Meredith Rand says: ‘Can I say that one of the reasons you come off as a little boring is that you don’t seem like you have any sense of what the real topic of a conversation is? This stuff doesn’t have anything to do with what we were just talking about, does it?’
Drinion looks slightly puzzled for a moment, but not hurt or embarrassed. Rand says: ‘What makes you imagine anybody possibly even wants to hear some long job-related noodle you don’t even know about if the whole point of being here is that it’s Friday and we don’t have to think about shit like this for two days?’
Drinion says: ‘You don’t normally choose to devote time to matters like this unless you’re clocked in, you’re saying.’
‘I’m talking about loneliness and people paying attention to you or not and you launch into this whole long like thing about radio expense protocols and it turns out the point of the whole thing is only that there’s procedural stuff you don’t know?’
Drinion nods in a thoughtful way. ‘I understand what you’re saying.’
‘What do you imagine is going through the other person’s mind when you’re ranting like that? Do you just automatically assume they’re interested? Who cares about radio accounting if you’re not tasked to it?’
Beth Rath is now seated between Keith Sabusawa and somebody else at the bar, all on stools in identical stool-postures that to Meredith Rand always look vulturelike. Howard Shearwater is playing pinball, at which he’s said to excel — his pinball machine is the more distant one from their table, and the angle of incidence doesn’t allow Rand to see the design or motif of the machine. The sun is not yet all the way down but the bar’s low lights in the artificial tiki torches on the wall have come up, and the air-conditioner vents’ rate seems at least to have been cranked back a bit. As baseball fans, real Peorians tend to be equally divided between the Cubs and the Cardinals, though in this era the Cubs fans tend to keep their partisanship more to themselves. Baseball on television is just about the most tedious type of sport there is, in Meredith Rand’s husband’s opinion. It may or may not rain, as usual. There are different-shaped puddles of condensation on all the places that do or did have a glass, and none of these ever evaporate. Drinion still hasn’t spoken or fidgeted or changed his facial expression much at all. This now right here is cigarette number three since 5:10. There are no attempted rings.
Meredith Rand says: ‘What are you thinking now?’
‘I’m thinking that you raise a number of points that seem valid, and that I’m going to maybe have to give the whole matter of what someone is thinking when I’m speaking to them about something more thought.’
Rand does the thing she can do where she smiles broadly with everything except the muscles around her eyes. ‘Are you patronizing me?’
‘No.’
‘Are you being sarcastic?’
‘No. I can tell you’ve become angry, though.’
She exhales two brief tusks of smoke. Because of less backdraft from the air-conditioner vent, some of the smoke is going into Shane Drinion’s face. ‘Did you know that my husband is dying?’
‘No. I didn’t,’ Drinion says.
They both sit for a moment, doing the respective sorts of facial things they are inclined to do.
‘Aren’t you going to say you’re sorry?’
‘What?’ Drinion says.
‘It’s what you say. It’s the standard etiquette thing to say.’
‘Well, I was considering this fact in the light of your asking me about sexual feelings and loneliness. Receipt of this fact changes the context for that conversation, it seems.’
‘Should I ask how so?’ Meredith Rand says.
Drinion inclines his head. ‘I don’t know that.’
‘Did you think finding out he was dying might mean you’ve got some kind of sexual chance with me?’
‘I had not thought that, no.’
‘Good. That’s good.’
Beth Rath has started back over to the table with her mouth partly open to maybe say something or try to join the conversation, but Meredith Rand gives her a look that makes Rath turn around and return to her place on the red leather stool at the bar, where Ron is changing out the club soda cartridge. Meredith Rand puts her purse on the table and rises to recharge her glass.
‘Do you want another Heineken or whatever?’
‘I still haven’t finished this one.’
‘You don’t exactly party down, do you?’
‘I get full quickly. My stomach doesn’t seem to hold very much.’
‘Lucky you.’
Rand, Rath, and Sabusawa have some kind of quick conversation while Ron is making Meredith Rand’s gin and tonic, which Drinion doesn’t hear, though he can see slight reflections of the people at the bar in Meibeyer’s front window. Nobody knows what he looks like or what his face is doing as he sits at the table alone, or even what he’s looking at.
‘Do you know what cardiomyopathy is?’ Rand asks when she sits back down. She looks at her purse, which is almost more of a bag in terms of shape. Half the gin and tonic is already gone.
‘Yes.’
‘Yes what?’
‘I think it’s a disease of the heart.’
Meredith Rand taps her cigarette lighter experimentally against her front teeth. ‘You seem like a good listener. Are you? You want to hear a sad story?’
After a moment, Drinion says: ‘I’m not certain how to answer that.’
‘I mean my sad story. Part of mine. Everybody’s got their sad story. You want to hear part of mine?’
‘…’
‘It’s actually a disease of the muscle of the heart. Cardiomyopathy.’
‘I thought that the heart was itself a muscle,’ Shane Drinion says.
‘It means as opposed to the vasculature of the heart. Trust me, I’m kind of an expert on this. What they call heart disease is the major vessels. As in a heart attack. Cardiomyopathy is the muscle of the heart, the stuff of it, the thing that squeezes and relaxes. Especially when it’s of unknown cause. Which it is. They aren’t sure what caused it. The theory was that he’d had a terrible flu or some virus when he was in college that seemed to get better but nobody knew it had settled in his myocardium somehow, the muscle tissue of his heart, and gradually infected it and compromised it.’
‘I think I understand.’