“Do you like that type of woman?” Marino asked.
He hesitated. “No, sir. To be honest.”
Marino laughed, leaned forward and said to him, “Hey. Me, I don’t like those types either. Like the pastel babes better.”
I gave the real Marino one of my looks.
He ignored me as on-screen he said to Hunt, “Tell me some more about Beryl, about what you picked up.”
Hunt frowned, thinking hard. “The pastel shades she sent out weren’t all that unusual except I didn’t interpret them as fragile, exactly. Not passive, either. The shades were cooler, arctic, as I’ve said, versus flower shades. As if she were telling the world to keep away from her, to give her a lot of space.”
“Like maybe she was frigid?”
Hunt fidgeted with his 7-Up can again. “No, sir, I don’t think I can say that. In fact, I don’t think I was picking up that. Distance is what came to mind. A vast distance one would have to travel to get to her. But if you did, if she ever let you get close, she would burn you with her intensity. That’s where the white-hot signals came in, the thing that made her stand out to me. She was intense, very intense. I had the feeling she was very intelligent, very complicated. Even when she was off sitting alone on her bench and not paying anybody any attention, her mind was working. She was picking up on everything around her. She was distant and white-hot like a star.”
“Did you notice she was single?”
“She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring,” Hunt replied without pause. “I assumed she was single. I didn’t notice anything about her car to tell me otherwise.”
“I don’t get it.” Marino looked confused. “How could you tell from her car?”
“I think it was the second time she brought it in. I was watching one of the guys clean out the interior and there wasn’t anything masculine inside. Her umbrella, for example–it was on the floor in back and was one of these slender blue umbrellas women usually carry, versus the black ones with big wooden handles men carry. Her dry cleaning was also in the back and it looked like women’s clothing in the bags, no men’s garments. Most married ladies pick up their husband’s clothing when they pick up their own. Also, the trunk. No tools, jumper cables. Nothing masculine.
It’s interesting, but when you see cars all day long, you start to notice these details and make assumptions about the drivers without really thinking about it.”
“Sounds like you did think about it in her case,” Marino said. “Did it ever cross your mind to ask her out, Al? You sure you didn’t know her name, didn’t notice it on her dry cleaning slip, maybe on a piece of mail she left inside her car?”
Hunt shook his head. “I didn’t know her name. Maybe I didn’t want to know it.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know …” He became uneasy, confused.
“Come on, Al. You can tell me. Hey, maybe I would have wanted to ask her out, you know? She’s a good-looking lady, interesting. Hey, I would have thought about it, probably would have gotten her name on the sly, maybe even tried to ring her up.”
“Well, I didn’t.” Hunt stared down at his hands. “I didn’t try any of that.”
“Why not?”
Silence.
Marino said, “Maybe because you had a woman like her once and she burned you?”
Silence.
“Hey, it happens to all of us, Al.”
“In college,” Hunt replied almost inaudibly. “I went out with a girl. For two years. She ended up with some guy in med school. Women like that … they look for certain types. You know, when they start thinking about settling down.”
“They look for the big shots.”
Marino’s voice was getting sharp around the edges. “The lawyers, doctors, bankers. They don’t look for guys working in car washes.”
Hunt’s head jerked up. “I wasn’t working in a car wash then.”
“Don’t matter, Al. The blue-chip babes like Beryl Madison ain’t likely to give you the time of day, right? Bet Beryl didn’t even know you were alive, right? Bet she wouldn’t have recognized you if you’d run into her damn car on a street somewhere …”