Beautiful Ruins (87)

“Your mustache is gone,” she said, and then, “It’s Debra now. Debra Moore.”

“I’m sorry, Debra,” Alvis said, and sat down at the counter. He told her that his father was looking at buying a car dealership in Seattle and he’d sent Alvis out west to scout it.

It was strange bumping into Alvis in Seattle. Italy now seemed like a kind of interrupted dream for her; to see someone from that time was like déjà vu, like encountering a fictional character on the street. But he was charming and easy to talk to, and she found it a relief to be with someone who knew her whole story. She realized that lying to everyone about what had happened had been like holding her breath for the last year.

They had dinner, drinks. Alvis was funny and she felt comfortable immediately with him. His father’s car dealerships were thriving, and that was nice, too, being with a man who could clearly take care of himself. He kissed her cheek at the door to her apartment.

The next day, Alvis came by the lunch counter again, and said that he needed to admit something: it was no accident that he’d found her. She’d told him about herself in those last days in Italy—they had taken a boat together to La Spezia and he’d accompanied her on the train to the Rome airport—and that she figured she’d go back to Seattle. To do what? Alvis had asked. She’d shrugged and said that she used to work at a big Seattle department store, thought maybe she’d go back. So when his father mentioned that he was looking at a Seattle Chevy dealership, Alvis jumped at the chance to find her.

He’d tried other department stores—the Bon Marché and Rhodes of Seattle—before someone at the perfume counter at Frederick and Nelson said there was a tall, blond girl named Debra who used to be an actress.

“So, you came all the way to Seattle . . . just to find me?”

“We are looking at a dealership here. But, yes, I was hoping to see you.” He looked around the lunch counter. “Do you remember, in Italy, you said you liked my book and I said I was having trouble finishing it? Do you remember what you said—‘Maybe it’s finished. Maybe that’s all there is’ ?”

“Oh, I wasn’t saying—”

“No, no,” he interrupted her. “It’s okay. I hadn’t written anything new in five years anyway. I just kept rewriting the same chapter. But you saying that, it was like giving me permission to admit that it’s all I had to say—that one chapter—and to go on with my life.” He smiled. “I didn’t go back to Italy this year. I think I’m done with all that. I’m ready to do something else.”

Something in the way he said those words—ready to do something else—struck her as intimately familiar; she had said the same thing to herself. “What are you going to do?”

“Well,” he said, “that’s what I wanted to talk to you about. What I would really like to do, more than anything, is . . . go hear some jazz.”

She smiled. “Jazz?”

Yes, he said. The concierge at his hotel had mentioned a club on Cherry Street, at the foot of the hill?

“The Penthouse,” she said.

He tapped his nose charades-style. “That’s the place.”

She laughed. “Are you asking me out, Mr. Bender?”

He gave that sly half-smile. “That depends, Miss Moore, on your answer.”

She took a deep, assessing look at him—question-mark posture, thin features, modish swoop of graying brown hair—and thought: Sure, why not.

There you go, Ron: there’s the love of her life.

Now, a block from Trader Vic’s, she saw Alvis’s Biscayne, parked with one tire partly on the curb. Had he been drinking at work? She looked inside the car, but except for a barely smoked cigarette in the ashtray, there was no evidence that this had been one of his binge days.

She walked into Trader Vic’s, into a burst of warm air and bamboo, tiki and totem, dugout canoe hung from the ceiling. She looked around the thatch-matted room for him, but the tables were packed with chattering couples and big round chairs and she couldn’t see him anywhere. After a minute, the manager, Harry Wong, was at her arm with a mai tai. “I think you need to catch up.” He pointed her to a table in the back and there she saw Alvis, a big wicker chair-back surrounding his head like a Renaissance halo. He was doing what Alvis did best: drinking and talking, lecturing some poor waiter who was doing everything he could to edge away. But Alvis had landed one of his big hands on the waiter’s arm and the poor kid was stuck.

She took the drink from Harry Wong. “Thanks for keeping him upright for me, Harry.” She tilted the glass, and the sweet liqueur and rum hit her throat, and Debra surprised herself by drinking half of it. She stared at the drink through eyes that had become bleary with tears. One day, when she was in high school, someone had slipped a note into her locker that read “You whore.” All that day she’d been pissed off until she got home that night and saw her mother, at which point she inexplicably broke into tears. It was how she felt now, the sight of Alvis—even Drunk Dr. Alvis, his lecturing alter ego—enough to break her up. She carefully dabbed her eyes, put the glass to her lips, and finished it. Then she gave the dead soldier to Harry. “Harry, could you bring us some water and maybe some food for Mr. Bender?”

Harry nodded.

She walked through the chattering crowd, catching eyes throughout the room, and picked up her husband’s lecture, Bobby-can-beat-LBJ, right at its apex: “. . . and I’d argue that the only significant accomplishment of the Kennedy administration, integration, actually belongs to Bobby anyway—and would you look at this woman!”