“CHECK, PLEASE”
THURSDAY, AUGUST 19, 2004
That day, sitting across from Victoria at the Sunrise Diner, Morris’s eyes kept investigating the way her blouse clung to her chest and her skirt clung to her hips; how her forearm muscles bulged when she brought a drink or a fork to her lips; and how other men in the diner took mental snapshots of her.
So Morris was mentally unprepared for Victoria’s question:
“Morris, how come you never talk about your wife? Tell me about her.”
He shrugged his shoulders and said, “Rona.” Because that pretty much said it all.
“That’s it?” Victoria giggled.
Morris felt a slight nudging of the Feldstein Anxiety Anticipation Index and began tapping his foot. Then he fidgeted with his wine glass, moving it from one side of the plate to the other and watching the streak of moisture it left. “What do you want to know?”
“What does she look like? Do you have a picture?”
A picture, he thought. He couldn’t remember the last time he looked at the picture of Rona buried in his wallet. He fumbled through his inside jacket pocket, unfolded the wallet, and produced the only three photographs it contained: two high school graduation pictures of Jeffrey and Caryn, and a photo circa the 1990s of him and Rona taken at a dinner function he couldn’t remember. Someone’s bar mitzvah or wedding. Or maybe one of those Celfex Employee Appreciation dinners he hated. They sat at a table cluttered with plates and glasses and a huge floral centerpiece. His arm was extended across the back of Rona’s chair. She assumed her standard pose: her head cocked at an odd angle, her eyes widened. In that photograph, her auburn hair fell below her shoulders. More recently, it was cropped, and assumed an unnatural red sheen.
He passed the picture to Victoria, who studied it closely. “Awwww, you’re cute.”
“Who, me?”
“Yes, you.”
“No. I’m not cute.”
“Well I think so.”
Victoria returned the picture, pressing it into Morris’s palm. And when she did, she let the tips of her fingers rest there, just for a moment. But long enough to send a jolt through Morris’s body, as if she had rubbed her feet on carpeting on a cold winter’s day and shocked him. So that he felt the hairs jump on the back of his neck and a tingle pass straight down his back and into his groin.
“Rona’s okay. But you know how it is.”
“I know. Jerry.”
“You drift apart.”
“Eighteen years. That son of a bitch.”
“You run out of things to say.”
“But you never stop fighting.”
“We don’t fight,” said Morris.
“You will.”
“She just doesn’t . . . understand me anymore.”
“Jerry never listened. Never.”
“You develop separate interests.”
“Like a pizza girl. That—”
“It becomes . . . boring.”
“Painful.”
“Suddenly you have nothing in common. Nothing. Rona loves to watch the news. I love watching the Mets.”
“Let’s go Mets. Doubleheader tonight. Benson is pitching. Bad trade, I think. How about you?”
That was it. That was the moment. A question about Rona, with a follow-up question about the Mets’ pitching rotation. Marking the one time that Morris could not keep his feet reliably on the ground. Because Victoria D’Amico had swept him off his feet. Rona didn’t know the difference between Benson and Leiter. And here was Victoria—not exactly The Bill James Baseball Abstract, but she understood Morris. At his most primitive level. The Mets.
As they drank the last of their wine, Victoria looked at her watch and exclaimed, “Oh my God, Morris, we’ve been here so long we can go right to dinner. Or skip the diner and go right to the Bayview!” And giggled.
The Bayview was the Bellmore Bayview Motor Inn. It was also known as the “Pay-Per-View Motor Inn,” the “Bellmore Bordello,” and “Schtups-R-Us.” And if you were slinging back a beer at Flanagan’s Pub, which was just adjacent to the Bayview, you would here this joke:
“Question. How many people does it take to screw in a lightbulb at the Bayview?”
“I dunno. How many?”
“Two to do the screwing and—hold it—since when does the Bayview have lightbulbs! Ha!”
Unfortunately for Morris—or fortunately, depending on how one looks at it—when Victoria made that crack about skipping dinner and going straight to the Bayview, he wasn’t in his joke-receiving position. He was in no position at all to defend against a joke, now that he had lost his footing. So he responded, “Yeah, we sure could.”
To which Victoria curled her lips devilishly and said, “Oh, and don’t you just wish.” Which also verged on humor in the playful, flirtatious “I-could-be-kidding-but-maybe-not, let’s-just-see-how-you-respond” kind of way.
But Morris didn’t receive that as a joke, either. He looked at Victoria seriously, even sadly, and said, “I do wish.”
Which even caught Victoria off guard. Oh my God! Did he just say what I thought he said? He just crawled out on a limb? Now what do I do? Saw off the limb? That would be some reward for being honest. And look at those puppy dog eyes!
Victoria had a soft spot for honest men, puppies, and international drug counterfeiters.
The Feldstein Anxiety Anticipation Index began its inexorable ascent, forcing Morris to blurt out, “I’m kidding,” and then laugh, as if he were only kidding. He tried to regain his joke-receiving footing, like a staggering fighter who had just taken a sucker punch.
But it was too late.
“Let’s go!” Victoria declared.
Now, Morris had to retract his retraction, otherwise he would have caused irreparable offense to Victoria and lost an opportunity to see her naked. So he promptly said, “Okay!”
And then there was the ritual diplomacy and negotiations that often accompany such arrangements:
“I mean, if you would, I would,” said Victoria.
“Do you want to?”
“Do you?”
“If you do,” Morris offered.
“I have three more appointments—”
“I have to get back to Doctor Kirleski—”
“Oh.”
Silence.
“Tonight?” Victoria suggested.
“You mean tonight—as in when today ends?” asked Morris.
“No?”
“No?”
“I mean,” stammered Victoria, “yes. I was asking ‘no’ as a question. I would go. After work. Only if you can, Morris.”
“I can.”
“Me too!”
“Waitress! Check, please!”
When the check came, the formerly good and decent model citizen Morris Feldstein reached across the depravity line. So flummoxed was he that he grabbed the first credit card in his wallet that his thumb touched, which just happened to be his Celfex-issued American Express card.
It was so unused that he hadn’t even signed the back.