“Certainly, sir.” And he gamboled off.
“You’re very masterful,” Betty told me. Her disappointment that I was not my brother seemed to have waned. In fact, she now said, “I bet you have the business head in the family, don’t you?”
“Oh, we both do our share,” I said.
Still, she pursued the subject, and I gradually permitted myself to admit that Art was more the clever intuitive member of the family, while I was the practical one who kept the company stable and afloat. “Liz and I are like that,” Betty said. “She’s just so clever and witty sometimes, and I’m the plain practical one.”
“Not plain,” I assured her. Reaching across the table, I squeezed her hand. “Anything but plain.”
She squeezed back. “You are nice,” she said.
Then it was back to the greeting card company, and now she wanted to know if we did all the “verses” ourselves, or did we accept work from “free-lancers.” On the assumption that Mr. Hallmark doesn’t do all his own writing, I said, “Oh, we buy most of our verses from professionals.”
Something flustered and coy overtook her now, and she said, “You may not believe this, but I write verses myself.”
My heart sank. “Do you really?”
“Oh, not for publication, just for family occasions. I don’t suppose I’m good enough to be a real professional.”
Nor did I. However, I now had no choice; it was required of me that I coax her, blushing and reluctant, to quote me some of her crap. Which at last, of course, she consented to do.
“I wrote this for my mother’s fiftieth birthday,” she said. “Mother, when I think of all/The things you’ve done for me,/I know no other mother could/Compare on land or sea./I think you’re sweet, I think you’re great/In short, I think you’re nifty—”
“Oh, good!” I said. “Here come our drinks.”
8
“Good morning, sweetheart.”
I must be awake; nobody could dream a headache this bad. Cautiously — or incautiously, as it turned out — I opened one eye, and a needle of sunlight struck straight through into my brain. “Holy Mother of God!” I groaned, and snapped the eyelid shut again over my charred eyeball.
A smell of coffee threatened my stomach with upheaval, and a voice I recognized said, redundantly, “I brought you some coffee.”
This time I squinted, which was safer, and vaguely made out her female form. Liz, or possibly Betty. Which one was it? Come to think of it, which one was I?
“Do you want your glasses?”
Ah hah, a clue. Glasses = Bart. “Sweetheart” said to Bart = Betty.
Sweetheart? Betty? What bed was I in? “Glasses,” I muttered, feeling sudden urgency, and waved a hand in the air until my spectacles were thrust into it. I donned them without sticking the wings in my eyes and blinked around at a bedroom I knew from somewhere. Good God, there was the closet, its door demurely closed. I was upstairs once more in the Kerner house, and had apparently spent the night.
Oh, really? I struggled to a sitting position, my back against the knurled wood headboard, and looked fuzzily around. This room was furnished with twin beds, in one of which I was roiling about and on the edge of the other of which Betty was sitting, cheerful and not at all hung over, crisp and cute in white shorts and a pale blue top.
She smiled at me. “Hung over?”
“I think it’s terminal.”
“I brought you some aspirin.”
“Gimme.”
She watched me struggle the aspirin down with gulps of coffee, and her expression was fond and indulgent and maternal, three of my least favorite mannerisms in a woman.
It was hard to think and swallow aspirin at the same time, but I forced myself. Last night: romantic evening, motorboat, Pewter Tankard. Betty had informed me she never drank anything stronger than wine, so I’d seen to it the table flowed with the stuff. Sherry beforehand, Moselle with the appetizer, Médoc with the entree, and stingers with dessert. (The wine limitation had fallen by then.) I did remember the stingers, but from then on memory faltered. There was a scene involving hilarious laughter and me failing to get out of a boat There was something to do with whether or not we were going to steal bicycles. Beyond that, a veil covereth all.
At last I abandoned the effort and put the coffee cup on the night table between the beds, saying, “God, what a head.”
“I guess you’re just not used to wine.”
“That might be it.”
“You know, you look a lot more like your brother with your glasses off, and your hair tousled that way.”
I whipped a guilty hand to my head, but could do nothing effective there, and permitted it to drop again to my side.
“Have you ever thought of trying contact lenses?”
“Oh, well,” I said. “Glasses are good enough for me.” They were hurting my nose.
“You’re really very good-looking, you know,” she said, and when I looked at her it seemed to me there was something possessive, possibly triumphant in the set of her head and the glint of her eye.
Had we? There are things you don’t forget, aren’t there? Aren’t there? I was naked beneath the sheet and thin blanket. Speak, memory. Goddamn it to hell. But memory remained silent. And that is one question it is never possible to ask a woman. They don’t take kindly to the thought of being forgettable. “I think,” I said, “you should take cover. I believe my head is about to explode.”
“I’ll massage your temples,” she offered. “I do that for Liz sometimes when she has hangovers, and she says it helps just wonderfully.”
“Anything,” I said.
So she moved over to sit on my bed, remove my glasses, and began stroking my temples with her cool fingers. It did nothing for me in any medical way, but it did put her in arm’s reach, so I slid a hand around her waist The smile she gave me was very nearly as lewd as her sister’s, and she said, “Again? You’d better rest.”
Ah hah, another clue. Again, was it? I stroked a breast and drew her close and murmured, “It’s the only known cure. A medical fact.”
“Now, Bart,” she said, and we kissed. Despite my throbbing head I enjoyed it.
But when I tried to roll her into the bed with me she pulled back, becoming at once serious. “Not in my father’s bed!”
“Your fa—” I glanced toward the other one. “Not that one either, I guess.”
“You can understand, can’t you?” She petted my chest, seeking forgiveness.
“Oh, sure. But—” How to phrase this, without tipping the fact that our previous encounter wasn’t on the tape? “Last night,” I suggested, “didn’t we, uh?...”
She looked at me, with humorous shock covering the true shock. “You don’t remember!”
“Of course I remember.” I sat up straighter, astounded that she could doubt me. “I remember you. But you know the condition I was in, and the dark, and...” I let it trail off, with a vague wavy gesture of the hand “I just don’t remember where” I said.
“You silly thing,” she said. “On the porch.”
“Ah.”
“And the living room.”
“Ah hah.”
“And the bathroom.”
“Ah?”
She giggled, and petted my chest some more. “You were just insatiable,” she said.
I must have been. “I still am,” I said, and petted her chest, while I looked around for some solution to our quandary. My eye lit on the closet; no, that would be going just too far.
“Oh, Bart,” she said, and leaned forward to nibble my pectorals.
“Um,” I said, and pointed to the floor. “You see that rug?”
“What a wonderful idea,” she said, and bounded out of her shorts.