I found her in front of the flat file, looking at drawings with her purse hanging weightlessly from her shoulder. Her frown was as miserable as a kicked dog’s. “Are you actually working in here?”
“Yeah. I’m taking lessons.”
“Are these yours?”
“Those are Dad’s.”
She looked up at me. “Really? Dad did these?” The drawings seemed to be ink sketches, the kind I knew he occasionally sent to fans who wrote him letters. Bitty herself was in one, holding an apple as big around as her head.
“Yep.”
For several seconds, she seemed in awe of the pictures, and I opened my mouth to tell her to take them. Then she dropped them back onto the others, as if to preempt me, and pushed shut the drawer. She composed herself and walked out of the studio. “Well, I’m famished,” she said over her shoulder. I followed.
* * *
Mike and Bitty’s Toyota was the kind of rugged car that is often pictured atop mountains in television commercials, surrounded by dumbstruck goats. I didn’t understand why. Our part of the state had no mountains in it, and Mike and Bitty were not the type, apparently, to leave it. They didn’t ski, and had never vacationed together, as far as I knew. Bitty’s driving was competent and slow, and at four-way stops she waited until all other cars were out of sight before she pulled away.
Close up, she looked charmingly seedy. Her hair was roughly cut, as if by hedge clippers, and her makeup, at one time a seamless and carefully applied mask, had been dashed on. The hem of her skirt was frayed, and as she drove she picked at the loose strands, pulling them farther away from the whole. Her sweater was loosely woven, and the bra underneath allowed her nipples to show clearly through. I anchored my gaze out the window and found us out on Route 518, heading toward Hopewell.
“Where are we going?” I said.
“AJ’s.”
“In Princeton?”
“Mm-hmm.”
AJ’s was a pancake and coffeehouse on Nassau Street, known for its enormous variety and high prices. Still, it was always packed. When I was in college in Philly, I had a group of friends I went to Princeton with to see rock-and-roll shows: the campus eating clubs frequently hosted huge parties at which many of our favorite bands — loosely musical ratfaced outfits with gratuitously improbable names — exerted themselves. Afterward, since there were no bars in town, we would go to AJ’s to sober up. There was always a two o’clock rush there. I’d never been during the daytime.
As we passed through Hopewell, conversation inexorably turned to the Hopewell Head. Hopewell was notorious for a murder case that was cracked there in the 1980s. Apparently, a pimp from Atlantic City had killed one of his prostitutes; to cover up the crime, he cut her into pieces and scattered them around the state. The Head was discovered in a creek next to a Hopewell golf course, not far off the road.
“Remember the guy who found it?” Bitty said.
“He was a caddy or something.”
“I was on the debate team with him.”
I turned to her. She had produced a candy bar from somewhere and was eating it. “You were on the debate team?” I said.
“Uh-huh.”
“What else did you do in high school that I don’t know about?”
She chuckled. “Lots.” She folded the wrapper over the end of the candy and stowed it under the seat. “Remember when the Badenochs’ old shed burned down?”
“Not really.”
“Pierce and I did that.”
“What!”
“We got drunk together and we went out trying to set things on fire. But it didn’t work. We didn’t have any kerosene or anything, and the matches kept going out. But that shed was like, it went up like a tinderbox.” She wiggled her fingers in the air, indicating flames.
I paused a moment to digest this. “Do you remember when Pierce set his flea circus on fire?”
Her jaw dropped, and she banged the steering wheel with both hands. “That happened?! Were you there?”
“So were you,” I said.
“All these years I thought I imagined that whole thing, it was so weird. Do you remember the tall guy with the hoop earrings?”
“Not the earrings.”
She shook her head. “Fuckin’-A,” she said, and from her tone I knew that it was a high school phrase she hadn’t used in years.
* * *
AJ’s was packed with bespectacled Asians, no doubt foreign students who couldn’t afford to go home for the summer. Their food battled for table space with rambling mounds of books and papers. The menu had two panels; on the left was the pancake list. Apple, Banana, Buckwheat, Buckwheat Apple, Buckwheat Banana, Buckwheat Blueberry, Buckwheat Pear, fifty pancakes long. The coffee list, on the other half of the menu, was similar. I ordered a cup of cherry-flavored coffee and buckwheat pear pancakes. Bitty got decaf and buttermilk cakes. The waiter looked familiar. He had a gaunt face and a strange beard: muttonchops reaching for a meticulous black checker of hair on his chin.
“Do you know that guy?” I asked Bitty.
“Nope. He’s cute, though.” I watched her eyes follow him across the room.
“So,” I said.
She smiled. “So.”
“How’s married life?”
She shrugged. “Dull. I guess.”
“Tell me a little about Mike,” I said. “How’d you meet?”
“How’d we meet,” she repeated, as if it were a peculiar and probing question. “Okay, I guess it was at a picnic. My friend Sheila got married to a guy named Steve, and Steve works with Mike, and they had a picnic and introduced us. We fooled around in the pool.”
“Neat,” I said.
“I suppose. He’s an odd one, that Mike.” I couldn’t read between the lines of this comment, which sounded like it was said about a mutual acquaintance of ours whom neither of us had seen in some time. Her face went mildly dreamy, and her eyes took to a shaft of sunlight, following dust motes through the air.
“How so?”
She shrugged. “Mysterious. Occasionally explosive. Sexually devious. Not that you want to know that.”
“Not exactly.”
“Do I love him?” she asked the hanging lamp over our table, as if this question had been posed. “I suppose I do. He asked me to marry him. It was a surprise. I said yes.”
Our coffee came. Bitty began to sip hers without preamble. I set to adjusting mine, sprinkling in a carefully measured spoonful of sugar, dripping in the cream. It was real cream, too, not milk. The smell of cherries rose as I stirred. I took a sip. Combined with the lingering flavor of toothpaste, which had not long ago been in my mouth, the coffee tasted exactly like cough syrup. I could not conceal my disappointment.
“Why would you order that?” Bitty said. I looked at her unadulterated decaf with envy.
“I don’t know.”
“I’ve got it,” she said suddenly.
“Why I ordered?”
“Who our waiter is.”
“Who?”
She waggled her finger at me. “Paul Crumb. That guy is Paul Crumb.”
I turned. Indeed, it was Paul Crumb. Paul was the valedictorian of my high school class, and had been roundly hated by almost everyone. He was generally considered a genius, and went to study particle physics at Caltech. Now, a dozen years later, he was pouring flavored coffee at AJ’s. We had all hung out with Paul at one time or another; he had a nice car and his older brother bought people beer, something Bobby would not have done for me if I had paid him double. I remembered my betrayal of Paul with agonizing clarity. I was one of a small group who set him up with an imaginary date, then spied on him as he waited on the street for half an hour, by himself. We had all been the victims of similar jokes, and since he was the only guy we knew more gullible than we were, we jumped at the chance. It was curiously unsatisfying. I never spoke to him again.