“Yeah, sure,” Edison said, and he found that the first drink, in combination with the codeine, had made his words run down like an unoiled machine, all the parts gummed up and locked in place, “and let me maybe see the bar menu. You got a bar menu?”
The cocktail waitress — she was stunning, she really was, a tall girl, taller than the bartender, with nice legs and outstanding feet perched up high on a pair of black clogs — flashed her dimpled smile when Edison cocked his head to include her in the field of conversation.
Sure they had a bar menu, sure, but they really wouldn’t have anything more than crudités or a salad till the kitchen opened up for dinner at six — was that all right, or would he rather wait? Edison caught sight of himself in the mirror in back of the bar then, and it shook him. At first he didn’t even recognize himself, sure that some pathetic older guy had slipped onto the stool beside him while he was distracted by the waitress, but no, there was the backwards Lakers cap and the shades and the drawn-down sinkhole of his mouth over the soul beard and the chin that wasn’t nearly as firm as it should have been. And his skin — how had his skin got so yellow? Was it hepatitis? Was he drinking too much?
The bartender moved off down the bar to rub at an imaginary speck on the mahogany surface and convert half a dozen limes into neat wedges, and the cocktail waitress was suddenly busy with the cash register. On the TV, just above the threshold of sound, somebody was whispering about the mechanics of golf while the camera flowed over an expanse of emerald fairways and a tiny white ball rose up into the sky in a distant looping trajectory. A long moment hung suspended, along with the ball, and Edison was trying not to think about what had happened on the beach, but there it was, nagging at him like grief, and then the bartender was standing in front of him again. “You decide yet?”
“I think I’ll,” Edison began, and at that moment the door swung open and a woman with a wild shag of bleached hair slipped in and took a seat three stools down, “I’ll … I don’t know, I think I’ll wait.”
Who was she? He’d seen her around town, he was sure of it.
“Hi, Carlton,” she said, waving two fingers at the bartender while simultaneously swinging round to chirp “Hi, Elise” at the waitress. And then, shifting back into position on the stool, she gave Edison a long cool look of appraisal and said hi to him too. “Martini,” she instructed the bartender, “three olives, up. And give me a water back. I’m dying.”
She was a big girl, big in the way of the jeans model who’d married that old tottering cadaver of a millionaire a few years back and then disappeared from the face of the earth, big but sexy, very sexy, showing off what she had in a tight black top — and how long had it been since Kim had left? Edison, the T-shirt still damp over his breastbone, smiled back.
He initiated the conversation. He’d seen her around, hadn’t he? Yes, she had a condo just down the street. Did she come in here often? A shrug. The roots of her hair were black, and she dug her fingers deep into them, massaging as she talked. “Couple times a week maybe.”
“I’m Edison,” he said, smiling like he meant it, and he did. “And you’re—?”
“I’m Sukie.”
“Cool,” Edison said, in his element now, smiling, smiling, “I’ve never known anybody named Sukie. Is that your real name?”
She dug her fingers into her scalp, gave her head a snap so that the whole towering shako of her hair came to life. “No,” she said.
“It’s a nickname?”
“No.”
“You don’t want to tell me your real name? Is that it?”
She shrugged, an elegant big-shouldered gesture that rippled all the way down her body and settled in one gently rocking ankle. She was wearing a long blue print skirt and sandals. Earrings. Makeup. And how old was she? Thirty-five, he figured. Thirty-five and divorced. “What about you?” she said. “What kind of name is Edison?”
Now it was his turn. He lifted both hands and flashed open the palms. “My father thought I was going to be an inventor. But maybe you’ve heard of me, my band, I mean — I had an eponymous rock band a few years back.”
She just blinked.
“Edison Banks. You ever hear of them — of us, I mean? Early eighties? Warner Brothers? The Downtown LP?”
No, she hadn’t heard of anything.
All right. He knew how to play this, though he was out of practice. Back off—“We weren’t all that big, really, I don’t know”—and then a casual mention of the real firepower he could bring to the table. “That was before I got into TV.”
And now the scene shifted yet again, because before she could compress her lips in a little moue and coo “Tee-vee?” the door swung open, loudly, and brought in the sun and the street and three guys in suits, all of them young, with haircuts that chased them around the ears and teeth that should have been captured on billboards for the dental hygienists’ national convention. One of them, as it turned out, would turn out to be Lyle, and when she saw him come through the door, Sukie froze just for the briefest slice of an instant, but Edison saw it, and registered it, and filed it away.
The roar went down the other end of the bar, and Edison asked her if she’d like another drink. “No,” she said, “I don’t think so. But it’s been nice talking to you,” and already she was shifting away from the stool to reach for her purse.
“How about a phone number?” he said. “We could do dinner or something — sometime, I mean.”
She was on her feet now, looking down at him, the purse clutched in her hand. “No,” she said, and she shook her head till her hair snatched up all the light in the room, “no, I don’t think so.”
Edison had another drink. The sun slid down the sky to where it should have been all along. He gazed out idly across the street and admired the way the sunlight sat in the crowns of the palms and sank into the grip of the mountains beyond. Cars drifted lazily by. He watched a couple turn the corner and seat themselves under a green umbrella on the patio of the restaurant across the way. For the briefest moment the face of his humiliation rose up in his mind — the kid’s face, the poised stick — but he fought it down and thumbed through a copy of the village paper, just to have something to do while he sucked at his sweet-sour drink and chewed his way through another dish of sawdust pellets.
He read of somebody’s elaborate wedding (“fifteen thousand dollars on sushi alone”), the booming real estate market, and the latest movie star to buy up one of the estates in the hills, browsed the wine column (“a dramatic nose of dried cherries and smoked meat with a nicely defined mineral finish”), then settled on an item about a discerning burglar who operated by daylight, entering area homes through unlocked doors and ground-floor windows to make off with all the jewelry he could carry — as long as it was of the very highest quality, that is. Paste didn’t interest him, nor apparently did carpets, electronics, vases, or artwork. Edison mulled that over: a burglar, a discerning burglar. The brazenness it must take — just strolling up the walk and knocking on the front door, hello, is anybody home? And if they were, he was selling magazine subscriptions or looking for a lost cat. What a way to make a living. Something for those little shits on the beach to aspire to.
By the time he looked up to order his fourth drink, the place had begun to fill up. The cocktail waitress — Elise, he had to remember her name, and the bartender’s too, but what was it? — was striding back and forth on her long legs, a tray of drinks held high above the jostling crowd. Up on the TV in the corner the scene had shifted from golf to baseball, fairways and greens giving way to the long, dense grass of the outfield — or was it artificial turf, a big foam mat with Easter basket fluff laid over it? He was thinking he should just eat and get it over with, ask what’s his name for the menu and order something right at the bar and then hang out for a while and see what developed. Home was too depressing. All that was waiting for him at home was the channel changer and a thirty-two-ounce packet of frozen peas to wrap around his bad knee. And that killed him: where was Kim when he needed her, when he was in pain and could barely get around? What did she care? She had her car and her credit cards and probably by now some new sucker to take to the dance—