“Well . . .”
“And maybe dancing later.”
“Well . . .”
“I hate to eat alone, don’t you?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact, I do. But Bert . . .”
“Yes?”
“I feel sort of funny about this.”
“Funny how?”
“Leading you on,” Nora said.
“I’ve been warned,” he said. “You’ve given me fair warning.”
“I would like to have dinner with you,” Nora said, “but . . .”
“Can you be ready at eight?”
“You do understand, don’t you, that . . . ?”
“I understand completely.”
“Mmm,” she said dubiously.
“Eight o’clock?”
“Eight-thirty,” she said.
“See you then,” he said, and hung up quickly before she could change her mind. He was grinning when he looked into the mirror. He felt handsome and assured and sophisticated and in complete control of America.
He did not know who Nora’s phantom lover was, but he was certain now that she was only playing the age-old maidenly game of shy resistance and that she would succumb soon enough to his masculine charm.
He was dead wrong.
Dinner was all right, he couldn’t knock dinner. They exchanged thoughts on a wide variety of subjects:
“I once did a cover for a historical novel,” Nora said, “with a woman wearing one of these very low-cut velvet gowns, you know, and I was bored to tears while I was doing the roughs, so I gave her three breasts. The art director didn’t even notice. I painted out the third one when I did the final painting.”
“I look at myself,” Kling said, “and I know I’m not a pig, I’m a fairly decent human being trying to do his job. And sometimes my job involves getting into situations that are distasteful to me. You think I like going onto a college campus and breaking up a protest by kids who don’t want to die in a stupid war? But I’m also supposed to see that they don’t burn down the administration building. So how do I convince them that keeping law and order, which is my job, is not the same as suppression? It gets difficult sometimes.”
“Contact sports,” Nora said, “are all homosexual in nature, I’m convinced of it. You can’t tell me the quarterback isn’t copping a feel off the center every time he grabs that ball.”
And like that.
But after dinner, when Kling suggested that they go dancing at a little place he knew in the Quarter, three-piece band and nice atmosphere, Nora at first demurred, saying she was awfully tired and had promised her mother she would take her out to the cemetery early tomorrow morning, and then finally acquiescing when Kling said it was still only ten-thirty, and promised to have her home by midnight.
Pedro’s, as Kling had promised, was long on atmosphere and good music. Dimly illuminated, ideal for lovers both married and un-, adulterated or pure, it seemed to work as a deterrent on Nora from the moment she stepped into the place. She was not good at hiding whatever she was feeling (as Kling had earlier noticed), and the ambience of Pedro’s was either threatening or nostalgic (and possibly more), with the result that her eyes took on a glazed look, her mouth wilted, her shoulders slumped, she became the kind of Saturday-night date red-blooded American males feared and avoided; she became a thorough and complete pain in the ass.
Kling asked her to dance in the hope that bodily contact, blood pulsing beneath flesh, hands touching, cheeks brushing, all that jazz might speed along the seduction he had so successfully launched during dinner. But she held him at bay, with a rigid right arm on his left shoulder, so that eventually he tired physically of trying to draw her close, being afflicted with bursitis, and tired mentally of all the adolescent fumbling and maneuvering. He decided to ply her with booze, having been raised in a generation that placed strong store in the seductive powers of alcohol. (He was, incidentally, a cop who had tried pot twice and enjoyed it. He had realized, however, that he could not very well go around offering grass to young ladies, or even lighting up himself, and had abandoned that pleasant pastime.) Nora drank one drink, count it, or to be more exact, half a drink, toying with the remainder of it while Kling consumed two more and asked politely, “Sure you don’t want to drink up and have another?” To which she politely shook her head with a wan little smile.
And then, despite her protestations, two days ago, that she did not want to talk about her grand amour, the band began playing the Beatles’ “Something” and her eyes misted over, and the next thing Kling knew he was being treated to a monologue about her lover. The man, she confessed, had until just recently been married, and there were still some complications, but she expected they would be cleared up within the next several months, at which time she hoped to become his wife. She did not say what the complications were, but Kling surmised she was talking about a divorce settlement or some such; at this point, he could not have cared less. He had been warned, true, but spending a Saturday night with someone who talked about another man was akin to taking one’s mother to a strip joint, maybe worse. He tried to change the subject, but the power of “Something” prevailed, and, as the band launched into a second chorus, Nora similarly launched into her second chorus, so that the music seemed to be accompanying her little tone poem.
“We met entirely by accident,” she said, “though we learned later that actually we could have met at any time during the past year.”
“Well, most people meet entirely by chance,” Kling said.
“Yes, of course, but this was just the most remarkable coincidence.”
“Mmm,” Kling said, and then launched into what he considered a provocative and perhaps completely original observation on The Beatles Phenomenon, remarking that their rise and fall had encompassed a mere five years or so, which seemed significant when one remembered that they were a product of the space age, where speed was of the essence and . . .
“He’s so far superior to me,” Nora said, “that sometimes I wonder what he sees in me at all.”
“What does he do for a living?” Kling asked, thinking Ho-hum.
Nora hesitated for only an instant. But because her face was such a meticulous recorder of anything she felt, he knew that what she said next would be a lie. He was suddenly terribly interested.
“He’s a doctor,” Nora said, and turned her eyes from his, and lifted her drink, and sipped at it, and then glanced toward the bandstand.
“Is he on staff any place?”
“Yes,” she said immediately, and again, he knew she was lying. “Isola General.”
“Over on Wilson Avenue?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said.
Kling nodded. Isola General was on Parsons and Lowell, bordering the River Dix.
“When do you expect to be married?” he asked.
“We haven’t set the date yet.”
“What’s his name?” Kling asked conversationally, and turned away from her, and lifted his own glass, and pretended to be completely absorbed in the band, which was now playing a medley of tunes from the forties, presumably for the Serutan members of their audience.
“Why do you want to know?” Nora asked.
“Just curious. I have a thing about names. I think certain names go together. If, for example, a woman named Freida did not eventually hook up with a man named Albert, I would be enormously surprised.”
“Who do you think a ‘Nora’ should hook up with?”
“A ‘Bert,’” he said immediately and automatically, and was immediately sorry.
“She’s already hooked up with someone whose name isn’t ‘Bert.’ ”