been okay by now since Little Big Man had gone south.

  I headed south too, to Uncommon Grounds, Saratoga's other upscale coffee shop right down the street. It's not as nice as Madeline's—it's narrow and too well lit, and feels a little like an airport runway—but it's passable. So I went in, got myself some Colombian, and sat down at one of the two empty tables in the back. I heaved a sigh of relief. Finally, I would get to read the application. I reached into my back pocket.

  But the pocket was empty. The application was gone.

  Bonnie must have ripped it off, was my first thought. But that was just a lame attempt to ward off my second thought: I must have dropped it in the basement of Madeline's.

  I'd have to go back to the devil's lair. Not that Marcie was the devil, but you know what I mean. I hurried out of Uncommon Grounds, regretfully leaving my undrunk java behind. I was leaving behind undrunk java at every coffee joint in town. People would start thinking I was eccentric.

  If anyone wanted even more evidence of my eccentricity, they got it if they were watching me a minute later. I was hiding behind a wall outside Madeline's, sneaking occasional peeks through the window. I know I was being cowardly, but Marcie was clearing tables in the front room and I wanted to make it down to the basement without her seeing me. I wasn't ready to face her again; it would be too embarrassing. And besides, I'd barely succeeded in retaining my virtue the first time around; pushing my luck would be foolish. Especially since I could already feel my blood rise when she bent down to clear a table and her dress fell slightly, revealing her breasts.

  If I were British, maybe I'd have tried thinking about the queen; being American, I tried thinking about Karen Carpenter singing "Close to You." But even that didn't wor
k. Sneaking peeks through the window was making the whole damn thing even more erotic.

  Marcie looked up from her wiping, and I ducked quickly behind the wall. It took me a whole minute before I got up the nerve to look back inside. I sang "Close to You" to pass the time. Four middle-aged couples walked up the sidewalk, throwing me questioning looks as they passed by. Maybe they thought I was singing for quarters.

  Then they stopped and went into Madeline's. Screwing up my courage, I slowly eased my head around the wall and eyed the front room. Just as I'd hoped, Marcie wasn't cleaning tables anymore; she was behind the counter now, taking orders from the four couples, hemmed in. Go. I opened the door and slipped past the counter to the back room, pretty sure I hadn't been noticed, and hurried straight for the basement stairs.

  But Jonas, the sports memorabilia collector, was cleaning tables in the back room, and he looked up at me and nodded. If I tried going down to the basement, he might hassle me. So I stopped short at the big green bookcase lining one wall and pretended to studiously examine the books, an eclectic mix of Leo Tolstoy and Danielle Steele. As slow as Sports Memorabilia was working, it looked like I'd have time to read War and Peace before he finished. I just hoped I could make it downstairs before Marcie spotted me, or we might end up giving Danielle some fresh material.

  Sports Memorabilia finished wiping a table and headed for the front room, so I sidled toward the back stairs. But then he did a nifty 90-degree turn and walked up to me. "Hey, did you hear the Albany-Colonie Diamond Dogs signed Bam Bam Mueller to a two-year contract?" he asked.

  I contemplated braining him with a Tolstoy tome. But instead I just smiled slightly—very slightly, so as not to encourage him.

  Unfortunately, the guy didn't need any encouragement. He spent the next ten minutes telling me in painful detail about every single one of the Diamond Dogs' offseason roster moves, as well as the moves made by the Catskill Cougars, the Elmira Pioneers, the New Jersey Jackals, and all the other teams in the Northeast Independent Baseball League. War and Peace wasn't nearly heavy enough, I realized; true justice would require that I drop the entire seven-foot-tall bookcase on his head.