The sun was hot and high in a practically cloud-free sky and Jon was feeling lousy. It was Tuesday afternoon, just an hour and a half after he’d left his uncle at the antique shop to join Karen at her apartment, and he was on his way back already. The late breakfast at Karen’s had been fine; she was a good cook and Jon enjoyed that side of her as much as anything. But her ten-year-old pride and joy, Larry, had a dentist’s appointment at four, and, of course, Karen had to drive the kid there and be by his side throughout the great ordeal. And so Jon had been rushed through the breakfast, forced into throwing those delicious eggs and sausage down his throat as if he was shoveling coal into a boiler.
“Why,” Jon had asked her, through a mouthful of eggs, “did you ask me over if you were in such a goddamn hurry? You didn’t say anything about the kid’s teeth on the phone.”
“What’re you bitching about?” she had said. “The price is right, isn’t it? I thought maybe you’d lower yourself to go along with me when I take Larry to his dental appointment.”
“That’s my idea of a good time,” he’d said.
“Oh,” she’d said angrily, “go read a comic book.”
Larry had been sitting at the table the whole time and the kid would flash an innocent smile now and then, batting his lashes at Jon. Larry had red hair and freckles and big brown eyes, like the kids in paintings you can buy prints of by sending in three toilet paper wrappers and a dollar-fifty. Jon hated Larry.
Jon supposed he was jealous of the kid. It was hard getting used to going with a girl — woman — who was the mother of a ten-year-old kid. Karen looked younger than thirty, and was very pretty, with long, wild, dark hair and the same brown eyes as the kid, only on her they looked good. She also had a body that wouldn’t quit.
But still it was odd, strange getting used to. Karen’s apartment was large enough that privacy wasn’t a real problem, and Larry kept pretty much to himself, having a stamp collection or some silly such thing he played around with all the time, shut tight in his room. When Larry did decide to intrude, however, he intruded big, and could, with his big-brown-eyes coaxing, dictate the course of an evening’s activities. The new Brian DePalma film they had planned to attend could be turned into the latest revival of “Son of Flubber”; a night of Cantonese dining at Ming Gardens could be transformed easily into greasy take-out tacos; and on television the educational channel’s showing of “The Maltese Falcon” on the Bogart Festival would lose out to a made-for-TV movie with someone who used to be on “Laugh-In.” When a need of Jon’s was balanced against a need of Larry’s, no contest, Larry won every time.
So Jon hated Larry, and felt quite sure that the feeling was reciprocal, even though the kid rarely said a word. But with those shit-eating big brown eyes, who needed the power of speech?
Jon had met Karen in her candle shop, which catered to a head crowd, selling incense and Zig-Zag papers and hash pipes and posters and the like, in addition to countless candles, most of which Karen made herself. He went there to buy underground comics and posters, and after a while he was haunting the place, checking for new stuff (which was ridiculous, since he bought so much mail order) but mostly just getting to know Karen. At first it was just that he was fascinated watching her boobs act as a bouncing billboard for various causes, in tee-shirts ranging from NO NUKES to SAVE THE WHALES. Later he found out she was funny and bright and crazy, when she got politics off her chest.
Jon realized that probably the primary reason he and Karen got together was because both of them were straighter than they appeared to be: Jon with his frizzy hair and Wonder Warthog tee-shirts, Karen with her equally frizzy, longer hair and ERA slogans. The turning point in their relationship was that day in the Airliner when they had been sitting drinking beers and Jon had made a confession. He told Karen sheepishly that he was not into the dope scene, in spite of his looks and certain bullshit comments he’d from time to time made. Karen had grinned and admitted the same thing, that despite her latter-day hippie appearance, she was a painfully straight, divorced woman of thirty with a ten-year-old child.
Which was the first Jon heard of her age, her broken marriage, and her kid, but he hadn’t minded, as the shared confessions had played like a scene in a movie and fantasy was something he could really get into, so they had laughed, toasted beers and joined forces.
