“Do you like my hair long?”
“Do you call it long now?”
“Yes.”
“Yes.”
When my daughter, Samantha, was a freshman in high school, she had her first date, a blind one for the Introductory Prom, the boys from Saint Aloysius drawing the Saint Mary’s girls from a hat. Samantha and I sat waiting for the date, I with my instructions not to open the front door until she had a chance to leave the room so that she could then be a little late, she with her blue pinafore skirt tucked under her fat knees. We watched Gunsmoke as we waited. The boy didn’t come. Gunsmoke gave way to the Miss America pageant. Bert Parks went nimbly back-stepping around snaking the mike cord out of his way. Samantha’s acne began to itch.
“I wouldn’t have missed this, Poppa,” said Samantha as we watched Miss Nebraska recite “If” in the talent contest. But she was clawing at herself.
“Me neither.”
I began to itch too and needed only a potsherd and dungheap. Curse God, curse the nuns for arranging the dance, goddamn the little Celt-Catholic bastards, little Mediterranean lowbrow Frenchy-dago jerks. Anglo-Saxon Presbyterians would have better manners even if they didn’t believe in God.
“Why are you crying?” Moira asks me, rubbing my back briskly. She wants to get up.
“I’m not crying.”
“Your eyes are wet.”
“Tears of joy.”
But Moira, paying no attention, raises herself on one elbow to see herself in the mirror.
“Nothing is wrong with two people in love loving each other,” says Moira, turning her head to see her hair. “Buddy says that joy not guilt—”
“Buddy says!” Angrily I pull back from her. “What the hell does Buddy have to do with it?”
“All I meant was—”
“And just when did the son of a bitch say it? On just such an occasion as this?”
“At a lecture,” says Moira quickly. “Anyhow”—she levels her eyes with mine—“what makes you so different?”
“Different? What do you mean? Do you mean that you — that he—? Don’t tell me.”
“I won’t. Because it’s not true.”
But I can’t hear her for my own groaning. Why am I so jealous? It’s not that, though. It’s just that I can’t understand how Moira can hold herself so cheaply. Why doesn’t she attach the same infinite values to her favors that I do? With her I feel like a man watching a child run around with a forty-carat diamond. Her casualness with herself makes me sweat.
“It’s just that—” I begin when the knock comes at the door.
For a long moment Moira and I search each other’s eyes as if the knock came from there.
“The Bantus,” whispers Moira.
“No,” I say, but get up in some panic and disarray. Getting killed is not so bad. What is to be feared is getting killed in a bathtub like Marat.
Moira breaks for the bathroom. I finish off my toddy and brush my hair.
Comes the knock again, light knuckles on the hollow door. Somehow I know who it is the second my hand touches the doorknob.
It is Ellen, of course, in uniform, with the wind up, color high in her cheeks, head reared a little so that the curve of her cheek narrows her eyes, which are icy-Lake-Geneva blue. It is hotter than ever, but a purple thunderhead towers behind her. Her uniform is crisp. The only sign of the heat is the sparkle of perspiration in the dark down of her lip.
“Come in come in come in.”
She’s all business and a-bustle, starch whistling as if she were paying a house call. When she sets down her bag, I notice her hands are trembling.
“What’s the matter?”
“Somebody shot at me,” she says, leafing nervously through the Gideon, unseeing.
“Where?”
“Coming past the church.”
“Maybe it was firecrackers.”
She slams the Bible shut “Why didn’t you answer the Anser-Phone?”
“I guess I turned it off.”
Ellen, still blinded by the sunlight, gazes uncertainly at the dim fogbanks rolling around the room. I guide her to the foot of the bed. I sit on the opposite bed.
“Chief, I think you better come back to the office.”
“Why?”
“Dr. Immelman found the box of lapsometers.”
“I know.”
“You know? How?”
“Moira told me she saw him.”
“Oh. Chief, he’s been handing them out to people.”
“What sort of people?”
“Some very strange people.”
“Yes, hm.” I am eyeing the dressing room nervously. Moira is stirring about but Ellen pays no attention.
“I heard him send one man to NASA, another to Boeing.”
“It sounds serious.”
“When the fight started, I left.”
“What fight?”
“Between Mr. Tennis and Mr. Ledbetter.”
“Is that Ted Tennis, Chico?” cries Moira, bursting out of the dressing room. “Oh hello there!” She smiles brilliantly at Ellen and strides about the room, hands thrust deep in the pockets of the blue linen long-shorts I bought for her. They fit. “These really fit, Chico,” she says, wheeling about.
Chico? Where did she get that? Then I remember. When we stayed in the small hotel with the wishing well in Merida, she called me Chico a couple of times.
“Yes. Ah, do you girls know each other?”
“Oh yes!”
“Yes indeed!”
Ellen then goes on talking to me as if Moira had not come in.
“And that’s not the worst, Chief.”
“It isn’t?”
Ellen and I are still sitting at the foot of separate beds. Moira stretches out behind me. Both girls are making me nervous.
“I heard him tell the same two men that five o’clock was the deadline.”
“Deadline?”
“I didn’t know what he meant either. When I asked him, he said that was the time when we’d know which way our great experiment would go. What did he mean by that?”
“I’m not sure.”
“He said you’d know. He said if worst came to worst, you had the means of protecting us and that you would know what he meant.”
“I see.”
“What do you suppose that means, Chico?” asks Moira, giving me a nudge in the back with her toe. I wish she wouldn’t do that. “Is that why we have to stay here?”
“Ahem, it may have something to do with that.”
“Give me a quarter.”
“O.K.,” I say absently.
Moira puts the quarter into the slot. The Slepe-Eze begins to vibrate under me. I jump up.
Ellen manages to ignore the vibrating bed.
“Chief, he said you would know what to look for at five o’clock.”
“Right,” I say eagerly. The prospect of a catastrophe is welcome. “Three things are possible: a guerrilla attack, a chain reaction, and a political disturbance at the speech-making.”
“Pshaw,” says Moira, gazing at the ceiling. “I don’t think anything is going to happen. Idle rumors.”
My eyes roll up. Never in her life has Moira said pshaw before — pronounced with a p. She read it somewhere.
“That was no rumor that took a shot at me,” says Ellen, looking at me blinkered as if I had said it. She hasn’t yet looked at Moira.
“I imagine not,” I say, frowning. I wish the mattress would stop vibrating. I find myself headed for the door. “I better take a look around. I’ll bring y’all a Dr. Pepper.”
“Wait, Chico.” Moira takes my hand. “I’ll go with you. Don’t forget you promised me a tour of the ruins, the ice-cream parlor, the convention room where all the salesmen used to glad-hand each other.” She swings around. “It’s been nice seeing you again, Miss Ah—”