They slept late that morning, it was Christmas after all, and Bob strolled into the kitchen wearing lounge pants and a shirt he found at a Second Hand that read 'Rolling Stones Voodoo Lounge '94.' He was tamping Earl Grey leaves into a filter and holding it at the water level of a large cappuccino mug when he looked out the window. Daniel Walter and Myra Healey were loading supplies into Daniel Walter's old Plymouth Fury, painted the color of that PBS dinosaur the neighbor boys wanted so badly to harass.
Bob slid into a chair in the breakfast nook, and watched Daniel Walter yell at Myra for stacking the "kid's presents all cocked up!" Daniel Walter threw his hands in the air, and the noontime breeze caught the tricep-wings of his hideous cable-knit sweater.
Twenty minutes later, the Fury finally ambled out of the driveway and rattled down the road, no doubt on the way to the Healey family Christmas, wherever that was. Bob imagined forty other Healeys gathered around a table, all 'hankering fer some ham!' and all yelling over one another because what Uncle Bob had to say was more important than Aunt Myrtle, and who gave a shit about Johnny trying to get into college because who did he think he was?
Bob shivered and didn't know why and took another drink of tea.
Not five minutes later, Johnny Storm's 46 Ford stopped in the street, after the Healey's driveway and before their mailbox, Johnny trying earnestly to be Mister Good Motorist.
Bob got up quickly and went to the front door, He strolled out on the front porch, which was really more of a five-by-five square of laid-in bricks, and braved the cold blowing down the street. The mailbox was a black iron affair, nailed to the siding on the door's right side. Bob cast a quick and indiscriminate glance at the Ford, and then flipped the mailbox lid up, fetched out the collected mail he'd neglected to get during the last week because he honestly didn't feel like it. Then he strolled back inside and shut the door softly.
In the driver's seat, plush and comfy, of the 46 Ford, Johnny Storm finally let his shoulders sag and he sighed and ran a hand through his hair, which cocked up the gel, but that was okay. He looked over at the Dutch Colonial whose driveway he was blocking and said, in his deepest and most worrisome, "Christ…"
Bob went back into the kitchen and tossed the pile of mail, bills and a check from the Gilloglys next door for shoveling their walk last week, on the table. Sarah was emptying a spatula and a single hotcake onto a plate full of its fried and battered brethren, and he slid his arms around her waist and kissed her on the cheek once. She let him do it, and set the spatula down, and he released his lock around her.
"Merry Christmas, Mister Reynolds," she said.
"Same to you," and he kissed her again. "So what shall we do today?"
She grabbed the plate of pancakes and tucked a bottle of Aunt Jemima under one arm, and made for the den, and Bob followed. "Well, first, I plan on camping out for as long as you'll have me and watching every old movie I ever wanted to. There're some great beats in those old Bogart movies that really energize me, y'know? Gets the juices flowing. I've been thinking of getting back into the writing game, and since I've oodles of sicktime from the restaurant saved up, I figure this is as good a time as any. Plus," she said more amusingly, "you inspire me."
"Oh yeah?"
"Yeah," she said and laid down the plate and the syrup on the coffee table, and sat on the davenport. The television was one of those plasma affairs about which Bob knew nothing: he'd walked into the electronics store and, similar to the whole Brooks Brothers thing, said he wanted a TV, something nice, because TVs should be meant to be looked at, and price was sort of an object, but Bob moreover wanted to feel important.
A nice new TV was important to him. He didn't feel he needed to defend this, and Sarah didn't seem to mind 'The African Queen' in gloriously rendered High Definition.
They sat for the next hour and a half watching Bogart and Kathryn Hepburn fight off Nazis in colonial Africa, sharing the mountain of pancakes, and when that was done, she switched it over to digital cable.
Discovery Channel specials on how banjoes were made, History Channel shockumentaries on the True Nature of Christ and How He Wasn't Really What We Think of Him. TLC specials on customized motorcycles for the FDNY. They found 'Spaceballs' on the Comedy channel and got comfortable with that. Sarah didn't laugh except when Rick Moranis' head went flying through the metal box during Ludicrous Speed, but she had a gleam in her eye the whole time, one of total transfixion.
He sat lazily in the sofa, and when she curled up next to him he threw an arm around her shoulder. Took a deep breath. And he couldn't shake the feeling that the bum's rush was fast coming.
Bob slept badly that night. Wondering what the rest of his people were doing. Simon, and Carol. Natasha. If Janet and Henry had decided to call off their mutual dogs and enjoy a Christmas together. If all super-people were meant to worry this much about things that didn't matter.
If Reed Richards, or maybe even Nick Fury, was staring out his window, too. Wondering the same things.
Sarah stayed with him for the week following Christmas, and went into Panera on December 27th to resign, which went politely enough. She sublet her apartment to the Gillogly's son Arthur, so recently a college graduate, and within the past month possessive of an apparently great job at the newspaper in town. Sarah went in for a visit on December 30th and Arthur had the place neatly oriented along perpendiculars and diagonals like the good obsessive-compulsive personality he was. She signed him over the last of the rent forms and shook his hand and bid him happy living. She and Bob went to the Turner's Steakhouse franchise on the edge of Columbus to celebrate her new life.
On New Year's Eve, Bob and Sarah went dancing at a jazz bar/seafood restaurant on the north side of Columbus, The Ocean Club, which was a strange title, Bob thought, given the landlocked nature of the state capital. They went and it was glorious. They overdressed for the occasion, as they'd done on their first date, Sarah in a length black dress: black as the ace of spades with a white satin stripe down the left side and the excess tied into a bow just below the waist line. She bound her hair at the crown with a gold weave hairnet she'd bought years ago in Amherst, on a tour of UMass, which she ended up not attending, so the story went, in favor of a full-ride and Fulbright to Yale. She wore a thin silver chain around her neck, with a caduceus pendant hanging low and resting on her sternum.
Bob finally caved and bought a tuxedo, which he'd always wanted.
Every table in the restaurant was packed with other people, dressed as Bob and Sarah, eating the same courses, drinking the place dry, enjoying the same company as the youthful pianist hard at work over the Steinway. The Ocean Club's owner, an equally youthful man wearing a linen suit and striped blue-white seersucker underneath, strolled up to the microphone. He introduced himself merely as 'Rene' and jabbed the crowd to 'give it up for our newest star, Harry Watson!'
A couple of kids, Bob guessed in their early twenties, probably college lovebirds on break before going back for Winter Semester, sitting at the next table over. Sarah struck up a conversation with the girl, a polite blonde number who called herself, in a thick Bostonian, Allison, and then touched her boyfriend's arm lithely and said, "This is Jarad. With an A."
Bob thought it was strange that he hadn't introduced himself, that Allison had taken the initiative. Maybe he was timid. Maybe she was the one who ran things.They were know-it-alls and no-nonsense and every other hyphenated word that described post-adolescent scrappiness. They were able. They knew what they wanted: Allison about to graduate from Xavier, Jarad from Syracuse, a state and a half away. How'd they met? Friend of a friend, of course. In the technology age, blind dates still held some water, or so Allison'd told Sarah. Allison and her friend dining with Jarad and his friend at some seafood restaurant in the Stix. Six bars and three bottles of Patron later, and she was his to lose. Gentleman that he was though, he took her home and stayed up with her all night, and when she was finally done vomiting up the wine-lobster mix from the evening before, and after Jarad had given her an Altoid for good measure, he kissed her. A nice and simple peck on the lips. Innocent.
"That was when he had me," she said and didn't care about the embellishment. She looked at him fondly, and he supplied an obligatory kiss. They'd made the long distance work, Allison said, and they hadn't looked back since.
When Allison was done telling the story, Bob took a long and deep swig of champagne. The Nicholas Sparks angle just wasn't dying tonight.
Jarad, with his gel-slathered hair and freakishly squared jaw and slightly askew bowtie, seemed more well-adjusted than she did. His own story, revealed by way of a White Russian and a half-bottle of Grey Goose? He was the product of a strict Baptist upbringing: sex and drugs in high school were his form of rebellion, so much so that by the time he left High School his parents had said good riddance. He was putting himself through Syracuse, and Bob had to shake his hand for that.
Bob saw a lot of himself in Jarad. When he figured this out, he took a long drink on his champagne, leaving only a slim puddle at the bottom of the flute. Jarad went to order another round, and Bob watched Sarah and Allison talk. And observed.
Together they were either genuinely braintrusts, or wanted to at least look the part. When Sarah and Allison started talking about Sarah's Fulbright from twelve years ago and the nature of the Yale English Department, Bob suspect the starlit collegiates were the genuine article. Jarad came back with a bottle of champagne in one hand, number three on the night, and set the bottle in the silver ice pitcher at the table's edge. When Bob looked back, Jarad was at the side of the owner, near the piano. He set an easy hand on the owner's shoulder, and the linen-suited bruiser leaned toward Jarad slowly, his brow furrowing as he listened.
The owner smiled, thinly, where the smile lines have been established for years and in the process make crow's feet around the eyes, and went back to the microphone, waiting attentively on its stand.
"Folks," he said, "we've got a request, what do we think of that, eh?"
The nearest tables clapped politely as Harry the Pianist wrapped up the aria, and a corpulent man even said "give the kid what he wants!" and then the rest of the diners and drinkers chimed into support Jarad's New Year's Wish. And he hunched slightly, standing up there, and smiled widely, and was only a little embarrassed. The owner waved his arms to shush the crowd, and then said, "Okay, okay, what's your name, kid?"
"Jarad," he said into the microphone and shot a quick and amorous look at Allison, next to Sarah.
"Jarad," the owner repeated. "Well, Jarad, looks like you get your wish." He turned over one shoulder to Harry the Pianist. "Our friend here wants Bowie. Something romantic." He added after a second: "If Bowie does romantic."
Harry leaned forward and gave the owner a cockeyed look. "There's more to Bowie than Major Tom, boss." He sat back and started in on it, doing the opening guitar part to 'Starman' in middle C.
Continued...
