I played the hand dealt me. “Aces, man,” I said. “That’s precisely the response we were looking for.”
Later, after super-brat left, prancing out on the balls of his feet, I reported to Molly that I was getting the hang of the self-confidence racket.
“I was listening in,” she said, “and let me be the first to tell you, you have a long way to go to fill Donald’s shoes.”
When she said that, I realized that I was at the time actually wearing a pair of Donald’s shoes, which aside from pinching the small toe on my right foot, were a near perfect fit. “I’m open to pointers,” I said grudgingly.
“You have to be tougher with them,” she said. “Let them know who’s calling the plays.”
I let her remark echo in my head, listening for murmurs of irony, but I heard none. “Is that right?” I said, a further prodding.
She continued in her sternest manner. “I’ll assume that’s a rhetorical question,” she said. “Didn’t you read Donald’s book? You have to teach by example, Jake, show them from the way you handle yourself the virtues of self-confidence.”
“Fuck off,” I roared at her.
Eventually, when she returned to the den after her composure had been restored, her tears dried, she said with unmediated dislike, “Well, maybe you’re not as hopeless as I thought.”
For a flickering moment, my confidence soared off the charts.
And so I made my long delayed move, which led to a hectic chase around the apartment, chairs and tables flying in our wake, everything that had been together coming apart, questions and answers, unexpressed feelings, pages of a long discarded uncompleted manuscript.
46th Night
And then one morning Molly went to the drugstore for some unspecified items and didn’t return. Confident to the point of insentience, I waited three days without undue concern, with barely diminishing expectation, expecting her to walk through the door at any moment.
On the fourth day, I accepted the possibility that she might not be coming back.
On the fifth day, with a sense of urgency, I gave up the house to search for her, armed with the only head shot of her I could find. It was the bruised photo that lived in my wallet and was, by unreliable estimation, thirty years out of date.
When I showed the photo to our local druggist — we actually had two local druggists — he said he couldn’t be sure and that he was a man made uncomfortable by uncertainties.
“I’m looking for an older version of this woman,” I said.
“I understand,” he said, “but as students of aging have discovered, no two people grow older in exactly the same way.”
I had never known him before to be so exacting. “Did you see anyone like her?” I asked. “Anyone remotely resembling her?”
“Oh that’s a different question altogether,” he said. “If it comes to that, I’ve probably seen a lot of women like her.”
I couldn’t imagine what he meant, but I persisted in my questioning. “Did a woman resembling her come in three days ago at about this time of day?”
When I handed him the photo again, he glanced at it briefly and then slipped it into a drawer under the counter.
“It’s not impossible,” he mumbled, and turned to a woman who had just come in with a prescription to be filled.
“If you don’t mind, I’d like the picture back,” I said and then repeated in a louder voice when he continued to ignore me. And then repeated again.
Under the guise of waiting on his other customer, he pretended that I was invisible and without voice.
I found that intolerable.
My patience as always on short leash, I stepped behind the counter to reclaim the photo of Molly which, stuffed into an oversubscribed drawer, had attached itself to a random condom. While I was trying to detach the condom, a storewide alarm went off.
The blast of sound unnerved me. The photo with the condom hanging from it like an appendage held delicately between thumb and forefinger, I ran from the store.
I noted a police car coming down the street and I ducked into a phone booth, where I hung out in a debilitating crouch until two cops emerged from the police car, completed their business in the drug store and drove off. During this extended period, I worked at liberating the condom from the photo with limited success.
When I entered the second and larger of the two local drugstores, there was a cop already there, browsing among the mouth washes. I couldn’t turn around and leave without attracting the wrong kind of attention.
I picked up a package of aspirin and then in another aisle a nail clipper from a low shelf only to discover the oversized cop standing behind and above me. “I use my teeth,” he said.
It took a moment for the context to fill itself in. “That’s very funny,” I said.
“Of all the opportunities out there for a man of my size,” he said, “there were only two that attracted me, police officer or late night TV host.”
“And which did you choose?” I asked, the question escaping the restraints of better judgment.
His eyes turned mean. “Didn’t your mother ever tell you,” he whispered, “never to get sassy with a man carrying a gun?”
“It was meant as a joke,” I said. “Like you, I also wanted to be a stand-up comic.”
“You’d never make it with that joke.” He had his hand now on the butt of his gun, seemed unappeased. “You’re not the condom thief, are you, there’s an all points alarm out for, eh?”
I looked at him in disbelief, wondered if I could make it out the door before he could unholster his weapon.
“Are you the perp who goes from pharmacy to pharmacy, stealing party hats?” he asked. “Have I got your number, Jack, or what?”
“Not at all,” I said with the over-earnest conviction of a poor liar.
“Don’t get so worked up,” he said, cackling. “I was just pulling your middle leg. I had assumed, stupid me, that you knew the drill.” He took something off a shelf — a box of condoms perhaps — and stuffed whatever it was in his jacket pocket and made a hasty exit.
A woman working the checkout, no one I’d ever seen, before beckoned in my direction, and it took awhile for me to realize that it was me she was requesting. “Are you the guy looking for his wife?” she whispered to me when I approached.
“She’s no longer my wife,” I said, “but yes.”
“I thought you were the one,” she said, shielding her mouth with her hand. “Two men came in just as she was paying her bill and she went off with them. I don’t believe… It didn’t look to me like she wanted…”
When she stopped in mid-sentence, I realized that someone who disapproved of this conversation was standing behind me.
It was the owner of the store, the pharmacist Dr. Andsons. “Is there a problem?” he asked.
“What do you mean by problem?” I said, taking the crumpled photo out of my pocket, the condom still hanging to it by a thread. “Have you seen this woman in the last few days?” I asked.
“Who wants to know?” he said, looking everywhere but at the picture itself. “I’ll tell you this, I may have seen that rubber in its prior life. If I didn’t sell the nasty things, I wouldn’t allow them in the store. What’s the condom got to do with the woman, as if I couldn’t guess?”
“Forget the condom,” I said. “There’s only a circumstantial connection.”
“That’s a line that’s made the rounds.”
I held one edge of the picture while he held the other, studying the photo with an almost frightening intensity. “This is my picture,” he said. He tried to kiss it but the condom got in his way and he drew his head back in disgust. “This woman, Alma, disappeared from my life twenty-five years ago. What’s your connection to this, Bo.”