“She’s been here the whole time?” I asked.
“Just waiting for Leslie to get lost.”
“Does Mrs. Moore know?”
“She knows,” said Chuckie Lamb. “She knows every last thing, that’s her problem.” He stood. “I’ll be back,” he said. “I got to pee.”
Chuckie Lamb left for the bathroom and I was left alone like a geek at that large, now empty table to concentrate on the woman at the bar, Moore’s mistress. From the way she was turned I could see just enough. Where do these women come from, I wondered, thinking of Moore’s mistress, thinking of the receptionist at Talbott, Kittredge and Chase, thinking of the new Miss Jersey Tomato, whose picture in the Daily News that morning I couldn’t help but admire. How do their breasts grow so? Some sort of growth rub? Who does their hair and how do they get it to stay model-perfect, as if it had just been teased by a stylist before the photo shoot? How many cases of Aqua Net? Is there a finishing school for these women, a Barbizon trade school, do they have their own professional association? And if there are so damn many of them, spread across the country like overripe peaches on a tree, why do they always end the night in someone else’s bed? Maybe I should move to Georgia, improve my chances.
As I stared at the curve of her back and my feeling of deprivation grew, I noticed another woman walking up the aisle that ran past our table. She was Audrey Hepburn to the Marilyn Monroe at the bar. She was beautiful too, but in a 180-degree different way. Tall, with shoulder-length, straight brown hair. Her thin hips shifted as she walked. Her shoulders were marine straight, but her head hung low, with pale blue eyes, big and just slightly limpid, subtle cheekbones, a soft, round nose. She wore a short black dress with thin shoulder straps and she was looking at me as she walked up that aisle. I wondered if everyone else saw the beauty lurking there, hoped they hadn’t, hoped she had a mother who always told her how homely she was, hoped she was insecure about her slight breasts, hoped she had been a high school outcast. Guys like me know that things like that can help. She saw me looking at her, possibly read the hope in my eyes, and she smiled at me. Her smile was incandescent.
I smiled back, expecting her to nod and move on, lost to me for all time because that was the way it always was with girls I passed on the street with whom I fell instantly in love, but then she did something strange. She came right up to the table and sat down next to me.
“Hi,” she said.
“Do I know you?” I asked hopefully.
“Veronica,” she said, reaching out a slim, soft hand.
“Victor Carl.”
“Explain something to me, Victor Carl,” she said. “Men with toupees.”
“What’s to explain?”
“Explain to me why. Look over there by the bar, the man with the dead beaver on his head. Why would a man wear so obvious a rug? You’re an initiate to those dark secrets of manhood. Explain toupees to me.”
“It’s a calculation,” I said. “Champagne?”
She smiled and let out a soft giggle that was sexy, not silly. “Yes, please.”
I reached across the table for the new bottle the waiter had deposited in the wine bucket and turned over Prescott’s unused goblet. I filled her glass and then mine. She tasted the wine and looked at me and gave me that smile again.
“That is so good,” she said.
“It is, isn’t it. The French.” I couldn’t understand why I had never before tried to pick up a woman with Dom Perignon.
“I don’t remember seeing you here before,” she said.
“I’m here with City Councilman James Moore.”
“Is that so? What do you think of him?”
I shrugged. “He’s a politician.”
“Yes. So tell me about toupees.”
“I’m of the theory,” I said, “derived from my misspent college career as an economist, that every choice in life is a calculation. Everything we do is the product of a cost-benefit analysis as to what is best for us.”
“Everything?”
“Everything. Now that fellow at the bar has calculated that he looks better with hair, even when that hair lays on his head like a dead rodent. And who’s to say he’s wrong?”
“Me.”
“You’ve never seen him bald. I’m sure he feels a lot peppier looking fifty with the hairpiece than sixty-five without it.”
“But couldn’t he get a better looking one?” she asked.
“That’s where calculation becomes miscalculation. He thinks it’s snazzy.”
“Oh, it’s snazzy all right. I don’t believe everything is calculation, Victor Carl,” she said.
“Because you don’t want to believe.”
“What about love?”
“The biggest calculation of them all. We each have lists of qualities we’re looking for and love comes when enough of the boxes are checked, or at least we get as many checks as we think we’re going to get.”
“How romantic.”
“Some fellow won a Nobel Prize for coming up with that.”
“He must be a charmer.”
“I’m sure his wife appreciates him.”
“Well, I’ll tell you something, Victor Carl. I don’t believe it, and you don’t believe it either.”
“I don’t?”
“I read eyes like some people read palms and I’ll tell you what your eyes say.”
She brought her face close and put her soft fingers on my cheek and brow, peering into my eyes as if she were reading something writ in tiny letters on my retinae. Her breath smelled sweet and dry from the champagne and as she looked into my eyes I felt as if I were drowning in pale blue waters. Then she pulled back suddenly.
“See, I was right,” she said.
“What did you see?”
“I saw enough to know.”
“Tell me what you saw,” I said, only partly joking now.
I heard the scrape of a chair and Jimmy Moore sat down next to Veronica and all of a sudden I was embarrassed, as if this woman who had just been gazing into my eyes should be kept away from the likes of Jimmy Moore. Even so, I was about to introduce them when Jimmy said, “I thought they’d never leave,” and Veronica stretched her long beautiful neck and turned away from me, resting her chin on the back of her hand, facing Jimmy. I looked at the bar and saw the aggressively curved woman there laughing with a man who had his arm around her neck, and with a sickening disappointment I realized that sitting next to me was not a woman mysteriously attracted to my smile and wit but instead was Jimmy Moore’s mistress. It was enough to break my heart in two.
7
EVEN IN THE BEST OF TIMES I am not one of those people who leap out of bed in the morning ready to attack any challenge the day might bring. I wake like I enter a swimming pool, slowly, hesitantly, one step at a time as my body gradually becomes accustomed to the cold. The morning after the night before, with my head swollen from the councilman’s champagne and my legs sore from I knew not what, I might have stayed comfortably unconscious until noon except for a shrieking pain in my bladder that demanded, DEMANDED, attention. Good thing, too, since as I was pissing relievedly at 9:05 I realized I had to be in Judge Gimbel’s courtroom at 10:00 in United States v. Moore and Concannon.
I didn’t remember all of what happened after the fourth bottle of champagne the night before. I remembered Veronica, who grew more beautiful by the drink until I would have sworn I had never seen anyone as perfect before, and Jimmy Moore, growing larger, louder, ever more powerful, ever more passionate, and Chuckie Lamb, his surliness expanding with the hour, and Chester Concannon, easing our transitions as we moved in a group from club to club. There was Henry, the councilman’s driver, a handsome, silent Jamaican with purple-black skin and a high forehead, standing just over six feet tall and sporting evil looking sunglasses despite the darkness. And then of course the limousine, that great black cat of a car. It had a boomerang hovering over its trunk and a bar and television in back and it wasn’t rented, it was owned by the councilman and cared for by Henry, so it was clean as soap and it shined in the city light and moved as smoothly and as predatorily as a panther through the night. I remembered that car all right. My first limousine ride, looking out the darkened windows at those who could only wonder who we were to deserve such splendor. I had always hated limousines, their ostentation, their imposing bulk, the way they tied up traffic on tight streets, parked in front of restaurants too expensive for me, the way they proclaimed that the people inside were somebodies, names, and that the people outside were nobodies, the nameless. I had always hated limousines, but I had to admit that viewed from inside they were entirely more benign.