“This place is pretty crazy,” he says, picking up a snow pea. “I thought that nothing could be worse than teaching fifth-grade grammar. But knowing all the rhymes on the jukebox is probably worse than teaching grammar.” He takes a joint out of his shirt pocket. “You know what happened tonight? My father’s accountant came in here with a guy. They had on T-shirts with swirls of pink and blue and green—it would have been good protective coloration in a basket of Easter eggs. The accountant almost died when he saw me. Then, Tuesday night, my old Hackensack heartthrob, Dorie Vesco, came in. I saw her sitting at the bar. She was all tied up. She had on one of those blouses that lace up the front and those shoes with strings that you wrap around your ankles. The guy she was with was a real jerk. Dorie Vesco and I recognized each other at the same instant, and when I hugged her the guy said, ‘This some kind of a setup?’ ” He laughs. “Wyatt and the cat,” he says, rubbing his foot over an orange cat that has just darted under the table. “She’s been around here longer’n me. Longer than anybody. Cat can’t set alarms, Wyatt can.”
We are in what used to be Jason’s favorite restaurant. I used to live with Jason; now we’re apart. After Wyatt took a job as a waiter here, though, Jason stopped coming. “Honey, it’s just too odd,” Jason said to me one night. “I don’t feel comfortable being waited on by the same person I always call when I have a question about the correct use of apostrophes.”
When we go out, Wyatt hands Corky the keys to the car. I open the back door, muttering about what a bad idea this is, because she has only had three driving lessons so far. She no more than pulls away from the curb than a cop car comes up alongside us and stops for the red light. I catch one cop’s eye and look away. Our car is angled strangely through two lanes. No cars are in back of us or around us. Next, one of the cops catches Corky’s eye. “You know what?” he calls over. “If you were a red Toyota with six guys inside, we’d have found what we’re looking for.” Then the cop in the driver’s seat leans forward and hollers, “Now he’ll tell you that if you twinkled you’d be the North Star, and we could follow you so we don’t get lost.”
The light changes and the cop car takes off, no siren, at about sixty miles an hour.
“Still nothing behind us,” Wyatt says, patting Corky’s leg. “First rule of driving: Many other dangerous people are driving at the same time you are, and you must drive defensively.”
“Did you think you’d marry Jason?” Corky says.
I never lived in a dorm when I was in college, but Corky did. Lights-out is still a signal to her to start talking.
“We almost got married,” I say. “I told you about that. The summer he bought the house in Garrison. We were as stupid as everybody else who’s breaking up. We kept finding something to do that interested us, so we could pretend that we were interested in each other.”
“What about you and Wyatt?”
“I’ve always thought that he loved somebody else. We had quite a talk about that years ago, and he said I was wrong. Then again, he never mentioned Dorie Vesco until tonight.”
“Archie told me a week before our wedding that he’d been engaged twice before.” She lights a cigarette. “Which was the one who flushed his credit card down the toilet?”
“Sally.”
“And Sondra’s the one who swallowed the ring?”
“A citrine with diamonds. Our grandmother’s. When Archie took her to the emergency room and she filled out the form, she said that she’d swallowed a bone.”
“She had to be nuts not to level with the people in the emergency room,” Corky says.
I roll over to see Corky’s face in the half-dark. She has unrolled the futon sofa into a mat on the bedroom floor, where she will sleep tonight.
“You know the rest of that story, don’t you?” I say. “The next day, he got a book about training puppies. He took it home and showed her the part where they say not to worry if your dog swallows a rock unless it chokes. A joke, but when they went to couples therapy she kept bringing up the dog book.”
