12

Millie wore a white silk blouse and a long black skirt, and when we went to our table, enough heads turned to make me realize that I was not an observant man. For six years it had not occurred to me that Millie was a very beautiful woman.

“You know, this is the first time I’ve ever been here, Al,” she said after we had ordered. I had told her my thoughts, and she said, “I’m not a beautiful woman, not in this town. I’m tall and skinny, so I pass with a long skirt. A beautiful woman gets taken to Chasin’s at least once before she’s thirty.”

“Are you thirty?”

“Next month.”

“How come you never got married?”

“I told you.”

“I mean again.”

“It’s a buyer’s market. Oh, Christ, Al, the whole thing stinks. You buy me a steak and then you take me to Chasin’s, and you’re a hero because you got up enough guts to ask a woman who’s been sleeping around like a high-class pro for a dozen years to give you a divorce, and like a fat little kid you run to Rosie Krantz to let all your friends know that finally Al Brody is a man, or what passes for one in this stinkhole we inhabit. And now you want me to pat you on the back and tell you how flattered I am because maybe you might ask me to marry you.”

“That’s a hell of a thing to say. You don’t only put in a knife, you like to twist it.”

“Yes, I like to. I love you. That never occurred to you, did it?”

“No one loves me.”

“Poor fat, bald Al Brody. No one loves him. I went to bed with him because he bought me a New York steak. I go to bed with anyone who buys me a steak. That’s part of the course.”

Then I had nothing to say, and I just sat there. Two or three people stopped at the table and said hello, and I said hello and introduced Millie. Then I sat in silence again.

“It’s going to be a long evening if you don’t say anything, Al.”

I turned and stared at her, and then I touched her arm as if I wanted to be sure it was still there, and then I said, “Will you stop eating for a moment?”

“I’m hungry.”

“You eat like a truck driver. Why don’t you get fat?”

“I only eat like a truck driver when someone else is paying for it. Why should I stop eating?”

“Because I want to talk to you. I don’t like women who talk while they chew.”

“How about men?”

“Go to hell.”

“That’s nice.” She stopped eating. “OK—what?”

“What did you mean when you said you loved me?”

“Figure it out.”

“I can’t.”

“Try.”

“Would you marry me?” I asked her.

“That’s both subjunctive and conditional. Try will.”

“If you want it that way. Will you marry me?”

“No.”

“You can go on eating,” I said. “I’m seventeen years older than you, and I am also, as you take great pleasure in pointing out, fat and bald.”

“All of which has nothing to do with it.”

“What has?”

“You hate yourself, and you’re always trying to prove something so that you’ll hate yourself a little less. Only you never prove it, do you? I don’t want to marry anyone who hates himself. It’s too painful.”

“Maybe it’s better than hating others.”

“It’s the same dish. Oh, God, Al, what’s the use of talking about something like this? I was very content here tonight before you began to talk about marriage.”

“All right, I’ll change the subject. I offered you a partnership. That was neither subjunctive nor conditional. What about it?”

“I gave it some thought. I don’t think I want it.”

“Why?” I insisted.

“Lots of reasons, Al. For one thing, I care about you, and not the way a partner should. Anyway, I’m not sure I want to be a flak.”

“You’ve been working for me six years.”

“Well, the days pass. Anyway, that’s not it—not all of it. I don’t like what happens to you, and what you do. If I were your partner, I’d argue about that. We’d be at each other over what you do, and that would be no good, would it?”

“Like for instance?”

“Like the senator, for instance. I wouldn’t have him as a client for all the gold at Fort Knox. I’d tell him to take his lousy political sinecure and shove it up you know where.”

“Maybe you’re right. What else?”

“You want it plain and ugly?”

“Might as well. At least it’s honest,” I said.

“I don’t know what’s honest anymore, Al. Like Rosie Krantz and trading shots. You don’t even know whether Evelyn will give you a divorce—and then you broadcast it all over town.”

“That’s me, not the business.”

“All right, let’s get down to Andrew Capestone. You’re the best public relations man in Los Angeles, and you haven’t had a five-thousand-dollar client in years. Now you’re pulling out all the stops for Capestone—and there’s something wrong about the whole show.”

“I made the senator—you know that. All those years I built that image of his. He didn’t exist.”

“So what? You were paid. You build images. You hate it, but now you’re trying to prove something with Capestone. If you hate it so, why don’t you get out of it?”

“And do what?”

“I don’t know. Run a gas station. Write a book. Grow oranges. You have enough money to do anything you want to do.”

“I am what I am.”

“No, you’re not,” she said, dabbing at her eyes with her napkin. “You don’t have the vaguest notion what you are, and now you’ve ruined my makeup.”