LITMIR.BIZ

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she was in a mighty hormonal rage and suffered under the delusion that she could lift a thousand pounds and chew her way through vanadium steel. She claimed that Lazar had bankrupted her, among other outrageous and untrue assertions, and he went out for a beer to escape from her. By the time he returned, several hours later, she had moved out, taking with her only his belongings, as though she had come to see some fundamental inequity in their relationship—such as their having been switched at birth—and were attempting in this way to rectify it.

      This loss, though painful, he would have been willing to suffer if it hadn’t included his collection of William Powelliana, which was then at its peak and contained everything from the checkered wingtips Powell wore in The Kennel Club Murder Case to Powell’s personal copy of the shooting script for Life with Father to a 1934 letter from Dashiell Hammett congratulating Powell on his interpretation of Nick Charles, which Lazar had managed to obtain from a Powell grand-nephew only minutes before the epistolary buzzards from the University of Texas tried to snap it up. Suzette sold the entire collection, at far less than its value, to that awful Kelso McNair up in Lawndale, who only annexed it to his vast empire of Myrna Loy memorabilia and locked it away in his vault. In retaliation Lazar went down the next morning to their safe-deposit box at Dana Point, removed all six of Suzette’s 1958 and ’59 Barbie Dolls, and sold them to a collectibles store up in Orange for not quite four thousand dollars, at which point she brought the first suit against him.

      “Why is your face turning so red, Bobby?” said Dawn, who must have been all of twenty-two.

      “Oh!” he said, not bothering even to sound sincere. “I just remembered. I have an appointment.”

      “See you, Bobby,” said Al.

      “See you,” he said, but he did not stand up.

      “You don’t have to keep looking at her, anyway,” Al continued reasonably. “You can just look out at Ocean Avenue here, or at my lovely new wife—hi, sweetie—and act as though Suzette’s not there.”

      “I know,” Lazar said, smiling at Dawn, then returning his eyes immediately to Suzette. “But I’d like to talk to her. No, really.”

      So saying, he rose from his chair and walked, as nonchalantly as he could, toward her. He had always been awkward about crossing public space, and could not do it without feeling somehow cheesy and hucksterish, as though he were crossing a makeshift dais in a Legion Hall to accept a diploma from a bogus school of real estate; he worried that his pants were too tight across the seat, that his gait was hitched and dorky, that his hands swung chimpishly at his sides. Suzette was next in line now and studying the menu, even though he could have predicted, still, exactly what she would order: a decaf au lait and a wedge of frittata with two little cups of cucumber salsa. He came up behind her and tapped her on the shoulder; the taps were intended to be devil-may-care and friendly, but of course he overdid them and they came off as the brusque importunities of a man with a bone to pick. Suzette turned around looking more irritated than ever, and when she saw who it was her dazzling green eyes grew tight little furrows at their corners.

      “How are you?” said Lazar, daring to leave his hand on her shoulder, where, as though it were approaching c, very quickly it seemed to acquire a great deal of mass. He was so conscious of his hand on her damp, solid shoulder that he missed her first few words and finally had to withdraw it, blushing.

      “… great. Everything’s really swell,” Suzette was saying, looking down at the place on her shoulder where his hand had just been. Had he laid a freshly boned breast of raw chicken there and then taken it away her expression could not have been more bemused. She turned away. “Hi, Norris,” she said to the lesbian woman behind the counter. “Just an espresso.”

      “On a diet?” Lazar said, feeling his smile tighten.

      “Not hungry,” she said. “You’ve gained a few pounds.”

      “You could be right,” he said, and patted his stomach. Since he had thrown Suzette’s Borg bathroom scale onto the scrap heap along with her other belongings (thus leaving the apartment all but empty), he had no idea of how much he weighed, and, frankly, as he put it to himself, smiling all the while at his ex-lover, he did not give a rat’s ass. “I probably did. You look thinner than ever, really, Suze.”

      “Here’s your espresso,” said Norris, smiling oddly at Lazar, as though they were old friends, and he was confused until he remembered that right after Suzette left him he’d run into this Norris at a party in Bluebird Canyon, and they had a short, bitter, drunken conversation about what it felt like when a woman left you, and Lazar impressed her by declaring, sagely, that it felt as though you’d arrived home to find that your dearest and most precious belongings in the world had been sold to a man from Lawndale.

      “What about that money you owe me?” he said. The question was halfway out of his mouth before he realized it, and although he appended a hasty ha-ha at the finish, his jaw was clenched and he must have looked as if he was about to slug her.

      “Whoa!” said Suzette, stepping neatly around him. “I’m getting out of here, Bobby. Good-bye.” She tucked her chin against her chest, dipped her head, and slipped out the door, as though ducking into a rainstorm.

      “Wait!” he said. “Suzette!”

      She turned toward him as he came out onto the patio, her shoulders squared, and held him at bay with her cup of espresso coffee.

      “I don’t have to reckon with you anymore, Bobby Lazar,” she said. “Colleen says I’ve already reckoned with you enough.” Colleen was Suzette’s therapist. They had seen her together for a while, and Lazar was both scornful and afraid of her and her lingoistic advice.

      “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ll try to be, um, yielding. I’ll yield. I promise. I just—I don’t know. How about let’s sit down?”

      He turned to the table where he’d left Albert, Dawn, and his cup of coffee, and discovered that his friends had stood up and were collecting their shopping bags, putting on their sweaters.

      “Are you going?” he said.

      “If you two are getting back together,” said Albert, “this whole place is going. It’s all over. It’s the Big One.”

      “Albert!” said Dawn.

      “You’re a sick man, Bob,” said Albert. He shook Lazar’s hand and grinned. “You’re sick, and you like sick women.”

      Lazar cursed him, kissed Dawn on both cheeks, and laughed a reckless laugh.

      “Is he drunk or something?” he heard Dawn say before they were out of earshot, and, indeed, as he returned to Suzette’s table the world seemed suddenly more stressful and gay, the sky more tinged at its edges with violet.

      “Is that Al’s new wife?” said Suzette. She waved to them as they headed down the street. “She’s pretty, but she needs to work on her thighs.”

      “I think Al’s been working on them,” he said.

      “Shush,” said Suzette.

      They sat back and looked at each other warily and with pleasure. The circumstances under which they parted had been so strained and unfriendly and terminal that to find themselves sitting, just like that, at a bright café over two cups of black coffee seemed as thrilling as if they were violating some powerful taboo. They had been warned, begged, and even ordered to stay away from each other by everyone, from their shrinks to their parents to the bench of Orange County itself; yet here they were, in plain view, smiling and smiling. A lot of things had been lacking in their relationship, but unfortunately mutual physical attraction was not one of them, and Lazar could feel that hoary old devouring serpent uncoiling deep in its Darwinian cave.

      “It’s nice to see you,” said Suzette.

      “You look pretty,” he said. “I like what you’ve done with your hair. You look like a Millais.”

      “Thank you,” she said, a little tonelessly; she was not quite ready to listen to all his prattle

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