“Further than here,” I said, and went on to explain Katharine’s destination and motive. Sue Ann’s reaction was immediate: “Tell her forget it. Anybody plans to get married, my advice is, shoot yourself instead. It’s quicker.”
“You’ve been burned, huh?”
“You know it, brother. How about you?”
“A little scorched around the edges,” I acknowledged.
She studied me, as best she could in the cash register light. “You don’t look married,” she decided.
“I’m not married, not anymore.”
She lifted her glass. “Mazel tov.” She knocked back some more of her drink, then said, “I learned that word in New York.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“It’s Greek. It means ‘congratulations’.”
Correct her? Definitely not. “Then mazel tov, yourself,” I said. “I take it you left your husband on top of the World Trade Center?”
“With that other giant ape,” she said, and broke herself up laughing. She was a good old girl. When the laughing fit eased, she said, “You know what broke the camel’s back?”
“The last straw,” I suggested.
“That’s what I’m gonna tell you.” One of us was getting a little drunk. “Ralph’s car was towed away. You know they do that in New York? Park in the wrong place, they tow your car away.”
“That can be expensive,” I said.
“Sixty-five dollars,” she told me, “just to get your car back. And that doesn’t count the parking ticket. But also you know what they do? They keep records, they check to see are there any unpaid old parking tickets on that car, they don’t let you have the car back until you pay up.”
“Ralph had some old tickets, huh?”
She leaned close again, speaking with slow emphasis. “Four-hun-dred-dol-lars.” Then she grinned sidelong, and added, “You never saw anybody so mad in your in-tie-er life.”
“I bet.”
“It was when I laughed he slugged me. So I went and got Jason’s bat and—”
“Jason?”
“Ralph’s son from a previous marriage. Ralph’s the marrying kind. Jason’s OK, he’s about fourteen now. Anyway, I went and got his baseball bat and snuck up behind Ralph while he was getting a beer out of the refrigerator, and I gave him a shot he’s still feeling.” She laughed again, and tried to drink from her glass, and discovered it was empty.
“We need refills.” I turned to wave at the Fred-silhouette.
“My round,” Sue Ann said, and when Fred came over she told him, “Again, Fred. On my tab. Or, wait a minute.” To me, she said, “You want to stick to beer? It’ll bloat you all up.”
“Well, I don’t know,” I said. “I had gin before dinner, wine with dinner, and now beer. How do you suggest I round it off?”
“With a stinger,” she said. “Definitely.”
“Hey, look, lady. I have to drive tomorrow.”
“Two stingers, Fred,” she said. “And don’t go too heavy with the ice.”
“I gotta close up in a few minutes, Sue Ann.”
“That’s okay, we’ll drink fast.”
“I seem to be getting a stinger,” I said, as the Fred-silhouette went away.
“You know,” she said, “you’re a good guy.”
“I am?”
“For instance, the way you handled yourself at dinner. You didn’t try to take over, and you didn’t make a big fuss about not taking over. You know what burns my ass?”
“No, I don’t.”
“The birthday wives. In comes a couple, it’s her birthday so she doesn’t have to cook, and they shoved the kids off onto Aunt Sadie, and now they’ve got this idea she’ll take him to dinner out of her birthday money. So they sit there, and she blushes and giggles and she’s all helpless, and she about faints when it’s time to taste the wine — half a bottle of Blue Nun, you’d think it was the end of the world. And the husband sits there with this big fat-headed smile on his face, being proud of the little lady. It’s exactly like birthday teenagers, thirteen-year-old kids getting to order their own dinner for the first time, with the grown-ups all smiling at each other, isn’t-it-sweet, how-time-flies, all that malarkey. But here you’ve got the same thing with a forty-five-year-old woman, she’s off the leash for one day in her life. I tell you, Tom, there’s more than once I’ve wished I had Jason’s baseball bat.”
“For the husband, or the wife?”
She thought that over for a few seconds, and then nodded. “You’re right. For both of them.”
Meantime, the bar’s other customers had drifted on out of the joint, our stingers had been delivered and tasted — deceptively gentle and cool little devils — and now Fred started ringing up all the tabs on his cash register. You know the way they do: ba-bring-a, bring-a, bring-a, on each and every check covering each and every transaction of that business day. The noise is loud, repetitive, interminable, and intolerable. “Jesus,” I said. “What a racket.”
“He’s got to do it, Tom,” Sue Ann told me. Her loyalty was, after all, on Fred’s side of the bar. “He can’t go home until he’s rung them all up.”
“Well, I can. Why don’t we finish these drinks in the lobby?”
“You might be able to get away with that,” she said, “but I wouldn’t. Remember, I work here.”
“Then come up to my room. We can borrow the glasses, can’t we?”
“Sure we can.” But she hesitated, looking at me with a slightly crooked grin, before finally giving an abrupt nod and saying, “Yeah, let’s get out of here, it’s too loud.” She yelled a good night to Fred over the clanging of his cash register, and we left the Coliseum forever.
The evening air, as we walked from the lobby around to the side stairs, was cool and crisp, but it didn’t do much for the mush that seemed to have gotten into my brain. I was thinking clearly enough — for instance, I knew damn well that Sue Ann and I were on our way to bed together — but my normal activities, such as walking and talking, were all a bit slurred and shambly. I hoped not all my abilities had been impaired by drink.
Upstairs, I had an oddly uncomfortable feeling about Katharine’s door; it seemed to disapprove of me, though there was no reason why it should. There was nothing between Katharine and me. If I was going behind anybody’s back it was Rita’s, my occasional roommate back in New York, and she couldn’t have cared less. Nevertheless, I hunched my shoulders against the imagined emanations from Katharine’s door as I unlocked my own.
Once inside my room, all that nonsense disappeared without trace. Sue Ann said, “Christ, all these rooms look alike, don’t they?” In response, I took her drink out of her hand, placed both glasses atop the low dresser, put my arms around her and kissed her.
Nice. Nice soft moving mouth, nice tongue, good lean rangy body slender and muscular beneath my hands. It had been a while, by golly. “Bed,” I murmured, against her lips.
“Mm, yes.”
Lovely. Sex is so nice, exploring that other body, rolling together, the terrific physical sensations, the wonderful things that can be done with mouths, hands, fingers — with all sorts of body parts, combining in so many soft sweet ways. And my abilities had not been impaired; that was also nice.
Afterwards, we lay side by side on the sheets and sipped our stingers. Sue Ann was a smoker, so she had the ritual cigarette. Puffing on it, squinting through the smoke, she said, “That was the one nice thing about marriage. The regular fucking. I did like that.”
A smell of darkroom chemicals seemed to waft past my nose, competing with Sue Ann’s low-tar fumes. “Sometimes even that was a mixed blessing,” I said.