Writers & Lovers(29)
‘They didn’t mean to.’
‘I’m not so sure. John’s pretty good at math.’
‘The prices are in tiny font, way over to the side. No dollar signs. He might not have seen or understood.’
He nods reluctantly. ‘And you let him get away with it.’
‘He was wearing a bow tie.’
He looks at his feet, fighting a grin. He has on beat-up hiking boots with red laces. He lifts his eyes up to me but not his head, and his eyes are even greener now because light from the deck is coming in over my shoulder. ‘I suppose I’d rather think of him as unperceptive than unethical. At any rate, I owe you sixty-three fifty, plus tip.’
‘I already cashed out.’
He holds out a stack of twenties, fresh from the ATM. ‘You have to take it.’
I shake my head. ‘Happy birthday.’
‘I’m not leaving till you take it.’
I step back. ‘Your boys wanted to treat you. I just helped them out a bit. I’ve got to get back to my side work.’
‘Then I’m just going to leave it right here.’ He drops the bills on the floor. They fan out. Four twenties.
‘I’m not picking that up.’ I turn around and walk through the wait station into the kitchen.
After a while Marcus finds me. He’s holding a pink envelope with a white iris in the corner.
‘Just let the customers pay for their own meals, okay? Even if they look like Kevin Costner.’
Kevin Costner? Oscar Kolton was a lot better looking than Kevin Costner.
He gives me the envelope.
In small, unslanted print it says:
Casey
(interesting name)
I don’t open it. I put it in my apron pocket and finish my side work.
Out on the street, daylight surprises me. Somehow between the top floor and the bottom I forgot I worked brunch, not dinner. The Square is quiet. I head to the river on foot. My dinner shift starts in less than an hour. I’m still in my uniform. The sun has come out and burned off most of the rain. I feel the sun on my back, the warmed air on my arms. I walk up the Larz Anderson Bridge, thinking of Faulkner and Quentin Compson, remembering Quentin as I would an old love, with a swollen heart, Quentin who buckled under the weight of Southern sins, who cracked the crystal on the corner of the dresser and twisted the hands off his grandfather’s watch his last morning and, later in the afternoon, cleaned his hat with a brush before he left his Harvard dorm room to kill himself.
Halfway across the river I hoist myself on the wide parapet, swing my legs over the edge, and look down in the water for Quentin’s body. How does a man in Mississippi in the 1920s create a character who feels more alive to a waitress in 1997, remembered with more tenderness, than most of the boys she’s ever known? How do you create a character like that? The concrete is warm. A few people walk by on the sidewalk behind me. A quick shove and I’d go down like Quentin. But I wouldn’t die. The drop isn’t more than twenty feet, either bank an easy swim. Quentin tied flat irons to his ankles in order to drown.
I open the envelope. Four twenties and a note. I was hoping for a note.
Casey,
A lot of creeps have probably asked you to play miniature golf with them. John and Jasper are not creeps so that’s 2 out of 3. They begged me all the way down the stairs to ask you. So I’m asking. 538-9771. I’ll call you here at Iris in a few days. We like King Putt out on Route 12. Lots of mummies and asps.
Oscar K.
I stay on the bridge for the time I have left. I read Oscar’s note once more. The bow of a crew shell appears below my feet and lurches out of the bridge in two strong, synchronized pulls. They are women, eight of them, facing backward, faces wrenched to snarls, groaning in rhythm each time they heave with their whole bodies their one oar through the water, which seems from this angle to have the resistance of cement. In the brief pause between groans, as they slide back, the coxswain, a peanut in a baseball cap tucked down in the stern, speaks through a headset: ‘Build in two . . . build in one . . . on this one: Go!’ And the boat jerks forward and the strokes become fiercer and their sounds disappear, and they become smaller and smaller until they slide under the Weeks Bridge and vanish.
I take out Oscar’s letter again. I like the sentence: ‘So I’m asking.’ I like thinking of him in Marcus’s office, crossing out words, not wanting to ask for another piece of the pink Iris stationery, like me writing to Mr. and Mrs. Richard Totman of Weston. It gives me pleasure that a writer of three books would labor even a little over a note to a brunch waitress. He didn’t cross out his phone number as heavily as in the other places. I vowed never to hit a golf ball again, but I might have to make an exception for him and those little boys.
On my third birthday my father gave me a set of plastic clubs in a plaid golf bag. There was a cup you had to hit the ball into and my father put it on the rug a few feet away and showed me how to swing and I swung and it went in. My father says I didn’t open any of my other presents, that I played with that set till bedtime. My mother says my father forced me to play with that set until bedtime. By the time I was fully conscious, my life outside of school was golf—at four I was playing in local eight and unders, and by six we were traveling to national tournaments. Like many parents, my father wanted to give me what he didn’t get, then he wanted me to get what he couldn’t reach.