Where the God of Love Hangs Out - Amy Bloom [79]
“In a pig’s eye,” Randeane said, and she shoved the bagels in a bag and threw Ray’s change on the counter.
Before winter started, Ray bought a dog. (“Do you even like dogs?” Eleanor said.) He walked it every night past Randeane’s house. Often Randeane was reading on her front porch; sometimes she was around the back, where she had a hammock, an outdoor fireplace, and two white plastic lounge chairs.
“Hammock or chaise longue?” Randeane said.
Ray said that he was more a chair kind of person, that hammocks were unpredictable.
“Oh, life’s a hammock,” Randeane said.
“Exactly my point. I’ll take the chair.”
“Remember Oscar? You met him once. He’s asked me to marry him,” Randeane said.
Ray sighed.
“Don’t sigh,” she said.
“That’s what Ellie says to me. She says, ‘Don’t sigh, Ray, this is not the Gulag.’ You know what else she says—after a few drinks, she says, ‘Ray, I promised to love you for better or worse.’ No one should make such a promise. I don’t think I even know what it means—for better or for worse. Why would you be married to someone for worse?”
“You don’t think I should marry him?”
“I met him once,” Ray said. “Firm handshake.”
“Come lie in the hammock.”
“I can’t do that,” Ray said.
“I’m pretty sure you can,” Randeane said. She kicked off her green slippers and climbed into the hammock. Her pants pulled up to her calves. “At least you can push me.” Ray gave her a push and sat down again.
“You could marry me,” Ray said. “We both know I’d be a better choice.”
Randeane looked up at the sky. “I guess so,” she said. “You, younger, single, maybe not so deeply pissed off and inflexible.”
“I don’t think we’ll be seeing that,” Ray said, and he stumbled a little getting off the chaise and took the dog home. He drove to The Yankee Clipper for a beer.
The parking lot was barely half full and Ray knew most of the cars. Leo Ferrante’s BMW, that would be Leo, celebrating having persuaded the people in charge of Farnham that neither a Stop & Shop nor a horse crematorium was anything to get upset about. Leo would be drinking with his clients and sitting near Anne Fishbach. Every Tuesday night, Anne left her senile husband with a nurse and drove over to the Clipper. (“Aren’t I allowed?” she’d said to Ray. “Does this make me a bad wife? After fifty-three years?”) She sat in a back booth and drank Manhattans until someone drove her home.
Ray recognized his next-door neighbor’s green pickup. He saw two guys from the Exchange Club walk out of the bar and recognize his car and Ray knew enough to go somewhere else. He drove about ten miles and pulled into a town he’d been to only once, twenty years ago, to pick up Jennifer from a Girl Scout jamboree. There were two bars, on either side of the wide main street. One awning said PADDY O’TOOLE’S BAR AND GRILLE and had gold four-leaf clovers in the window and on the awning. The other said BUCK’S SAFARI BAR and had a poster of Obama in one window and in the other, a poster of a black girl, with an enormous cloud of black curls, standing with her oiled legs apart, falling out of a tiny leopard-skin bikini. Ray thought, When it’s your time, it’s your time, and he went in.
No one minded him. Back in the day, some young man might have felt compelled to defend his manhood or his blackness or the virtue of a waitress and Ray might have found himself scuffling on a wet wood floor or a hard sidewalk, but not now. A young woman and her date slid off their barstools into a booth and the man indicated that Ray was free to take the man’s seat. The barmaid was short and wide, wearing a gold leather skirt and gold nail polish. Her hair was cut close to the scalp and dyed blond. She put a napkin in front of Ray and looked at him the way she looked at every other man at the bar.
“Just a beer, please. Whatever’s on tap.”
He could stay in Buck’s all night. He could probably move into Buck’s. They seemed like nice people. They were certainly a lot more tolerant of an old white man in their midst than the people at the Clipper would be if some strange black guy bellied up to