“Aha!” Simon says.
“Not too bad,” says Veronica.
“I’ll have another,” Ralph says. He puts a ten on the bar.
“Me too,” says Veronica.
“I’ll go along,” Simon says.
“You two getting it on, or what?” Ralph asks.
“Just acquaintances,” Veronica says. “Mere acquaintances.”
“Don’t look like mere acquaintances to me,” Ralph says. “I have a feel for that sort of thing. There’s a way people look. They kind of lean toward each other.”
“This music is a little muddy,” Simon says. The jukebox is playing a Madonna number, “Into the Groove”.
“You mean conceptually?” Veronica asks.
“I mean the sound.”
“I don’t care,” Ralph says. “If you two are getting it on. I’m just an old friend. If you two are getting it on, I’m happy for you. This kid is not my type, actually. I love her, but she’s not my type. We spent the night together once, and it was a damp, damp evening. Many, many tears. You remember?”
“Don’t remind me. I remember.”
“The Brown Palace,” Ralph says. “Denver’s finest.”
“You were trying very hard,” Veronica says.
“I always try very hard. One of the nicest things about me. But you just sat there and wept, all night long. First I said to myself, Ralph, what is this? Is this a tactic? Is this a maneuver? If it’s a tactic, what’s the objective? I couldn’t see an objective. So I decided it was grief, real grief.”
“It was grief.”
“So I said to myself, how am I to deal with this real, genuine grief? Room service? Booze? What?”
“Booze we already had.”
“Stuff a cold, starve a fever,” Ralph says. “I decided this was more in the cold area. We had their twenty-two dollar prime rib, if you remember.”
“I had just busted up with Jack.”
“So we’re sitting there tearing up this twenty-two-dollar prime rib in the Brown Palace at four o’clock in the morning and she tells me I have a relentlessly pedestrian mind. Remember that?”
“I guess I was in a bad mood or something.”
“I was not unaware of that,” Ralph says. “Nevertheless it hurt me, at the time. Now I can laugh about it.”
“I was probably too drunk to be as sensitive as I am when I’m not drunk,” she says.
“You were pretty unhappy. You were probably thinking, what am I doing in this hotel room with this bozo?”
“I never thought of you that way. I always thought of you as kind of a friend.”
“I just bought a new Mazda, gold in color,” Ralph says. “People who are referred to as ‘kind of a friend’ tend to buy cars that are gold in color.”
“Now you’re feeling sorry for yourself,” Veronica says. “Stop it.”
“Back to Denver,” Ralph says. “Denver and my gold Mazda.”
“This round’s on me,” Simon says. “The same again? Everybody?”
In the first dream he was grabbed by three or four cops for firing a chrome-plated.45 randomly in the street. He had no idea where he had gotten the.45 or why it was chrome-plated. In the second dream he awoke sitting on a lounge in a hotel lobby wearing pants and shoes but bare-chested. “I’ve got to find a shirt,” he thought. Then he was in an apartment, which he recognized, trying to find a shirt. People were sleeping in the apartment and he kept banging into cymbals on stands placed here and there. He couldn’t find a shirt. His mother came out of a closet and asked him to be a little quieter.
A sober conversation with Anne. “Tim asked Dore to come to work for Medlapse,” she says. “He’ll make her a vice-president. To begin with, though, she’ll have to be the secretary.”
“It’s got crash-and-burn written all over it.”
“She’ll be a vice-president.”
“Like being vice-president of a bag of popcorn.”
“I know,” Anne says, sighing. “God I hate being a secretary. I did it for three years in Denver. These assholes telling you what to do.”
“If you could do whatever you wanted —”
“I’d like to be an independent oil operator. There were a lot of those at home. Real party guys. Great hearts.”
“Well,” Simon says, “that’s a skill too. You have to know how to con banks.”
“I had one semester of geology.”
“Maybe law school?”
“Terrible.”
“You don’t know that for a fact.”
“I’m a total failure.”
“Begin.”
When the women began to get angry, Simon had not known quite how to react. They surprised him. He had, after all, done little more than give them a place to stay, feed them, sleep with them and talk to them, extending good Christian fellowship. But they had to be mad at somebody, he understood that, and even if they were mad at themselves still that was only starting the engine, as it were, the vehicle still had to go somewhere, win a race, explode, even. Veronica had come in one day with a headline from the National Enquirer,
Boy Produces 100 Yards Of Thread From His Right Eye And Said, “What Can You Do, Simon?”
Some days they were angry with him, some days they were angry with each other. Four people, many possibilities. Each person could be angry at any given point with one, two, or three others, or angry at the self. Two people could be angry at a third, three people at a fourth. He reached forty-nine possibilities before his math expired.
Their movement through the world required young men, a class to which he did not belong. Simon liked young men, within reasonable limits, and approved, in general, of the idea of young men and young women sleeping together in joyous disregard of history, economics, building codes. Let them have their four hundred square feet. Veronica liked garage apartments. Perhaps the young men would do well in the world, attend the new branch of Harvard Business in Gainesville, market a black bean soup that would rage through Miami like rabies or a voice attenuator capable of turning crackers into lisping Brits, and end up with seven thousand square feet in Paris on the Ile de la Cité. Young men had stiff pricks and smelled good, by and large, almost as good as babies. Young women bounced up and down on your chest and dazzled you with a thousand unexpected attacks. Simon counted the ways in which he was God-visited.
Sarah calls. “Do you know what she’s done?” she asks. She’s referring to her mother.
“What?”
“Fallen in love.”
Simon is astonished. “With whom?”
“The mayor. And he’s married.”
“Good God that’s terrible.”
“She was crying on my shoulder all last night.”
“Oh Lord. Can I do anything?”
“Talk to her?”
“Would she want to talk to me about this?”
“I guess not. She said you were what she was trying to get away from.”
“I understand that. I understood that a long time ago.”
“Don’t be bitter.”
“Simple statement of fact. People get too much of each other. Civility goes away, finally.”
“Yeah I think you’d better butt out. Not that you’ve had so much to do with the affairs of your Philadelphia group lately.”
“Well. Do you have enough money?”
“Daddy you’ve been asking me that since I was thirteen.”
“It’s a reflex. Listen, Sarah, is there anything I can do for her, do you think? Or would it be better if I didn’t know about it?”
“I think she wants you to know about it. There’s nothing you can do about it.”
“Is he in love with her?”
“He’s a mayor. He needs a lot of love. More than other people. Oceans.”
How does she know so much? “Keep me posted,” he says.