“In the dark?”
“Certainly in the dark. Of course in the dark. In the daytime there’d be much too much traffic. They can get a better idea on a relatively empty street.”
“When will you be getting home?”
“Gee, I don’t know. Not till late, I guess. Long past your bedtime. Hell, long past mine. A marathon is twenty-six miles three hundred eighty-five yards. I’ve drawn up three possible routes for them. This McIlvoy character is supposed to be a real stickler. We’ll probably have to go over each of them. I only wish they’d have come two or three weeks from now when the potholes will all be filled in.”
“Well, have fun,” Rose Helen said.
“Yeah,” Druff said. “Oh, and Rose Helen?”
“What?”
“You know what they’re bringing with them?”
“What?”
“Well it seems there’s this brand-new gadget that not only measures linear distance but gives you the precise gradients, and then totals the whole thing in feet and inches. This was specifically designed for marathons. That way they can tell whether a Cincinnati marathon is longer than a New York marathon. The damn thing factors the basic twenty-six miles three hundred eighty-five yards and determines the exact degree of difficulty.”
“That’s really something,” Rose Helen had to admit.
“Yeah. Irwin Scouffas was telling me about it. He says it isn’t any bigger than an ordinary stopwatch,” said the man who couldn’t lie to his wife.
They met at the agreed-upon restaurant at the agreed-upon time. Druff hadn’t been at all sure she’d show up, but there she was in the bar waiting for him, big as life, beautiful, and, just for a moment as she rose up off the stool and called out to him in greeting, totally unrecognizable, someone he not only could not remember ever having seen before but a person whose name he knew he would not recognize even if she were to say it for him. He began to go through his City Commissioner of Streetsmarts grab bag of ploys to please, his airy, insubstantial token talk.
“Maggie Glorio,” she interrupted. “Your dreamgirl?”
“Pardon?”
“Your date for the evening?”
“Sure,” he said, “don’t you think I know?”
“You’re at a loss,” she said.
“Well I am,” he admitted, “I am at a loss.” And took her into the dining room — he had selected a restaurant in a small, “continental”- style hotel; it was already nine o’clock; this was the second seating — making conversation, explaining Rose Helen, finding his theme in his family, neither boasting nor complaining, merely giving away the store, talking to the woman as if she were already the one person in the world to whom he could bring his life, at ease, almost offhand, no more self-conscious, really, than if she had been a professional, his doctor, say, his tax accountant, someone accustomed to peering at his private parts, having inside info on his bottom lines. Shipboard romance was written all over his conversation, some no-holds-barred, strangers-on-a- train immediacy to their — well, his—speech. It was as if they had been in combat together or knew — well, Druff; Meg gave away nothing — that they would never meet again. (Well, he was at a loss, set adrift. This was merely a reckless hand-over-hand he was doing, some Theseus/ Ariadne routine to locate himself for her, to locate himself for himself. There was, he thought, nothing personal.)
“For example,” he said, continuing now that the waiter had gone off to fetch their drinks, “from time to time I’ll talk in my sleep. Nothing very interesting, nothing of much importance. Nothing compromising, I mean. No secrets divulged or lives jeopardized — just this old, aging guy small-talking in his sleep.
“Where’s the harm? What damage do I do? But, you know? It drives Rose Helen crazy. No kidding, it’s the cause of some of our biggest fights. I don’t know why she gets so upset. It can’t just be because I woke her up. Hell, you think it would interest her to tune in. It would interest me. It does interest me. That’s why I get so mad at her when she cuts into one of my monologues. Because once she starts shaking me I lose my place and it’s all over, you can forget it. There I am trying to find out why I’m so exercised about whatever it is I’m so exercised about, and Rose Helen is swinging on my pajamas telling me I’m asleep, I’m sleeping, and to wake up, I’m talking like a fool.
“Well, I’ll tell you something. I’m not talking like a fool. Dreams are nature’s way… Well, any psychiatrist will tell you. Besides, I enjoy it. Some of my best speeches occur in dreams.”
“She’s probably a light sleeper,” Margaret Glorio said.
“Wake up, I’m talking like a fool?”
They were eating their steamed mussels now, the commissioner going on (when he was not going on about his wife) about his city’s elaborate appetizer arrangements, the ancient New Orleans trade routes. “It’s important that a town’s restaurants have some juice with the established Gulf Coast shellfish interests,” he told her. “I mean, take away prawns, take away shrimps, crabs, clams and lobster tails, and what have you got? You’ve got bush league wineries and dineries, that’s what you’ve got. You’ve got a strictly one-horse, non-starter sort of a town where no one entertains and there’s half an inch of dust collecting on the credit cards and nobody knows what to do with a wedge of lemon except set it down in a cup of tea. You can forget all about your Astrodomes and zillion-square-foot convention centers. You can forget about your combination concert hall — cum — opera house slash shopping mall — performing arts centers. All that shit’s for naught if nothing’s cooking with the influential dory-and-trawler water interests. It all starts with crustaceans and mollusks,” said Druff, speaking of dreams, speaking of dreamgirls, and plying his date with all the inside info he could think of.
“Well,” she said, “you seem to have it down to a science.”
They were eating their greens. They were eating their roast potatoes. They were eating their crown rack of lamb for two.
And now he’d stopped talking. Had said almost nothing since he’d asked the waiter if he would check with the chef to see how their fruit soufflé was coming. It took forty-five minutes to do a soufflé, he explained to Ms. Glorio. If it didn’t go into the oven at just about the time the diners were served their main course it could be a disaster.
“Yes,” Margaret said, raising the side of a fist to her mouth and lightly tapping it against her teeth by way of a yawn. “I’d heard that.”
“Then there’s nothing more I can teach you,” the commissioner said.
“I’ve hurt your feelings.”
He pooh-poohed the notion with a wave of his napkin.
“I have,” she said.
He brushed away the idea with his knife and fork.
“Well, I mean,” she said, “why are you so nervous? What do you think you have to be talking for all the time? What are you so afraid of? I don’t bite. You didn’t act like this this afternoon. Oh, you were out to impress me, but that was cute — a little. I mean if all you want is to get laid, there’s no reason to go through all this rigmarole. Just get on with it. My place or yours, Commissioner?”
“I’ve always had this heavy sense of decorum,” the commissioner said.
“Oh, decorum,” Margaret Glorio said negligently.
“It’s what separates us from the bears and giraffes,” Druff said.
“It’s what pries us from where our bread is buttered,” said Margaret Glorio.
Again with the love? the commissioner thought. Again with the thing for the interesting ladies? Aiee, aiee, thought Druff, and — you can imagine how he felt, you can just imagine — helplessly, once again began, though even less at ease now, to bring Rose Helen into it. (As if she’d ever been out of it. Indeed, she might, gone off to the powder room or to make a phone call, have just left the table. Margaret Glorio might just as easily have been an old pal, not seen in years, in town on business, Druff filling her in on the flora and fauna of his married ways, his picturesque local color, the tricky state of their life’s economy.)