Goldilocks

by Andrew Coburn

  “You’re serious,” he said, and did not wait for a response. After glancing quickly around, he lowered his head and toughened his voice. “What if I don’t want to do it? You’re asking for a freebie on this one, am I right?”

  “You’re absolutely right,” she said. “And if you don’t do it, all bets are off.”

  His grin was instantaneous. “You’re in luck, Lou. The punk’s name is Rafael. After he screwed up the job, he blew town, but I heard he’s back. So there’s no problem. The truth is I was going to do him anyway.”

  “I thought as much,” she said.

  “I should’ve figured that. You know there are feds in town. They ever squeeze him, they get me. They get me, they get you. We don’t want that to happen, do we?”

  She said coldly, “When are you going to do it?”

  “Soon.”

  She said, “I want to be there.”

  Two adolescent girls came in and sat down at a nearby table, dropping down books. Their heads together, they began whispering and giggling. Louise closed the magazine, swished her hair back, and with her foot nudged the briefcase between Chick’s knees. He reached down and drew it into his lap. “This thing going to explode on me when I get home?”

  “If you’re worried, open it now,” she said.

  He did, just enough to peek in at the money.

  Barney Cole and Kit Fletcher dined at the Andover Inn in celebration of her promotion, which came as a surprise to Cole. Over shallow bowls of spicy soup he asked why she had not warned him. “I didn’t want to jinx it,” she said. “Besides, it came as a sort of surprise to me.”

  “You must’ve settled the Globe case for a big amount.”

  “I settled it, but not for money.”

  “You got a retraction.”

  “Only an agreement that the Globe wouldn’t press for their legal expenses, which my client thinks is a victory.”

  Cole looked at her askance. “You never had a case.”

  “Only my client’s ego.”

  “So how did you get the promotion?” he asked. “You threaten to quit?”

  “If I had done that, I’d have been out on my fancy bottom. No, Barney. My boss gave me a push. He likes me. He likes me very much.”

  “Should I be jealous?”

  “Why not?” she said. “He is of you.”

  Cole frowned.

  “I’m only joking.” She smiled warmly. “If I didn’t have you in my life, I’d go crazy, believe me.”

  “With my clients,” he said, “I believe everything they say, then wait to be deceived. How about yourself?”

  “I’m a little different.”

  Between their salads and their entrees, people Cole knew came into the dining room, and he proudly introduced them to Kit. There were Jim Doherty, who was the town moderator, and his wife, who was in real estate. Moments later there were Bill Dalton and his wife. Bill was a lawyer and a former selectman. Then came the Tuckers. Mike was in publishing, and Sue, whose big-boned beauty rivaled Kit’s, was a state representative. The two women chatted briefly, each oblivious of the attention they drew.

  Later Kit said, “I have the distinct impression you’re showing me off. Am I a prize?”

  “You make my stock go up,” Cole said.

  Her knee touched his under the table. “I want to be valuable to you.”

  He said, “Have you ever considered kissing my ear in public?”

  The table was small. Holding on to her wineglass, she leaned over and did it. “Your stock just soared.”

  Their dinner was veal Oscar, which they ate leisurely over a second bottle of wine. Dessert was cake soaked in brandy, topped with exotic nuts and dabbed with whipped cream. Kit ate hers and most of his. Then they each had Irish coffee. She gazed at him through her lashes. “You don’t mind living high, do you?”

  “Occasionally,” he said. “Then it’s nice to float back down to earth.”

  She ran a foot up his calf. “I’m a little tight.”

  “I guessed.”

  “I could give you trouble tonight,” she said suggestively.

  “Perfectly all right. I’m a troubleshooter.”

  She squinted. “You’re the only man whose bad jokes I laugh at. It must be love.”

  They stepped out of the inn a little after eleven. The heat of the day had carried into the night, and the air was rich with dark grass smells. She tossed her hair loose and took his arm. They kissed in the parking lot and again in the car. She pressed fingers against his cheek. “Do I want too much, Barney, or do you want too little?”

  “How should I interpret that?”

  “It’s something we can talk about in bed. I might even forget the question.”

  “Good,” he said, “because I probably don’t have an answer.”

  She slumped her blond head against his shoulder as they drove home and was slow to get out when he pulled into the garage next to her car. She climbed out, but instead of proceeding into the house, she wandered out to the driveway and listened to the night chant of a bird. Bugs beat their way to her through the dark. Cole called to her from the garage.

  “The phone’s ringing.”

  “Answer it.”

  “What if it’s for you?”

  “I’m asleep. Tell my boss I’m in your arms.”

  The night heat was defiant. She let it bathe her. She batted mosquitoes from her hair and in the secrecy of the dark listened to the chant of the bird, the ring of peepers, the whistle of crickets, gather into a single summer sound. The sky, afire with stars, seemed grander and greater than ever, as if it too had a season for growing lush. When the mosquitoes became too much, she made her way through the garage into the house.

  Cole, his head lowered, was on the phone in the seldom-used family room, where the clock on the wall was an hour off. She moved near him, but his voice was too soft for her to distinguish words. After standing still for a number of moments, she said, “Who is it?”

  He whispered quickly, “My friend.”

  She threw out her hand. “Let me talk to her.”

  • • •

  The heat lessened in the early hours of the morning but returned in force with the rising sun. Henry shaved the lawn, back and front, with Harold’s Toro mower, maneuvering it with one hand. The sun roasted his bare back. Mrs. Whipple peeked through the shrubbery with a mind for conversation, but the roar of the mower allowed her only a long, curious look. Without meaning to, Henry obliterated an abundance of butter daisies glowing from a great clump of foliage and, in another miscarried effort, shredded a burst of marigolds. From some mysterious will, stacks of lilies seemed to retreat out of harm’s way. When he finished, he slaked his thirst at the outside spigot, though the water had a nasty taste, full of treatment. He went into the house smelling of sweat and grass and the perfume of flowers.

  Emma Goss was at the kitchen table reading yesterday’s newspaper and glanced up at him as she might have done with Harold coming in from the yard or the garage. “Don’t mess up the bathroom,” she said.

  He smiled, the cuts in his face brightly scabbed. “You ought to look out the window, see what a good job I did. I was a kid, I used to cut ten lawns a week. I had a regular route.”

  “Where did you go wrong?” she said quietly, and turned her attention to an article about next week’s Fourth of July celebration at the Lawrence High School stadium, an evening of festivities and fireworks that she and Harold, away at the beach, had always missed. Henry suddenly swept over her and gave her a fast affectionate kiss that left her mouth shiny with saliva. She immediately swabbed her lips. “Don’t do that!”

  She read the rest of the article while Henry took a fast shower, and pushed the paper aside when she heard him padding about in the bedroom, opening drawers, making enough noise to disorder her thoughts. Presently he returned in a white T-shirt and Harold’s old chinos and joined her at the table, laying out his good hand like an offering and leaving his other one to lie lame in his lap.
r />   “It was getting real hot out there,” he told her. “Supposed to be worse than yesterday.”

  “It’s cool in here,” she said automatically.

  “Won’t be later on,” he predicted. “If it gets too bad, we can go to Cinema Showcase. That would be nice, huh? Something to look forward to.”

  She considered it, far away in the deep part of her brain, which produced a long-forgotten image of the last movie she had seen in a theater, a comedy with a worn woman doing a jig on her husband’s grave. She remembered how hard Harold had laughed, his hand slapping his knee when the woman dropped to all fours to tell the dead man exactly what she thought of him.

  “Last movie I saw,” Henry said, “was Deerhunter. Actors playing Polacks going to Nam to get blown up. I saw it and cried. I identified with Christopher Walken, the guy who wouldn’t come home. He even looks a little like me, don’t you think?”

  “Nobody looks like you,” she said, with no knowledge of Christopher Walken. Heat was beginning to seep into the kitchen, and she tugged at the front of her dress, beneath which her parted breasts were loose and lolling.

  Henry said, “You go to war, you make the supreme sacrifice, what’s it mean to average slobs on the street? Like it never happened. They live, what do they care about you?”

  “What do you care about them?” she asked in a voice that even a ghost would not have heard. Her face was clicking shut on him.

  “Fourth of July,” he said, “I want to go to that memorial in Washington. I want to find the names of black guys I knew got killed. I’ve forgotten some of them.”

  “Go,” she said.

  “I don’t want to go if you won’t come with me.”

  “Then you don’t go,” she said.

  “There are things you don’t understand,” he said in a mild reproach. “I haven’t been lucky, Mrs. Goss. No time in my life have I been lucky till now. You know who I used to think was lucky? It was this guy in Chicopee who scrapped his car for a Winnebago and lived in it. I thought that was a damn good idea. Anywhere he went, he was home soon as he stopped. Now I’m not jealous anymore. I got something better.”

  She was not listening to him. He was there the way the furniture was, his voice no more obtrusive than the hum of the refrigerator.

  When he raised himself in his chair, her eye glanced over him as if he were the sort she would pay a dollar to roll out the trash barrel.

  “Something’s mine, I protect it,” he said. “In Nam all I had was myself, so I protected me. Now I’m protecting you in ways you don’t even know about. The woman next door, Mrs. Whipple, she’s got the hots for me, but I don’t give her a second look. I got too much respect for you, Mrs. Goss.”

  A line of sweat glistened from her temple to the no-longer soft curve of her jaw. In the intervals that her ear opened to him, she felt she was listening to the voice of a child from the mouth of a man. It gave her a disquieting sense of her own early and pampered beginnings.

  His good hand rested gently on her wrist. “I don’t want to embarrass you, but if we go the movies you should wear a bra.”

  “I don’t want to go to the movies,” she said.

  “It’s all right. We don’t have to.”

  “And I don’t want to go to any memorial next week.” Suddenly she thought of herself as a child, not yet civilized, with a fussing face and grabby hands. She said, “I want to go to the fireworks.”

  • • •

  They met at the Andover Inn for breakfast. Each arrived in a simple silk dress of elegantly clinging cut. Kit Fletcher’s was cerulean, which illuminated her blondness and the authenticity of her figure; Louise Baker’s was creamy beige, which set off the black gloss of her hair and dramatized the slender length of her limbs. The reservation was in Kit’s name. They were seated near a window, white linen and fresh flowers on the table. Checking the menu in the waiter’s presence, each gave the same light order of coffee, juice, and oatmeal toast. Louise’s smile was distant.

  “Kit, you said. Is that your real name?”

  “It’s Katherine.”

  “Katherine Fletcher of Boston. Are you from wealth?”

  “Hardly. My father worked for a printing company.”

  “You could fool people.”

  “That’s my job. I’m a lawyer.”

  “I’m an investor of sorts,” Louise said with a tincture of irony. “Call me Lou if you like.”

  “Why, do you think we’ll become friends?” Kit asked, her smile friendlier and looser.

  “Stranger things have happened.”

  The waiter served juice and toast and poured their coffee, the aroma standing rich between them. The breakfast crowd was predominantly male. A heavy man, comfortably unwieldy in his suit only because his tailor was doubtless a genius, flashed them a shrewd businessman’s smile that quickly faltered and died, as if he had first thought he could add them up on a pocket calculator. Louise powdered her coffee with Sweet ‘n’ Low and stirred it with a weighty spoon.

  “Does Barney take you here?”

  “We were here last night.”

  “This is my first time.”

  Kit showed mild surprise. “But you’re from around here. Originally, I mean.”

  “Lawrence. That’s a million miles away. I fool people too.”

  A beeper went off in the midst of the dining room, and a well-known doctor rose with only a slight sign of irritation and threaded his way to the door. Kit added jelly to her toast.

  “You must be wondering why I wanted to meet you.”

  “I can think of a couple of reasons. Barney’s the obvious one. Is the relationship serious?”

  “It seems to be heading in that direction,” Kit said with a forthright smile meant to be trusted. “He’s the only man I’d consider marrying.”

  “You could do worse.”

  “No, I could do better, but it wouldn’t please me.”

  “Should that be a consideration?” Louise asked with another touch of irony. She drained her juice glass with easy swallows. “Women like us usually put pleasure in its proper place. Maybe you should rethink your position.”

  Kit viewed her with fresh eyes, as if a window had been slightly raised in her mind. “Are we alike?”

  “I try not to size up people too fast, so I’ll let you answer that.”

  In an unsettling way Kit felt she was dealing with another lawyer, one with a stronger case and more trial experience. “You could very easily intimidate me,” she said. “Are you asking me to back off on Barney?”

  “Why would I do that?” Louise glanced at the jelly. “Is that strawberry?”

  “Yes.”

  She spread a generous amount on her toast and said, “I don’t think I intimidate you, Kit. At least not very much. So maybe you’d better tell me exactly what’s on your mind, unless you just wanted to get a look at me. I’m supposed to be Mafia, you know, did Barney tell you?”

  “Not in so many words.” Kit smiled archly. “But all Italians are, aren’t they?”

  “No,” Louise said, chewing easily. “Some are pretenders.”

  Kit lifted her coffee cup. “Shall I get to it?”

  “Please. I don’t have that much time.”

  “There’s something between you and Barney I know nothing about,” Kit said with quiet concern. “Maybe it’s none of my business, but as a lawyer I don’t like unknown factors. As a woman in this situation, I like them even less.”

  “You want to know what Barney is to me. He’s a buddy. I call him when I need him. On occasion he calls me. What we have is private and too basic to explain. It wouldn’t come out right in the telling.”

  “If you give me the chance, maybe I can make sense of it.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you.”

  “But I do,” Kit persisted gently. “Is it sex?”

  “A man and a woman, it’s always sex. Barney might deny it, but I won’t. Does that bother you?”

  “It’s the emotional attach
ment that bothers me. Besides, it’s impossible not to be jealous. You’re a beautiful woman.”

  “You have an edge. You’re younger.”

  “I don’t think too many people would guess that,” Kit said over the rim of her cup. “I noticed something when we walked in. It was you the men looked at first.”

  “That’s not necessarily a compliment, is it?”

  “But it’s a proof of strength. That’s your edge.”

  Both women finished their toast and shook the crumbs from their fingers. The waiter poured more coffee, Louise’s move to cover her cup coming too late. Her hand, Kit noticed for the third or fourth time, was as smooth and slender as a girl’s, the jeweled wedding ring exquisitely demure. The doctor had returned and shot glances at them over his Wall Street Journal. The heavy man who had failed to add them up stared shamelessly, his attention evenly divided, as if each were a creature to whom the gods had blown a kiss. Louise cast aside her napkin.

  “If it’ll make you feel better, I’ve always been jealous of blondes.”

  “I’ve always been jealous of women who look like Sophia Loren.”

  “We’re full of compliments, aren’t we? What you don’t understand is we’re not competing. You want to marry Barney, fine. You get a man who happens to be my friend. The only catch comes from statistics. Marriages break up every day. Friendships seem to survive.”

  “There’s another catch,” Kit said. “I couldn’t bear not to have all his loyalty.”

  “Nobody gets all of anything. Even in the best of marriages people hold back. It’s the same with business deals. Somebody always fudges a little.”

  “Did you know his wife?”

  “She was like us, but she lacked direction. If Barney marries you, he’ll gladly be making the same mistake all over again, which is why I won’t bother to tell him.” Louise checked her watch, which was as exquisitely demure as her ring and the ice impaling her earlobes. “I’m afraid I can’t stay any longer.”

  “If I thought you were leaving for good, maybe I’d breathe easier.”

  Louise looked at her keenly. “Somehow I feel that’s all you really wanted to know, how long am I going to be around. So far I’ve been lucky.”