“Second-secondhand smoke?”
“That’s what Flip calls the air smokers breathe out. But I don’t care. It’s worth it.”
“Shirl’s been assigned to you?” I said.
She nodded. “This morning she delivered my mail. My mail. You should get her assigned to you.”
“I will,” I said, but that was easier said than done. Now that Flip had an assistant, she (and my clippings) had disappeared off the face of the earth. I searched the entire building twice, including the cafeteria, where large NO SMOKING signs had been put on all the tables, and Supply, where Desiderata was trying to figure out what printer cartridges were, and found Flip finally in my lab, sitting at my computer and typing something in.
She deleted it before I could see what it was and leaped up. If she’d been capable of it, I would have said she looked guilty.
“You weren’t using it,” she said. “You weren’t even here.”
“Did you make copies of those clippings I gave you Monday?” I said.
She looked blank.
“There was a copy of the personal ads on top of them.”
She tossed her swag of hair. “Would you use the word elegant to describe me?”
She had added a hair wrap to her hank, a long thin strand of hair bound in bilious blue embroidery thread, and a band of duct tape across her forehead cut out to frame the i.
“No,” I said.
“Well, nobody expects you to be all of them,” she said, apropos of nothing. “Anyway, I don’t know why you’re so hooked on the personals. You’ve got that cowboy guy.”
“What?”
“Billy Boy Somebody,” she said, waving her hand at the phone. “He called and said he’s in town for some seminar and you’re supposed to meet him for dinner someplace. Tonight, I think. At the Nebraska Daisy or something. At seven o’clock.”
I went over to my phone message pad. It was blank. “Didn’t you write the message down?”
She sighed. “I can’t do everything. That’s why I was supposed to get an assistant, remember? So I wouldn’t have to work so hard, only since she’s a smoker, half the people I assigned her to don’t want her in their labs, so I still have to copy all this stuff and go all the way down to Bio and stuff. I think smokers should be forced to give up cigarettes.”
“Who all did you assign to her?”
“Bio and Product Development and Chem and Physics and Personnel and Payroll, and all the people who yell at me and make me do a lot of stuff. Or put in a camp or something where they couldn’t expose the rest of us to all that smoke.”
“Why don’t you assign her to me? I don’t mind that she smokes.”
She put her hands on the hips of her blue leather skirt. “It causes cancer, you know,” she said disapprovingly. “Besides, I’d never assign her to you. You’re the only one who’s halfway nice to me around here.”
Angel food cake [1880–90]
Food fad named to suggest the heavenly lightness and whiteness of the cake. Originated either at a restaurant in St. Louis, along the Hudson River, or in India. The secret of the cake was a dozen (or eleven, or fifteen) egg whites beaten into stiff glossy peaks. Difficult to bake, it inspired an entire folklore: The pan had to be ungreased, and no one could walk across the kitchen floor while it was baking. Supplanted by, of course, devil’s food cake.
It was the Kansas Rose at five-thirty. “You got my message okay,” Billy Ray said, coming out to meet me in the parking lot. He was wearing black jeans, a black-and-white cowboy shirt, and a white Stetson. His hair was longer than the last time I’d seen him. Long hair must be coming back in.
“Sort of,” I said. “I’m here.”
“Sorry it had to be so early,” he said. “There’s an evening workshop on ‘Irrigation on the Internet’ I don’t want to miss.” He took my arm. “This is supposed to be the trendiest place in town.”
He was right. There was a half-hour wait, even with reservations, and every woman in line was wearing po-mo pink.
“Did you get your Targhees?” I asked him, leaning back against an ABSOLUTELY NO SMOKING sign.
“Yep, and they’re great. Low maintenance, high tolerance for cold, and fifteen pounds of wool in a season.”
“Wool?” I said. “I thought Targhees were cows.”
“Nobody’s raising cows anymore,” he said, frowning as if I should know that. “The whole cholesterol thing. Lamb’s got a lower cholesterol count, and shearling’s supposed to be the hot new fashion fabric for winter.”
“Bobby Jay,” the hostess, who was wearing a red gingham pinafore and hair wraps, called out.
“That’s us,” I said.
“We don’t want to sit anywhere close to where the smoking section used to be,” Billy Ray said, and we followed her to the table.
The sunflower fad had apparently come here to die. They were entwined in the white picket fence around our table, framed on the wall, painted on the bathroom doors, embroidered on the napkins. A large artificial bunch was stuck in a Mason jar in the middle of our sun-flowered tablecloth.
“Cool, huh?” Billy Ray said, opening his sunflower-shaped menu. “Everybody says prairie’s going to be the next big fad.”
“I thought shearling was,” I muttered, picking up the menu. Prairie cuisine wasn’t so much hot as substantial—chicken-fried steak, cream gravy, corn on the cob, all served family-style.
“Something to drink?” a waiter in buckskin and a knotted sunflower bandanna asked.
I looked at the menu. They had espresso, cappuccino, and caffè latte, also very big in prairie days. No iced tea.
“Iced tea’s the Kansas state beverage,” I told the waiter. “How can you not have it?”
He’d apparently been taking lessons from Flip. He rolled his eyes, sighed expertly, and said, “Iced tea is outré.”
A word never uttered on the prairie, I thought, but Billy Ray was already ordering meat loaf, mashed potatoes, and cappuccino for both of us.
“So, tell me about this thing you’re researching that’s got you working weekends.”
I did. “The problem is I’ve got causes coming out my ears,” I said, after I’d explained what I’d been doing. “Female equality, bicycling, a French fashion designer named Poiret, World War One, and Coco Chanel, who singed her hair off when a heater exploded. Unfortunately, none of them seems to be the main source.”
Our dinner arrived, on brown earthenware platters decorated with sunflowers. The coleslaw was garnished with fresh basil, which I didn’t remember as being big on the prairie either, and the meat loaf was garnished with lemon slices.
Billy Ray told me about the merits of sheep-raising while we ate. Sheep were healthy, profitable, no trouble to herd, and you could graze them anywhere, all of which I would have been more inclined to believe if he hadn’t told me the same thing about raising longhorns six months ago.
“Dessert?” the waiter said, and brought over the pastry cart.
I figured a prairie dessert would probably be gooseberry pie or maybe canned peaches, but it was the usual suspects: crème brûlée, tiramisu, “and our newest dessert, bread pudding.”
Well, that sounded like a Kansas dessert, all right, the sort of thing you were reduced to eating after the cow died and the grasshoppers ate up the crops.
“I’ll have the tiramisu,” I said.
“Me too,” Billy Ray said. “I’ve always hated bread pudding. It’s like eating leftovers.”