“Do you regret it, then?”
“I regret I’m not rich, yes ma’am.”
“I doubt that.”
“Do you now.” His smile has warmth in it for the first time.
She asks, “How much does the business lose in the course of a year?”
“Depends on the year. By the time Marian and I take our living expenses out-we can usually figure on breaking even more or less. But the last two years have been poorer than normal. Partly the economy. Partly that our customers keep getting older-the demographics would make a market researcher weep. Half our clients are geriatric cases. Sooner or later their eyesight goes bad or they pass away. Whichever comes first.”
A motorcycle goes by with a roar calculated to offend, and the white-haired man glares toward the window. “Our new generation there doesn’t give a hang about the old West. When was the last time you saw a Western in the movies? You don’t see any horse operas on the tube any more. Was a time twenty years ago there’d be two dozen cowboy series on the television every week.”
He looks grim. “Remember True Grit? When was the last respectable Western book on the bestseller list? It’s a sad thing, you know, but there’s a generation out there all the way up into their twenties who think the American myth has something to do with automobiles. They’ve never heard of Wild Bill Hickok or Wyatt Earp or Cochise.”
A man’s voice startles her from behind her shoulder. “Doyle, there’s a bloody story in that.”
It’s the customer in the khaki suit. He has a book in his hand. “This any good?”
Doyle Stevens takes it in his hand. “The Journal of Lieutenant Thomas W. Sweeny. Westernlore.” It brings out of him a reminiscent smile. “An absolute delight. Sweeny founded Fort Yuma, you know. Remarkable stories about the Indians down there. They had paddlewheel steamboats on the Colorado River in his day, did you know that?”
She remembers her brief stroll. “You could hardly float a toothpick on it now.”
The customer sizes her up. “That’s the bloody dam builders. You know a hundred and fifty years ago before it got overgrazed and before they bottomed out the bloody water table with too many deep wells, a good part of what’s now the Arizona desert used to be grassland. Green and lush.”
“It’s a shame,” she says with a polite little smile, wishing he would go away.
Doyle Stevens says, “Mrs. Hartman-Graeme Goldsmith.”
She shakes his hand. His eyes smile at her with more intimacy than she likes. He’s odd looking, especially up close where his astonishingly pale blue eyes take effect. It’s been too long since he’s been to the barber; he has a thatch of brown hair just starting to go thin at the front and she thinks she detects a pasty hint under the camouflaging tan: likely he drinks more than he ought to.
“That’s G-r-a-e-m-e,” he says. “Nobody can spell it. My mother fancied the bloody name.”
Time has faded the accent but he is distinctly Australian.
Doyle Stevens, about to burst, says, “Looks as though Mrs. Hartman’s going to be our new business partner.”
“That so?”
She says, “If Mrs. Stevens approves.”
“Well well. Good-oh. We’ll have to give it a proper write-up in the Trib.”
An alarm jangles through her.
Doyle Stevens says, “Graeme’s a reporter on the Valley Tribune.”
“Not to mention I’m a stringer for the UPI newswire,” Goldsmith says quickly.
She hatches a smile and hopes it is properly gentle. “I’d rather you didn’t print anything about this. It’s sort of a silent partnership.”
“Any particular reason.”
“I don’t want publicity. A woman living alone-you know how it is. It’s the same reason I have my phone unlisted.”
“Okay, Mrs. Hartman. I can buy that.” But she has seen it when he latched onto the statement that she lives alone.
Doyle Stevens says, “You want to pay for that book or were you just going to walk out with it?”
Graeme Goldsmith still has his blue eyes fixed on her face. “How much?”
She tries to keep her glance friendly when it intersects with the Australian’s but after he pays for the book she is glad to see the back of him.
A reporter, she thinks. That’s just what I need.
18
Every day she visits the mailbox of the dummy apartment in hope there’ll be something to collect.
By July 25 nothing has appeared except junk mail and Dorothy Holder’s Social Security card: it comes from the forwarding service in Las Vegas.
Taking a break from her on-the-job training in the retail bookselling business and from the flying lessons that take up a good part of every third afternoon she drives to Carson City where she applies for a Nevada driver’s license in the name of Dorothy (NMI) Holder.
In these towns you don’t go into the good restaurants and eat alone; some of them won’t seat you at all and the others assume you’re looking for a pickup. You eat instead in chain diners and coffee shops where your palate has become exceedingly bored with oversteamed vegetables and bland American provincial cooking.
By now she has memorized DuPar’s menus and those of the House of Pancakes. She has had one too many Open Face Hot Roast Beef Sandwiches With Brown Gravy. Walking into this particular Holiday Inn restaurant she is dreaming wistfully of Guido Tusco’s fettucine al pesto, of Henri’s Dover sole amandine, of the Manhattan chowder that Marjorie Quirini used to make from clams her husband had dug out of the Great South Bay that very day.
It is in that frame of mind, walking in and waiting to be seated, that she sees Bert and recognizes him.
Terror roots her to the spot.
It can’t possibly be-can it?
He sits at the bar with his back to her, the muscles pulling his jacket tight across the wide lean shoulders, and his big long close-cropped dark head is cocked a bit to one side as he stirs the drink in front of him. He sits hipshot on the bar-stool with one leg dangling and the other propped stiff against the floor-his habitual posture.
Standing bolt still she tries to fight the panic.
What in the hell is he doing here?
Come on. Jesus. Get a grip … just sidle on out of here … move.
She’s paralyzed. Pinpricks of fear burst out on her skin.
Her mesmerized stare is fastened to the back of his head.
Unwillingly her eyes crawl up to the mirror beyond him, the mirror behind the bar. He’s looking right at her.
For a moment it doesn’t register. All she knows is that he’s staring at her.
Then she sees his face-it was there all the time, a pinched dewlappy face she has never seen before.
A stranger.
It’s not Bert after all.
Relief is so powerful that when the hostess comes toward her with a menu she beams a radiant smile upon the bewildered woman. But by the time she slides into the Naugahyde booth she’s gone faint and weak and she orders a double martini, extra dry, and sits shaking in all her joints until it arrives.
Not him at all. But what an uncanny resemblance from the back. The shape of his head, the cant of the wide slabby shoulders-even the waist-nipped cut of the light tweed jacket.
It’s so easy to be fooled …
He was just like that, she recalls, the very first time she saw him. Propped tall against a bar stool with his back to her.
It was in-what was the name of the place? One of those tony discos in the Hamptons. Filled with groupers, of whom she was one that summer: two weeks of sharing a dumpy cottage in Sag Harbor with five other girls.
He was in lime sherbet slacks and a madras jacket. She danced with him. He was long-boned and awkward: a graceless dancer, but he had an attractive way of laughing at his own clumsiness. And his hard lean musculature made the other men in the place look like marshmallows.