7
THE LUNCH COUNTER at Watson’s Drug Store was crowded, mostly with local businesspeople ordering hot turkey sandwiches and meatloaf and burgers. Ivy was supposed to meet a client for lunch, a woman named Linda Marvel, who honestly didn’t seem to know what a great, sideshow-sounding name she had. She and her husband wanted to buy a bungalow on Center Street that was priced a little steep, and Linda had a moderate dose of buyer’s remorse, although it was nothing she couldn’t be talked out of. Right now she was nowhere to be seen.
Ivy stood near the magazine rack and looked at the people who occupied the tables. Lots of them wore coats and ties, and she was suddenly glad she’d worn her wool suit. She hated to look unprofessional when she was working. Better to overdo it a little bit than to underdo it. Half of the people gobbling lunch at the tables qualified as old-timers. That was one of Walt’s great goals in life, to be recognized as an old-timer at the lunch counter.
Watson’s had been there since the 1920s and had gone largely unchanged through the years—lots of chrome fixtures and red Naugahyde that was meant to be stylish back around 1945. They made big milkshakes on one of the old Waring machines, using real ice cream and whole milk and flavored syrups, and served it in those big stainless-steel buckets that easily held two full glasses. Walt always acted pettish when she wanted to share one, but she usually got her way by bringing up the subject of calories and waistlines. Today was strictly iced tea, though, unless Linda wanted to share one of the shakes, in which case she’d drink it for the sake of business. Any sacrifice for a sale.
Right now the Marvels lived out in Mission Viejo, and liked the “personality” of downtown Orange, especially since the suburbs of Mission Viejo and Irvine had almost no personality at all. That’s why Watson’s Drug Store was perfect for their meeting. It had ambience to spare. It was a place where you saw your postman eating a sandwich and where the druggist knew your name. They still served vanilla Cokes at the fountain.
A couple in a corner booth got up and left, and Ivy pounced on the table before anyone else made a rush for it. She ordered an iced tea from the waitress and relaxed, sliding her purse and attaché case onto the adjacent chair. The house the Marvels wanted to buy was worth every penny of the asking price, even in today’s market. It had already been extensively restored, and the tiled kitchen had a walk-in pantry, a Sub-Zero refrigerator, and a Wolf stove with a big copper hood. There was a fireplace in the master bedroom, and adjacent to that was a small room that had already been turned into a nursery, with a frieze around the walls depicting fairy-tale scenes, all of it framed in wood. The Marvels were the perfect owners for the house. Linda was three months pregnant.
Ivy realized she envied the woman—her baby, the house, the fact that her husband made a hundred and fifty thousand a year and they could afford this dream house without thinking about it more than twice. When she had shown it to them for the first time a week ago, Linda had become a sort of happy-faced zombie, drifting from room to room in a trance, until Bill, her husband, had said to her, in a voice that sounded like he’d been practicing in front of the mirror, “Darling, say the word.”
That was it. Linda had said the word right there on the spot, like something out of a Doris Day movie circa 1955. She spun around and shouted “Oh, yes! Darling!” and they’d kissed each other right there in the empty living room. Actually it had been fairly wonderful. Ivy had very nearly kissed him too. She’d been calculating the commission in her head all that afternoon, and what it added up to, from her perspective and Linda’s both, was Bill being the hero of the week. He was handsome, too, in a weathered sort of way. Probably he was a creep in some other area: came home late and got drunk in front of the television.
The waitress brought her iced tea and a menu, and she told herself to cut it out. Still, she couldn’t help thinking about her and Walt—how devoted he was to their house, their neighborhood. He was stodgy; that was the only word for it. The idea of change gave him heartburn. She had tried him out once—suggested that they move into a house that had just been listed with the agency. It was a steal. They could have moved up by a factor of fifty thousand dollars and not felt it once they refinanced, except for the increase in property taxes. But the very idea of it had left him speechless with dismay. He wasn’t interested, he’d said, in the mathematics of investment, only in “the damage” it would do to his soul.
What it boiled down to, she had finally decided, was that he couldn’t give up his sheds in the backyard. Sheds were some kind of philosophy to him. Last night he had gone on and on about them, all worked up, about how the best sheds were built out of used materials, old boards and cinderblocks, and about how that made his new tin shed from Sears inferior, except that, he’d said very seriously, there was something “nicely musical” about the sound of a new tin shed in the rain.
That’s why he didn’t need any children, Ivy figured; he had all these sheds in the backyard, each one with its own personality. Ivy had told him as much last night. She had advised him to go ahead and build one more shed, maybe out of brick this time, in order to organize them into a basketball team. They could play in the shed leagues. Ivy could be a team mom, and the two of them could drive the sheds back and forth to games in the back of the Suburban. Walt had laughed as if he thought it was funny and then had turned over and pretended to go to sleep. That was the end of the conversation.
She looked out the window at the street. It had started to rain. There was only one customer at the outside tables, and when the wind blew the rain under the canvas awning, he grabbed his half-full coffee cup and headed for the door.
Abruptly she recognized him, just at the moment that he saw her through the window. He waved at her and smiled, looking pleased, and although she hated herself for doing it, she smiled back. Probably she couldn’t manage to look authentically pleased no matter how hard she tried. Thank heaven she had an excuse not to sit with him; it would simply be too difficult.
He came across to her table, and she stood up, taking his hand when he held it out and trying to hold onto the smile, too, reminding herself to let bygones be bygones, especially with a man like Robert Argyle, who, as much as she hated to say it, had acquired a certain amount of power in the city—multiple businesses, charities, residential and commercial properties…. Because of Walt, she couldn’t bring herself to refer to him as anything but Argyle. Walt had banished his Christian name and most often turned his last name into a joke, predictably having to do with socks. She and Walt had carefully avoided him over the past couple of years that they’d been neighbors. When it had been absolutely necessary, a nod or a monosyllable had been enough. Three years ago he had run for school board, and Ivy had to stop Walt from driving around the neighborhoods and vandalizing his campaign signs.
But, God, his face had gotten coarse over the years. He looked almost grainy, and his eyes were too active, as if he were afraid of something. Gravity hadn’t been kind to him, and he was getting a little jowly. He was tall—taller than Walt, who was nearly six-two—and had always walked with just a slight stoop, as if he’d been timid and withdrawn as a child. His hair was still just as brown as it had been when they had dated in college. Walt’s was gray at the temples, but Argyle looked older than Walt despite that.
He put his coffee cup on the next table, which was cluttered with dirty dishes, and then asked, “Can I join you?”
She thought immediately of Walt’s stock rejoinder: “What’s the matter, do I look like I’m coming apart?” and she nearly giggled out loud, realizing at the same time that she was nervous. There was too much history between them for it to be any other way. Sometimes things broke and you couldn’t fix them. It was better to throw them away.
“Only for a moment,” she said. “I’m afraid I’m meeting a client.”
“Good. That’s nothing to be afraid of. In this economy, any business is good business.”
He looked searchingly at her, as if he were trying to see if there was anything in her face that he could read, some evidence that she still carried a torch for him, perhaps a candle, a lighted match…. Whatever kind of man he had been twenty years ago, he was made of something different now. The years had turned him upside down and shaken all the good things out of his pockets, unless you counted money as a good thing, and in his case it wasn’t. Aunt Jinx had called him a “husk” once, when Walt was going on about him, which was the word Jinx used for worthless, empty men. Ivy wondered now if that was fair. The evidence was twenty years old. Maybe there was a statute of limitations on that kind of thing.
Argyle remained standing as he talked, and she realized that she’d tuned him out. “… a couple of industrial properties over on Batavia, if you’re interested,” he said.
She nodded. What was this, a business proposition? “I’m sorry,” she said. “I thought I saw my client coming in. What were you saying?”
He looked at her for a moment before speaking. “I was wondering whether you were interested in listing a couple of pieces of property.”
The idea struck her as odd. The last time she had spoken to him he’d—what?—propositioned her; there was nothing else to call it. She’d put him off pretty hard. Of course she hadn’t told Walt, who would simply have gone out of his mind. So the suggestion that they have dealings of any sort, even business dealings, was a complete surprise. Her first impulse was to turn him down.
But if there was ever a time that she and Walt needed the income from commissions, it was now. Why not take the man’s money? Walt was determined to make his business work, and he deserved to. Probably he would make it work, given enough time, because as screwball as some of his ideas could be, he had a certain strange genius for seeing the sense in nonsense, and making other people see it too. Not that catalogue sales was nonsense—Argyle apparently had done all right with his own mail-order businesses over the years….
“Perhaps I could drop by the office,” she said to him. Breakfast or lunch was out of the question.
“Tomorrow, then?”
“Make it day after tomorrow, can you? I’m going over to my sister’s tomorrow.”
“That’s fine,” he said. “Morning? Say ten?”
“Ten’s fine.” She wondered why she’d mentioned her sister. Her personal life wasn’t any business of Argyle’s, and hadn’t been for a long time.
“How is Darla? I haven’t seen her in …” He shook his head, as if he was unable to remember.
“She’s fine,” Ivy said.
“What was her husband’s name?”
“Jack.”
“They’re still happy, then?”
“Tolerably. You know—ups and downs, like the rest of the world.”
“You’re not giving anything away, are you?” He smiled wistfully. “You aren’t still hard on me, are you?”
There was no answer to the question; whatever she was, it had little to do with him. The waitress approached just then, carrying the iced tea pitcher. Argyle pulled his lunch check out of his shirt pocket along with a five-dollar bill and waved it at her, smiling broadly and starting to say something.
And at that moment the check and the five-dollar bill burst into flame, flaring up like burning phosphorus with a bright, white glow. He dropped it on the ground, jerking his hand back and shaking it as if he’d been burned. The waitress, without seeming to think twice about it, bent over and poured iced tea on the burning paper, which fizzled out.
She picked it up and looked at the five-dollar bill, which was charred black along one edge. She shrugged. “Looks okay,” she said. “No harm done.” A busboy appeared and wiped up the floor with a rag, and at that moment Linda Marvel came in through the front door carrying a dripping umbrella. Ivy waved at her and motioned her over, relieved to be saved from Argyle, who seemed to be embarrassed nearly to the point of apoplexy. He stood unblinking, gaping at the waitress, then opened and closed his mouth like a fish.
“I guess the candle …” He gestured, not finishing the sentence. He tried to piece his smile back together. Linda slid past him and sat down in the empty seat. “Oh, yes,” he said. “I’ll just … I’ll leave you two alone.” He rubbed his hands together, looking detached, as if he’d been tapped on the shoulder by a ghost.
“Did you burn yourself?” Ivy asked.
“No. Not at all. Thursday, then?”
“Fine. Ten.”
He nodded and fled, going out through the door and into the rain where he hurried away down the sidewalk on foot, pulling his coat shut and angling out into the street.
“Do you want the candle relit?” the waitress asked, pouring what was left of the iced tea into Ivy’s glass. “I don’t know why it was lit anyway. Usually we don’t light them until later. A customer must have lit it.”
“I don’t think it was lit,” Ivy said. “Do we need a candle?” She looked at Linda, who shook her head. “I guess we don’t care about the candle.” She touched the bumpy glass vase that the candle was in. The glass was cool.
The waitress shrugged, and Ivy looked out the window again, distracted now. She could still see Argyle, far down the block, hurrying through the rain in the direction of Maple Street, probably heading home. He cut a very small and sorry figure from this distance, and Ivy was suddenly struck with the notion that whatever power he’d ever had over her had been illusory. Had she changed? He certainly had. There was a loud crack of thunder just then, and the rain poured down in a torrent, concealing him altogether behind a gray veil of mist.