"Oh, no. We have a lot of the same interests."
"Like what?"
"Baseball, for one thing."
"That's right! I forgot you like baseball."
"I'm an addict."
"So you talked baseball all night."
"Oh, no," she said. "We talked about a lot of other things. Movies--"
"Movies? Are you trying to tell me Frank is a film buff?"
"He knows the old Bogart pictures almost line by line. We traded favorite bits of dialogue."
"I've been talking about film for three months, and he hasn't opened his mouth," Tony said.
"He hasn't seen a lot of recent pictures, but we're going to a show tonight."
"You're seeing him again?"
"Yeah. I wanted to call and thank you for fixing me up with him," she said.
"Am I one hell of a matchmaker, or am I one hell of a matchmaker?"
"I also wanted to let you know that even if it doesn't work out, I'll be gentle with him. He told me about Wilma. What a rotten thing! I wanted you to know that I'm aware she put a couple of cracks in him, and I won't ever hit him too hard."
Tony was amazed. "He told you about Wilma the first night he met you?"
"He said he used to be unable to talk about it, but then you showed him how to handle his hostility."
"Me?"
"He said after you helped him accept what had happened, he could talk about it without pain."
"All I did was sit and listen when he wanted to get it off his chest."
"He thinks you're a hell of a great guy."
"Frank's a damned good judge of people, isn't he?"
Later, feeling good about the excellent impression that Frank had made on Janet Yamada, optimistic about his own chances for a little romance, Tony drove to Westwood to keep his date with Hilary. She was waiting for him; she came out of the house as he pulled into the driveway. She looked crisp and lovely in black slacks, a cool ice-blue blouse, and a lightweight blue corduroy blazer. As he opened the door for her, she gave him a quick, almost shy kiss on the cheek, and he got a whiff of fresh lemony perfume.
It was going to be a good day.
***
Exhausted from a nearly sleepless night in Helen Virtillion's bedroom, Avril Tannerton got back from Santa Rosa shortly before ten o'clock Sunday morning.
He did not look inside the coffin.
With Gary Olmstead, Tannerton went to the cemetery and prepared the gravesite for the two o'clock ceremony. They erected the equipment that would lower the casket into the ground. Using flowers and a lot of cut greenery, they made the site as attractive as possible.
At 12:30 back at the funeral home, Tannerton used a chamois cloth to wipe the dust and smudged fingerprints from Bruno Frye's brass-plated casket. As he ran his hand over the rounded edges of the box, he thought of the magnificent contours of Helen Virtillion's breasts.
He did not look inside the coffin.
At one o'clock, Tannerton and Olmstead loaded the deceased into the hearse.
Neither of them looked inside the coffin.
At one-thirty they drove to the Napa County Memorial Park. Joshua Rhinehart and a few local people followed in their own cars. Considering that it was for a wealthy and influential man, the funeral procession was embarrassingly small.
The day was clear and cool. Tall trees cast stark shadows across the road, and the hearse passed through alternating hands of sunlight and shade.
At the cemetery, the casket was placed on a sling above the grave, and fifteen people gathered around for the brief service. Gary Olmstead took up a position beside the flower-concealed control box that operated the sling and would cause it to lower the deceased into the ground. Avril stood at the front of the grave and read from a thin book of nondenominational inspirational verses. Joshua Rhinehart was at the mortician's side. The other twelve people flanked the open grave. Some of them were grape growers and their wives. They had come because they had sold their harvests to Bruno Frye's winery, and they considered their attendance at his funeral to be a business obligation. The others were Shade Tree Vineyards executives and their wives, and their reasons for being present were no more personal than those of the growers. Nobody wept.
And nobody had the opportunity or the desire to look into the coffin.
Tannerton finished reading from his small black book. He glanced at Gary Olmstead and nodded.
Olmstead pushed a button on the control box. The powerful little electric motor hummed. The casket was lowered slowly and smoothly into the gaping earth.
***
Hilary could not remember another day that was as much fun as that first full day with Tony Clemenza.
For lunch, they went to the Yamashiro Skyroom, high in the Hollywood Hills. The food at Yamashiro was uninspiring, even ordinary, but the ambience and the stunning view made it a fine place for an occasional light lunch or dinner. The restaurant, an authentic Japanese palace, had once been a private estate. It was surrounded by ten acres of lovely ornamental gardens. From its mountaintop perch, Yamashiro offered a breathtaking view of the entire Los Angeles basin. The day was so clear that Hilary could see all the way to Long Beach and Palos Verdes.
After lunch, they went to Griffith Park. For an hour, they walked through part of the Los Angeles Zoo, where they fed the bears, and where Tony did hilarious imitations of the animals. From the zoo they went to a special afternoon performance of the dazzling Laserium hologram show in the Griffith Park Observatory.
Later, they passed an hour on Melrose Avenue, between Doheny Drive and La Cienega Boulevard, prowling through one fascinating antique shop after another, not buying, just browsing, chatting with the proprietors.
When the cocktail hour arrived, they drove to Malibu for Mai Tais at Tonga Lei. They watched the sun set into the ocean and relaxed to the rhythmic roar of breaking waves.
Although Hilary had been an Angeleno for quite some time, her world had been composed only of her work, her house, her rose garden, her work, the film studios, her work, and the few fancy restaurants in which the motion picture and television crowd gathered to do business. She had never been to the Yamashiro Skyroom, the zoo, the laser show, the Melrose antique shops, or Tonga Lei. It was all new to her. She felt like a wide-eyed tourist--or, more accurately, like a prisoner who had just finished serving a long, long sentence, most of it in solitary confinement.
But it was not just where they went that made the day special. None of it would have been half as interesting or as much fun if she'd been with someone other than Tony. He was so charming, so quick-witted, so full of fun and energy, that he made the bright day brighter.
After slowly sipping two Mai Tais each, they were starving. They drove back to Sepulveda and went north into the San Fernando Valley to have dinner at Mel's landing, another place with which she was not familiar. Mel's was unpretentious and moderately priced, and it offered some of the freshest and tastiest seafood she had ever eaten.
As she and Tony ate Mel's steamed clams and discussed other favorite places to eat, Hilary found that he knew ten times as many as she did. Her knowledge did not extend much beyond that handful of expensive dining spots that served the movers and shakers of the entertainment industry. The out-of-the-way eateries, the hole-in-the-wall cafés with surprising house specialties, the small mom-and-pop restaurants with plainly served but delicious food--all of that was one more aspect of the city about which she had never taken time to learn. She saw that she had become rich without ever discovering how to use and fully enjoy the freedom that her money could provide.
They ate too many of Mel's clams and then too much red snapper with too many Malaysian shrimp. They also drank too much white wine.
Considering how much they consumed, it was amazing, Hilary thought, that they had so much time between mouthfuls for conversation. But they never stopped talking. She was usually reticent on the first few dates with a new man, but not with Tony. She wanted to hear what he thought about everything, from Mork and Mindy to Shakespearean drama, from politics to art. People, dogs, religion, architecture, sports, Bach, fashions, food, women's liberation, Saturday morning cartoons--it seemed urgent and vital that she know what he thought about those and a million other subjects. She also wanted to tell him what she thought about all those things, and she wanted to know what he thought of what she thought, and pretty soon she was telling him what she thought of what he thought of what she thought. They chattered as if they had just learned that God was going to strike everyone in the world deaf and dumb at sunrise. Hilary was drunk, not on wine, but on the fluidity and intimacy of their conversation; she was intoxicated by communication, a potent brew for which she had built up little tolerance over the years.