Nicholette’s visit had left Stein unsettled. He thought of himself as the retired gunslinger in the Western movies who goes out to the barn late at nights while his wife and kids are asleep and unwraps the old Colt. 45 from the creche where he has carefully swathed it in bunting and fur, feeling its heft and weight in his hand, remembering its dangerous, seductive power, but also the promises he made to people who depended on his being alive, and then returning it to its hiding place, along with another tiny little piece of himself.
When Stein mentally replayed the stream of condescending replies he had made to Nicholette he did not feel like a western hero. He felt like an idiot. He wished that someone from the Ministry of Pompous Assholes had come and shoved a pie in his face- a service he had performed during his youth to many others who deserved it.
“You ought to clean up after your pet.”
The morally superior voice of a neighbor, a deputy sheriff in the Environment posse, brought Stein back into now. Watson had squirted out a squalid little dump onto a patch of new grass. “What are you feeding him?” she added.
“He’s old. Cut him some slack.”
“I wasn’t blaming him.”
Naturally, Stein had neglected to bring the little baggies, the latest industry to thrive on America’s obsession with early toilet training. “I have them inside,” he muttered. He scooted Watson back into the house and came back out with a baggie, fully intending to perform his civic duty. But when he saw the woman still standing there, marking the spot, he could not give her the satisfaction of having puppeteered him. Before getting to the sidewalk he diverted from his path and knocked on Penelope Kim’s door. She lived on the other side of the horseshoe from Stein. Their front doors faced each other across a center courtyard dominated by a tall banyan tree.
“Go away,” she pouted from inside. “I’m writing.”
“I thought today was a thinking day.”
She came to the door wearing slim running shorts and a tank top that clung to her like tracing paper. “I hate when you do this to me, Stein.”
“Do what?”
“Make me beg.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Nicholette Bradley has been gone for eleven minutes and you haven’t told me a word.”
“How do you know her name?”
“God. Stein. Do you not exist in the modern world? Have you not seen the last fifty covers of Cosmo and Vogue?”
Vogue. Stein pulled Nicholette’s card out of his shirt pocket. Now the picture made sense.
“Oh my God. Is that what she smells like?” Penelope plucked the card out of Stein’s hand and filled her chest with a long Zen breath, one nostril at a time. Stein realized that he had been breathing in that perfume too and was still partially intoxicated.
“She wants to sleep with you, doesn’t she?”
“I’m pretty sure.”
“You underestimate your power.”
Music emanated from Angie’s bedroom across the courtyard. Stein felt drawn to obligation. “I should get back.”
“Are you still menstruating about her weed? You should send her to Paris, Stein. Let her live on her own for a while. Tend bar. Be an artist’s model. It would be good for her. Good for both of you.”
“That’s so interesting! Her mother keeps suggesting precisely that.”
“Her mother has your balls in a bolo.”
“Why don’t you give Klein a teenage daughter? So I can read it as an instructional manual.”
“You say that as a joke.”
“Tell me what he does when his daughter forgets her father’s fiftieth birthday.”
“Stein, is it your birthday? Is that why you’re depressed?”
“I’m not depressed.”
“Oh my God! Of course you’re a Sag. How could I not have known that?”
Penelope wrangled him inside and sat him down on one of her silky, cushiony arrangements. Her entire apartment was white. White walls, white curtains, white lampshades, white silk room dividers, white lilies in a white porcelain vase on a white obelisk. She knelt behind him and told him to close his eyes.
“I have to clean up Watson’s-”
“Shh.”
Her fingertips on his temples felt like butterfly wings that sent sparks of electricity through him. He wondered if being attracted to a bisexual meant that he was partially gay. “Being old is cool,” Penelope murmured. Her fingertips manipulated his scalp through the short grey hair. “My high-school teacher told me that it takes a man until he’s fifty to realize that his penis is not a weapon but a baton.”
“Your high-school teacher told you that?”
She was past that and already on to the next thing. “Stein, you just gave me the perfect idea for Klein. The killers use his daughter as bait knowing that he can’t help trying to rescue her. She’s his kryptonite. That’s how they get him.”
“What do you mean, get him?”
“You know, kill him.”
“The character you’re modeling on me dies?”
“It’s the perfect existential ending, Stein. He’s so sixties. Which are so over.”
There was a thump and a loud crash from across the courtyard.
“Angie!”
Stein catapulted off Penelope’s cushions and out her door. Across the courtyard, Stein’s door was wide open. He bounded across the bed of ivy that grew around the circumference of the banyan tree and vaulted up the steps of his landing. “ANGIE!” He bellowed up to the open second story window directly overhead. He grabbed the kryptonite bar lock from his bicycle that rested against the stairs and entered his living room on full alert.
The wooden rack of cassette tapes had been knocked over, and plastic boxes littered the floor. His breath came heavily. There was a noise on the staircase. A leg materialized. Followed by a body in a business suit and a beautiful face. Stein looked up at his ex-wife with a combination of rapidly depleting relief and growing anger. “Hillary?” He allowed his right arm brandishing the iron bar to drop to his side and tried to make his voice sound welcoming, coming not even close. “What are you doing here?”
“I told you. I was taking Angie Christmas shopping tonight and to see The Nutcracker.”
“You never told me that.”
She was uninterested in his protest.
“You never even asked.”
“I told Angie to tell you.”
Nitrogen bubbles popped in Stein’s brain. He spoke so civilly he thought his teeth would pulverize. “We agreed not use Angie as a go-between, Hillary. Does this conversation ring a bell? We agreed we would make all parental arrangement directly with each other.”
“Are you going to hold me hostage to every word I say?”
“Do you mean are you accountable for what you say? YES! We call that being an adult. Setting an example to our child about integrity.”
“Don’t spar with me Harry, I’m too tired to pull my punches.”
“Anyway, you can’t take her to The Nutcracker tonight. We have plans.”
Angie clomped down the steps at that moment. “What plans? We don’t have any plans,”
“Well we should,” he grouched. “It’s my damn birthday.” He turned on Hillary. “You should have told her. I remind her when it’s yours.”
Angie shot Stein a look of pity and mortification a parent never wants to see from his child. “Is that why you’ve been acting so weird today? You thought I forgot your birthday?”
“Don’t make it worse by pretending.”
Angie strode with purpose to the linen closet, tossed aside the blankets and pillowcases where Stein had momentarily contemplated hiding Goodpasture’s birthday bud, then marched back to him brandishing a festively wrapped parcel. “Do you and Watson not have the same birthday?” she demanded. “Does this not prove I remembered?” She tore apart the folds of red and blue tissue paper and thrust the inner contents at Stein. It was a package of twelve rawhide chewies. She knelt and nuzzled Watson. “You see Watsie, I know it’s your special day.”