"It was bound to be awkward," she says. "I never should have gone."
"My mistake. I couldn't imagine anybody's not seeing you as I do."
"And how is that, Nelson?"
"As a lovely person," he says. A love child. He has an impulse to put his hands on hers where they rest, short-nailed and broad, on the Formica tabletop. She pulls her hands back as if reading his mind.
"I'm not such a lovely person, Nelson," she says. "I've done things, and had them done to me."
"We all have," he says. As the words leave his mouth they sound lamely big-brotherish to him. 'That's life," he adds, which is also dumb. But what was she talking about, exactly?
"I think," Annabelle says, "we should rest easy for a while. You're living alone and have things to sort out with your family. I'm not really your family."
Like those white Christmas balls that aren't really balls. "You are, dammit."
"I'll be going away before Christmas and some days after. That girl I mentioned, we were at St. Joe's together, she and her husband have invited me to go with them to Las Vegas, and, you know, I figured why not, I've never been there or hardly anywhere. They say if you don't gamble everything else is pretty cheap. There are all these fantastic new buildings you can wander around in for free."
"Hey, you must look up my Aunt Mim. Your Aunt Mim. Your father's sister. Seriously. I told her about you and she was enthusiastic. She's a real card, honest. She runs a beauty parlor out there. I don't know what name she uses now, she's had husbands, but Miriam Angstrom is her maiden name and I'll give you her number to call. I'll call her and warn her. Please do it. Please. It won't be awkward, I know. Aunt Mim is a real sport." It relieves him to think of Annabelle taken care of on the holiday, so he can sneak over to Ronnie and Mom's without a bad conscience. He wonders if everybody has a conscience like his, crimped early and always uneasy.
'I don't want to, Nelson. It'll be one more thing."
"Suit yourself," he says, sharply. She has rejected one of the few things he could give her, a treat and treasure out of his own genes. 'I'll leave her number on your machine but not tell her you're coming." The dispirited atmosphere inside The Greenery is getting to him. He and this half-stranger keep running out of things to say. Finally he asks her, resorting to television news, "So what do you think? Should the little Cuban boy be sent back to his father in that miserable country or kept in Disney World?"
"Sent back to his father."
"I agree." It was as uncanny as the weather, the way he and she agreed about everything.
The phone does ring one evening, while he's watching a Star Trek rerun. It's not a woman but a male voice from the past, Billy Fosnacht. "I got the number from your mother. I heard from little Ron Harrison you moved out. His wife is one of my patients."
"What a bitch she is. She's far Christian right."
"If you knew her jawbone like I do, you'd feel sorry for her. It's chalk. I've done three implants, with my fingers crossed."
Billy went to dental school in Boston, near Boston, Tufts it was called. He and Nelson, friends in childhood, saw each other around Brewer in Nelson's bad-boy days, up at the Laid-Back and other local hangouts, but since Nelson got clean ten years ago there's been a fading away. "What's an implant?" he asks.
"Nellie, how can you not know what an implant is? It's what I do. It's an osseous-integrated artificial tooth. The best ones are made in Sweden. You pull the real tooth, which is rotten by now right down to the root, otherwise you'd set a gold post in the root and crown it, and you open up the gum and insert a titanium screw with an inner thread as well as an outer, and if the bone bonds with it in five or six months you screw a fake tooth into it and the bite is as good as new. Better than new. I do three, four a day. It's the only time I'm happy, when I'm doing implants."
"You're not happy, Billy?"
"Forget I said that. I'll fill you in later. Let's have lunch. On me. I'm flush, and no wife to spend it for me."
Billy has learned a new way of talking-punchy, self-mocking, rapid. In their shared boyhood he had been four months older, a few inches taller, and the one to get the latest kiddie-fad for a present first. His mother and Dad had a little episode in the sexual mess of the Sixties, everybody splitting up back then. Since then Mrs. Fosnacht has died of breast cancer and Billy's father-a weedy little guy who used to run the music store above the old Baghdad movie theatre on Weiser Street, where the great hole in the ground is now-faded south to New Orleans, where jazz came from. The old playmates' conversation reveals that, though their clienteles rarely overlap, they both work at giving fresh starts to members of the Brewer population, and that in middle age both are at personal loose ends. "Sure," says Nelson, of lunch.
They agree to meet downtown, at the restaurant on Weiser Square that was Johnny Frye's Chophouse many years ago and then became the Café Barcelona and then the Crêpe House and then Salad Binge and now under new management has been revived as Casa della Pasta, pasta supposed to be good for your arteries while having a little more substance than salads or crêpes. The day they meet, as it turns out, is the one after the day when Charles Schulz announced he was ending Peanuts and Jimmy Carter went down to Panama to give them the Canal.
"He got to give it away twice," Billy points out. "Once when he was President and now when he's a has-been. You notice Clinton's too smart to show his face. In ten years the Red Chinese will control it, just you watch. Those spics'll sell it off."
Nelson's father within him winces when anyone threatens to disparage Clinton or any sitting President. Dad had never much liked Billy, complaining about the boy's fat lips. Yet, seeing him, Nelson cannot but warm: here is a partner in his childish dreams, the conspiracy of imagined speed and triumphant violence that boys erect around themselves like a tent in the back yard under the scary stars. Billy, who used to be heavy like his wall-eyed, doomed mother, has become weedy like his father, though taller. His hair, a curly black like neither of his parents', has thinned back from his brow even more decidedly than Nelson's straight hair, its convict cut. Billy has a bald spot at the back of his head the size of a yarmulke. There was always something about Billy that kept people from taking him absolutely seriously, and that light something has become Jewish, quick-tongued and self-mocking and hypochondriac, caught from his teachers and colleagues in prosthetic dentistry. Yes, he says, his dad is still alive, filling in on clarinet in so-called Dixieland bands, though being white is a big disadvantage, and making ends meet in various fishy ways. Yes, he, Billy, has been married-twice, in fact, once to a nice girl from Newton he met up there in New England and then to one of his assistants in his practice down here. The second marriage broke up the first and then developed its own twinges. She was twelve years younger and he didn't want to go out as much as she did and she got tired of his night sweats and yelling out in his sleep and his moods.
"Moods?" Nelson asks.
"Depressed, irritable, could't sleep. Weekends I'd be so beat and bored I'd pray for an emergency to call. Tooth-structure loss I could handle. Wives," he goes on. "They shut down without even knowing they're doing it. The fancy stuff goes and then even the basics are cut back to once a week, then twice a month, and then just holidays and trips abroad. Portugal, Austria, Acapulco-all that way just to get a little nooky from my lawful wedded."
"Well, in my case," Nelson begins, but Billy overrides him: "And then when you suggest maybe this marriage isn't working, they act stunned and tell their lawyers to go for all they can get, this isn't their idea."