Part 4
by Jack Mauro
[Editor's Note: This is the fourth chapter of Jack Mauro's five-part summer fiction serial. Last week, we learned of Olive Hogarth Burrough's long-ago love affair, and Olive quizzed Enola on her new love.]
Enola has engineered the double date Betsy has long craved. The boys are pumped, showered and on their way to meet the girls. The girls are waxed, scented and waiting in Harry's bar. The night is young and full of possibilities.
As we shall see: there are in fact only two possibilities in the luggage of the evening. But one is so big, it fills the whole trunk.
On the ride there, Robby is silent. As Drew rarely notices his best friend's communicative patterns, there can be nothing terribly unusual about it. At Harry's bar, Betsy is excessively closemouthed. Enola, expert in all the shades of her best friend's behavior, is a bit put off. She fears Betsy's reticence is related to her finally meeting Drew. She worries that she has revealed too much to Betsy too soon, and too much of that unflattering to her soul mate.
"Bets, should I have another glass of wine?"
"Sure."
"Yours OK?"
"It's great."
Enola needn't fret. Betsy is quiet because Betsy is hearing Robby drive directly towards her, from miles away. Betsy is quiet because real satisfaction has little to say.
Harry's on this night is equipped with the combination of sophistication and down-home affability only a jazzy spot in East Tennessee could ever boast. Enola and Betsy, two good-looking young women in smart ensembles, might have been painted in by an advertising agency for the cafe, so right is their presence. Men alone or in pairs at the bar eye them, but don't intrude. No one sends a fresh glass of wine to either. Clearly, these are women with escorts on the way.
Who arrive. Drew and Robby walk into the pleasantly buzzing lounge. The buzz is momentarily broken by a woman at a small table, definitely undrunk, yet suddenly unable to find enough table on which to set her drink. A cheerful little explosion of glass hits the floor. Ah, but many a Drew entrance is so accidentally gonged. And Robby—in a tie knotted as tautly as a piece of string around a balloon's air aperture—stubs his toe hard. On, oddly enough, the floor itself.
Drew pecks Enola on the cheek, thus allowing her the opportunity to bestow a more pressured imprint of her lips just below his generous cheekbone. In the two seconds it takes for this affectionate greeting to transpire, Robby and Betsy stare at one another. What passes between them is no kiss. It is not words, not a reciprocal salute of smiles, not a handshake. But, whatever it is, the elemental energy of it turns the kiss-kiss of Drew and Enola into something as evocative of real passion as a Bavarian folk dance, with lederhosen and hand-slapping.
"Drew, Robby—this is Betsy."
We must note that Betsy has chosen for this evening what women call the little black dress. Enola's slacks and silk blouse are reduced in comparison to rubber gloves and apron. The little black dress can do all sorts of things for a woman with a purpose. For the vixenish Betsy, already keyed to a state of magnetism so heightened that loose change on the bar should be flying to her and sticking like patriotic sequins, such a choice in attire might be thought unnecessary. But one doesn't leave the really good guns at home when going to war.
"Hello." Betsy's legs are crossed, her tiny feet in slim black pumps. Her right hand is resting on her little black bag. Her ash-blonde bang is luminous. A few adorable whiskers just under her nose, and she would be a fox to blithely cripple any wolf conjured by the Brothers Grimm.
Drew takes charge now, because he is Drew, and that is one of the burdens placed upon beautiful shoulders. "We almost met, didn't we?"
"Yes." In answering Drew, Betsy looks at Robby.
Enola is beaming, Drew has his social smile on. "Yeah, that day you came to my office."
Betsy thinks, like a hand brushing away a piece of lint, "my office?"
Then she says, "Yes, that's right," and returns to looking at and through Robby.
Robby says, "I guess we almost met, too. At the same time. I mean." He starts to further dig into the already excavated territory of this region of introductory small talk, but is interrupted by what sounds like an animal growl.
"Yes," Betsy responds. The monosyllabic assent is a good half mile beyond husky, as though its origin were in the ground deep beneath Harry's basement.
A little more politely empty conversation ensues. It is like the thin and unexpectedly tranquil mist over a raging waterfall. It is bad enough when young people engage in the pantomime of grown-up worldliness; there is an aching sense that they would do better to wash off the make-up and go play in the yard. Now, with the current between Robby and Betsy perhaps responsible for the flickering of the lights behind the liquor bottles, it is a façade so flimsy, the cardboard walls are falling on every side. Enola is a bit troubled. She does not yet see that it isn't Betsy's dislike for Drew that is creating the tension within the gathering.
"Well. Why don't we go in and eat?" This from Drew. There will be far less in the way of disappointment when we finally learn how to unplug the mechanism that has us expecting fine things to emerge from exquisite faces. The girls stand, the men make way, and all four begin to file into the dining room. That is, Drew places a guiding hand on the small of Enola's back, and the two set out from the lounge. Only a moment later does Enola turn to see Robby standing by Betsy. She is still as well. Then she drops her head a nearly imperceptible half-inch. Robby holds out an arm, something he has never in his life done. The action is jerky, but the motivation for it is sound. Betsy smiles a little fox smile in approval, lays her paw—hand—upon his trembling forearm, and the couple moves into the main room, behind the unelectric backs of Drew and Enola.
Now, Enola understands. A wholly innocent Eurydice, she had turned her head to see what the delay was, and saw passion. She is stunned, ashamed of herself for not having foreseen this, and a little, just a very little, jealous.
Next week: Dinner
July 18, 2002 * Vol. 12, No. 29
© 2002 Metro Pulse
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