Paula wasn’t even supposed to be there. She was supposed to be at home, making up a batch of flapjacks and penne with cheese sauce and lying inert on the couch with the remote control. This was the night before the night before the event, a time to fuel up her tanks and veg out. But because of him, because of her silver-tongued hero in the baggy shorts, she was at the Pasta Bowl, carbo-loading in public. And so was Zinny Bauer, the last person on earth she wanted to see.
That was bad enough, but Jason made it worse, far worse — Jason made it into one of the most excruciating moments of her life. What happened was purely crazy, and if she hadn’t known Jason better she would have thought he’d planned it. They were squabbling over his cigarette and how unlaid-back and uptight the whole thing had made him — he was drunk, and she didn’t appreciate him when he was drunk, not at all — when his face suddenly took on a conspiratorial look and he said, “Hey, Paula, you see who’s here?”
“Who?” she said, and she shot a glance over her shoulder and froze: it was Zinny Bauer and her husband Armin. “Oh, shit,” she said, and she lowered her head and focussed on her plate as if it were the most fascinating thing she’d ever seen. “She didn’t see me, did she? We’ve got to go. Right now. Right this minute.”
Jason was smirking. He looked happy about it, as if he and Zinny Bauer were old friends. “But you’ve only had four plates, babe,” he said. “You sure we got our money’s worth? I could go for maybe just a touch more pasta — and I haven’t even had any salad yet.”
“No joking around, this isn’t funny.” Her voice withered in her throat. “I don’t want to see her. I don’t want to talk to her. I just want to get out of here, okay?”
His smile got wider. “Sure, babe, I know how you feel — but you’re going to beat her, you are, no sweat. You don’t have to let anybody chase you out of your favorite restaurant in your own town — I mean, that’s not right, is it? That’s not in the spirit of friendly competition.”
“Jason,” she said, and she reached across the table and took hold of his wrist. “I mean it. Let’s get out of here. Now.”
Her throat was constricted, as if everything she’d eaten was about to come up. Her legs ached, and her ankle — the one she’d sprained last spring — felt as if someone had driven a nail through it. All she could think of was Zinny Bauer, with her long muscles and the shaved blond stubble of her head and her eyes that never quit. Zinny Bauer was behind her, at her back, right there, and it was too much to bear. “Jason,” she hissed.
“Okay, okay,” he was saying, and he tipped back the dregs of his beer and reached into his pocket and scattered a couple of rumpled bills across the table by way of a tip. Then he rose from the chair with a slow drunken grandeur and gave her a wink as if to indicate that the coast was clear. She got up, hunching her shoulders as if she could compress herself into invisibility and stared down at her feet as Jason took her arm and led her across the room — if Zinny saw her, Paula wouldn’t know about it because she wasn’t going to look up, and she wasn’t going to make eye contact, she wasn’t.
Or so she thought.
She was concentrating on her feet, on the black-and-white checked pattern of the floor tiles and how her running shoes negotiated them as if they were attached to somebody else’s legs, when all of a sudden Jason stopped and her eyes flew up and there they were, hovering over Zinny Bauer’s table like casual acquaintances, like neighbors on their way to a P.T.A. meeting. “But aren’t you Zinny Bauer?” Jason said, his voice gone high and nasal as he shifted into his Valley Girl imitation. “The great triathlete? Oh, God, yes, yes, you are, aren’t you? Oh, God, could I have your autograph for my little girl?”
Paula was made of stone. She couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, couldn’t even blink her eyes. And Zinny — she looked as if her plane had just crashed. Jason was playing out the charade, pretending to fumble through his pockets for a pen, when Armin broke the silence. “Why don’t you just fock off,” he said, and the veins stood out in his neck.
“Oh, she’ll be so thrilled,” Jason went on, his voice pinched to a squeal. “She’s so adorable, only six years old, and, oh, my God, she’s not going to believe this—”
Armin rose to his feet. Zinny clutched at the edge of the table with bloodless fingers, her eyes narrow and hard. The waiter — the one Jason had been riding all night — started toward them, crying out, “Is everything all right?” as if the phrase had any meaning.
And then Jason’s voice changed, just like that. “Fuck you too, Jack, and your scrawny fucking bald-headed squeeze.”
Armin worked out, you could see that, and Paula doubted he’d ever pressed a cigarette to his lips, let alone a joint, but still Jason managed to hold his own — at least until the kitchen staff separated them. There was some breakage, a couple of chairs overturned, a whole lot of noise and cursing and threatening, most of it from Jason. Every face in the restaurant was drained of color by the time the kitchen staff came to the rescue, and somebody went to the phone and called the police, but Jason blustered his way out the door and disappeared before they arrived. And Paula? She just melted away and kept on melting until she found herself behind the wheel of the car, cruising slowly down the darkened streets, looking for Jason.
She never did find him.
When he called the next morning he was all sweetness and apology. He whispered, moaned, sang to her, his voice a continuous soothing current insinuating itself through the line and into her head and right on down through her veins and arteries to the unresisting core of her. “Listen, Paula, I didn’t mean for things to get out of hand,” he whispered, “you’ve got to believe me. I just didn’t think you had to hide from anybody, that’s all.”
She listened, her mind gone numb, and let his words saturate her. It was the day before the event, and she wasn’t going to let anything distract her. But then, as he went on, pouring himself into the phone with his penitential, self-pitying tones as if he were the one who’d been embarrassed and humiliated, she felt the outrage coming up in her: didn’t he understand, didn’t he know what it meant to stare into the face of your own defeat? And over a plate of pasta, no less? She cut him off in the middle of a long digression about some surfing legend of the fifties and all the adversity he’d had to face from a host of competitors, a blood-sucking wife and a fearsome backwash off Newport Beach.
“What did you think,” she demanded, “that you were protecting me or something? Is that it? Because if that’s what you think, let me tell you I don’t need you or anybody else to stand up for me—”
“Paula,” he said, his voice creeping out at her over the wire, “Paula, I’m on your side, remember? I love what you’re doing. I want to help you.” He paused. “And yes, I want to protect you too.”
“I don’t need it.”
“Yes, you do. You don’t think you do but you do. Don’t you see: I was trying to psych her.”