Her throat was constricted, as if everything she’d eaten was about to come up. Her legs ached, and her ankle — the one she’d sprained last spring — felt as if someone had driven a nail through it. All she could think of was Zinny Bauer, with her long muscles and the shaved blond stubble of her head and her eyes that never quit. Zinny Bauer was behind her, at her back, right there, and it was too much to bear. “Jason,” she hissed.
“Okay, okay,” he was saying, and he tipped back the dregs of his beer and reached into his pocket and scattered a couple of rumpled bills across the table by way of a tip. Then he rose from the chair with a slow drunken grandeur and gave her a wink as if to indicate that the coast was clear. She got up, hunching her shoulders as if she could compress herself into invisibility and stared down at her feet as Jason took her arm and led her across the room — if Zinny saw her, Paula wouldn’t know about it because she wasn’t going to look up, and she wasn’t going to make eye contact, she wasn’t.
Or so she thought.
She was concentrating on her feet, on the black-and-white checked pattern of the floor tiles and how her running shoes negotiated them as if they were attached to somebody else’s legs, when all of a sudden Jason stopped and her eyes flew up and there they were, hovering over Zinny Bauer’s table like casual acquaintances, like neighbors on their way to a P.T.A. meeting. “But aren’t you Zinny Bauer?” Jason said, his voice gone high and nasal as he shifted into his Valley Girl imitation. “The great triathlete? Oh, God, yes, yes, you are, aren’t you? Oh, God, could I have your autograph for my little girl?”
Paula was made of stone. She couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, couldn’t even blink her eyes. And Zinny — she looked as if her plane had just crashed. Jason was playing out the charade, pretending to fumble through his pockets for a pen, when Armin broke the silence. “Why don’t you just fock off,” he said, and the veins stood out in his neck.
“Oh, she’ll be so thrilled,” Jason went on, his voice pinched to a squeal. “She’s so adorable, only six years old, and, oh, my God, she’s not going to believe this—”
Armin rose to his feet. Zinny clutched at the edge of the table with bloodless fingers, her eyes narrow and hard. The waiter — the one Jason had been riding all night — started toward them, crying out, “Is everything all right?” as if the phrase had any meaning.
And then Jason’s voice changed, just like that. “Fuck you too, Jack, and your scrawny fucking bald-headed squeeze.”
Armin worked out, you could see that, and Paula doubted he’d ever pressed a cigarette to his lips, let alone a joint, but still Jason managed to hold his own — at least until the kitchen staff separated them. There was some breakage, a couple of chairs overturned, a whole lot of noise and cursing and threatening, most of it from Jason. Every face in the restaurant was drained of color by the time the kitchen staff came to the rescue, and somebody went to the phone and called the police, but Jason blustered his way out the door and disappeared before they arrived. And Paula? She just melted away and kept on melting until she found herself behind the wheel of the car, cruising slowly down the darkened streets, looking for Jason.
She never did find him.
—
When he called the next morning he was all sweetness and apology. He whispered, moaned, sang to her, his voice a continuous soothing current insinuating itself through the line and into her head and right on down through her veins and arteries to the unresisting core of her. “Listen, Paula, I didn’t mean for things to get out of hand,” he whispered, “you’ve got to believe me. I just didn’t think you had to hide from anybody, that’s all.”
She listened, her mind gone numb, and let his words saturate her. It was the day before the event, and she wasn’t going to let anything distract her. But then, as he went on, pouring himself into the phone with his penitential, self-pitying tones as if he were the one who’d been embarrassed and humiliated, she felt the outrage coming up in her: didn’t he understand, didn’t he know what it meant to stare into the face of your own defeat? And over a plate of pasta, no less? She cut him off in the middle of a long digression about some surfing legend of the fifties and all the adversity he’d had to face from a host of competitors, a blood-sucking wife and a fearsome backwash off Newport Beach.
“What did you think,” she demanded, “that you were protecting me or something? Is that it? Because if that’s what you think, let me tell you I don’t need you or anybody else to stand up for me—”
“Paula,” he said, his voice creeping out at her over the wire, “Paula, I’m on your side, remember? I love what you’re doing. I want to help you.” He paused. “And yes, I want to protect you too.”
“I don’t need it.”
“Yes, you do. You don’t think you do but you do. Don’t you see: I was trying to psych her.”
“Psych her? At the Pasta Bowl?”
His voice was soft, so soft she could barely hear him: “Yeah.” And then, even softer: “I did it for you.”
—
It was Saturday, seventy-eight degrees, sun beaming down unmolested, the tourists out in force. The shop had been buzzing since ten, nothing major — cords, tube socks, T-shirts, a couple of illustrated guides to South Coast hot spots that nobody who knew anything needed a book to find — but Jason had been at the cash register right through lunch and on into the four-thirty breathing spell when the tourist mind tended to fixate on ice-cream cones and those pathetic sidecar bikes they pedaled up and down the street like the true guppies they were. He’d even called Little Drake in to help out for a couple of hours there. Drake didn’t mind. He’d grown up rich in Montecito and gone white-haired at twenty-seven, and now he lived with his even whiter-haired old parents and managed their two rental properties downtown — which meant he had nothing much to do except prop up the bar at Clubber’s or haunt the shop like the thinnest ghost of a customer. So why not put him to work?
“Nothing to shout about,” Jason told him, over the faint hum of the oldies channel. He leaned back against the wall on his high stool and cracked the first beer of the day. “Little stuff, but a lot of it. I almost had that one dude sold on the Al Merrick board — I could taste it — but something scared him off. Maybe mommy took away his Visa card, I don’t know.”
Drake pulled contemplatively at his beer and looked out the window on the parade of tourists marching up and down State Street. He didn’t respond. It was that crucial hour of the day, the hour known as cocktail hour, two for one, the light stuck on the underside of the palms, everything soft and pretty and winding down toward dinner and evening, the whole night held out before them like a promise. “What time’s the Dodger game?” Drake said finally.
Jason looked at his watch. It was a reflex. The Dodgers were playing the Mets at five-thirty, Astacio against the Doc, and he knew the time and channel as well as he knew his A.T.M. number. The Angels were on Prime Ticket, seven-thirty, at home against the Orioles. And Paula — Paula was at home too, focusing (do not disturb, thank you very much) for the big one with the Amazing Bone Woman the next morning. “Five-thirty,” he said, after a long pause.
Drake said nothing. His beer was gone, and he shuffled behind the counter to the little reefer for another. When he’d cracked it, sipped, belched, scratched himself thoroughly, and commented on the physique of an overweight Mexican chick in a red bikini making her way up from the beach, he ventured an opinion on the topic under consideration: “Time to close up?”
All things being equal, Jason would have stayed open till six, or near six anyway, on a Saturday in August. The summer months accounted for the lion’s share of his business — it was like the Christmas season for everybody else — and he tried to maximize it, he really did, but he knew what Drake was saying. Twenty to five now, and they had to count the receipts, lock up, stop by the night deposit at the B. of A., and then settle in at Clubber’s for the game. It would be nice to be there, maybe with a tall tequila tonic and the sports section spread out on the bar, before the game got under way. Just to settle in and enjoy the fruits of their labor. He gave a sigh, for form’s sake, and said, “Yeah, why not?”