I pushed my main course aside, and silverware clattered. Eleanor had already floated hers out into the center of the table. “I want to know that you understand that when I tell you something it’s because I need your brains, not because I want it passed on to a bunch of strangers. I’m not willing to trust my life, or Eleanor’s life, or even your life, to people I don’t know. I’ll tell you what I want passed on and what I don’t. And if you tell me everything your guys get, I’ll tell you everything I get. Otherwise, I’m in a Holiday Inn, someplace like Denver or Des Moines, until you catch him.”
“You won’t like Des Moines,” Eleanor said as the headwaiter hovered, looking down at our neglected entrees.
“Then we’ll go to Thailand,” I said. “I’ve got five thousand dollars in my pocket. We’ll leave on different flights, you first by a couple of days, both of us going someplace else, and after I check every single passenger on my first flight and make sure he’s not on my second one, we’ll meet up in Seoul, and then we’ll check all the passengers again and go to Thailand and wait for Willick to catch the Incinerator. Then we’ll come home.”
“Not so fast,” Eleanor said. She looked up at the headwaiter and said, “Do you mind? ” He stepped backward suddenly, bumping into the table behind him. “Simeon,” she said as the headwaiter apologized to two anorexics who were picking at their salads, possibly seeking the deadly radicchio, “we’ve got our own problems to work out. Also, I’ve got a book contract to fulfill.”
“It’s a lot less pressing than the possibility of burning to death,” I said.
“True,” she said. “But there’s Burt.”
Burt was the publisher, an inexhaustible optimist who had pronounced her upcoming book, Eastern Roots, based on her recent visit with her own extended family in China, a Really, Really Important Book. More important even, in the Universal Scheme of Things, than her last, The Right-Brain Cookbook, a collection of recipes that were supposed to enhance creativity. I had my own opinion of both the book and its publisher. My opinion of the book was based on the fact that its inspiration had been a sarcastic remark I’d made about the old belief that some foods were supposed to be brain food, and wasn’t that a pregnant topic for the New Age? She’d taken me up on it. My opinion hadn’t been changed by the sales, which were, as they say, brisk.
My opinion about Burt was more complex. “Burt’s a nit,” I said. “He wears imitation everything. Imitation Gucci, imitation Armani, an imitation Rolex. He’s got an imitation smile, and his vocabulary is an imitation of Norman Vincent Peale. Even his hair is an imitation, for Christ’s sake. It looks like something that a misguided housewife would put on the lid of a toilet seat.”
Eleanor was looking at me with an expression I couldn’t read.
“Except that it isn’t pink,” I added. “I’ve seen better rugs for sale on the sidewalk. In bad neighborhoods.”
“What he thinks about me is real,” Eleanor said stubbornly, “which is more than I could say for some.”
Hammond looked from her to me and got up. “Pit stop,” he said tactfully.
“Have a lube job while you’re at it,” I said. “This could take a while.”
Eleanor regarded me steadily as Hammond headed for the John.
“So much for Thailand,” I said.
“You don’t have to like him,” Eleanor said. “I think we’re past the point where you have to like him.”
“As someone who’s halfway to being a guru, you should know more about male psychology.”
She looked out the window, and I wondered who might be looking back in. “It’s supposed to be a surprise that you’re possessive?”
“Oh, bull’s-eye,” I said nastily. “And you don’t go all white around the mouth every time Baby Winston’s name comes up, do you?”
She turned back to look at me. “Are you sleeping with her?”
“It’s not just possessiveness,” I said. “A large part of my self-esteem is anchored in the fact that you fell in love with me. How am I supposed to feel when you fall in love with this bedbug, a guy who couldn’t tell an ounce of iron pyrite from the Lost Dutchman’s mine?” I wasn’t whispering, and the headwaiter was glaring at us.
“How are you supposed to feel about yourself, or how are you supposed to feel about me?” Eleanor demanded. “Disregarding your insults about Burt, it usually seems to come down to yourself, Simeon.”
I took a breath and used it. “About both of us. It works both ways. I guess one of the reasons I love you is that you had the good taste to fall in love with me.”
Eleanor laughed, then stopped abruptly. “I can’t have you,” she said. “Or, at least, you can’t seem to have just me. There always have to be a bunch of other females on the fringes. What am I supposed to be, a quasi-widow? Sleeping in a virginal bed and going on alternate Sundays to clip the grass around the gravestone, while you’re still alive and kicking everybody in sight? You haven’t got any right to ask that.”
I pushed my luck. It’s a life-long habit. “Are you sleeping with him?”
She looked away. “I just asked you the same question, except for the pronoun at the end of it. You answer me, I’ll answer you.”
“No,” I said, with all the force of the righteous.
She picked up her glass and took a ladylike sip. “Yes,” she said.
It was a little bit like being kicked in the stomach, and picking up a glass seemed like a very good idea. I picked up mine and polished it off and then picked up Hammond’s. Eleanor put her hand over mine to keep it on the table. Somebody behind me whispered.
“Don’t be silly,” she said. “He’s a very nice man. What good is that?”
“It’s better than listening,” I said. I shrugged her hand free and knocked back Hammond’s drink. I’d been expecting this, but not just yet.
“You never want to listen,” she said. “That’s why our talks never work out. You never want to listen. You only want to talk.”
“I don’t get surprises when I’m talking,” I said. “I know how it’ll come out.”
“You know how you want it to come out. But what about me? What about how I want it to come out?”
“Well,” I said, “that’s up to you and Burt now, isn’t it?” I hoisted Hammond’s empty glass. “Here’s to two-way conversations,” I said. “May you have many of them.” I poured some more wine, feeling the alcohol hit the complicated traffic pattern of my central nervous system and turn it into gridlock.
“He’s not like you,” Eleanor said earnestly.
“No kidding. Are his teeth real?”
“Get off it,” she said. “I’m an adult female with adult needs. These aren’t your precious Victorian times. Trollope and Dickens are dead. We’re not supposed to turn our heads, grit our teeth, and bear it just to keep the species going. Yikes, Simeon, what am I supposed to do? Haven’t you heard from Freud?”
“Just today,” I said. “Has he found your G-spot?” The headwaiter, six feet away, cringed.
“My G-spot is in Delaware,” she said, her jaw tight.
“Buy him a plane ticket,” I said.
“He’s afraid of flying,” she said.
I started to laugh. I always laugh at the wrong time. After a moment, Eleanor laughed, too.
“You kids have made up, huh?” Hammond said, dropping a heavy hand onto each of our shoulders.
“In a manner of speaking,” I said. “We’ve made our beds and decided to lie in them. You been lubed?”
“I’ve had my fucking tires aligned,” he said loudly, sitting down and looking at the table. “Where are the drinks?”
“Coming up,” I said, pouring. “Eleanor drank yours.”
Hammond made a fist and put it under my chin. “This is for you if you made her need it,” he said genially.
“I’m no longer the one who can make Eleanor need anything,” I said. “The torch has been passed.”
“And you passed it,” Eleanor said. “And never, ever, say that I wanted you to.”
The headwaiter cleared his throat assertively. “The entrees are not acceptable?” he asked. If his life had depended upon it, he couldn’t have kept his upper lip down. It had a life of its own, and its life depended on heading north.