The Twelve O'clock Chapters 1-17

"What do you mean complicated?" Billie Cooper says, looking up from the electric typewriter she's been making sweet music on.

"I told you before," I say, "you use too many words, very long sentences, and sometimes it's hard to follow." I show her a sentence on the page I've been proofreading. "See, eight lines plus six words, including three 'ands' - one, two, three; two ‘buts’ - one, two; four 'which’s' - one, two, three, four; and a dangling participle, this is a dangling participle. You also left out at least two verbs, here and here, which really confuses me."

"I write too fast," she says, taking the page from me, peering at it intently.

"Then simplify. That's all you need to do," I say. "Break up this long sentence, make it into maybe three or four short sentences, and you don't have a problem."

"Okay, fine," she says, an obvious tightness in her voice. "I'll do it."

"You don't have to do it. I'll take care of it," I say, snatching the page back from her.

"No, I don't want you to take care of it," she says sharply, reaching for the page and grabbing it from me. "I'll do it myself."

We're sitting across from one another at the dining room table. For her economics class she's writing a paper that's due on Tuesday. Her conclusion that American-style socialism keeps American-style capitalism from falling into the ashcan I totally agree with. Why then, I ask myself, did I rub her nose in that lousy paragraph, when I should have been concentrating on its content and shortened the damn sentence myself, as I'm still willing to do, except now I'm afraid to mention it to her. Instead I stare gloomily at her, feeling guilty, wishing I could take back everything I’d said about the paper, while she, hunched over the typewriter, fingers flying across its keys, ignores me.

What extraordinary talent, I think, to be able to concentrate like that, putting thoughts into words in her head, as simultaneously typing at the speed of light. But in everything she does she's quick, focused, and energetic, so I'm not surprised. She's also a pleaser, burdened since birth with this irrepressible need to make other people happy. The next time she looks up at me, she's relaxed and clear, and smiling warmly. Turning off the typewriter, she reminds me she's promised we'd go to Dr. Minzeezi's fundraiser at the college. To get dressed and drive to the campus in less than an hour isn't a problem for her, but I can't move as swiftly as she does. While I'm still putting on my shoes, she's ready to head out the back door. "I hate to be late," she says, glancing anxiously at me, as if she thinks I'm conspiring to make us late, but I'm not, and we aren't.

When we arrive at the college center, Minzeezi's friends and supporters, as well as students from his anthropology classes, crowd the main meeting hall. Classmates Billie's been close to since she started school at night have saved seats for us. On the speaker's platform Dr. Minzeezi is arranging his notes and making nervous attempts to adjust the microphone. Flashing his irresistible smile at us, as the students, led by Billie, applaud noisily, he begins by reviewing why he and others in the audience have organized the Healthy Mouth Opportunities Group to raise funds to build a dental clinic in his native village in Sundazi.

"If we stick together, the clinic will be built, and the people in the village will get the kinds of modern, clean, safe dental services they so desperately need," he proclaims proudly, in his robust Sundazian-accented English. "What they have now, as I told you when we met in December and raised more than seven hundred dollars, thanks to your very great generosity, is outmoded, badly maintained, and under-staffed. Three or four or maybe five or more villages in Sundazi share one dentist, and the equipment he has is so inadequate it can be extremely dangerous to patients with diabetes or high blood pressure."

Describing in excessive detail how most of the villagers have major tooth and gum problems, he shows slides of sore mouths, blistered gums, and rotting teeth. Half of the audience holds their hands over their eyes. When the wrinkled face of a gray-stubbled man with a carbuncle on his chin, a nasty boil on his tongue, and no visible teeth, comes on the screen, the woman in front of me slumps back in her chair as if she can't stand looking at him and in self-defense has passed out.

Funds are desperately needed, Minzeezi says, stressing that Sundazians, badly damaged by European colonialism, don't produce enough nutritional foods to keep them healthy. Snapping off the projector to a mass sigh of relief from the audience, he announces that at least four of his students, including Billie, are thinking seriously about going with him to Sundazi. When he calls her name, she rises quietly to her feet, looking pleased with herself and also, I think, guilty. That she'd be willing to abandon me to run off to Sundazi with him is so unexpected I try to yank her down into her seat, but she squirms away from me.

Doesn’t she realize she's never once told me why she’s contemplating betraying me like this with a guy she hardly knows except for his being her anthropology teacher? It affects me directly, doesn't it? Can she possibly deny she has an obligation to discuss with me her going to Sundazi before he tells me about it? And hasn't it occurred to her that maybe I'd object, or feel ignored or put down, or resent being treated with such indifference and contempt? But how can I say anything to her about any of this without embarrassing her? She's among her friends. Minzeezi is standing beside her. His appeal has raised an additional $926 for the clinic. Hugging everybody he can get his arms around, he kisses Billie on both cheeks and gives me a vigorous handshake. If I didn't love the clinic and getting those people's teeth fixed so much, I would have walked out. When we get to the car, Billie's still excited, and I'm ready to blow up. I don't mean to yell at her but I can't help myself. "You should've told me! I didn't know a damn thing about it until he introduces you and says you're going to Sundazi with him. I couldn't believe it."

"I did tell you," she says.

"No, you didn't."

"Yes, I did."

"When?"

"When I got home after Thursday night's class," she says, "we had a long conversation about it."

"We didn't have a long conversation about it, I say. "I'd remember a long conversation, wouldn't I? And I don't remember."

"Because you don't listen. You never listen," she says. "You're so wrapped up in yourself you don't hear a word I say. But I did tell you. I guarantee I told you, and I don't want to talk about it, okay?"

No, it's not okay, but regardless of what I say, or how I plead with her, she refuses to talk about it, or anything else, or even look at me. Is that fair, when I'm so agitated? Don't I deserve a reply, if my question is reasonable? Yet the entire trip back to our West Hollywood apartment I don't get a single answer out of her. How frustrating, I think, and rude. While I'm pulling open the garage door, she disappears into the apartment.

The light in the upstairs bathroom comes on, as I'm hurrying across the backyard to the apartment's rear door. Maybe she's calmed down. At least she hasn't locked me out. Immediately I go upstairs. The bathroom door is shut. I hear water running. I call softly to her. She doesn't respond. I again call softly. Again she doesn't respond. The water is turned off. Knocking on the door, I jiggle its knob. "Don't come in," she says.

I apologize. "You're right," I say. "Sometimes I don't listen like I should." I offer to make her favorite black olive scrambled eggs. "You must be hungry." When she again doesn't answer, I go back downstairs, get an apple out of the refrigerator, munch on it furiously, then race upstairs to confront her as she exits naked from the bathroom, carrying what she'd worn to the fundraiser - jeans, underwear, and the tan cashmere sweater I'd given her two weeks ago on her twenty-eighth birthday.

Dumping her jeans and underwear on the bedroom's upholstered armchair, she gets a flannel nightgown from her part of the closet and quickly puts it on. She's carefully folding the cashmere sweater, when suddenly she bursts out laughing. "This is silly. I've done nothing I shouldn’t have done. I told you about Sundazi. I didn't make a secret commitment to Minzeezi. And I haven't tried to hide from you that I'm thinking seriously about helping him to get his clinic built. That's what we both want, isn't it?" she said.

“Of course, it's what we both want," I say.

Throwing her arms around my neck, she gives me the wettest, most eye-popping kiss I'd ever gotten from her, knocking both of us down on the bed. Stripping off our clothes, we make great, joyful, exhausting love and fall peacefully asleep in one another's arms. Then abruptly I wake up. Untangling myself from her, I go to the bathroom. She's awake, when I come back to bed. I glance at the clock. It's almost four-thirty. She can't keep her eyes open, she says. I can't fall back to sleep. "I'm worried about Minzeezi," I say.

"You're jealous," she mumbles, rolling against me, hooking her arm across my chest.

"I don't trust him," I say

Groggily she snorts something that doesn't sound defensive or annoyed, which gives me courage to tell her how humiliated I am that she's still debating whether to choose me over him. "Suppose the situation is reverse," I say, "and I have to decide between you and some other woman. How would you feel, if I couldn't make up my mind?"

"That's not what's happening," she says.

"It's happening to me," I say, "so I'm warning you I intend to do everything I can to prevent you from going anywhere with him."

Instantly she's wide-awake and making disapproving faces at me, despite my clumsy attempt to explain I didn't mean to insult her, that my tremendous panic about losing her is my fault not hers, that humiliated is an overstatement, and that disappointed is more accurate and less hurtful, because I'm deeply disappointed she hasn't talked openly to me about Sundazi, which, in an outraged voice, I blame on Minzeezi.

Pushing me roughly away from her, she bounces off the bed.

"This proves it," she screams. "You don't respect me. You don't respect me as a woman. You don't accept I can make decisions as a woman on my own. What you want to do is to control me, and don't try to deny it, because your only choice, if I do decide to go to Sundazi, and you sincerely want me to come back to you, is to stop telling me what to do. Is that too much to ask?"

Out of bed and on my feet, shouting so loud I shock both of us, I passionately remind her how splendid our days together have been, pointing out that she often jumps to the wrong conclusion about something I say or hope to do, that she's been too quick on too many occasions to condemn me if I even mildly disagree with her, and that I don't want to control her, have never wanted to control her, and wouldn't try to control her if I could, but I can't.

That we'd get ourselves into this bitter argument about Minzeezi and Sundazi doesn't make sense. We're in love with one another.

Certainly I'm in love with her.

Yet too much has changed between us I don't understand. Wasn't the first time I saw her, on that fantastic Tuesday night in downtown L.A. at the Ambrose Franklin Forum, a genuine miracle? Shouldn't we be grateful for it and stop acting as if it's no longer important to us?


2.


Keep in mind the Ambrose Franklin doesn’t have a proscenium, or a curtain, that its audience sits in semi-circular rows, that at twenty minutes-to-eight the auditorium was filling up rapidly, and that many of its seats were already occupied.

When I spotted Billie, she was coming toward me along the crowded aisle we both sere sitting in. Navigating around a group of early arrivals, she squeeze past a heavy-set man, who suddenly wined, pulled sharply back from her, and pointed down at his foot, which she’d apparently stepped on. Despite her obvious and immediate apology, he rocked irritably out of his seat, indicating with agitated gestures he’s gotten up to gie her more room, though his large belly was now blocking most of the aisle.

Looking radiantly beautiful, Billie towered over the heavy-set man. At five-ten and a half, was I tall enough for her? Would she tower over me? What about those long arms, her long neck? Was her height being accentuated by her tight-fitting, sleeveless, dark green dress and closely cropped golden hair? A rare beauty, I decided. Arriving at her seat, she lowered herself regally into it and smiled a gentle, embarrassed smile.

How significant was it that we were sitting in the same row, Row G, the lucky number seven row? Should I have taken seriously the unobstructed view I had of her as another favorable omen? Though she was on the far side of the Franklin’s stage that jutted out into the audience, only when a certain fidgety person, halfway between her and me, turned his oversized head in the wrong direction, did I have to stretch up in my seat to see what she was doing. Otherwise, I could look at her whenever I wanted, which was often.

Definitely not true was what my friend Al Kipper has been saying about the pink shaft of light that was supposedly shining on her head. There was no pink shaft of light on anybody’s head. I might have said I saw an aura from her, or an unusual radiance that seemed very mysterious to me but he’s exaggerated totally out of proportion what I told him, and a lot of people, many of whom we’ve both known for a long time, believe him over me, which is ridiculous, because I was in the Ambrose Franklin, and he wasn’t.

Important Questions about The Twelve O’clock’s Principal Characters:

Why does the narrator, an ambitious but uncompromising real estate appraiser, think a discontented press deputy / graduate student is perfect for him, when she’s tempted to run away to Africa with her anthropology teacher? Why is this teacher so eager for her to go to Africa with him? And why does someone attempt to intimidate the teacher by putting a baby rattlesnake in his pajamas? Also, why is the narrator’s neighbor, a stockbroker, trying to impregnate the two women he shares an apartment with? Why do these women want to get pregnant by the same man? And why have they been competing with one another to get pregnant first?

Why does the narrator’s best friend, a talented aspiring actor, who is unable to act on stage or in front of a camera, act so brilliantly in getting himself fired from his job as a parking garage attendant?

Why do four or more boys (young men) parade a 15-year-old girl through the neighborhood, mauling her enormous breasts, fingering her vulva, mindlessly taking advantage of her rebelliousness, desperate need for love, and misunderstood sexual desires.

Why has the narrator’s hoped-for client, a hugely successful shopping center developer, at age 56, after a 32-year-career as builder and manager of shopping centers, including the shopping center the actor gets fired from, lately concluded his centers have done more harm than good, putting major doubt in his head about the methods he’s endorsed to build, manage, and promote them? And, why, when the developer admits his company’s strategy toward low-wage, unskilled, untrained workers is designed to take advantage of and profit from even the harshest inequalities created by differences in class, culture, race, education, and gender, has he continued to insist class warfare doesn’t exist and is not inevitable?

The Twelve O’clock is a comic novel about the pursuit of sex, love, power and magic by the above-described cast of characters, unsuspecting victims of not only deader-than-a-doornail corporate capitalism but also politicians and lobbyists who claim to promote jusice and democracy and produce instead baby steps to class warfare.


3.

The play that night was called THE SERVANT OF or TO TWO MASTERS. The playwright's name, if I remember correctly, was Gondoli, somebody Gondoli, Gino or Mario Gondoli. The play's plot is what its title says it is. A rich guy has a servant. He doesn't know the servant is also working for another rich guy. Both rich guys abuse the servant outrageously. The servant survives by outfoxing the rich guys who are dumber than he is. One of the rich guys turns out to be a woman disguised as a man, who's been trying to track down her long-lost lover, the other rich guy.

A farce, played in the commedia dell'arte style, which meant lots of noise, movement, and surprises, it starred Ronnie Blatt, a talented and very funny actor, artist, musician, acrobat, and juggler. As the servant, he was all of the above, standing on his head, juggling dishes of various shapes and sizes, playing at least a half dozen musical instruments in a sensational, crowd-pleasing performance, except, as I think about it now, much of what he did with such ease and grace is extremely hazy in my mind, partly because my fascination with Billie in her dark green dress had completely overwhelmed me.

"The stage is that way," my date, Margaret Roland, whispered. She'd noticed me staring into the audience. "Who are you looking at?"

"Who?" I said, also whispering.

She nodded. "You're looking at somebody, aren't you? Who?"

I didn't reply. On stage the servant was doing cartwheels. I glanced toward Billie. She was watching him with a wonderful, innocent look on her lovely face. In a hoarse whisper Margaret said: "I'm going to get up and leave if you don't tell me. And you know I'll do it."

"No, please," I said. The woman sitting in front of us turned her head slightly as if she'd heard what we'd been whispering and was annoyed by it.

"Watch me," Margaret said, narrowing her heavily mascaraed eyes and peering at the audience. "Some woman, isn't it? You take me out, and look at somebody else. What kind of game is this? I have feelings. I've been hurt enough no matter what you think of me."

Again I didn't answer. The man in the next seat flicked a nervous smile at us. "If it's a woman, say so,” she said, “and that's it. I promise. All I'm asking is to know where I stand. Is that unreasonable?" Her whisper was stronger and more emphatic. One of the masters on stage was ordering the servant to do something for him. I glanced at Margaret. How can I distract her, get her to watch the play instead of me?

"See that guy?" I said finally, pointing toward the auditorium's rear rows that were shrouded in such serious gloom I couldn't make out anybody who was sitting so far way from us. The man to my right put his finger over his lips, warning us we were distracting him from the play.

"Which guy?" she said.

"Next to last row," I whispered forcefully as if I could actually see somebody in the next to last row, which I couldn't. "With the big hair and the bow tie." Noticing Billie was laughing along with the rest of the audience, I laughed.

"Where?" Margaret said. When I hesitated, she repeated in a loud whisper: "Where?"

"Two seats in. From the aisle." My whisper sounded strained.

She leaned forward, shook her head. "Too dark. Can't see him. Can't see anybody." When I tried to look puzzled as if I couldn't understand why she couldn't see him, she stared at me suspiciously. "I don't appreciate being treated like you think you're putting something over on me, which you're not."

I took a deep breath. "He owes me money," I said, barely able to get the words out of my mouth. Someone shushed at us.

"Oh?" she said, lowering her whisper, sounding calmer suddenly.

"A lot of money."

There was another huge laugh from the audience. "How much is a lot?" she said.

4.

During the six weeks I'd been dating Margaret she'd often talked to me about money. A dancer by profession with loads of stage, movie, and tv credits, she'd made up her mind, she said, to make a fortune before she was thirty-five and was investing whatever she could scrape together in the stock market. "I'm salting it away."

She also seemed to know everybody in showbiz, and that was very attractive to me. Too bad she always looked so disappointed when I arrived to pick her up as if she'd been expecting somebody else but instead was stuck with me.

A great looking woman, she had thick brown hair with natural red highlights in it. Her olive skin was smooth and, above her shoulders, unblemished. Her strong nose was straight and slender. Her mouth was definitely kissable, soft and full-lipped. She didn't smile too much around me but whenever we bumped into somebody she knew from having worked with them, especially if she thought they could get her a job, she unhesitatingly showed them what she rarely showed me, her brilliantly sparkling teeth.

I wish we hadn't been so formal and reserved with one another. I can think of only one time, for maybe three or four terrific hours, when we both were genuinely relaxed and spontaneous, the night I took her to dinner at Hayden-Gluck's on Hollywood Boulevard.

That morning Martin Longhi, the choreographer who'd been such a strong influence in Margaret’s life had called her from Las Vegas. "Out of the blue," she said. "I'm thrilled. It's been too long. Do you know Martin? Do you know Judi, his wife?"

"I've seen them on television," I said.

"Wonderful people. Very good to me."

Longhi's wife was Judith Mills Rosen, the documentary photographer, who'd made a sensation with a photographic expose of the garment industry in Mexico City. "Also took a million pictures of me," Margaret said. "A joke mostly, but they're marvelous and very flattering." She laughed. "Am I blushing? I should be."

A waiter arrived to take our order. She wanted pork chops. I couldn't make up my mind; finally decided on pot roast and red cabbage.

"Traveled with them for almost two years. His chief assistant on every show in South America and the two he did in Paris. Never should have split like we did. Could have worked it out if we'd tried harder, but we didn't."

Margaret's pork chops looked grand. "Perfect," she said, sniffing them. I told her I'd always been a big fan of red cabbage. She asked to taste it. I loaded my fork and held it out to her. Licking the fork clean, she began to chew slowly.

"You approve?" I said.

She grinned, revealing those gorgeous teeth, wiping away the solemn hurt she usually carried on her pretty face.

"Good choice," she said, winking at me. I gave her more of my red cabbage, which, along with the pork chops, a heaping mound of mashed potatoes, and a generous mixture of carrots and squash, she ate ravenously. Before I'd half-finished the pot roast, there wasn't a scrap of anything left on her plate. The waiter returned. I was on my last bite. She was sitting back in her chair, watching me, with pleasure, I think. As he started to clear the dishes, he asked if either of us wanted dessert. "Not for me," I said, looking to Margaret.

She glanced up at the waiter, then at me. "I'm not into sweets," she said, "but I would like something."

"Sure," I said. "What?"

"Another order of pork chops."

5.

The intensity and passion with which she devoured those pork chops she never again even hinted at on any of our subsequent, subdued, unemotional dates until that night, at the Franklin, when she became so incensed about the non-existent deadbeat who supposedly had borrowed money from me. "No telephone number for him, or address?" she asked, struggling to control the disapproval she was obviously feeling.

"None. He moved without telling me."

"That's so awful, to do something like that, when you have an obligation. Lend money, lose a friend. I've had the same experience," she said, again peering into the gloom of the Franklin's next-to-last row. "I still can't see him."

Meanwhile, I was taking quick peeks at Billie, who looked, from where I was sitting, as if she were completely engrossed in the play, laughing as hard as everybody else in the audience, as on stage Ronnie Blatt, the servant, was making extravagantly contemptuous gestures behind the back of one of his rich-guy employers.

At intermission Margaret insisted we rush to the lounge at the rear of the auditorium to track down the deadbeat. We also searched the inner and outer lobbies. Having invented him, I wasn't surprised we didn't find him. "Must've seen you coming," she said, glancing around the lobby. When she noticed the men's room was directly across from us, immediately I knew what she was thinking: that she'd discovered the villain's hiding place, and that I was elected to check it out.

The men's room was crowded. I had to wait before I could get to a urinal. Then I took extra time washing and drying my hands. When I returned to the lobby and told her what I'd found, that he wasn't in the men's room, she gave me such a disappointed look I felt bitterly ashamed. How can I continue doing this to her? I thought. I've lied. I'm still lying, which I hate to do, even in self-defense, except Billie is worth it, isn't she? Suddenly I realized I hadn't seen Billie since we'd left the auditorium. I began to worry that she and her escort - I haven't mentioned her escort before - had decided to skip the rest of the play. Then she'd be lost to me forever.

"I need to go," Margaret said, grinning uncomfortably. While I waited for her in the lobby, she hurried to the women's room. As chimes were being sounded, that the second act was about to begin, she reappeared, moving quickly toward me. A few steps behind her, smiling gloriously, looking impossibly gorgeous, also coming directly at me, was the golden-haired Billie.

Instantly my heart was pounding so loud I was sure Margaret could hear it. For about thirty seconds I couldn't breathe, my body stiffened so I couldn't move, and my stricken face, I knew, was showing in unmistakable detail the infatuation and massive guilt I was feeling. Margaret picked up both instantly, staring with disbelieving eyes at me, then at Billie as she walked swiftly past us, disappearing through the open lobby doors into the auditorium.

"It's her, isn't it?" Margaret snarled, pointing first to Billie, then at my nose. "That's who you were looking at, not some slob who owes you money. There's no slob, right? The whole thing is one hundred percent about her. Admit it. Tell me you don't give a damn what happens to me. I'm nothing to you and never will be. You can have her, and she can have you if she even knows you exist, which you can bet she doesn't because you're too small and insignificant for anybody who has half a brain in her head, which I do, and you don't." Tears were streaming down her cheeks. I tried to put my arms around her. She punched me in the stomach. "I'm getting out of here," she shouted.

"No, wait, you can't. There's one more act," I said, stumbling after her, as she stormed across the outer lobby into the street. "Where are you going?"

"Home," she shrieked, eyes blazing, "and you're taking me. Right now!"

6.

The trip in the car was dismal. Intermittently she screamed at me, calling me the worst, most selfish, self-centered, unfeeling person she'd known in her entire life. "Don't you realize how rotten and miserable you are?" She shook her fist at me. Trying not to provoke her, I purposefully didn't apologize because I knew she wouldn't believe anything I said. The only time I dared to open my mouth was when she started on Billie who, from my standpoint, was a completely innocent party and wouldn't have been involved with Margaret or me, if I didn't have such an overly stimulated imagination about falling in love with somebody who might be willing to fall in love with me.

Margaret lived in Beverly Hills, south of Wilshire. Her Monterey-style, two-story apartment building had full-length, covered balconies on each story, a thick, neatly trimmed lawn, and an outside staircase to the second balcony. Though she warned me, as we were both getting out of the car, to stay away from her, I followed her across the lawn and up the staircase. Her apartment door was at the far end of the balcony. Glaring fiercely at me, she unlocked the door, pushed it open, squeezed past it, then slammed it in my face. Mortified at being rejected so brusquely, even if I did deserve it, I was about to pound on the door to tell her how wrong and irresponsible I was, when suddenly it was yanked open from the inside, and Hector, her wildly affectionate Labrador, came bounding out of the apartment, pouncing on me ecstatically, as Margaret thrust his leash into my outstretched hand. "Walk him," she snapped, slamming the door shut again.

For twenty minutes Hector and I romped around the block. I couldn't have denied him what probably was the last chance for us to frolic together.

Demonstrating how delighted he was to see me, he kept leaping on my arms and shoulders, slobbering kisses on my face, getting his leash repeatedly entangled around my ankles, while grinning joyously as he hit every tree, bush, and blade of grass from one end of the street to the other.

When we got back to Margaret's apartment building, we sat on the bottom steps of the outside staircase and had an intimate conversation. While he whimpered grumpily, I told him the story of my life. I’m a total flop, I said. Look what I've done to Margaret. My pal Al says I'm not neurotic enough for women like her. Stick to your own kind, he says, somebody who doesn't know Freud from a pickle. Hector rubbed his head against my chest. Maybe I won't see you again. That could happen if she doesn't change her mind. Hector growled. It's not my choice so you shouldn't be mad at me.

Tail between his legs, head slumped, face depressed and minus its grin, he followed me up the stairs, then moped after me until we arrived at Margaret's front door.

Getting down on my knees, I hugged him, which seemed to revive his spirits slightly. Then I knocked on the door. Almost immediately it was pulled open.

Reaching out, showing only her right arm to me, Margaret grabbed the leash. Hector gave me one more sweet, unhappy look and walked dejectedly into the apartment, as Margaret, still concealed behind the door, began to close it again, this time easing it shut.

"I'll call you," I said lamely to the closed door. Inside the apartment Hector barked. I barked back, then, feeling dejected myself, quietly departed.

7.

My first idea, after getting into the car, was to stop at Schubert's Parlor, a late-night, meeting-and-eating place on Sunset Boulevard. I needed cheering up. My friend Alonzo (Al) Kipper, whose acting name was A. Lonzo Kipp, was a Schubert regular, which meant he showed up at Schubert's six nights a week. Schubert's was closed on Mondays.

As I started up La Cienega, I began to worry Al might say something nasty about Margaret that would make me even more depressed so I decided to go straight home.

Home for me was a courtyard apartment off Holloway Drive. In my section of the courtyard there were two buildings, facing one another, with two apartments in each building, and a kitchen, a dining room, and a living room downstairs and a bedroom and a bath upstairs in each apartment. I also had a small, fenced back yard and a narrow garage. I drove into the garage carefully.

Sometimes the back door lock got stuck, and the key couldn't unstick it. Tonight, when I was feeling so miserable after my disastrous date with Margaret, it happened. No matter what I did with the key, how much I wiggled it, how hard I pushed and shook it, the lock wouldn't budge. I considered walking around the building to the front door but that seemed too wishy-washy to me. Doesn't a key have the responsibility to get its door open? Am I, a strong, fundamentally reasonable man, supposed to roll over for a sticky lock? With these thoughts in mind, I slipped the key back into the lock, gave a gentle twist, and presto the door swung open.

The kitchen light I'd left on, and also the lamp beside the couch in the living room. I put some water up to boil, ran upstairs to the bathroom, came back down as quickly as I could, and made myself a cup of tea. Dousing the kitchen and the living room lights, I carried the tea up to the bedroom.

The brown tweed jacket I’d worn that night was too tight and pinched my shoulders, making me look as if I'd been stuffed into it. This may sound silly, but I think that jacket and the distorted way it made me look had contributed to my debacle with Margaret. I just didn't feel comfortable wearing it anymore. As I was hanging it up, I seriously considered exiling it to the back of the closet to which I'd already consigned my faded, moth-eaten maroon bathrobe and the much-too-big plaid mackinaw sent to me by my cousin Edgar Rubenstein, who owned and managed a mackinaw manufacturing company in Medford, New Hampshire.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, I was having trouble unknotting my tie, when I noticed that the shade on the bedroom window behind the bed was only half pulled down. As I reached over my pillow to grab the shade, I glanced toward Mrs. Haber's apartment, diagonally across the courtyard from mine. Her living room windows were ablaze with light. Why did this seem so odd to me? It took me a couple of seconds to realize that the drapes and the shades had been stripped from the windows. I couldn't believe it. I also couldn't believe that two guys I'd never seen before were carrying Mrs. Haber's dining room table out of her apartment. "They're doing it again," I said aloud. "What nerve these people have!"

Six months ago somebody had backed a truck up to another tenant's apartment, while the tenant was at work, and cleaned out everything he owned, except an old pair of hiking boots that were too worn-out to steal. "They're not getting away with it," I said, also aloud.

Immediately I called the cops.

"How can I help you?" a voice said.

As I breathlessly described what was happening to Mrs. Haber's furniture, the same two men carried a second table from the apartment; then a woman appeared with a chair.

"Are you sure they're burglars?" the telephone voice said

"What do you mean?

"Well, they could be anybody, couldn't they?"

I described how the other tenant had lost his entire household, including every stitch of clothing, except his worn-out boots.

Apparently the voice wasn't impressed. "Look," he said, I thought, condescendingly, "this is a very busy place. We don't have people we can just send out unless we're absolutely certain a crime is being committed. That makes sense, doesn't it?"

"No."

"Are you telling me you know for a fact these guys definitely are burglars?"

"I didn't say that."

"Exactly," he said, "because you don't really know whether they're burglars, or some friends of the family, helping this woman to move."

"Then what should I do?" I said, trying to remain calm.

"Ask them."

"Ask them?"

"How else can you find out?"

"Let me get this straight," I said. "You want me to go to these people and ask them if they're stealing Mrs. Haber’s furniture?"

"No, absolutely not. What you have to do is talk to them, size them up. There could be a very logical explanation that has nothing to do with them stealing anything."

"Suppose they say yes."

"Yes, what?"

"That they are stealing her furniture?"

"Then there's no problem. Call me back."

"Call you back? Is this what you want me to say to Mrs. Haber when she gets home and sees what they've done to her apartment, that you won't send anybody to find out who they are unless they're dumb enough to tell me they’re stealing her furniture?"

"Best I can do," he said and hung up.

Now I was really worried about Mrs. Haber. It doesn't make sense, as far as I'm concerned, to ask these people if they're burglars. I'm not a cop, but I refuse to turn my back on what these people are obviously doing to her, no matter what that guy on the phone says about the cops being too busy to find out who they are and why they're taking her furniture.

Mrs. Haber was a widow. I'd had maybe a dozen conversations with her. She'd lived in the courtyard for over twenty years since shortly after her husband Izak died. Once she invited me to her apartment for coffee, muffins, and marmalade jam. She'd made both the muffins and the jam, but clearly wasn't a very attentive baker or jam-maker. Her coffee was also too bitter for me. As a talker, she was impressive and powerful. Even her gestures were intimidating. To stop me from interrupting her, she'd snap her fingers in my face, or whistle and hold up her hand like a traffic cop, or guffaw so loudly she'd permanently distract me from what I'd been trying to say to her.

Occasionally her son Stefan showed up. He'd studied at Oxford and taught for three semesters at Holmtwist College in Maine. Each time I saw him, he was drunk. They had terrible rows, shouting at one another, he threatening violence, she vowing noisily to have him locked up. One morning she appeared with a large bruise on her left cheek. "He did it," she said. "Get him started, and he doesn't stop." She also had a daughter, Lillian. A mathematics teacher at a community college in Anaheim, she'd been married four times and had children from each of her husbands, a grand total of six, two boys and four girls. The complete opposite of Stefan, she was quiet, smiley, thoughtful, and polite. I also noticed she blushed easily. "Can I depend on her? It’s not possible," Mrs. Haber said. Lillian had had two nervous breakdowns, both short-lived. "The children suffer. They always do."

8.

When Mrs. Haber went out of town, to Lillian's in Anaheim, or to her sister Brenda's in Newark, New Jersey, she'd knock on my door and ask me to keep an eye on her place, "if it's not too much trouble." Well, something was happening, these people were emptying out her apartment, and didn't I have a responsibility to fulfill my promise to her? Grabbing a sweater, slipping it over my head, I hurried downstairs to the front door, eased it open, and stepped out into the courtyard. From where I was standing I had a clear, deep view into Mrs. Haber's living room. Gone were her overstuffed, high-backed sofa, her cherry-wood coffee table, which she valued so much, the gold-trimmed side chairs she'd bought in Paris, and the tall, aquamarine Chinese vase she and Izak had brought back from Hong Kong.

To get a better look into the apartment, I started down the courtyard path toward the street. Moving slowly, as I passed the drapeless front windows, I could see three men and one woman, a mixed assortment of furniture, and numerous cardboard boxes of various sizes. The woman and one of the men were packing the boxes. I didn't recognize any of the men or the woman. She certainly wasn't Lillian, and none of the men was Stefan. Despite the strong advice I'd gotten from the police telephone dispatcher to talk to them, I couldn't bring myself to do it. How would I know if anything they told me was true? On the street, at the foot of the courtyard path, was a huge moving van, packed with Mrs. Haber's furniture, her dark blue refrigerator, her chopping-block table, and her shiny chrome stove. My heart sank. What do I do now? I asked myself.

Glancing up toward Sunset Boulevard, I saw at the corner, on the opposite side of the street from the courtyard, sitting on his parked motorcycle, apparently watching traffic on Sunset, was a uniformed County Sheriff. We're saved, Mrs. Haber, I said, also to myself, as I rushed up the block to the corner, waved excitedly at the Sheriff, then started across the street toward him.

He wasn't sympathetic. I could tell from the disinterested look on his face he'd already heard too many stories like Mrs. Haber's. When I'd finished describing the furniture that was being stolen, he said irritably: "Call the Police."

"I've already called them. They won't come."

"So what do you expect me to do about it?"

"See those guys," I said, pointing toward the two men who were loading Mrs. Haber's sideboard into the van. "And that woman?" A woman had arrived with a large box and was handing it to one of the men in the van. "Would you please go down there, on your bike, of course, and ask any one of them if what they're doing has been approved by Mrs. Haber? If they tell you she's told them to do it, then I'm completely satisfied, and you won't hear from me again."

His immediate answer was no, no, no, he was a County Sheriff, and it wasn't his beat to do something like that, but I persisted and pleaded and told him how desperate I was to fulfill my solemn obligation to Mrs. Haber. "Everything I've tried to do for her is a failure."

Reluctantly, very, very reluctantly, he gunned his bike and cruised slowly down Holloway toward the van, with me, crossing back to the courtyard side of the street, running as fast as I could after him.

I was halfway to the van, when he made a u-turn. Pulling up beside the van, he leaned toward the woman and said something to her.

Whatever she replied obviously was okay with him. Heading back toward Sunset, picking up speed as he roared past me, he gave me the index-finger-to-thumb, All Is Well/ Mind Your Own Business sign, and that was it. The deed was being done, and I was powerless to stop it.

9.

To avoid the van, and, more importantly, the people I was still convinced were stealing Mrs. Haber's furniture, I walked rapidly back to my apartment via the access road that ran behind the courtyard's buildings. I was pushing open the gate to my backyard, when I heard someone say in a mellow, English-accented voice: "Hi there, neighbor." It was Dora Spencer-Higgins. Recently Dora and her friend Lulu Bogg and the man they shared, Howard Neville, had rented the next-door apartment. "Lovely evening, isn't it?"

"Not for me," I said, explaining briefly what had happened to Mrs. Haber’s furniture and how frustrated I was not being able to do anything to stop the burglars from stealing it. "The police are useless," I said, "totally uncooperative."

Coming up behind us were Lulu and Howard. In the garage next to mine they'd parked Lulu's car. Giggling affectionately as she grabbed my hand and yanked me into their backyard, "I'm pregnant," Lulu said.

"You can have coffee with us," Dora said.

Howard made the coffee. "Found out I'm pregnant Friday night," Lulu said. "How do I feel? Fine, terrific, never better, except Dora is jealous, which I don't blame her for, because she's always wanted to be first."

"I'm not jealous. I'm envious. In case we can't afford two babies at one time, which is possible," Dora said, "I might have to wait."

Lulu took me upstairs to see the custom bed they'd just bought. It was the same length as a queen-sized bed, ten inches wider than a king. Pushing me down on the bed, throwing herself on top of me, she gave me such a remarkable kiss on my mouth I could barely breathe. Leaning back her head, she peered mischievously into my eyes. "You like it?" she said.

"I like the kiss."

"How about the bed?" she said, wriggling off me. Before I could answer about the bed, or push myself out of it, she turned abruptly away from me and headed downstairs. Scrambling to my feet, I was about to rush after her, when suddenly, from the kitchen, I heard a loud burst of laughter. What had she said about me that made them laugh like that? I certainly hadn't enticed her to jump on top of me, and the kiss she gave me was her idea, not mine.

Admittedly I'd had a small, physical response that was entirely unintentional and so mild it didn't seem possible she would have noticed it enough to ridicule me for being aroused without implicating herself. If I could have escaped out the second-story bedroom window and avoided seeing her again, I would have done it, gladly. Instead, expecting to be laughed at the instant I showed my face, I crept quietly down the stairs, arriving in the kitchen, as Howard was wiping up the floor, the legs of several chairs, the stove, and the cabinet under the sink. He'd accidentally knocked over a carton of milk, he said. Milk had splattered everywhere. "You must've heard them laughing at me."

"Laughing at you?" I said

"Of course, at him," Lulu said. "He did it, didn't he?"

"That's not funny," Howard said. "I didn't do it on purpose. You'd think I'd get some sympathy." Lulu got down on her knees beside him. Putting her arms around his neck, she gently hugged him. Then Dora asked my opinion of their new mattress.

"Howard hates it," Lulu said, pushing away from him.

"I don't hate it," he said.

"You don't like it," she said.

"Too soft," he said, looking to me. "It's breaking my back."

"But three adults in a queen-size bed didn't work," Dora said, "especially if one person refuses to relax."

"And I'm the person, right?" Lulu said.

"She doesn't like other people to sleep if she can't," Dora said.

"That's so untrue," Lulu said. "I may be nervous in bed, but I'm also neat and cuddly, and never in my life have I tried to stop anybody from sleeping if they wanted to sleep."

"Except Howard and me," Dora said.

"Oh, come on. You're much worse than I am," Lulu said, "and so is he." Howard was at the sink. He'd finished cleaning up the milk and was rinsing out the sponges he'd used. He began teasing Lulu about her more objectionable sleeping habits, which included, he said, eating, singing, and “jumping idiotically like she’s the only one in bed.”

"I don't jump in bed," Lulu said, grinning innocently. "Do I?"

The conversation switched to Lulu's pregnancy and the new responsibilities they were all going to have. He might need a second job, Howard said, especially if Dora also got pregnant. Dora said she had enough savings to pay for her share of their expenses for at least a year, and Lulu said she could probably get a loan from her brother in England. They'd definitely have to move, which wasn't a problem for any of them. They'd want two baths and three bedrooms, and a house would be preferable to an apartment. They all talked enthusiastically about buying a house.

These were such remarkable people. Discounting the kiss Lulu had given me, they seemed to love one another openly, casually, without guilt or regret, as if threesomes like theirs were a dime a dozen. "It's against my code to hide behind anything," Dora said, "no matter who disapproves of me or Lulu or the man of my dreams who's going to give me a baby tonight if possible."

Howard was smiling sweetly at her. "More coffee?" he said, filling my cup. Six-foot-two tall, slender as a string bean, bald as a cucumber, with dangling arms that reached below his knees, huge hands, huge feet, no neck, birdlike shoulders, intriguing buck teeth, and loving-cup ears, Howard possessed so much warmth and unpretentiousness he could charm anybody he turned his attention to.

What a catch for intense, ambitious, determined Dora and giggly, scatter-brained, manipulative, flirtatious Lulu. Both were barely five-foot-two. As Dora walked her jaunty walk, her thick, wavy, brown hair bounced rhythmically off the tops of her broad shoulders. Lulu was short-red-haired, green-eyed, and pasty-faced. A rapid, breathless talker, she did marvelous, sensual things with her thick-lipped, fleshy mouth, which caused me to smile excessively at her. Will I get another kiss? I wondered, as I was preparing to leave, having finished off my second cup of coffee. Dora pecked my cheek. Howard gave me an extravagant hug, while Lulu remained on the opposite side of the kitchen and wiggled her fingers at me.

10.

It was after midnight by the time I got back to my bedroom. The burglars, I saw, were gone. The lights in Mrs. Haber's apartment had been turned out, and her courtside windows were dark. Poor Mrs. Haber, I thought. She goes away without telling me she'd be gone, and look what happens. Imagine the shock she'll get, when she comes back. For my own sake, so I can sleep tonight, I was determined to put her out of my head, forget how the police had mistreated me, and accept that my failure to stop the burglary wasn't my fault. What else could I have done to prevent those people from stealing her furniture?

Pulling down the shade, I undressed quickly, took care of my bathroom needs, and got into bed. The soft light from the glass-shaded lamp beside the bed gave an eerie glow to the room. Lying on my back, I stared at the pale, textured ceiling and began to think about my next-door neighbors and the closeness and harmony they'd created for themselves. Lulu's kiss, I didn't understand at all. Actually I'd expected her to make a joke or tease me about it, but she didn't even mention it, or hint at it, or give me any indication it had ever happened, or could have happened, or that she would have wanted it to happen, which confused me. Should I be worried? If only I hadn't told her I liked the kiss, though I did like it, and I liked her mouth and the feel of her body on me, none of which I wanted to think about anymore.

That got me back to Margaret and how shamefully I'd treated her. Imagine being out with some person who spends the entire evening ogling somebody else. I'd be furious if it had happened to me. And then to have that person lie about doing it and claim to feel hurt and rejected, as I had done, when I clearly deserved having more than the door slammed in my face.

My excuse, of course, was Billie. Switching off the lamp, I lay in the dark, trying to bring her shadowy image into sharper focus. What I recollected most was her golden hair and fleeting shots of her in action, much more vague than I would have hoped for, which made me wonder if I'd even recognize her again. This sobering thought woke me from my dozing. Where should I start to look for her? To put an ad in a newspaper, pleading with her to contact me, sounded futile and dumb. I could ask, I suppose, at the Ambrose Franklin box office if they had the name and address and telephone number of the woman who that night had sat in a certain fifth-row seat, the number of which I didn't know. They'd think I was out of my mind, right? Like Mrs. Haber's furniture, Billie had vanished from my life. I get one microscopic, wafer-thin chance at what my heart tells me is true love, and immediately it disintegrates before I can take advantage of it. Maybe I should call Margaret and apologize. Instead I demonstrate my deep-rooted shallowness and insincerity by expunging her from my head to concentrate solely on Billie, as a distant voice that sounds like mine is singing softly:


I think I love you.
But don’t know your name.
What can I do
to find you again?
Where are you now?
O my, what a shame,
to lose you forever
and not know your name.

Zonk! Snore.

11.

The next morning the first thing I did was to open the front door, go out into the courtyard, and look into Mrs. Haber's apartment. Though I'd been expecting it to be empty, seeing it empty was a shock. Nothing whatsoever had been left behind, including her black and brown doormat with WELCOME written on it in Chinese.

Now I had to do a very sad duty on her behalf. Call Reggie at the Management Office. "Got rotten news," I said.

"Yeah?" he said. "What?"

"Someone took Mrs. Haber's furniture," I said.

"So?" he said, sounding unreasonably cheerful.

"You know about it?" I said.

"Of course, I know about it," he said. "She moved."

"Moved? Where to?"

"Daughter's in Anaheim."

“Daughter's in Anaheim?” I said. That she’d be willing to move to her daughter’s in Anaheim after she’d been so critical of her “undisciplined life style” shocked me. He gave me the daughter’s address and telephone number, but I was too annoyed at Mrs. Haber to copy it down. I also didn't appreciate his laughing nastily at my emotional description of the ordeal I'd gone through with the police, when I was so desperately trying to convince them the furniture movers were burglars who were stealing her furniture.

“She hired them,” he said. “Didn’t consult me, except I did agree to open the apartment for them, so she could get an early start on her vacation in Bermuda."

"Bermuda!," I said.

"Two weeks before she goes to Anaheim. Deserves it, doesn't she? Worn out from being alone so much since Mr. Haber died. Couldn't stand it anymore."

When finally I hung up the phone, I was outraged. While she was having fun in Bermuda, I was battling the police to save her furniture, which didn't need to be saved, because she'd hired somebody, without telling me, to move it to her daughter’s in Anaheim. Angrily I asked myself why hadn't she called or knocked on my door to wish me luck or say goodbye?

The possibility she might have moved hadn't even entered my head. How could I have overlooked that I didn't know all the facts? Was my ego so distorted I automatically presumed she would have talked seriously to me about wanting to move in with her own daughter?

Jumping to the wrong conclusion caused me to suffer intense upset and disillusionment with the cops that could have been avoided. I checked my refrigerator. At the back of the top shelf was one of Mrs. Haber’s walnut cookies. Throw it out, I said aloud, stamp on it, get rid of it, disrespect it as she'd obviously disrespected me.

Instead I decided to eat the cookie later.

12.

At eleven-thirty that morning I had an appointment downtown in the Dundee Pearl Building with Blackman and Blackman, insurance brokers. Built in the nineteen twenties, the six-story, tan-brick, narrow-windowed, flat-roofed Dundee Pearl was a handsome, sensitively designed, high-quality building. Waiting impatiently in its marble-floored, mahogany-paneled lobby outside one of its three elaborately sculptured, brass-doored elevators, I had this vivid premonition that something extraordinary was about to happen to me.

The floor-indicating arrow above the elevator's sliding doors was pointing at four. A half minute later it moved down to three. It took more than a minute before it dropped to two. Forty seconds later, it started down again, moving slowly past M for Mezzanine, stopping finally at L for Lobby, as the brass doors slid open, revealing an exceptionally crowded elevator. First off was a tall, orange-haired woman. She was followed by two men in gray, pin-striped suits, a priest, a man with a bushy black beard, a woman carrying a baby, another man wearing a tan raincoat, four smartly-dressed young women, among whom, looking as spectacularly gorgeous as she had at the Ambrose Franklin, moving with the same obvious calm and grace, not once glancing in my direction, was the golden-haired Billie I'd never expected to see again. Wow!

She was past me and halfway to the building's main exit before I got words enough to call out to her. "Miss! Miss! Please. Wait."

Turning toward me, she smiled quizzically. "Yes?" she said.

"Do you mind?" I said. "I'm sorry. I have to ask."

"Ask what?" she said, looking doubtful, her smile fading.

"Didn't I see you last night at the theatre?" I said.

Her eyes narrowed. "What theatre?" she said.

"The Ambrose Franklin."

"The Ambrose Franklin?" Her face instantly broke into a broad grin. "The Servant of Two Masters?" I nodded enthusiastically. "Wasn't it wonderful?" she said. "And isn't the servant great?"

"No matter what those bosses do to him, how much they try to beat him down, he's still the master of his own spirit. They're on one side, and he's
on the other, refusing to give up this terrific vision he has of himself." She laughed, wrinkling her lovely nose at me. "I love how he stood on his head so much."

"And twirled those batons," I said.

"And played the trombone with such fury. To prove he's better, smarter, shrewder, and more independent than they could ever hope to be." She laughed again. "Which is only my opinion, of course."

She gave me a pretty smile. "I'm late," she said. "I've got to run."

"Can we talk again?" I said, thick-voiced and sounding embarrassingly anxious. "I'm downtown a lot. We could have lunch if you're available. Maybe some time this week? Friday? I've got another appointment."

She dug a card from her purse. "Call me Thursday," she said, handing me the card. "About eleven. Okay?"

"Eleven," I said, with a large grin on my face.

Then she hurried off through the Dundee Pearl's main exit into the busy street. Not until she was out of sight did I look at her card. BILLIE COOPER, it said. Printed below her name was a telephone number. Later, after my meeting at Blackman and Blackman, I called Al Kipper from the Dundee Pearl's lobby, described in detail everything I knew about Billie, where I'd first seen her, how she'd walked out of that elevator practically into my arms, and why I was so convinced a miracle had happened to me. "I'm definitely in love," I said, then asked him to meet me at eight thirty at Schubert's Parlor.

"Can't wait," Al said.

13.

Schubert's Parlor was located in a domed building on Sunset Strip that until recently had housed an antique furniture dealer. In converting the dealer's showroom into the Schubert's dining room, maximum advantage was taken of the room's remarkable architectural features, including its curved, floor-to-ceiling, front window, its walnut-stained wood floor, its raised, wood-burning fireplace, and its arched, acoustically-hot ceiling, which sometimes allowed somebody's whispered conversation on one side of the room to be heard clearly by somebody else on the opposite side of the room.

It was said that one Saturday morning, Mimi Stutz, a New York stage designer went to Schubert's with a large pad and a couple drawing pencils and made a rough sketch of the room that became her final interior design. The long, marble-topped buffet, flanked at both ends by a towering concrete vase, containing a fanlike kentia palm, was the central focus of Mimi's original sketch. She put high-backed benches along the curved rear wall and upholstered them in black and tan striped mattress ticking. It was her idea to paint the room a soft, yellowish tan and to cover the wall behind the benches with a tan, marbleized wallpaper. The coffee bar was her design. She also designed the marble-topped, iron-based tables and chose the black director's chairs and the brass, frosted-globe chandelier that hung over the buffet. The only important feature in the entire room that didn't originate with her was the Italian-made, chrome-plated, 1903 espresso machine that John and Chip, the two guys who owned and operated Schubert's Parlor, had found in Greenwich Village and shipped back to L.A.

A showbiz hangout, Schubert's Parlor was almost always crowded and noisy. Many of its customers came regularly and often to meet friends and make business contacts. When I arrived that night, Al was waiting for me at one of the small tables that rimmed the benches along the rear wall. Immediately I could see from his sly, flirtatious expression he'd been attempting to work his magic on the twenty-year-olds at the next table. He already knew their names, Audrey Frost and Pam Bender, that they were both actors, that they'd each been in a low-budget movie, and that they earned their livings in the same profession as dental assistants.

"This guy," he said, introducing me, as I sat in the director's chair opposite him, "no matter what you think of how he looks, and he's not that great looking to begin with, is a world famous, enormously talented and skilled brain surgeon."

“Brain surgeon?” Instantly Pam was intrigued. "Where's your office?" she said, flashing a bright, inviting smile at me.

"Scanlon Building," Al said quickly. The Scanlon Building was Beverly Hills' most prestigious medical address.

"What floor are you on?" Audrey said.

"Third," Al snapped, winking inanely at me.

"Do you know Dr. Rockport?” she said, ignoring Al. “He's my mother's doctor. He's also on the third."

"Bosom buddies," Al said before I could reply.

"Hey," Pam said, thrusting her chin at Al, "she asked him. Let him speak for himself."

"Doesn't have a voice," Al said. "Too many operations in too few days. Dries up the vocal chords." Pam's eyes narrowed. "Is that true?" She was talking to me. Then she turned to Al. "If he can't talk, tell him to whisper something. That won't hurt his vocal chords."

"On the contrary," Al said, slapping his hand over my mouth. "Could ruin them forever. Even the slightest strain on his throat."

"I think you're making this up," Pam said. She glanced at Audrey who was staring at me suspiciously.

"Operated on me," Al said.

"Who did?"

"He did. Frontal lobotomy." Now both women looked suspicious "See that scar," Al said, pointing to a small scar above his left eyebrow that he'd gotten at age five when he walked into a flagpole. "That's where he drilled the hole." First Audrey, then Pam leaned forward to get a closer look at the scar. Audrey actually touched it.

"He took this instrument," Al said, "the size of a miniature button hook, poked it into the hole, grabbed the lobotomy, and yanked it out."

"How big was it?" Audrey said.

"Size of a coconut."

"A coconut? Are you telling us this guy put a button hook in your head and pulled out a coconut?"

"Didn't hurt," Al said. "No fuss. No bother. Not even one spot of blood." He looked to me. "Right, doc?"

"He's not supposed to talk. Remember?" Pam said, eyeing me skeptically, as Audrey was shaking her finger at Al. "I think you're crazy," she said, "that you've got a screw loose someplace, that you get some rotten kick out of insulting a person's intelligence.”

"Kid's got moxie," Al said, as she was pushing to her feet.

"And you need your head examined," Audrey said, making a nasty face at him. Then she paid their check, and they were gone. As soon as their dishes were cleared from the table, another couple, a nervous-eyed woman and a glowering man, replaced them.

14.

"Can we talk about Billie now?" I said.

"Not quite," Al said. He wanted a second cappuccino. I ordered a mocha frost, a specialty of the house. “This morning,” he said, “I started that new job.” He flexed his eyebrows mischievously. Not a good sign, I thought. "First of all,” he said, “I get there at nine o'clock. This guy, who says he's the boss that I don't know from Adam, asks what happened, didn't anybody tell me they start at eight, which is when he says he'd expected to see me. Now, he says, he has to take time out from his busy schedule, which I'm supposed to feel guilty about, to show me how to operate the machine. He sits me down, says okay, Al, just do what I tell you to do, and there won't be a problem. Then he shows me this foot pedal under the machine about three inches above the floor on the left. You push it with your left foot, he says, so I push it with my left foot, and some wheels turn. Then he shows me this lever also on the left and tells me to pull it with my left hand, which is what I do, and more wheels turn. Okay, he says, same with the foot pedal on the right, you push it with your right foot, and the lever on the right you pull with your right hand, and that's the rhythm you get into, push on the left, pull on the left, push on the right, pull on the right. Okay?

"Try it," he says, so I try it, and what I do is just the opposite of what he tells me to do. Instead of starting by pushing on the left, I start by pushing on the right. Wait a minute, wait a minute, he says, you got mixed up, and he goes through the routine again, push, pull, push, pull, first on the left, then on the right. Not too bad if you concentrate, he says. But how can I concentrate? There's no way. This machine's a monster, and I've already made up my mind I don't want anything to do with it. So every time he says left, I do right, and every time he says foot, I do hand, and I'm driving this guy nuts until finally he says, okay, you did your best, and you're just not suited, and he asks me to leave, which I'm prepared to do, except, as soon as he isn't watching me anymore, I sneak back to the machine and do left, left, right, right twenty times in a row to prove to myself I really can do it."

"And that's it?” I say. "Did you tell your sister?" His sister Rhonda's friend, Harry, had recommended him for the job. "He'll probably ask her what happened, won't he?"

"I quit, that's what happened," Al said sharply, his voice seething with anger. "Whatever he’s trying to do to me, I'm not taking it from him, okay? The guy's a creep. She should stay away from him, which is what I've already told her. How can she be that desperate?"

"You still have to talk to her," I said.

"No, no, it's not possible to talk to anybody," he said, suddenly clutching his right knee.

"What's the matter?" I asked.

"Cramp,” he said. “It's killing me. Can't sit this long. I've got to get out of here."

Schubert's, as usual, was mobbed. It took time to get a check from the waiter; then paying it took more time. Al's agitation seemed to increase. The cramp, he said, was now also in his left knee. With a terrible scowl on his face, he was vigorously rubbing both knees. "I'm in agony," he said. The woman at the next table identified herself as a nurse and offered to call an ambulance for him.

"He'll take care of me," he said, meaning I'd take care of him. Struggling to his feet, he grabbed my arm, leaned heavily against me. The nurse reached for his wrist and tried to feel his pulse. He shook her away from him.

"This could be serious," she said.

"Of course, it's serious. It's always serious, but I can manage," he said, limping with such an exaggerated limp I could hardly hold onto him. Almost magically, Schubert's bedlam hushed, the crowded aisles ahead of us cleared, as he maneuvered me through the dining room, the lobby, and out the front door. Like the star of a hit play, he waved goodbye to customers who were peering at him from the inside the restaurant’s front window. Was he putting them on? Was he putting me on? Were his knee cramps as severe as he claimed? Did they justify his outrageous limp?

15.

"I don’t normally give up my table this early," he groaned, squeezing my arm tightly. Then in less than a block of torturous limping he completely walked off the cramps. "I'm cured," he said, dancing a few fancy steps on his toes, “except they could come back, couldn’t they?” When I accused him of faking the cramps as well as the limp, he rolled his eyes at me, as if he was about to share some big, delectable secret.

“Acting,” he said, a triumphant smile spreading across his face, “to pay them back for what they’ve done to me.” “Them” were the Schubert’s showbiz clientele, “ the same kind of assholes who’ve been denying me a legitimate shot at demonstrating how talented I am.” He detailed his complaints against a producer and a casting director, Schubert’s Parlor customers, who, he said, had undercut him. I was sympathetic and didn’t interrupt, but I’d heard both stories before. He also told me again, for maybe the sixth time, about a guy who was president of one of the major movie studios. He’d met this guy at a party. The guy had said that as soon as he got to be top dog in the studio he didn’t hesitate to “dee-stroy” anybody who’d tried to stop him from getting ahead. “Exactly what I intend to do – ‘dee-stroy’ or give one helluva scare to all these birds who’ve refused to give me a chance to prove myself.”

We were heading east on Sunset Boulevard. It was almost ten-fifteen. The night was warm and clear. Traffic had started to thin out. Small shops lined the street on both sides. Their brightly-lighted windows were stocked with upscale, colorfully-displayed merchandise, most of which I couldn't afford.

Before we got to the next cross street, Al had completely changed his tune and was contrite, first about Audrey and Pam and how harshly he'd teased them, then about his fake limp and disrupting the Schubert’s business, then about the boss at the factory and the contemptuous way he'd rejected the job, then about his sister Rhonda and the frightening possibility he'd gone too far, and she'd kick him out of her apartment where he'd been staying for the past eight months, and finally about her boyfriend Harry, who'd been trying so hard to find him a job. "Maybe he thinks he's doing me a favor," Al said, taking my arm again. "You and Rhonda are my only true friends. Everybody else I don't trust, and they don't trust me."

He asked me about Billie. "Smart, isn't she?" he said. "That stuff she told you about the play makes sense. Shows she has strong opinions and isn't shy about making them known, which is okay, if that's what you want, somebody who's always ready to run circles around you."

"That's not how she is," I said.

"How do you know how she is?” he said heatedly. “Or who she is?"

"It's what I feel about her," I said, which provoked from him a big, noisy, bitter, discouraging laugh. He also gave me an impassioned lecture about finding a woman like his sister Rhonda to give meaning and substance to my life.

"Too bad she's too old for you," he said.

Rhonda was three years older than Al, who was two years older than me. "How about you finding a woman like your sister Rhonda to give meaning and substance to your life?" I said.

"That's a tricky subject," he said. "Namely this schnoz, right?" He tapped his strong beak-like nose, which fitted perfectly among his strong cheekbones, strong chin, strong jaw, strong forehead, and strong Adam's apple that protruded brashly from his short, ruddy neck. His entire, expressive, brown-eyed face was ruddy as if he'd been thrusting it into a gale for a week. They make storm-on-the-high-seas movies, don't they? Why hadn't he at least had a bit part or a walk-on in one of them?

It definitely wasn't his height, though he was slightly on the short side. It wasn't the stockiness of his muscular body. It wasn't his extra broad shoulders, which looked great in a sports coat. It wasn't his deep, sonorous voice. And it certainly wasn't that he lacked talent. In somebody's living room, at Schubert's Parlor, and always on the telephone, he was brilliant. But put him on the stage or bring him to an audition, and he froze up like an ice cube. I saw him in action twice, and both times he could barely move or speak or respond appropriately to what the other actors were saying to him, which may have been the reason he couldn't stop performing off stage and why he insisted on giving such a massive headache to Rhonda and everybody else he got involved with by constantly putting them on.

Even I was annoyed at his incessant teasing, especially when he turned it full-blast on me. What kind of friend was this guy that he’d do such a thing to somebody who’d spent so much time catering to him? Maybe I should have dumped him and concentrated on my own troubles for a change, regardless of how many great laughs we continued to have together.

16.

Thursday I couldn't sleep past four a.m. I'd awakened three times previously, once to go to the bathroom, twice to look at the clock. Exhausted and aching from too little sleep, I suddenly began to worry I was making a mistake, that it was wrong for me to pursue Billie, that she didn't need me to cause her heartache, and that I should take Al’s advice and stick with women I knew how to relate to, because she was obviously so different from them I couldn't possibly make her happy.

With only seven hours till my scheduled eleven o'clock telephone call, I had to get my mind on something other than why I wasn't good enough for her. I tried a variety of distractions from boiling an egg, which I overcooked, to meditating in the lotus position, which strained my back, to taking a bath in chlorine-smelling water that refused to get hot. I called my mother in New York, then remembered she was visiting my sister in Boston. I also attempted to rework the conclusion of an appraisal report on a defunct brewery and fourteen acres of prime, high-valued industrial land in East L.A., but couldn't concentrate enough to get it done.

It was light now and closing in on seven o'clock. I tried writing down what I was planning to say to Billie. I'd seen someone do that in a movie. It was funny in the movie but doing it myself seemed silly. Then I tried speaking aloud an imaginary dialogue with her, taking both parts, of course, and that seemed to relax me.

At eight-twenty I drove to Westwood. A friend of mine, Chuck Seebey, had asked me to check out a house he and his wife were thinking about buying. It was located on Apex Drive, a couple of blocks off Westwood Boulevard. I'd collected comparables. I looked first at the house my friend was interested in, a two-story, 1800 square-foot Spanish, which appeared from the outside to have a load of deferred maintenance. The comparables were in much better shape. When I got back to my apartment, I called another friend, a broker, Annie Muller, who'd sold a lot of properties in the area. She'd seen the house, hadn't liked it, thought it was overpriced, and told me to tell Chuck not to buy it. Chuck wasn't at his office so I called him at home.

The phone rang about six times before his wife Verna answered. Chuck had gone to the Post Office, she said. When I told her what Annie had told me about the house, she got so angry she began to scream at me I had no right to stick my nose in her business. "I want that house," she said and slammed down the phone.

17.

The time was now ten-forty-one. I went upstairs to the bathroom and brushed my teeth. At eight minutes to eleven I couldn't stand waiting any longer. I dialed Billie’s number. A woman answered: "Supervisor Klein's office." She also told me her name but I was too nervous to hear what she said. I asked if I could speak to Billie.

"She's not here," the woman said. "She's at a meeting with the Supervisor about the new hospital the County's building and won't be available all day to talk on the telephone."

"Oh," I said, sounding crushed.

"Are you the one she met at the play?" she said.

"We didn't exactly meet," I said.

"Well, she did leave a message. She'll be waiting tomorrow at the Fish Net Restaurant." My spirits shot up. "Do you know the Fish Net on Seventh Street?" she said. "Very fine food, particularly if you're out of your mind for prawns and lobster like I am." She gave me the Fish Net's address and described how to get there.

"What time?" I said.

"Noon sharp. And please don't be late. She's on a tight schedule," the woman said, sounding so concerned about me I apologized for not catching her name the first time she’d told it to me and asked her to repeat it. “Evelyn Von Hewger,” she said, carefully spelling Hewger for me. “My husband’s family, the Von Huggers, actually say Hugger, but Hewger is much more dignified, don’t you think, though none of them agrees with me, including my husband Ollie, who’s still a Von Hugger, Hugger.” She laughed. “Or as I always remind him: Ugher!”

That afternoon I made two quick stops to meet potential clients. A major shopping center developer needed an appraiser to do a market study on a large project in Riverside County. The other involved three partners who sounded serious about asking me to appraise some special properties for them in Canada, Hong Kong, and Japan. By the time I arrived at the Hollywood Public Library I was so excited I had to walk around the block to calm myself. What a glorious day I’d had. First, Billie agrees to have lunch with me, and then I’m told by these influential guys that my sales pitch makes sense to them. Can you imagine? Could hardly believe it!

The Library’s reference room was on the second floor. What I was looking for was information on the play, “The Servant of or to Two Masters,” and its author, Gino or Mario Goldoni, in case Billie wanted to talk about him or the play at tomorrow’s lunch. Certainly I’d feel more comfortable if I had something unique or especially interesting to contribute to our conversation instead of having to depend on her to do most of the talking for both of us.

Surprisingly it turned out that Goldoni’s first name was neither Gino nor Mario. It was Carlo. It was also surprising that the play had been known by both titles: “of two masters,” and “to two masters.”

Goldoni, who was born in Venice in1707 and died at age 86 in 1793, had had a successful career as a lawyer, when in 1745 he was commissioned to write a commedia dell’arte style play, which, as one of the articles points out, completely contradicted the commedia dell’arte tradition.

Until Goldoni commedia dell’arte actors had improvised their own plays within the established roles of their traditional stock characters. Once Goldoni imposed on these actors his scripted play, he undermined the spontaneity of their performances, and eighteenth century commedia dell’arte was dead.

Fascinating stuff to discuss with Billie, I thought, provided she understands I went to the library because I was curious about Goldoni, and not because I was trying to show off by exaggerating my meager knowledge of him or his plays, which I knew wouldn’t work with her. She’d certainly find me out, and I’d feel even more inadequate in expressing my opinions about the play than I already did.

So I made up my mind that tomorrow at lunch I definitely wouldn’t mention Goldoni. If she brought him up, then we’d talk about him, but to risk saying something dumb or inappropriate about my research at the library that might cause a misunderstanding between us made no sense whatsoever, when we could easily postpone talking about Goldoni and the play until we had more experience with one another, and I felt less anxious about making an upbeat impression on her, having already decided, based on what my heart was telling me, that we’d be perfect together.

The Twelve O'clock Chapters 18 - 28

18.

The Fish Net was mobbed when I arrived twenty minutes early. I'd already stopped at Blackman and Blackman and picked up the papers they'd prepared for me. Paul David, the Fish Net's maitre d', gave me a big smile and shook my hand. I told him I was looking for Billie. He said he knew who she was but hadn't seen her.

Mingling with the crowd, I waited outside the front door briefly, then in the lobby, and finally at the bar. I had a couple of short conversations with several people who looked familiar to me. Then Florence Finstone, a senior partner at Blackman and Blackman, got my ear. She invited me to a dinner party, gave me the address of the building she lived in on Wilshire Boulevard and said she'd call me when she and her husband had set the date, which she thought would be in about two weeks. It was now almost twelve twenty-five.

Billie still hadn't shown. I went to the lobby phone booth and called her office. I got Evelyn again. She'd been waiting for me to call, she said, because Billie didn't know how to get in touch with me. "She's going to be late. Well, you know that already, don't you?" Billie’s morning meeting had run past noon, and she hadn't been able to get away from it until the Supervisor decided to adjourn the meeting till Monday. "But she's on her way. Look for her in twenty minutes. Okay?"

The aquarium in the Fish Net's lobby was wide, tall, and sparkling. One of its residents, a yellow guy with a red stripe down its back, was eyeing me flirtatiously. He/she was shortly succeeded by a blue guy, then a pink guy, a green guy, a second yellow guy, two gold guys, a speckled guy, and finally a silver-skinned guy, with whom I was exchanging intense, impatient stares, when Paul David tapped my elbow.

"She's at the back door," he said.

"Is she coming in?" I said. He shrugged, shook his head. He didn't know. I’d have to ask her myself, which was okay with me, now that he’d told me she’d arrived.

The back door was at the end of a long corridor behind the bar. I’d skirted the bar and was hurrying down the corridor, when the door was yanked open from the outside by loud-talking new arrivals (I guessed, a busload of tourists), who pushed into the restaurant, clogging up the doorway and rudely trampling over me. Am I invisible? I thought. Who are these people? What right do they have to treat me as if I don’t exist? Then, because one hulking guy, almost twice my size, wouldn’t budge no matter what I did to squeeze past him, I was that close to poking him in the ribs, which, I admit, could have been doomsday for me, if he’d decided to retaliate.

Fortunately, while I was still resisting my rash impulse to slug him, Paul David, the maitre d’, distracted both of us by summoning the entire group to the dining room. The group’s sudden surge forward thrust me in the opposite direction, out into the Fish Net’s parking lot. Billie, her golden hair glistening in the mid-day sunlight, was crouched behind a silver Toyota sedan. That she didn’t look happy immediately alarmed me. Had she changed her mind? Or, did she have another meeting to go to and needed to postpone having lunch with me? Didn’t make sense, did it, that instead of coming to the lobby to tell me directly, she was apparently intending to give me the bad news on the parking lot, without regard to my intense feelings for her? Peering out from behind the Toyota’s windshield, she signaled me to come to her. "I'm sorry," she said, taking my hand, sounding as anxious and worried as the distressed expression on her lovely face. "We can't eat here. There's some one in the dining room. I don't want him to see me." She asked if it was okay for us to go to another restaurant. "The Shanghai Wok. Do you know it?"

I'd eaten at the Wok a couple of times. "Sure," I said, as we started toward it. Then abruptly, propelled by her long, slender legs, she began to run away from me with such an unexpected burst of speed I couldn't catch up to her until she slowed down as we were approaching the two-story, red-and-gold building, in which the Shanghai Wok was located. "None of them saw us," she gasped, holding her chest, breathing heavily.

What are you talking about?" I said. "None of who didn't see us?"

"In that car. The Cadillac."

"What car? What Cadillac?" I said, swiveling around, as I scanned the street and the parking lot.

Billie had already arrived at the Shanghai Wok's black enameled front door. "Wait here if you don't mind. I'll check." She was in and out of the Wok in less than thirty seconds. "Still no good. Sorry."

Around the corner from the Shanghai Wok in another red and gold building that used to be a Chinese restaurant was the Country Kitchen. A guy in a string tie and a blue and white checked shirt greeted us. "Two?" he said, taking a quick glance at Billie, as he held up two fingers, grabbed two menus from the counter. Indicating we should follow him, he hurried toward a small table at the rear of the crowded, narrow-aisled dining room. As he slapped the menus on the table, I turned to give Billie access to the chair I thought she'd be sitting on and was startled to see she’d vanished. She also wasn't anywhere in the dining room. Skirting through the aisles to the now-empty lobby, I peeked into the near-empty bar. Again I didn't see her. Must be outside, I decided, but when I exited to the street, she wasn't there either. Where could she have gone? Was she deliberately trying to get rid of me? And what about this ridiculous running we'd been doing from one restaurant to another? It didn't make sense. It also depressed me.

My Mustang convertible I'd left on the Fish Net's parking lot. Should I head back to it, or stick around the Country Kitchen to see if she showed up again? Then I began to worry that whoever she'd been attempting to avoid had grabbed her, that they'd hustled her off someplace, that she was in big danger, and that I should be doing something, notifying somebody, to keep her from getting hurt or killed or worse. I'd just about made up my mind to call the cops or Supervisor Klein, when I heard somebody on the other side of the street whistle at me.

"Is that you?" I said, peering hard toward a large, leafy bush behind which I thought I saw her crouching. When her head appeared, then her hand, beckoning me to come to her, I didn't hesitate, almost walking out in front of an oncoming truck, which I'd neglected to notice, because I was so intent on getting to her. Looking innocent and mysterious, she quietly apologized for deserting me in the restaurant. "Still want to take me to lunch?" she said.

19.

The Sacramento Dining Car was Billie’s next choice. Built in 1927 for the Sacramento-San Diego Railroad, the dining car was installed as a restaurant at the corner of Seventh and Dill by an L.A. entrepreneur. Very quickly a huge success as a dinner house, it also developed a hefty luncheon business that continued to grow until a year ago last January when the original owner sold out to a restaurant chain that immediately fired the head chef, drastically revised the menu, and cut back on food quality and service. "It's no longer ‘in,’" Billie said.

When we arrived, less than half of the tables were occupied. Fortunately among the diners there were no other nemeses of Billie so we didn't have to run again. As soon as we were seated, she apologized for the "ordeal" she'd put me through. "It wouldn't have been too bad," I said, "if I'd known what you were doing and why you were running me around like that."

I'm married," she said.

Married? I didn't blurt out, clamping my mouth shut instead.

"We're getting a divorce." I also didn't blurt out Divorce!

She then explained she'd been married four years, that neither she nor her husband was happy in their marriage, and that they both wanted a divorce. "The lawyer is in the Dundee Pearl Building. That's the reason I was there, to see her," she said. "Otherwise, I never would have met you, right?" She gave me a brilliant smile. "Everything's been settled. Tim is moving out on Sunday." Tim was her husband. "He and his friend Steve have rented a two-bedroom apartment in Sherman Oaks. Steve's the guy in the Fish Net I was trying to avoid. Not that it matters if he sees me with you but who knows what he might say to Tim and what kind of trouble that could start when so far we've managed to keep things from getting too complicated between us. Okay?

"The same with the people from my office in the Cadillac. They know about Tim and me, but only Evelyn knows about you, and I want to keep it that way and not get anybody else involved. Then seeing those two women in the Country Kitchen, one of them being Tim's mother's best friend, and the other his dentist's ex-wife, I figure why push it, when all I have to do is walk out the front door, which is exactly what I did, and what I also did at the Shanghai Wok." She began to giggle. "I just looked, thought I saw somebody I recognized, and got myself out of there. Twenty seconds flat, right?" When she put her left hand over her mouth to stifle the giggle, I noticed she wasn't wearing a wedding ring.

This is pure pleasure, I thought, to be sitting here, directly across from her, watching that beautiful, clear-eyed, determined, laughing, smiling, outgoing, shy, intelligent, caring, intensely serious face in action. When the waiter brought the drinks we'd ordered, iced tea for her, a coke for me, she was earnestly small-talking about her office, Supervisor Klein, two of Klein's deputies, Evelyn Von Hueger (Hugger), and several others on the office staff, all of whom might be tempted to gossip about her, which she didn't want to happen.

When our cups of clam chowder arrived, her small talk switched to her family and friends. Somewhere in the middle of our Cobb salads, it switched again, to my family, friends, birthplace, schooling, job, etc. While we were sipping coffee, and she was spooning down her hot fudge sundae, she began to question me in detail about my attitudes toward wages and working conditions, politics and politicians, religious philosophy and affiliation, civil rights, Martin Luther King, the unequal treatment of women, and the Vietnamese War.

Brought up Catholic in a mixed nationality neighborhood, I regularly go to mass, confession, holy communion, the works, I say, until a couple of months after my nineteenth birthday when I quit the Church without notifying either my mother or the Pope. I also attended Catholic grammar and high schools. My mom is Irish-German, or Irish-German Jewish. My dad is English-Australian. There were few girls my age in the neighborhood we lived in, many boys. Among my closest boyhood pals were four Italian-Americans, four Jewish-Americans, two Irish-Americans, one Portuguese-American, and one German-American. We played softball, stickball, wall ball, touch football, and roller skate hockey. We trooped to Sunday afternoon dances together and had secret club meetings in the basement of the apartment building at the corner of East Twelfth Street and Foster Avenue.

On the other side of Twelfth, across from the apartment building and next door to Irving's Fancy Food Market, was Mr. Zimmerman's newspaper and cigar store. Outside the store was a small stand on which Mr. Zimmerman displayed newspapers and magazines. Every day of the week a crowd of adults and kids hung out around the stand. Whenever the crowd got too dense, Mr. Zimmerman would say: "Don't block me up the stand," or too noisy, putting his finger to his lips, "Shush, baby sleeping." The adults were all men. Most were retired lefties, who loved to argue in strong, passionate voices about everything. Their favorite topics, which produced the biggest uproar among them, were economics and politics, socialism vs. capitalism, and the shortsighted, dumb, selfish, corrupt rich guys who ran the world to their own advantage.

The loudest, most emotional and boisterous lefty was an ex-longshoreman named Bingo Meyer. One Saturday Mr. Meyer took a bunch of us kids to Union Square in Manhattan. A huge rally was in progress when we arrived. The newspapers estimated the crowd at thirty-five thousand. There were mini-rallies all over the square. There were also marching, singing, dancing, band-playing, and loads of soap-box speakers haranguing anybody who'd listen on every subject under the sun.

For us the highlight of the day happened when Mr. Meyer was invited up to the main speakers' platform to make a speech about longshoremen and the Brooklyn Navy Yard. We kids were thrilled, watching his face get red and the veins in his neck bulge up as he waved his arms and poked his enormous fists at the crowd who were cheering him so vigorously we couldn't hear a word Mr. Meyer was saying.

This was the life, I thought, unions, crowds, cheering, marching, making speeches nobody can hear, being uncritically recognized as an important, valuable, worthwhile human being.

A neat sparkle lit up Billie’s eyes. Isn't now, I thought, a great time to pop the question I'd been worrying about during most of the last hour of our Sacramento Dining Car lunch? "Dinner on Tuesday?" I said.

"Tuesday?" she said, looking as disappointed as I was about to feel. "Sorry. I can't. In school on Tuesday." She was taking an American History class at Valley College. "It's test night. I can't miss it."

"Wednesday?" I said, giving her a big, sympathetic smile.

"I picket on Wednesday," she said. Her father was a printer. For eighteen years he'd worked for a newspaper company. For the last two years he'd been on strike against the company. His shift on the picket line was every Wednesday from four to eight p.m. "He expects me at five-thirty. He's so shy, would even be worse, if I didn't show up."

"Thursday?" I said, this time not smiling.

"That's bad too," she said, "On Thursdays I baby-sit my three-year-old god-daughter while her mom and dad see a psychotherapist. They're under so much stress they don't know how to handle it"

"Friday?" I said, anticipating being turned down again.

"Fine," she said. "Friday's perfect."

"You sure?"

"Or Saturday."

"Saturday's better?" I said.

"No, not unless it's better for you."

"Makes no difference. You decide. It's your choice."

"How about Monday?" she said.

"Monday? I play basketball on Monday." I felt my heart sinking.

"Then Friday," she said.

"Saturday's also okay," I said.

"No, Friday. That's what you want, isn't it?"

"Any day but Monday."

"Can we make it Friday?" she said.

"Not Saturday?" I said.

"Saturday or Friday, but definitely not Tuesday," she said. "I can't miss school on Tuesday." Then, in a tense, clearly emotional voice, she described how she'd been struggling to get a college education without much encouragement from anybody. Even her parents, who were willing to help their sons, her brothers, to go to college, wouldn't help her, their daughter. "They actually told me college isn't for girls, especially if she has what they think is a wonderful job in Supervisor Klein's office. In the eight years I've been at Valley College I've accumulated half the units I need to get a degree. I've also made up my mind to transfer as a full-time student to a four-year college, as soon as the divorce is final, but that won't happen, the lawyer says, for at least another six months, which gives me time to stop worrying about a lot of things, including having dinner with you on Friday, unless you still prefer Saturday?"

"Only if Saturday is good for you," I said.

"Friday is better," she said. "I take my mother to the movies on Saturday."

Oh, no, I thought, doing a quick calculation in my head. Saturday she takes her mother to the movies, Tuesday she goes to school, Wednesday she pickets with her father, Thursday she baby-sits her goddaughter. What was left for me? Sunday? On Sunday, she said, she has dinner with her family in Burbank. “Can’t disappoint them.” Then it’s Friday or Monday, right? "Maybe we should consider Monday again," I said.

True, I'd told her I played basketball on Monday, but Monday made more sense, didn't it? First of all, I could switch basketball from Monday to Wednesday, when she was picketing with her father. Second, if I did see her on Monday, I'd have only three days to wait till our next date, while Friday meant an additional four days beyond the original three days, for a grand total of seven days without seeing her, which for me was a major consideration. Third, depending on how successful our dinner was on Monday, we could decide to meet again on Friday or Saturday, which would give us two, or possibly three days together in the same week, provided we could persuade somebody to take her mother to the movies on Saturday.

"I go shopping on Monday," Billie said, her voice suddenly sounding distant and stern, which totally confused me, until she began to giggle again, which got me giggling, which got us laughing so hard, with such obvious affection and trust, it wiped out whatever reservations I might have had about falling in love with her. Agreeing finally to have dinner on Monday, we exchanged home addresses and telephone numbers. When I told her I'd pick her up at seven thirty at her apartment in Sherman Oaks, she reminded me Tim wouldn't be moving out till Sunday.

Then casually she mentioned the Anthropology Club meeting she attended on Saturday mornings at nine thirty. "In Doctor Minzeezi's office. Just hearing Minzeezi's name, if I remember correctly, made me uneasy. "Great person. You'll like him," she said cheerily. No, I won't, I thought, which was awful, wasn’t it? To think such a thing about a guy I hadn't met is shameful. She described how accomplished and brave he was, provoking me to feel worse and more deceitful, because I had no interest whatsoever in having anything to do with him, wanting instead to concentrate on her and how she was reacting to me, which seemed mostly positive, with lots of meaningful eye contact and enthusiastic smiling, even as we exited from the restaurant and walked slowly to the parking lot.

Her MG Vanden Plas Princess and my Mustang convertible were parked on opposite sides of the Fish Net's parking lot. Billie was still worried about her friends seeing us together and asked whether I'd mind if we walked to our cars separately. Kissing her fingertips, she pressed them gently against my cheek. I waited until she’d reached the MG Princess, had started up its engine, then, with joy in my heart, hurried after her, as the Princess, with Billie at the wheel, headed jerkily into the lightly-trafficked Wendell Street, while on the far side of the parking lot, standing alone, sleek and serene, was my 289 V-8, lime green, black-topped Mustang.

20.

As I walked quickly toward the Mustang, I was convinced Billie was the most fabulous woman I’d ever met. Okay, I admit she shouldn't have been so frantic about our being seen together by her friends, and we did waste a lot of time running between restaurants, but it was also fun and intriguing and challenged me to consider seriously what was so beautiful about her and why she had such overwhelming appeal to me.

First of all, her beauty had dimension to it. Here, without question, was a beautiful person, inside and out. Purity of her heart and spirit radiate from her, and she didn't seem to have a competitive, mean, or cynical bone in her body.

Most women I went out with mistook my willingness to put their problems ahead of mine as a signal that they had some constitutional right to talk me under the table. Take Margaret, for instance. She knew nothing about who I was, what I felt, and where I wanted to go in life. Not one time had she asked me a single question about myself, and that was true of 98 percent of all the women I’d ever dated, whether I was sleeping with them, or not. And if the woman was in show business like Margaret, or aspiring to be in show business, she'd harangue me almost exclusively about her frustrations at not being a star, or missing out on a terrific part in a movie that would have made her a star, or being humiliated by some ruthless director, or producer, or big-time agent, or embittered by the terrible tragedy of being broke and desperately needing a job, an apartment, a loan, a car, a wig, or a week's vacation in Las Vegas, without ever showing the slightest interest in what was happening to me.

In contrast, Billie seemed wide-open to everything I told her. Not once had she cut me off, or abruptly changed the subject, or interrupted me to make a frivolous or self-centered comment, or act bored, impatient, or annoyed at being forced to listen to what I had to say. True, we'd only been together a relatively short time, but my intuition had already told me loud and clear that she was definitely the perfect person I'd been looking for.

Unlocking the Mustang, pulling open its driver's side door, I practically floated in behind the steering wheel. Restraining myself from chasing after her, I put down the Mustang's convertible top, which I rarely did, having this severe allergy to the California sun, which had already given me two basal cell cancers, one on each ear.

The Mustang's name, of course, came from the three letters on its license plate, V-I-V. Well, both VIV and I were in grand form. While VIV’s engine hummed contentedly, I belted out show tunes in a brash, unruly tenor that sounded terrific to me. We were heading for the beach at Santa Monica. When we arrived, it was almost four o'clock. The sun was waning, but the sand was still hot. Taking off my shoes and socks, I walked along the wet shoreline, just out of reach of the incoming waves.

How lucky can I be, I thought, to have met Billie. The odds against such an extraordinary thing happening to me were enormous. A remarkable sage and world-class prognosticator had once told me that if I stood tippy-toes anywhere along the Santa Monica beach on an ultra-clear day, eyelids narrowed, straining with every fiber of my body to see across the glistening, white-capped ocean, I might have the monumental good fortune of catching a rare, split-second glimpse of some exotic place like Hawaii, Japan, or the distant coast of China, which made no sense whatsoever and sounded completely preposterous, until now, when I became living proof that outrageous impossibilities can actually happen. There, deep into the horizon, at the top of a shimmering, unknown mountain, unfurling a banner that was obviously meant for me, were two black-clad figures. The message on their banner was hazy at first, but as my concentration intensified, I was finally able to read what it said: GO BILLIE GO!!

Then filling my head was this strange, thin, discordant tune, its heroic lyric croaked gruffly in a strident, unfamiliar rasp, hailing Billie Cooper, the golden-haired beauty of my dreams:

Go, Billie, go,
Helping friend and foe,
Doesn’t matter who you are,
She’ll be there and so
Go, Billie, go,
Doing what you know
In your heart is good to do,
Give love a chance to grow.
Be yourself
and do your best
and try to understand
what you want
and how you want it,
walking hand in hand.
So go, Billie, go,
Time for you to show
what it is we need to do
to fight the status quo,
Go, Billie, Go, Billie,
Go, Billie, Go!


21.

On Saturday at 8:12 p.m., when I was already sleeping soundly, the telephone rang. It was the threesome next door. They were inviting me to go with them to Rockaway Tess on Melrose. In ten minutes I was dressed and waiting for them in front of their garage. First out from their apartment was Dora. Despite her usual sunny smile, she was obviously unhappy. “I’m not dancing so don’t ask me,” she said. She was annoyed at Howard for giving into Lulu again, “after the three of us had already agreed to stay home to watch tv.” She was wearing a loose-fitting, full-length, multi-colored, flowered shift that had a large, dark stain below her left breast. “He won’t dance either,” she said irritably, as if she was resigned to having a rotten time at Tess. “He never does. He’s self–conscious about being so tall, and his legs get tangled up when he tries to move too quickly.”

“It’s not my legs,” Howard said, coming up behind her. “I just don’t dance. I’m not a dancer.”

“That’s so silly,” she said, taking a half-hearted swipe at him.

He turned toward me. “I’m always in trouble,” he said. “Every time they disagree about something, I get the deciding vote, so one of them ends up blaming me.”

“Nobody blames you,” Dora said, “though it is annoying when you don’t stand up to her.” But who can possibly stand up to Lulu, I thought, with that great, kissable mouth and those innocent, hurt, vulnerable, pale blue eyes? If I were in Howard’s shoes, I’d be a permanent pushover for her. Poor Dora wouldn’t stand a chance. I’d always be voting against her. Not that I was ever involved in a threesome as they are, or played one woman off against another as he apparently does, but I’ve known vamps like Lulu. All she has to do is gaze helplessly at me, or walk, jiggling her baby fat seductively, and I’m ready to melt, gulp, sweat, or perform her bidding regardless of how inconsiderate and irresponsible she might be.

And what did I do now, when I heard the door to their apartment slam shut, and she suddenly appeared among us? Dressed in tight black pants, a form-fitting black turtleneck sweater, and an embroidered silver vest, she was carrying a four-foot tall plastic walrus. As she strode toward Dora’s blue, four-door Pontiac, totally ignoring me, I could feel my throat tighten and heavy pressure spread across my upper chest. This is dumb, I thought. How can one single kiss make me feel so stupid about myself? Then Dora, who’d accused Howard of having caved in to Lulu’s unreasonable demands, blithely caved in herself, announcing, without embarrassment, that we’d be going to Tess in the Pontiac, that Lulu would be driving, and that Howard and I would be sitting in the back seat with the plastic walrus, which, he said, he’d bought at the Super Outdoor Flea Market in Culver City, when he went to the market looking for monkey wrenches.

The walrus’s one dollar price was an outstanding bargain, he said. He then described how he’d put the walrus on Lulu’s side of the bed, its head nestled on her pillow, and how later, when she arrived home in a foul mood after a hectic day at the office supplies wholesale house, where she worked as a stocker and part-time bookkeeper, she’d stomped through the apartment, without saying a word to him or Dora. “Should’ve heard her upstairs, the way she banged around the bathroom,” Dora said, “until she discovers this thing."

“It’s not a thing,” Lulu said from the driver’s seat, looking over her shoulder at Howard and me. We had squeezed the walrus between us on the rear passenger seat.

“Okay, it’s not a thing, it’s a walrus,” Dora said “A fake walrus."

“I still love it, even if it is fake,” Lulu said, giving us a stern lecture on loyalty and gratitude to inanimate objects “for what they can do to a person’s psyche. I’m a beneficiary. He’s brought me relief. What more can I ask?” Then to me, because I was trying to slip the walrus off the rear seat onto the floor into the space between my knees and the back of the front seat, she said: “Don’t push it down like that. It’s rude.”

“It is?” I said, feeling mortified she’d reprimanded me so bluntly.

“Of course, it is,” she said.

Restoring the walrus to its upright position between Howard and me, I apologized.

“You’ve still got it slumped,” she said. “I don’t want it slumped.”

This time Howard adjusted the walrus, until Lulu was satisfied it was standing up straight enough. “I can put it in the trunk,” Dora said.

“Will you please stay out of this?” Lulu said. “It’s done. It’s perfect where it is.”

“But they’re cramped. Aren’t you cramped, Howard?” Dora said, swinging open the passenger door. Lulu had started up the engine.

“What are you doing?” Lulu said.

“I need to change my dress, okay?” Dora said,

“Now?” Lulu said.

Getting out of the car, Dora turned toward us, planted her hand over the dark stain on her dress. “I didn’t notice how bad it is,” she said.

“You did notice,” Lulu said.

“No, I didn’t.”

“I told her,” Lulu said, looking to Howard and me. “I swear I told her, but she said she didn’t care how bad the stain was, the dress was good enough, and she was still was going to wear it.”

“We can wait, can’t we?” Howard said quietly.

“You see what he does?” Lulu said, directing her sexy mouth provocatively at me. “Takes her side. No matter what the argument is, I’ve got to fight both of them.” Dora was hurrying toward the backyard of their apartment.

“I’m not fighting anybody,” Howard said.

“What are we doing then?” Lulu said. I was watching her sexy mouth twitch.

“I’m trying to give you my personal opinion,” Howard said, as Dora, who was about to vanish into their backyard, held three fingers high above her head.

“Five minutes!” she shouted.

“Five! Five? Give her twenty. It won’t be less than twenty. That’s so damn selfish,” Lulu said, manipulating her lush lips with such irresistible emphasis I wanted to reach over and grab her.

“Would you mind turning off the engine?” Howard said. Lulu had left the engine on, and the car was vibrating squeakily. “We’re wasting gas, especially if she does take twenty minutes.” When Lulu’s only response was to glare fiercely at me, then at him, he said in a low, determined voice: “Turn it off, please.”

Spinning away from us, she grabbed the ignition key, and, as the engine went dead, yanked the key from its socket. “It’s off,” she said defiantly, dangling the key, as if she was about to hand it to Howard. Instead, even more defiantly, she threw it out the driver-door’s open window.

22.

Dora returned in seventeen minutes, not bad, considering Lulu’s estimate of twenty, during which Lulu groaned and sighed grumpily, got out of the car and threatened to abandon us twice, and eventually, climbing a third time from the car, poked among the bushes alongside the apartment building, searching for the ignition key she’d tossed out the window, while I continued to pay close attention to her fascinating mouth, as she bounced in and out of the car, and Howard, who was a trader at the Pacific Stock Exchange, described the disastrous week he’d had, when several of the stocks he traded-in had reported major earnings losses. He also was worried-sick, he said, because Lulu was angry so much of the time. “Until this damn competition started to see who’d get pregnant first, she never said anything against Dora. Now, no matter what Dora tries to do for her, she immediately wants to argue about it.” Lulu was walking slowly back toward the car. “I wish I could make her happy,” he said.

Lulu had found the ignition key. Showing the key to us, as she got back into the car, she pointed to a skinny bush at the top of the path beside the apartment building. “Skipped that far when I threw it,” she said, pursing her sexy lips, I thought, arrogantly, as if we were supposed to be grateful to her for finding the key, which she’d almost lost by throwing it out the car window.

Then the door to their apartment opened, and Dora came out. Immediately she headed toward the Pontiac, announcing in a loud voice how sorry she was for holding us up longer than she’d anticipated. “Had to take a shower,” she said.

“That’s so selfish,” Lulu said, glancing angrily at Howard. “Shouldn’t have waited for her.”

When Dora arrived directly in front of the car, Lulu snapped on the Pontiac’s powerful headlights. Completely transformed, in a pale green, ankle-length skirt, a bright gold, long-sleeved, collarless shirt, shimmering silver earrings, a thick silver chain around her neck, and a ton of silver and gold bracelets on her wrists, Dora grinned self-consciously. “Is this okay?” she said, stretching out her arms and swaying her shoulders awkwardly as if she didn’t feel confident about the impression she was making on us. When Howard and I shouted that she and her outfit were more than okay, Lulu didn’t look pleased.

Moving quickly to the passenger side door, pulling it open, Dora got into the car. “Ready at last,” she said, as she settled into the passenger seat.

The extraordinary perfume she’d put on sure smelled terrific. “Fabulous stuff,” I said, sniffing her, making her giggle, and getting Lulu even more irritated at me, which may have provoked her into giving us such a reckless, unnerving ride to Rockaway Tess that I seriously considered jumping out of the car. Or maybe this was how she always drove, and Howard and Dora were calm and uncomplaining, because what she was doing didn’t seem unusual to them. Deliberately I didn’t say anything critical about her or her driving, though much later I did mention to Howard that in my opinion everybody on the road, including Lulu, has an obligation to everybody else to obey the law and drive as carefully as possible in a reasonable manner that doesn’t confuse passengers like me, who depend on drivers like Lulu to keep them safe.

First of all, I didn’t appreciate that she drove in spurts that had nothing to do with traffic or other road conditions. That is, starting from the courtyard’s private street, she spurted out into Holloway Drive, cruised at a constant speed for a short distance, then abruptly spurted ahead again, then slowed down sharply as we approached La Cienega, before making a series of erratic spurts and slow-downs along Santa Monica Boulevard that had startled pedestrians scurrying to get out of her way. Also she tended to brake late and hard, which meant we’d get shaken up badly whenever she came to a full stop. On side streets she drove to the right as far as possible, narrowly missing parked cars, including, on Kings Road, a brand-new yellow Lincoln Continental. Stop signs she rolled through, barely hitting the brake pedal, and to make a left turn, as she did from Kings Road into Melrose Avenue, she first turned right, then left, sliding the tip of her tongue, which I could see clearly in the rear view mirror, in an inverse direction, from the left corner to the right corner of her magnificent mouth.

When we arrived at Rockaway Tess, its parking lot was crowded, cars overflowed into its aisles, and every time one of us spotted what appeared to be a vacant space, we were aced out of it by a combative driver, male or female, who seemed ready to crash into Dora’s Pontiac rather than to allow us to take the space away from him or her.

Then Dora announced she had this hunch, which Lulu tried to reject, but was talked into it by Howard, that we should look for a place to park on the far side of Tess’s building. Between the trash bins, Dora remembered, were three parking spaces. Miraculously backing out of one of them, as we turned into the far aisle, was a battered Dodge truck. Well, the sight of that truck, with a smiling driver at its wheel, and no one else around to challenge us for the space, got the four of us cheering excitedly. As soon as we were parked, Lulu and Dora grabbed and hugged one another, making such a big display of dependency and affection that Howard’s eyes, as well as mine, filled with tears. “That’s more like it,” he said, pounding my shoulder.

23.

Housed in an ornate, columned, three-story building that originally was a Perpetual Order of the Universe church and meeting hall, and still sporting the church’s pink-stucco Greek façade, its ornamental frieze of plaster-cast dancing angels, its Spanish-tiled peaked roof, and the lighted, hand-carved platform that once held its symbolic herald of good news, a gold painted, horn-blowing, faithful-summoning archangel Gabriel, Rockaway Tess was already packed.

“Bring Cotton Tail,” Lulu said.

“Cotton Tail? I said.

“The walrus,” Dora said. “That’s what she calls him.”

“A rabbit has a cotton tail, not a walrus,” I said.

“Talk to her about it,” Howard said, tucking Cotton Tail under his arm, as we started toward Tess’s main entrance. Hurrying ahead of us, Lulu quickly disappeared into the crowd that seemed as anxious as she was to join the former church’s new congregation. Shortly we too were swept into the defrocked hall’s lobby. Jammed together, hip-to-hip, on the oval-shaped dance floor that had displaced the church’s altar, intense-faced communicants were dancing ecstatically. On the choir loft above the dance floor were the ex-church’s new evangelists, the rock band, Five X’s, Three Y’s, and Ruby, whose strong beat and heavy brass sound instantly had my head bobbing. Even Howard, the self-proclaimed non-dancer, was twitching as if he was actually enjoying himself. “Great,” I shouted at him. Dora laughed and clutched his arm, hanging eagerly onto it. That she also had to stretch up on her toes as high as she could to kiss him was hilariously funny to both of them. Love is grand, isn’t it?

The next time we saw Lulu was after we’d paid our admission fees and were being hustled to a table on the second floor balcony. Squeezed against the far corner of Tess’s thirty-foot bar, Lulu was making spirited conversation with one of the bartenders and several eager-faced customers, all of whom seemed to have their hands on her. “She knows everybody, doesn’t she?,” Dora said.

“Well, I don’t like it. Look at them. Look what they’re doing to her. Doesn’t show respect,” Howard said, leaning over the railing. “Why can’t she sit with us?”

“She came here to dance, didn’t she?” Dora said. “Are you going to dance with her?”

“That’s not the question,” he said. “She’s being taken advantage of, regardless of what she thinks is happening to her.”

Turning toward me, Dora whispered: “He’s jealous.”

Of course, he’s jealous, I thought but didn’t say, and so am I. Can you imagine? One kiss, and I’m staking my claim on her. What a laugh. In my family we didn’t go around being jealous of one another. At least I wasn’t aware of it, but who knows what the rest of them had to contend with, especially considering my grandmother who completely dominated our household. Jealousy had to be somewhere, didn’t it?

Meanwhile, competing for elbow-and-hip room on the dance floor below us were Lulu and two manic-looking partners, whose dance styles were radically different from one another’s and also from hers. The tall guy was almost rigid, his arms straight down at his sides, his hips and feet barely moving. The other guy, the short guy, hunched his head forward and bounced a lot, while Lulu danced like the unforgettable kiss she’d given me, smoothly, sensually, totally coordinated in sinuous movement from top to bottom. Wow!

Then a waiter wanted to take the chair Cotton Tail was propped on. He had a customer, he said, who needed a chair. Howard tried to argue that the chair was really for Lulu who was on the dance floor and might be returning shortly, but the waiter insisted, saying he’d find another chair for Lulu, if and when she did return, because the customer who didn’t have a chair had been complaining bitterly to him. Finally Dora told the waiter he could take the chair, handing Cotton Tail to me, as Ruby, the band’s lead singer, was snarling in her grating, unpleasant voice one of the band’s most recent hits, either “Marmalade Pudding,” or “Chasing Bad, Bad Love,” I don’t remember which. Narrowing my eyes and peering hard through the foul air that was rising in pale blue clouds toward the balcony, I noticed a woman waving to me from a table at the edge of the dance floor. I recognized her immediately. It was Florence Finstone. Her husband, Harlow, I saw, was with her, and also two young women, who turned out to be their nieces, Bambi and Tinker Bloom, from Scranton, Pennsylvania.

Getting down to meet them was a delicate business. I couldn’t desert Dora and Howard. Lulu had abandoned them on the parking lot, disappointing them enough. If I walked out on them now, wouldn’t they feel even more neglected? But when I explained who Florence Finstone was and that I’d been negotiating with her on behalf of a real estate appraisal client, Dora said: “Go, talk to her, we’re okay, and don’t worry about Lulu. This is what she always does. Isn’t it, Howard?”

Howard nodded glumly. He’d noticed, as I had, that the six women at the next table were making covetous eyes at Cotton Tail. Older than the typical Tess’ rocker, they were dressed as if they’d come directly from the office where they worked, which was almost true, as they later told us, because they’d stopped at a pizzeria for dinner before arriving at Tess. Two of them, a bright-eyed blonde in her mid-forties and a dark-haired, round-faced, powerfully-built over-fifty-year-old were the most animated in gesturing how eager they were to cuddle Cotton Tail.

Shaking my head no, I made the dumb mistake of flapping one of Cotton Tail’s flippers at them, which got them even more excited. When the band took a short break, and the roar of the audience had simmered down, the fifty-year-old yelled at me: “Why can’t we hold it?”

“Not possible,” I said, again shaking my head no, which was ridiculous, of course, and selfish. What harm can they do to it? I thought. Then Dora whispered she was willing to allow them to hold Cotton Tail, but Howard didn’t agree. He was suspicious, he said. They were drinking champagne and acting silly. Who knows how careful they’d be with Cotton Tail and whether they’d give it back to us?

“We have a responsibility,” he said. “I’m sorry.“

The blonde, in an earnest voice, barely audible above the crowd noise, said: “We only want to dance with it. What’s wrong with that?”

“Dance with it?” Howard said. “It’s a walrus, a plastic walrus. It doesn’t dance.”

“We’ll teach it,” the fifty-year-old said, getting a big laugh from the other women.

“Can’t do,” Howard said, as the women, all six of them, began to pound the table and chant: “Share the walrus, share the walrus, share the walrus…Very quickly most people in the auditorium were pounding and chanting “share the walrus,” or “spare the swordfish,” or “snare the cookie,” or “scare the horsefly,” or “glare the headlight,” or “blare the tuba,” whatever came to mind that had an “air” sound and a two-syllable noun attached to it, not having the slightest idea of what had transpired on the balcony, until Howard, leaping to his feet, grabbed Cotton Tail from my lap. Raising it high above his head so the entire audience could get a clear view of it, he shouted: “Plastic walrus!”

Instantly the crowd went wild, cheering and applauding thunderously, though obviously few among them knew that Howard was brandishing a plastic walrus at them. In contrast, Lulu, whom I could clearly see from the balcony, was stunned. Saucer-eyed and limp-mouthed, she stared up at us, flanked by her dance partners, now numbering five, who were pumping their fists on behalf, I suppose, of sharing, sparing, or snaring Cotton Tail, all of which she was vehemently against. Shoving aside a couple of her partners, Lulu elbowed her way across the dance floor,then up the stairs to the balcony, wresting Cotton Tail away from Howard, her exquisite mouth throbbing sensationally. Then abruptly, while she was squeezing Cotton Tail so tightly its plastic head came close to exploding, the audience’s attention switched from Cotton Tail and Lulu to Ruby and the Band, when the band burst into a raucous rendition of their latest hit, “Don’t Trust Those Guys.” The minute Ruby opened her mouth, the rockers, who’d been screaming their undying allegiance to Cotton Tail, apparently forgot completely about it, as they sang boisterously along with her:

Don’t trust those guys,
Their awful ways,
And scornful gaze,
Their scheming heads,
Avoid their beds,
Don’t trust those guys at all.

They are the worst,
The very first
In doing harm to others,
What brutes they are,
Most vile by far,
They even kill their brothers.

Don’t trust those guys
Who tell such lies,
Despite their cries,
Say no instead,
Take none to bed,
Don’t trust those guys at all,
At all.
Don’t trust those guys at all
Yeah!

24.

By the time I got down to Florence and her family they were getting ready to leave. The noise was too much for them, Florence said, the nieces hadn’t been asked to dance, and Harlow, her husband, was complaining the bad air and loud chanting had given him “a vicious headache that seemed to be getting worse.”

“What are they hollering about?” Harlow said, screwing up his tanned, thick-nosed face.

I explained about Cotton Tail, Howard, Lulu, and the women at the next table who wanted us to share Cotton Tail with them.

“Share it?” Harlow said. “What do you mean share it? I thought they wanted to spare it.”

“It’s a plastic walrus,” I said,

“A walrus?” Florence said. She laughed, poking her finger at Harlow. “That’s what I told you it is, didn’t I?”

“It’s not what you told me it is,” Harlow said. “You said it’s a frog, or an alligator. You never once mentioned a walrus.”

“I did, Harlow,” she said. “Of course, I did. Didn’t I, girls?”

The nieces looked embarrassed. Florence introduced them to me. “This is Tinker,” she said. “She’s my brother Jack’s daughter, right?” Tinker nodded, blushed, and flashed her pale blue eyes at me. Nice, I thought. “And this is brother Paul’s daughter, Bambi,” Florence said. “They’re with us for three weeks, actually nineteen days, not including arrival and departure, and want to keep busy every minute, don’t you, sweeties? I wish I knew more people they could spend time with. I’m looking for volunteers.”

Selfishly (self-protectively) I didn’t volunteer, but I did ask if it was okay for me to sit between them. “They’d love it,” Florence said. Looking even more embarrassed, the nieces reluctantly shifted their chairs to make room for me. “They’re such great kids,” Florence said, making proud faces at them, “good to their parents, good to their auntie (her), good to their uncle (Harlow), both of them top of their class and straight A students. Bambi has five brothers and two sisters, all of them as terrific as she is, and Tinker wants to be a dentist like her father.”

“Dental surgeon,” Tinker said, smiling brightly at me. She had great teeth.

“Tinker, poor dear, doesn’t have brothers or sisters,” Florence said, “but the house she lives in, you should see it. Magnificent. Three-story. Six bedrooms. Jack’s dream.”

“Bambi’s daddy washes windows for a living,” Harlow said.

“That’s so silly,” Florence said. “He’s got a window washing business, which is quite different from washing windows for a living.”

“Lots of clients,” Harlow said. “Two sons in with him. Bambi’s in college, aren’t you, honey? Wants to be a social worker.” Bambi smiled shyly at me. “I have a sister-in-law who has a brother whose wife used to be a social worker,” I said.

Ruby and the Band had come back on stage. They were about to play “Race Horse,” another of their big hits, and Ruby was telling how on a flight to Louisville, Kentucky she’d written the song’s lyric, in which an impulsive gambler pleads with a long-shot named Race Horse to win the Kentucky Derby and to do it for her. “Is that so remarkable?” Ruby growled into the microphone, as the crowd roared with laughter and the band played loud, cynical chords. Then complaining crankily to more crowd laughter and more cynical chords, she demanded an apology from everyone involved in the race, including the horse. Hadn’t the horse let her down by finishing a dismal fifth? “What kind of gratitude is that?” she whined, a mischievous grin spreading across her wild-eyed face. “I want my money back!” Again the crowd laughed uproariously.

Shouting over the chords and the crowd, Florence said: “Doesn’t anybody want to dance?”

“She does,” Tinker said, almost inaudibly, pointing at Bambi.

“So do you,” Bambi said. .

“Not as much as you,” Tinker said, smiling prettily, but sounding as if she’d rather be boiled in oil than forced to dance with somebody she didn’t want to dance with. When she glanced at me, I think I blushed. Certainly I felt self-conscious, and my stomach began to rumble noisily.

“Take your pick,” Florence said, nodding to me, then to the nieces.

I shook my head no. “It’s up to them,” I said, unreasonably convinced they’d already made up their minds I was too square and/or too old for them. Each, to me, looked no more than sixteen, or maybe seventeen. Much later Harlow told me they had identification with them, claiming they were twenty-one. He also said they’d been born eleven days apart.

Grabbing my hand, Florence pulled me to my feet, as the Band and Ruby broke into “Race Horse, Race Horse,” which goes: “Race Horse, Race Horse, Got your number, Race Horse, Race Horse, Got it good, Race Horse, Race Horse, Do me justice, Win that race, Like you should.”

Short and stocky, with loose hips and a powerful spring to her legs, Florence maneuvered me into a narrow space at the center of the crowded dance floor. To avoid being pummeled by the energetic couple rocking next to us I had to turn sideways and hold my elbows against my chest. Florence’s dance style was arms-and-legs-flailing-wildly electric eggbeater. Not knowing how to keep up with her, I stood flat-footed and grunted grimly in time to the Band’s heavy beat.

We lasted through “Race Horse” and “Got Me Guessin’, Baby,” which Ruby said she’d also written, before Florence announced she was exhausted and dragged me off the floor. Harlow was alone at the table. “They’re dancing,” he said.

Sure enough, the nieces were out on the floor with two young guys, probably in their very early twenties, who seemed to have more vitality than what I’d observed from any of Lulu’s former partners. “They’re loving it,” Florence said. Certainly they had a glow to them I hadn’t seen before. It also struck me how much alike they looked, though they were cousins, not sisters. In height there was little difference between them. I estimated five six, or possibly five seven. They had streaked, shoulder-length blonde hair that flipped at the ends. Their skins were fair, almost stark white, with faded pimple marks around their lopsided mouths. Their eyes were blue, Bambi’s deeper blue than Tinker’s. Slim-waisted, thin-shouldered, full-hipped, thick-legged, they were dressed in striped tops and purple mini-skirts that were strictly Scranton, Pennsylvania, definitely not showbiz West Hollywood.

Florence reminded me about her party. “Next Saturday,” she said. “Bring whoever you want. We’re having a Latin trio. That’s my kind of music.”

“I love salsa,” I said.

“And tango? Do you love Tango?,” she said. I nodded yes. She told me about a trip she and Harlow had taken to Rio de Janeiro. “Got professional lessons from this brilliant guy. What a teacher. It was like a dream every time he put his arms around me.”

“Obviously you’re too good for me,” I said.

“We’ll see,” she said, a flirtatious smile on her heavily made-up face, as the nieces were being returned to the table by their partners, who immediately disappeared.

The nieces looked disappointed and hurt. “Not a success?” Florence said. They shook their heads no. When I mumbled something that I thought was sympathetic but may have sounded insincere or stupid to them, they abruptly turned their backs on me, as if I’d insulted them, or didn’t understand how angry and humiliated they were feeling, or maybe they decided they’d seen enough of my face and didn’t want to look at it again, which was okay with me, if that was what they genuinely felt, but I was shocked they’d rejected me so sharply.

“I’ll get the car and meet you out front,” Harlow said. “Still have that damn headache.”

25.

The nieces were even more subdued, as we walked out to the car. “Don’t trust those guys,” Florence muttered off-key and tonelessly, imitating Ruby. The nieces stared coldly at her. “They’re not worth it. They’re creeps. Who cares about them?” Florence said. “To start with you’re much too good for them, so why give them the satisfaction?”

Walking more quickly, the nieces began to put distance between them and us. “I’m making it worse, aren’t I?” Florence said. “They’re so popular at home, and they’re gorgeous dancers. What more do guys like that want from them? I resent it, and I can’t help if I talk too much, but somebody has to stand up for them, don’t they?”

We had to wait at the curb, until Harlow arrived with the car. The nieces climbed into the back seat. I held the front passenger door open for Florence. “Don’t forget Saturday,” she said, giving me a worried look, “and call me, okay?”

As Harlow drove off, the nieces again ignored me. What had these guys done to them, and why were they taking it out on me? Not that I didn’t recognize that something humiliating and hurtful had happened to them. But what can I do about it? Should I find these guys and confront them, when I don’t even know what to accuse them of? Heading back into Tess’s lobby, I decided I had no choice but to forget about them, no matter how outraged I felt on the nieces’ behalf.

Then I got the next shock. Halfway up the stairs to the balcony, I saw that four other people were sitting at the table Dora, Howard, and I had occupied and that the six women who’d been harassing us about Cotton Tail were gone. And what could have happened to my friends? Where had they disappeared to? Certainly they wouldn’t take off without me, or would they? The parking lot, I thought. Maybe they were waiting for me on the parking lot. Racing down the stairs, across the lobby, and out the front door, I hurried to the far side of the building where we’d parked Dora’s Pontiac, which, I saw immediately, also had vanished. Help! I’m deserted! Alone! Left behind! How could they have done this to me?

Hoping to find somebody to give me a lift home, I rushed back to Tess’s crowded lobby. At first glance, as I surveyed the crowd, I didn’t see a familiar face. Then on the far side of the staircase I spotted a guy I thought I knew from the bank I used to work at. When I got up close, I realized it was somebody else who didn’t even look like the guy at the bank. Can you imagine? I should wear my glasses more often. Then a woman called to me from the bar. Hey, I know her, I thought. She was also getting ready to leave. Unfortunately she lived south of Pico, in the opposite direction from my apartment on Holloway, and said meanly, I thought, that she didn’t have time to take me home.

Well, rats, I’d struck out again, which wasn’t so bad, because I could walk home in maybe twenty- five minutes, and that was hardly a problem, right? Turning toward the door, I was about to head out of Tess, when my next big headache happened. Pushing into Tess through the incessantly noisy crowd were two haughty-looking guys, one of whom, Billie’s soon-to-be-ex-husband, I recognized instantly from that fateful night at the Ambrose Franklin Forum. And who do you suppose was with them, looking even more gorgeous than I could have imagined in my wildest dreams? Billie, of course.

Billie, Billie, Billie, I gasped. Before she had a chance to see me, I wanted desperately to get out of there. I’d hardly taken a step, when she turned and was staring straight at me. Her face, that beautiful face, looked shocked. Shocked! As quickly as I could move, I was gone, vanished, my aching heart irreparably broken. But not quite.

26.

Truthfully, outside on Melrose Avenue, breezing along in the crisp, mind-clearing night air, I felt both elated and relieved.

Free of her at last, I thought, though I’d known her for less than a week.

To pull a stunt like that on me took nerve, a lot of nerve, again proving, I suppose, that so-called human nature, despite infrequent surprises, is eternally duplicitous and dumb. Popping into my head, as I hurried toward La Cienega, was Ruby and the Band’s smash hit, “Chasing Bad, Bad Love,” and the huge ovation Tess’s crowd of adoring rockers had given it. Wasn’t it remarkable that at this critical time I should think of “Bad, Bad’s” depressingly appropriate lyric? I had to laugh at myself. How ridiculous can I be?

Chasing bad, bad love,
That’s all I ever do,
Where’s my pride,
The tears I’ve cried,
To save myself for you.

Yes indeed I do it,
Barely getting through it,
Always left to rue it,
Knowing I just blew it.

Chasing bad, bad love,
Sad story of my life,
Don’t have time
To get what’s mine
And chase bad love again

A half-block from La Cienega I saw there’d been a terrible accident. Two cars had slammed into one another on the Melrose Avenue center dividing line. Several people from both cars appeared to be severely injured. When I got near enough to the smashed cars, I recognized that among the injured was one of the young women Al had been teasing the night I’d met him at Schubert’s. Her name, if I remember correctly, was Audrey – Audrey Frost, I think. From where I was standing she looked as if she was bleeding badly. A couple of cops had arrived. I could hear the sound of a distant siren. My first reaction was to try to help somebody who’d been injured. Of course, what I actually did was to head for Audrey. Well, when she saw me coming toward her, she started to shake her fists at me and scream: “Don’t let him touch me. He’s not a doctor! He’s not a doctor!” Her panic instantly got the cops excited about keeping me away from her.

“Stop! Hold it!” one of them shouted, as another cop grabbed my arm and hooked it behind my back. Sobbing convulsively, tears streaming down her bloody face, Audrey described how I’d claimed to be a brain surgeon and how I’d told her I had an office in the Scanlon Medical Building, which I didn’t, she said, because when she’d gone to the Scanlon and tried to find me, “no one in the building had ever heard of him.” Warning me that impersonating a doctor at the scene of an accident was a serious offense, the cop, my cop, the one who was twisting my arm behind my back, threatened to lock me up if I tried to make trouble for her, or him.

“It was just a joke,” I said, as sweat broke out on my forehead.

“This is not a joke,” the cop shouted, twisting my arm even harder.

Then, fortunately for me, as I was attempting to explain to him that Al had been teasing Audrey and her friend and that my being a doctor was the joke, not the accident and certainly not the horrible injuries poor Audrey and the other victims had suffered, an ambulance and two fire trucks roared into Melrose Avenue. While attendants from the ambulance as well as the fire trucks were jumping off their vehicles and rushing to Audrey and the accident’s other victims, the cops, including my cop, who was apparently in charge of intimidating me, immediately turned their full attention to the injured and the rescue crew who were hurriedly examining them.

Feeling justified I’d be harming no one if I took advantage of the confusion the rescue workers had created, I quietly slipped away from my cop, when he unexpectedly released his grip on my arm to assist a medic who was attempting to lift one of the victims, a panicked grade-schooler with a nasty gash on her forehead, onto a stretcher. Following a fireman back to his truck, walking rapidly past him as he hopped aboard it, I escaped unnoticed up a side street, panicked every step I took that my entire vascular system was about to rupture.

27.

Having run uphill most of the nine long blocks between Melrose and Holloway Drive, I was so dispirited and weak I practically crawled into the yard behind my apartment. Cotton Tail was waiting on the back porch to greet me, propped against the porch’s railing with a note on his chest that said SORRY! Probably this was Lulu’s idea. “I’m not forgiving them!” I said aloud.

Sinking down cross-legged on the porch, I stared up at the smog-filled sky. The stars I could see were fuzzy and dim, except for one remarkable dazzler that seemed to be winking at me. Oh, was I thrilled. Am I about to be delivered by this lucky star from the rash of painful defeats I’d just endured? “Let’s hope so,” I said, again aloud, though I didn’t doubt some of the fault belonged to me. I’m asking for it, right? I’m sticking out my chin, and they’re connecting with haymakers, because I deserve what I get for being such a fool with a major flaw in my character.

Take Lulu, for instance, beginning with that infamous kiss through the unbearable snub she’d given me at Tess, when she’d denied me the opportunity to dance even one stupid dance with her. Instead I was forced to sit with Dora and Howard, who are good people, so I’m not complaining, as Lulu danced with five somebody-elses, while I was expected to guard with my life her plastic walrus. Now that was offensive, wasn’t it? Why does stuff like that keep happening to me?

Consider, in addition, that Florence’s nieces had also snubbed me. No question I’m older than they are, by at least ten years, and a lot less cool, as I’ve already admitted, but that was no excuse for them to be rude to me after I’d tried so hard to please them. Yet there I was, standing forlornly in my back yard, a skinny one hundred and forty-six pounder, with thick, left-parted black hair, bushy eyebrows, and freckles on the bridge of my undersized nose, dressed in a navy blue, boat-necked, light-weight, tight-fitting nylon sweater, narrow-legged tan poplin pants, and oxblood loafers with splayed leather tassels on them, attempting to masquerade as much younger than my twenty-nine years, which the nieces had probably spotted the first time they’d looked at me. But did this mean I deserved to be spurned by them, because I’m admittedly vain and insecure about myself? Naw, not if they have half a brain between them. Then why the sub-zero cold-shoulder? And why did my own pals, Howard, Lulu, and Dora, walk out on me without explanation or warning? Where, o where, was my lucky star, when I needed it to protect me from being abandoned by people I uncritically respected and trusted?

And what did this so-called lucky star do to shield me from being threatened by bloody-faced Audrey, while that sadistic cop was trying to break my arm? And unless I’m far luckier than I can possibly hope to be, that cop is going to remember who I am and what his beef is against me. That Audrey knows my name and wouldn’t hesitate to file heavy-weight teasing charges against me probably means he’s already on his way to confront me, considering how much he seemed to enjoy twisting my arm.

Now, as the L. A.smog was rapidly swallowing up my lucky star, I struggled to my feet, unlocked the back door. What should I do with Cotton Tail? Was he a gift, a peace-offering, or another slap-in-the-face by three self-centered exploiters who don’t give a damn about me? But how can I blame this poor plastic walrus for what I’d suffered from them? He was sweet and innocent, wasn’t he? Scooping him up, I carried him into the apartment through the kitchen to the living room, where I sat him on the couch. What’s so fascinating about him? I wondered. He certainly didn’t compare to a dog, especially a dog like Margaret’s Hector, who could run and jump and chase a ball or a stick. Now that was real fun. I began to think about Hector and also about Margaret. What a mess I’d made out of my miserable relationship with her. To see Hector again, I’d certainly have to apologize for the dumb way I’d treated Margaret. I could call her, I suppose, provided she was willing to talk to me, which I doubted. Or I could send her a note. Would a note work? Would she read it? Would she answer me? I’ll write her in the morning, I decided.

Woof! Woof!

28.

From shortly after one a.m., when I got to bed, to five twenty-three, the last time I looked at the clock before falling deeply asleep, I worried about losing Billie. The trapped-in look on that gorgeous face of hers had told me the whole story, that the husband was back in, and I was out, plain and simple, that I had no chance whatsoever to do anything to reverse her tragic choice of him over me, except to drop like a rock into unconsciousness, which I promptly did, remaining inert and disconnected, until suddenly I thought I heard a shrill ringing in my head that I stubbornly refused to acknowledge, even as I was fumbling to pick up the telephone on the dresser beside my bed. Despite stiff lips and a parched tongue, I managed to grunt an incoherent hello and was startled when I heard Billie’s lovely voice reply: “Did I wake you?”

Again I grunted. Apparently satisfied with what I’d grunted at her, she said cheerily: “Too early, isn’t it? Should I call back later?” I groggily checked the clock. It said seven sixteen, I think. I’d slept slightly less than two hours, was completely exhausted and totally unprepared to have a conversation with her about how great the husband was and why she’d decided to stick with him instead of getting involved with me. She began by saying: “I need to explain what happened last night at Tess. Okay?”

Well, talk about mixed emotions. There I was flat on my back, struggling to wake up long enough to chastise her for humiliating me at Tess, at the same time I was thrilled she’d called me. Her reason for being at Tess, as she described it, was aboveboard and uncomplicated. She and the husband’s new roommate, she said, had helped the husband move out of their Sherman Oaks apartment. When the move was completed, the three of them had gone to dinner together. After dinner the husband had suggested Billie and he should celebrate their amicable break-up by going dancing at Tess (the roommate was invited). “ If you hadn’t run away like you did,” Billie said, “I would have introduced you to them. We could have danced, the two of us, you and me. It would have been fun. I would have loved it.”

Feeling more awake and less tense, I sat up in bed. She reminded me we had a dinner date on Monday. I asked her about restaurants and what kind of food she preferred: French, Italian, Mexican, Chinese? “You choose,” she said, giggling softly. The remainder of our conversation was a breeze, full of lightness and laughter. What a woman, I thought. It’s great to be in love again.