“There,” she said, everything about her sparkling, the earrings, the sheer fabric of her dress, her eyes, her lips, “you see? I make it better.”
But it wasn't better. He felt sulky, sullen, felt like lashing out at somebody. He freed his hand, picked up his fork and scattered the seared slabs of pink flesh round the plate. “You got your phone?” he said suddenly.
She was sipping wine, the pedestal of the glass hovering like a hummingbird over the bud of her mouth. She liked wine. Liked it even more than he did. She liked vodka too. “Why? Did you lose yours?”
He shook his head, held out his hand. “I left it on the dresser.”
“But no-you have it when we are at The Bridge, for cocktails. Before the Smart-Mart. Remember? You are calling for canceling Madison's piano lesson-remember?”
“Maybe I left it in the car.”
A theatrical sigh, the bemused frown giving way to a lingering look of chastisement, of maternal tsk-tsking-yes, and wasn't it motherhood that ruined them all, that elevated them to the status of the all-knowing and all-powerful, and reduced everybody else, even grandfathers, dictators and mercenary killers, to the level of feckless children? Even as she dug into her purse for the cell a quick flare of anger burst in his brain, streamers everywhere. Did he snatch it from her? Maybe. Maybe he did. “I've got to make a call,” he said, barely able to suppress the rage in his voice. “Be right back.”
He was on his way to the men's, shouldering his way past a group of lawyer types at the bar-thirty to sixty, pinned-back ears, faces that glowed like jack-o'-lanterns with their own self-importance, Glenfiddich in their tumblers and bitches on their arms, Berkeley bitches, Stanford bitches, maybe even Vassar bitches-when he shot a glance to the doorway and saw the cutout figure of a little girl with a tragic face poised right there on the carpet in the shadow of the hostess' stand. Madison was barefoot, her sundress askew, Henrietta Horsie dangling by the rope of its tail from the clench of one tiny fist. There was the smell of the sea knifing in through the open door, a smell of cold storage and rot, and it reminded him of where he was, of what it cost to live where you could get that smell anytime you wanted it, day and night. She was crying. Or no, whining. He could hear the faint singsong whimper, and it was like some stringed instrument-cello, violin-playing the same dismal figure over and over. Two couples suddenly entered the picture, looming up behind her looking puzzled and annoyed, as if they'd just stepped in something, and the hostess-Carmela, eighteen years old and as tall and lean and honey-breasted as a fashion model's little sister-was bent at the waist, clearly disconcerted but trying her best to coo something reassuring.
“Fuck it,” he was thinking, “let Natalia deal with it,” and he swung abruptly to his left, nearly colliding with a fish-faced woman in pearls and a black cocktail dress and half a mile of exposed bosom who was making her way back from the ladies'. “Oh,” she gasped as if he'd run her down on a football field and slammed the wind out of her, “oh, beg pardon,” and that was all it took-the movement, the distraction-because he heard Madison cry out behind him and then he turned and she was running to him, already sobbing.
The whole place stopped dead, every head raised to see what the commotion was, even the waiters looking over their shoulders as they levitated their trays and paused in mid-step. One of the lawyers might have said something: there was a laugh, a group laugh, at the bar behind him, but he blocked it out, Madison coming straight for him, her sobs brutal and explosive, the bare dirty feet slapping through a minefield of boots and loafers and heels till she was there clinging to his leg like a-what were those fish that fasten on to the sharks? “Dr. Halter, is everything all right?” one of the bartenders said, but he ignored him. And he must have lifted her too forcefully because she exploded all over again and he just tucked her, kicking, under one arm and brought her to Natalia like something he'd caught and trussed up in the jungle and they were laughing at him, he could feel it, everybody in the place, just laughing.
There was one white-haired old shit in the men's, meticulously drying his fat red hands as if he was afraid his skin was going to come off, and Peck gave him a look of such pure hate and burgeoning uncontainable violence that he backed out the door like a crab. The door eased shut on marble, fresh-cut flowers, a smell of new-minted money chopped up and vaporized. And what was that? — opera-playing through the speakers. For a long moment he just stared at himself in the mirror, his eyes vacant, and nothing registered, as if he didn't recognize himself or the place either. Then he realized the phone was still in his hand, Natalia's phone, the one that was stuck to the side of her head sixteen hours a day when she was running up the bill talking to her sister in Russia and her brother in Toronto and her best friend Kaylee whose kid was at the same pre-school as Madison. The phone. He studied it there in the palm of his hand as if he'd never seen it before, as if he hadn't signed on for a thousand free minutes and used it as an extension of himself whenever he had to check up on the ballgame or place a bet or score a little something to make the afternoons go easier with nothing to do but sit in the sun on the back deck and stare at Natalia's sweet brown midriff and tapering legs because how much sex can you have before you go blind and deaf and your tool falls off?
He heard somebody at the door-another white-hair-and he said, “Give me a minute here, will you? Is that too much to ask-a fucking minute's privacy?” And then he opened his hand and began to slam the cell against the marble tile of the wall in front of him, and he slammed it till there wasn't much left to hold, and after that he dropped it to the marble floor and worked it with his heel.
Later, after they'd got home and Natalia put Madison to bed and settled down in front of the tube (“Everything satisfactory? You want that doggie-bagged, Dr. Halter?”
“Nah, no point in it-give it to the homeless, will you?”), he took a bottle of beer into the spare bedroom he used as an office and booted up the computer. He went to the T-M site, typed in his password and brought up his account-OVERDUE AND PAYABLE/SERVICE INTERRUPTION WARNING-to see what he could find there. He'd gotten lazy or incautious or whatever you wanted to call it and now he'd put everything at risk and that was just stupid, stupid, stupid. For a year and more he'd been careful to pay up all his Dana Halter accounts just so something like this wouldn't happen, but he'd had a little cash-flow problem-the condo, the new car, Natalia on the phone and at the mall and the salon and Jack's and Emilio's and all the rest-and things had slipped. Now they were onto him. “Jesus,” the thought of it made him so furious, so rubbed raw and plain pissed off it was all he could do to stop himself from jerking the monitor off the desk and flinging it through the fucking window because the thing wasn't giving him what he wanted. He stared at the screen, at his account, calls out and calls in-incoming, incoming-but nothing more recent than the close of the last billing period. He wanted that number. The number of that fuckhead Dana Halter-or the cop or detective or whoever he was, “Rick Fucking James”-and he wasn't going to wait for the bill and he wasn't going down to the T-M office to pay off the account either. No, he was going to get a new phone in some other creep's name and no one would be the wiser except maybe Natalia (“Will you not give me back my cell, Dana?” she'd said the minute they got in the car; “No,” he said, “I need it because I'm expecting a call, okay? Can you just back off? Can you?”).
Before he did that, though, he had a little task to perform, the smallest pain in the ass maybe, but not risky, not at all. What he had to do, first thing in the morning, even before he opened a new account and got his five hundred free minutes and no-charge weekends, was go down to Smart-Mart and amble into the menswear department. He'd been hasty, impulsive. He hadn't been thinking. But he could picture it already, some career drudge stocking shelves or pushing a broom and “Hey, bro, can you help me out here-I had my cell balanced right here on top of this display because my arms were loaded down with all this high-quality Hanes underwear and I think it went down there, yeah, there, behind the partition. Hey, thanks, man, thanks beaucoup.” Yeah, and then he'd toss it away again, but not before he hit “Calls Received” and got that clown's number. Because who was to blame here, who was the wise guy, who was fucking with whom?