“Uh, yes.”
He led them to a spot with a commanding view of the La Jolla Cove below. Waves broke into foamy white sprays beneath the floodlights. “Ees zees taab-le hokay?” Gordon nodded while Penny rolled up her eyes. After the man had bestowed the huge menus and gone away she said, “God, I wish they’d cut out the accent business.”
“Vat ees eet, madame? You no like zee phony talk?” Gordon said.
“My French isn’t great, but—” she stopped as the waiter approached. Gordon did the wine ritual, selecting something he recognized from the fat book. When he looked around he saw the Carroways sitting some distance away, laughing and having a good time. He pointed them out to Penny; she duly entered the fresh datum in their running tally. But they did not go over to report the latest figures. The Colloquium lay five days in the past, but Gordon felt uneasy in the department now. Tonight’s splurge at the Top of the Cove was Penny’s suggestion, to lift him out of his moody withdrawal.
Something thumped at his elbow. “I open it now,” the waiter said, working at the bottle. “Muss lettit breed.”
“What?” Gordon said, surprised.
“Open ta da air, y’know—breed.”
“Oh.”
“Yes suh.” The waiter gave him a slightly condescending smile.
After he had left Gordon said, “At least he has the smile down pat. Are all the high-class restaurants around here like this?”
Penny shrugged. “We don’t have the old world culture of New York. We didn’t get mugged walking over here, either.”
Gordon would normally have sidestepped the now-what-you-New-Yorkers-ought-to-do conversation, but this time he murmured “Don’t krechtz about what you don’t know,” and without thinking about it he was talking about the days after he moved away from his parents and was living in a cramped apartment, studying hard and for the first time really sensing the city, breathing it in. His mother has assigned Uncle Herb to look in on him now and then, since after all he was living in the same neighborhood. Uncle Herb was a lean and intense man who was always landing big deals in the clothing business. He had a practical man’s disdain for physics. “How much they pay you?” he would say abruptly, in the middle of discussing something else. “Enough, if I scrimp.” His uncle’s face would twist up in the act of weighing this and he would inevitably say, “Plus all the physics you can eat? Eh?” and slap his thigh. But he was not a simple man. Using your intelligence for judging discounts or weighing the marketability of crew neck sweaters—that was smart. His only hobby he had turned into a little business, too. On Saturdays and Sundays he would take the IRT down to Washington Park Square early, to get a seat at one of the concrete chess tables near MacDougal and West Fourth streets. He was a weekend chess hustler. He played for a quarter a game against all comers, sometimes making as much as two dollars in an hour. At dusk he would switch tables to get one near the street light. In winter he would play in one of the Village coffeehouses, sipping lukewarm tea with an audible slurp, making it last so his expenses didn’t run too high. His only hustle was to make his opponents think they were better than he was. Since any chess player old enough to have quarters to spare inevitably also had an advanced case of chess player’s ego, this wasn’t hard. Uncle Herb called them “potzers”—weak players with inflated self-images. His game was no marvel, either. It was strategically unsound, flashy but built out of pseudo traps tailored to snare potzers who thought they saw an unsuspected opening suitable for a quick kill. The traps gave him fast wins, to maximize the take per hour. Uncle Herb’s view of the world was simple: the potzers and the mensch. He, of course, was a mensch.
“You know what was the last thing he said to me when I left?” Gordon said abruptly. “He said, ‘Don’t be a potzer out there.’ And he gave me ten dollars.”
“Nice uncle,” Penny said diplomatically.
“And you know last Friday, the Colloquium? I started to feel like a potzer.”
“Why?” Penny asked with genuine surprise.
“I’ve been standing firm on the strength of my data. But when you look at it—Christ, Dyson would’ve given me a break, would’ve backed me up, if there’d been any sense to it. I trust his judgment. I’m starting to think I’ve made some dumb mistake along the way, screwed up the experiment so bad nobody can find what’s wrong.”
“You should trust your own—”
“That’s what marks the potzer, see? Inability to learn from experience. I’ve been bulling ahead—”
“Zee compote, surrh,” the waiter said smoothly.
“Oh God,” Gordon said with such irritation that the waiter stepped back, his composure gone. Penny laughed out loud, which made the waiter even more uncertain. Even Gordon smiled, and his mood was broken.
Penny’s forced merriment got them through most of the meal. She produced a book from her handbag and pressed it on him. “It’s the new Phil Dick.”
He glanced at the lurid cover. The Man in the High Castle. “Haven’t got time.”
“Make the time. It’s really good. You’ve read his other stuff, haven’t you?”
Gordon shrugged off the subject. He still wanted to talk about New York, for reasons he could not pin down. He compromised by relating to Penny the contents of his mother’s latest letter. That distant figure seemed to be getting used to the idea of him living “in flagrant sin.” But there was a curious vagueness about her letters that bothered him. When he first came to California the letters had been long, packed with chatter about her daily routine, the neighborhood, the slings and arrows of Manhattan life. Now she told him very little about what she was doing. He felt the void left by those details, sensed his New York life slipping away from him. He had been more sure of himself then, the world had looked bigger.
“Hey, c’mon, Gordon. Stop brooding. Here, I brought you some more things.”
He saw that she had planned a methodically joyous evening, complete with door prizes. Penny produced a handsome Cross pen and pencil set, a western-style string tie, and then a bumper sticker: Au + H2O. Gordon held it between thumb and index finger, suspending it delicately in the air over their table as though it might contaminate the veal piccata.
“What’s this crap?”
“Oh, c’mon. Just a joke.”
“Next you’ll be giving me copies of The Conscience of a Conservative. Christ”
“Don’t be so afraid of new ideas.”
“New? Penny, these are cobwebbed—”
“They’re new to you.”
“Look, Goldwater might make a good neighbor—good fences make good neighbors, isn’t that what Frost said? Little lit’rary touch for you, there. But Penny, he’s a simpleton.”
She said stiffly, “Not so simple he gave away Cuba.”
“Huh?” He was honestly mystified.
“Last October Kennedy signed it away. Just like that.” She snapped her fingers energetically. “Agreed not to do anything about Cuba if the Russians took their missiles out.”
“By ‘anything’ you mean another Bay of Pigs.”
“Maybe.” She nodded sternly. “Maybe.”
“Kennedy’s already helped out quite enough fascists. The Cuban exiles, Franco, and now Diem in Viet Nam. I think—”
“You don’t think at all, Gordon. Really. You’ve got all these eastern ideas about the way the world works and they’re all wrong. JFK was weak on Cuba and you just watch—the Russians will give them the guns and they’ll infiltrate everywhere, all over South America. They’re a real threat, Gordon. What’s to stop them from sending troops into Africa, even? Into the Congo?”