But this one didn’t have any routine to depend on. Her infrequent glance was one of a puzzled uncertainty. I decided that it was another instance of the courage of The Pill bringing the bored young wife out hunting for some action while hubby was up in Atlanta at another damned sales meeting. I wondered how she’d manage if I gave her no help at all.
What she did was get up and head for the women’s room. She had to walk behind me. So she dropped her lighter and it clinked off the tile and slid under my feet. I backed away so I could stoop and pick it up, but my heel came down on her sandaled toes. I recovered in time to keep from coming down with all my weight, but I came down hard enough to make her yelp with anguish. I turned around and she limped around in a little circle, saying, “Oh, dear God!” while I made apologetic sounds. Then we compounded it by both bending at the same instant to pick up the lighter. It was a solid, stinging impact, bone against bone, hard enough to unfocus her eyes and unhinge her knees. I caught her by the arms, moved her gently over, and propped her against the bar.
“Now I will bend over and pick up the lighter.”
“Please do,” she said in a small voice. She grasped the edge of the bar, head bowed, eyes shut.
I wiped the lighter off with the paper napkin from under my drink and placed it in front of her. “Are you all right?”
“I guess so. For a minute there my toes didn’t hurt at all.”
She straightened, picked the lighter off the bar, and made a rather wide circle around me and headed for the women’s room. I motioned the bartender over and said, “Amateur night?”
“New to me, sir. You got each other’s attention anyways.”
“House rules?”
“They say to me, they say, Jake, use your judgment.”
“So what do you say to me?”
“Well… how about bon voyage?”
“How was she doing before I showed, Jake?”
“There were two tried to move in on her, but she laid such a cool on them I cased her for strictly no action, that is, until she began to throw it at you.”
“She’s in the house?”
“I don’t know. I’d guess not, but I don’t know.”
When I heard the tack-tack of her heels on tile returning, I smiled at her and said, “I have liability coverage. Like for broken toes, concussion, lacerations.”
She stopped and looked up at me, head tilted. “I think it was a truck, but I didn’t get the license number. I could settle my claim for some medication, maybe. On the rocks.”
So I followed her and took the bar stool beside her and asked Jake for more of the same for two, and winked at him with the eye farther from her. Ritual of introduction, first names only. Trav and Penny. Ritual handshake. Her hand was very small and slender, fine-boned, long fingers. Faint pattern of freckles across nose and cheekbones. Perfume too musky-heavy for her, too liberally applied. I could detect no evidence of a removed ring on third finger left, no pale line or indentation of flesh.
We made the casual talk that is on one level, while we made speculative, sensual communication on the second level. Humid looks from the lady. Pressure of round knee against the side of my thigh when she turned to talk more directly to me. Parting of lips and the tongue tip moistening. But she was too edgy, somehow, too fumbly with cigarettes and purse and lighter and drink. And her component parts did not add up to a specific identity. Wig, makeup, and perfume were garishly obvious. Dress, manicure, diction were not.
So Trav was in town to see a man interested in putting some money in a little company called Floatation Associates, and Penny was a receptionist-bookkeeper in a doctor’s office. Trav wasn’t married, and Penny had been, four years ago, for a year, and it didn’t take. And it sure had been a rainy summer and fall. Too much humidity. And the big thing about Simon and Garfunkel was the words to the songs, reely. If you read the lyrics right along with the songs while the record was on, you know, the lyrics right on the record case, it could really turn you on, like that thing about Silence especially. Don’t you think, honest now, that when people like the same things and have enjoyed the same things, like before they ever met, Trav, it is sort of as if they had known each other a long time, instead of just meeting? And people don’t have enough chance to just talk. People don’t communicate anymore somehow, and so everybody goes around kind of lonesome and out of touch, sort of.