Billy called early in the week to tell me he’d found out that Friday was Atley’s birthday. Atley had been Billy’s lawyer first, and then Billy recommended him to me. He became my lawyer when I called Billy after my car fell into a hole in the car wash. Atley gave me a free five minutes in his office so that I could understand that small claims court would be best. Billy had the idea that we should take Atley to lunch on his birthday. I said to him, “What are we going to do with Atley at lunch?” and he said that we’d think of something. I was all for getting some out-of-work ballerina to run into the restaurant with Mylar balloons, but Billy said no, we’d just think of something. He picked the restaurant, and when Friday came we were still thinking when the three of us met there and sat down, and because we were all a little uptight the first thing we thought of, of course, was having some drinks. Then Atley got to telling the story about his cousin who’d won a goldfish in a brandy snifter; he got so attached to the fish that he went out and got it an aquarium, but then he decided that the fish didn’t look happy in the aquarium. Atley told his cousin that the brandy glass had magnified the fish and that’s what made it look happy, but the cousin wouldn’t believe it, so the cousin had a couple of drinks that night and decided to lower the brandy glass into the aquarium. He dug around in the pebbles and then piled them up around the base of the glass to anchor it, and the fish eventually started swimming around and around outside the top of the submerged glass in the same contented way, Atley said, that people in a hot tub sit there and hold their hands next to where the jets of water rush in.
The waiter came and told us the specials, and Billy and I both started smiling and looking away, because we knew that it was Atley’s birthday and we were going to have to do something pretty soon. If we’d known the fish story beforehand, we could have gotten a fish as a gag present. The waiter probably thought we were laughing at him and hated us for it; he had to stand there and say “Côtelette Plus Ça Change” or whatever the specialty was, when actually he wanted to be John Travolta in
Billy said, when he was eating his shrimp, “My parents had a New Year’s Eve party the last time I visited them, and some woman got ripped and took my father’s shoe and sock off and painted his toenails.” At this point I cracked up, and the waiter, who was removing my plate, looked at me as if I was dispensable. “That’s not it, that’s not the punch line!” Billy said. Atley held his hand up in cop-stopping-traffic style, and Billy made a fist and hit it. Then he said, “The punch line is, a week later my father was reading the paper at breakfast and my mother said, ‘What if I get some nail-polish remover and fix your toes?’ and my father said, ‘Don’t do it.’ She was
“I had such a happy childhood,” I said. “We always rented a beach house during the summer, and my mother and father had one of each of our baby shoes bronzed—my sister’s and mine—and my parents danced in the living room a lot. My father said the only way he’d have a TV was if he could think of it as a giant radio, so when they finally bought one he’d be watching and my mother would come into the room and he’d get up and take her in his arms and start humming and dancing. They’d dance while Kate Smith talked or whatever, or while Gale Storm made her
Atley squinted and leaned against the table. “Come on, come on, come on—what do two people who have money do all day?” he whispered. That was when Billy kissed me, which made it look as if what we did was make love all day, which couldn’t have been farther from the truth. In the back of my mind I thought that maybe it was part of some act Billy was putting on because he’d already figured out what to do about the birthday. The waiter was opening a bottle of champagne, which I guess Billy had ordered. I knew very few facts about Billy’s ex. One was that she really liked champagne. Another was that she had been in Alateen. Her father had been a big drunk. He’d thrown her mother out a window once. She’d gone back to him but not until she’d taken him to court.
“I’ll tell you something,” Atley said. “I shocked the hell out of one of our summer interns. I took him aside in the office and I told him, ‘You know what lawyers are? Barnacles on a log. The legal system is like one big, heavy log floating downstream, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Remember every time one of those judges lifts a gavel that it’s just a log with a handle.’ ”
