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.