DMAGZ111987 — 023

Brookner novels. That woman knows too much.”

“What should I read?”

“Good poetry. That is why poets were invented. For times like this.”

“What about trashy TV and popcorn?”

“Better do that too. Wait a second.” I held on while Roger conferred with his secretary. The square of sunlight had shrunk by half. Bill the cat had returned to my garbage can, sniffing shamelessly, aging fearlessly. 1 wished I were Bill. “Have to go,” Roger said. “People are waiting.”

“Tell me something hopeful first.”

“You’re meeting me at my office tomorrow for an expensive lunch and I’m paying. High noon.”

I took the phone inside and perused my bookshelves for spiritual aid. It might be time to reread the seven-stages-of-man speech in As You Like It, I thought, except it might make me mewl and puke.

I held my Shakespeare collection, unopened, and remembered a cold Sunday afternoon in 1975. Depressed from some romantic nonsense or other, I’d stepped into a fern bar for an Irish coffee. My hair was shoved under a scarf, I wore no makeup, and I felt like the dog in L’Etranger. I sat alone at a table and slowly realized that three women at the next table were staring at me.

They were in their sixties. One was exquisitely beautiful, or had been. Her bone structure was Hepburnesque.

“Can you even remember having skin like that?” one of them said. The beauty shook her head as if her heart would break.

The one in the middle had an affable pudding face. “I never looked that great myself,” she said. “So 1 didn’t have that much to lose.’1 She laughed heartily.

I opened my Shakespeare to As You Like It. prepared for the worst. “All the world’s a stage,” I read. I remembered Elvis Presley speaking those words in the song “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” Elvis at the Cow Palace, bloated and six years from death.

Bill meowed on the deck. I opened the door and threw him a piece of cheese. His cries were piercingly loud. He finished off the cheese and gave me such an evil look that I tossed him another one. I knelt down to his cat level and asked him where 1 should get Roger to take me for lunch. He walked away.

I made popcorn, read some Dylan Thomas, and turned on the TV. A “Dynasty” rerun was on. I ate and watched, thanking God simultaneously for television and literature. Alexis Carrington, her fifty-year-old shoulders padded for battle, was spreading caviar on a cracker just as Bill knocked over my garbage can again. I could see from my living room the orange peels and egg shells skittering across the deck.

I laughed at the mess. I laughed as hard as Affable Pudding Face did in 1975. I swear I couldn’t think of another thing to do.