We had a steak on the garden patio last night and we got on the oilcloth-covered chaise together, Mary sitting in my arms, and upon a casual remark of mine about the flowers, she said, "It's too cold for them in winter here." In my no-bio disadvantage, a remark like that indeed suggests Florida, and I think I suggest Stump, whose clothes fit me to a t, and I think, all together, we're in small maneuvers for leaving for Florida, but there'll be no song and dance about that either.
"Thought I'd go see an old friend tomorrow, if you'd like to go," Mary said.
The idea of being alone in her house seemed radical. "Sure."
"They're a gas. Hazel and Bruce."
"Okay."
She turned around, and up and kissed me so suddenly she reminded me of a girl nervous about sex and deciding to get the butterflies over with. I felt young, too: Stump's Ban-Lons give me a strange feeling on the skin, not unlike I'm wearing ladies' nylon hose. The garden was close and green and dark, and a sprinkler was spicking somewhere, casting a mist on us. Mary's skin has a half-size-too-large feel, giving it a satin effect, a softer touch than a younger woman. It is hard to imagine we want to leave at all. It is a halcyon, unjudged time: billiards crack, drinks fizzle, colors pour into the house from dazzling flowers every morning watered, making it a cozy, gauzy life, as if we were candied fruits sweetening in a snifter of brandy.
Hoop and Virginia were practice, it turns out, for Hazel and Bruce. Mary put a half gallon of gin in the car and handed me the keys. On the drive, out into an old suburb development, she said, "Sugar, these people are somewhat rough-cut."
"What's rough?"
"Hazel is a doll, for my money, but you might be startled." I resolved not to be.
We found a low, cinder-block, brown house with rotted turquoise eaves and a rusted-out screen porch. A woman I presumed Hazel swung open the screenless door to the porch and bent over a bit, squinting through black cat-eye glasses before rushing Mary, chortling and pumping elbows. Their embrace was a confused arrangement and an ongoing adjustment of Hazel's cigarette and Old Milwaukee and slipping eye-glasses, and Mary's gin and cut flowers and Honeyhowlonghasitbeens and honeyhowgoodyoulooks. When introduced, Hazel looked at me and then said to Mary, "I see what you mean. You lucky dog. If I was twenty years younger.
In the house she sat us in the kitchen at a redwood table with benches. She put a tray of ice cubes and two jelly glasses on the table and sat down opposite us, still in a can't-believe-how-good-you-look-long-it's-been stream of talk, and Mary poured our drinks.
A flushing noise introduced Bruce from the bathroom, and he came in, fiddling with his fly. When he saw us, he bent sharply over and zipped, then walked over to his place at the table, which was marked by another Old Milwaukee in a circle of water and an
ashtray.
Hazel stood up and kissed him, having to hold her glasses in place, and Bruce also had to restore his glasses high up onto his nose with his middle finger. He held them there while he bent down to a Styrofoam cooler on the floor and got two beers, then looked up at us and got two more, and Mary said, "We brought our own, thanks."
"I'd give my eyeteeth," Hazel said, "if I could still drink hard stuff."
"Doctor told her it 'ud kill her," Bruce said. Hazel kissed him again.
The girls went into old times, which were privately hilarious, while Bruce and I watched each other drink.
After about twenty minutes, old times had become current events, and they had nothing currently in common except the visit, so Bruce and I were acknowledged.
Hazel turned to him with yet another smacky kiss misaligning their eyeglasses. These kisses seemed designed and sufficient to make up for centuries of neglect. She held her lips to his cheek while he held his glasses in place.
"Do you know what this rascal did on our first date?" Hazel suddenly said. "He takes me to this bar outside town and says we're going on to another one ten miles away, so I better go to the can."
"Seven miles," Bruce said.
"Yeah. So I go in, and there's this nude poster of Burt Reynolds naked, right where you have to look when you sit down. And there's a board over his pud."
"His what? I never heard you call it that." Bruce sipped his Old Milwaukee, settling it back on the table in a circling motion.
"You're about only a foot from it, right in front of you," Hazel said, "and the killer is, it's big-the board is much bigger than it needs to be. I'm not moving that board, I say, and for a long time I don't, and then I forgot and damned if I don't. When I do, I can hear this roar go up in the bar."
Bruce adjusts his glasses, smiling.
"The sonsofbitches have a red light wired up to the board which goes on when you lift it," Hazel said.
"Our first date."
"She comes out and they have it so the red light is still on, and everybody says together, How big is it? It was funny."
"And do you know what else was so funny, Mary?"
We were laughing. "What?" Mary asked.
"They time you."
"She had a good time. Forty seconds. The record's five minutes on a girl that was sick first before she could look."
"Our first date! What a stunt. Come over here, honey," Hazel said to Mary, patting the table. "I don't ever get to see you." When she got Mary seated, she took her hand and held it in both of hers and patted and held on to it on the table. Bruce got up and came to my side of the table. Mary was watching me. "Now listen to what I done to him on our second date," Hazel said.
"This was pretty good," Bruce put in. I had the feeling they were their own full-time archivists, historians of Old Milwaukee moments, as much as they were anything else on earth. They were amazing. One side of Bruce's face was a giant lipstick smudge from Hazel's endless kisses-they were completely happy, completely happy about nothing.
Hazel had picked up early on a thing Bruce said during the Burt Reynolds date, and she put it to good advantage on their second date. Bruce, when asked how it was going, was in the habit of saying, "I'm looking pretty good this year, don't you think?" Hazel had him take them to visit a friend of hers, and during the normal early conversation the friend asked Bruce how he was.
"He don't say, I'm fine, like he ought to," Hazel says. "He's still cock of the walk from the damn red-light trick. He pipes right up, Well, Hazel here thinks I'm looking pretty good this year, how about you? And my friend says, I can't tell, Bruce, I'm blind. It like to killed him. She is blind."
Hazel is laughing and Bruce is nodding with a kind of red-handed smile on. "He's so full of himself he doesn't even look at her! She's waving her head around like Ray Charles and he don't see it!l Hav-A-Tampa Bruce!"
"She calls me that because I'm from Tampa. She thinks it's funny." Bruce smiled what I was coming to consider his polite smile.
"You ought to be flattered," Hazel says. "Them things are big." She roars.
"You made a mistake that day, too," Bruce now adds.
"I sure did," Hazel confesses, beginning to giggle, and again I think they are interested in the record more than in the events. They want to get these stories out right. Mary is giving me a bit of the old Mother Nature look, as from the Hoop show, and I realize these are not unlike afternoons.
"A pretty good mistake," Bruce confirms. Hazel nods.
"A doozy," she says.
"What did you do?" I asked.
"We went in this convenience store on the edge of town after the blind date-we call it Bruce's blind date-and a girl I knew was working there. Well, I remembered her as being beautiful, and I saw her, and she smiled, and her teeth were gone. I said, God, honey, what happened to your teeth?"