"Who says I was with Melanie?"
"You did. With that card. Jesus, Charlie, a young kid like that grinding your balls could kill you."
"What a way to go, huh champ? You know as well as I do it's not the chicks that grind your balls, it's these middle-aged broads time is running out on."
Rabbit remembers his bout with Janice amid their gold, yet still remains jealous. "Whajja do in Florida with her?"
"We moved around. Sarasota, Venice, St. Pete's. I couldn't talk her out of the Atlantic side so we drove over from Naples on 75, old Alligator Alley, and did the shmeer – Coral Gables, Ocean Boulevard, up to Boca and West Palm. We were going to take in Cape Canaveral but ran out of time. The bimbo didn't even bring a bathing suit, the one we bought her was one of these new ones with the sides wide open. Great figure. Don't know why you didn't appreciate her."
"I couldn't appreciate her, it was Nelson brought her into the house. It'd be like screwing your own daughter."
Charlie has a toothpick left over from lunch downtown, a persimmon-colored one, and he dents his lower lip with it as he gazes out the tired window. "There's worse things," he offers bleakly. "How's Nelson and the bride-to-be?"
"Pru." Harry sees that Charlie is set to guard the details of his trip, to make him pull them out one by one. Miles of Southern belles. Fuck this guy. Rabbit has secrets too. But, thinking this, he can picture only a farm, its buildings set down low in a hollow.
"Melanie had a lot to say about Pru."
"Like what?"
"Like she thinks she's weird. Her impression is that shy as she seems she's a tough kid up from a really rocky upbringing and isn't too steady on her feet, emotionally speaking."
"Yeah well, some might say a girl who gets her kicks screwing an old crow like you is pretty weird herself."
Charlie looks away from the window straight up into his eyes, his own eyes behind their tinted spectacles looking watery. "You shouldn't say things like that to me, Harry. Both of us getting on, two guys just hanging in there ought to be nice to each other."
Harry wonders from this if Charlie knows how threatened his position is, Nelson on his tail.
Charlie continues, "Ask me whatever you want about Melanie. Like I said, she's a good kid. Solid, emotionally. The trouble with you, champ, is you have screwing on the brain. My biggest kick was showing this young woman something of the world she hadn't seen before. She ate it up – the cypresses, that tower with the chimes. She said she'd still take California though. Florida's too flat. She said if this Christmas I could get my ass out to Carmel she'd be happy to show me around. Meet her mother and whoever else is around. Nothing heavy."
"How much – how much future you think you two have?"
"Harry, I don't have much future with anybody." His voice is whispery, barely audible. Harry would like to take it and wirebrush it clean.
"You never know," he reassures the smaller man.
"You know," Stavros insists. "You know when your time is running out. If life offers you something, take it."
"O.K., O.K. I will. I do. What'd your poor old Manna mou do, while you were bombing around with Bimbo in the Everglades?"
"Well," he says, "funny thing there. A female cousin of mine, five or so years younger, I guess has been running around pretty bad, and her husband kicked her out this summer, and kept the kids. They lived in Norristown. So Gloria's been living in an apartment by herself out on Youngquist a couple blocks away and was happy to babysit for the old lady while I was off and says she'll do it again any time. So I have some freedom now I didn't used to have." Everywhere, it seems to Harry, families are breaking up and different pieces coming together like survivors in one great big lifeboat, while he and Janice keep sitting over there in Ma Springer's shadow, behind the times.
"Nothing like freedom," he tells his friend. "Don't abuse it now. You asked about Nelson. The wedding's this Saturday. Immediate family only. Sorry."
"Wow. Poor little Nellie. Signed, sealed, and delivered."
Harry hurries by this. "From what Janice and Bessie let drop the mother will probably show up. The father's too sore."
"You should see Akron," Charlie tells him. "I'd be sore too if I had to live there."
"Isn't there a golf course out there where Nicklaus holds a tournament every year?"
"What I saw wasn't any golf course."
Charlie has come back from his experiences tenderized, nostalgic it seems for his life even as he lives it. So aged and philosophical he seems, Harry dares ask him, "What'd Melanie think of me, did she say?"
A very fat couple are prowling the lot, looking at the little cars, testing by their bodies, sitting down on air beside the driver's doors, which models might be big enough for them. Charlie watches this couple move among the glittering roofs and hoods a minute before answering. "She thought you were neat, except the women pushed you around. She thought about you and her balling but got the impression you and Janice were very solid."
"You disillusion her?"
"Couldn't. The kid was right."
"Yeah how about ten years ago?"
"That was just cement."
Harry loves the way he ticks this off, Janice's seducer; he loves this savvy Greek, dainty of heart beneath his coat of summer checks. The couple have wearied of trying on cars for size and get into their old car, a '77 Pontiac Grand Prix with cream hardtop, and drive away. Harry asks suddenly, "How do you feel about it? Think we can live with Nelson over here?"
Charlie shrugs, a minimal brittle motion. "Can he live with me? He wants to be a cut above Jake and Rudy, and there aren't that many cuts in an outfit like this."
"I've told them, Charlie, if you go I go."
"You can't go, Chief. You're family. Me, I'm old times. I can go."
"You know this business cold, that's what counts with me."
"Ah, this isn't selling. It's like supermarkets now: it's shelfstacking, and ringing it out at the register. When it was all used, we used to try to fit a car to every customer. Now it's take it or leave it. With this seller's market there's no room to improvise. Your boy had the right idea: go with convertibles, antiques, something with a little amusement value. I can't take these Jap bugs seriously. This new thing called the Tercel we're supposed to start pushing next month, have you seen the stars? One point five liter engine, twenty-inch tires. It's like those little cars they used to have on merry-go-rounds for the kids who were too scared to ride the horses."
"Forty-three m.p.g. on the highway, that's the star people care about, the way the world's winding."
Charlie says, "You don't see too many bugs down in Florida. The old folks are still driving the big old hogs, the Continentals, the Toronados, they paint 'em white and float around. Of course the roads, there isn't a hill in the state and never any frost. I've been thinking about the Sun Belt. Go down there and thumb my nose at the heating-oil bills. Then they get you on the air-conditioning. You can't escape."
Harry says, "Sodium wafers, that's the answer. Electricity straight from sunlight. It's about five years off; that's what Consumer Reports was saying. Then we can tell those Arabs to take their fucking oil and grease their camels with it."
Charlie says, "Traffic fatalities are up. You want to know why they're up? Two reasons. One, the kids are pretty much off drugs now and back into alcohol. Two, everybody's gone to compacts and they crumple like paper bags."
He chuckles and twirls the flavored toothpick against his lower lip as the two men gaze out the window at the river of dirty tin. An old low-slung station wagon pulls into the lot but it has no wooden rack on top; though Harry's heart skips, it is not his daughter. The station wagon noses around and heads out into 111 again, just casing. Burglaries are up. Harry asks Charlie, "Melanie really thought about" – he balks at "balling," it is not his generation's word -"going to bed with me?"