Part 5
by Jack Mauro
[Editor's Note: This is the final chapter of Jack Mauro's five-part summer fiction serial. Last week, Enola and her friend Betsy met Enola's new love, Drew, and his friend, Robby, at Harry's for dinner.]
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.
Menus of roughly the shape and import of the tablets handed down to Moses are passed to Enola, Betsy, Drew and Robby. Drew asks to see a wine list, and Betsy's little nostrils flare just a touch.
She is seated directly across from Robby. She keeps only her bang and her eyes available to him above the menu. Except when Drew asks for the wine list. She wants Robby to see her nose twitch and to surmise the concealed amusement on her lips. He does. Already, in Robby's awed estimation, Betsy has reduced Drew's strutting in his baggy shorts at the gym to a clown's routine.
"The food here is terrific, really. Oh—Robby! Drew told me you got a new job."
Drew had indeed informed Enola of that career jump. It was a credential to offer on behalf of his friend, before the double date was to take place. Other men require credentials, reasons to be out and introduced to a fiancee's friends.
"Uh...yeah. Yes." Robby's heart is somewhere just below his collarbone and inches north of its customary socket. She—the girl—she, is looking at him with a casual but deadly focus, like a laser accidentally switched into life, changing forever the desk plant that happens to lie in the path of its beam.
"I handle X-Tech training equipment." He wedges a finger between his shirt collar and his neck. Breathing normally is not easy right now, as though X-Tech were a shady commodity in which to traffic.
Betsy's trimmed eyebrows, arcs of blondely suave punctuation, rise in polite inquiry. "You sell it?"
"Sure. I mean, yes, I do." He is somehow holding his own. He does not see, as men never do, that she is not about to permit him to fall. Then, desperation brings out, "It's very expensive stuff."
"Do we wanna share some appetizers?"
Betsy doesn't genuinely hate Drew, but that is irrelevant. She needs to destroy him, if she can. This she feels in her marrow. Drew must be hit hard in the shins and limp out of Enola's life. He has done his part, in being the means by which Robby is there.
"Yes, let's. We can share the Japanese tuna, some mussels..." Enola trails off.
Betsy speaks to Robby in the simultaneously condescending and deferential tones used by a very high-powered personnel director to a promising applicant. He probably has the job, but it won't do to confirm that, just yet. "Do you like it?"
"X-Tech? The equipment?"
"The job." The black of Betsy's dress glows like rich coal.
"I do, yeah. I do." In answering, Robby is suddenly aware that this superb woman has already shown more interest in his new career than his best friend yet has. What can't this girl give him? It is more staggering a horizon than he had dreamed, and he had dreamed unbounded vistas since first seeing her.
Enola: "Bets, you love mussels. Should we get two?"
Drew peruses menu and wine list alternately, like big cards he has been dealt in a pitifully unpromising hand. The logical thing is that the other three wait for his pronouncements on the subjects of appetizers, entrees and choice of wine. That is what always happens. He never actually tries to take command; it is simply that he will be the one to whom the server first turns. He is accustomed to this.
Betsy says, "You two pick what you want. Robby and I will have sauteed mushrooms, the tuna, and the mussels." Drew looks up, as at an unidentifiable and jarring noise. It is peculiar, that we get so used to something we never sought that we find ourselves indignant when it is no longer ours. Drew has a sensation alien to him. He is not being envied. He is being disliked, and—although this can never be—usurped.
Robby too quickly unwraps his napkin and the cutlery clangs on the table top. Enola places her hand upon Drew's, a reflex of unconscious and slightly wavering solidarity. The quartet is broken up now. To all intents and purposes, to an outsider's perception, Betsy has aligned herself with Robby and left Enola and Drew to make their own way, gustatorily and otherwise.
"OK, then." Drew doesn't raise a hand to attract their server. He only turns his face and looks out. This is always enough.
"I think we're ready to start." First courses are ordered by Drew. He doesn't further consult Enola. She is ready to be asked anything but equally and meekly accepting of the likelihood that she won't be so appealed to. Betsy takes the tacit interplay in; radiant with power, she is capable of much. And she takes it in as a chilling preamble for future occasions, by no means all of them gastronomic.
Robby is ready to submit his and Betsy's choices to the waitress, just as soon as Drew is done. He has in a sense been knighted by Betsy, and he is eager to tilt. Drew finishes by asking the woman to bring them a plate of fried calamari as well. He adds that the wine will be selected with the dinner. Robby's forefinger extends in a heartbreaking parody of a boy making the leap to manhood at a restaurant table. He even draws in his breath.
Then Betsy says, "Nolie. You hate calamari. Don't you?"
The air is horribly stilled. Suspended in it is Robby, who would applaud if he could what he is not fully understanding but liking enormously; Drew, collected, not thrown, yet in an instant in a world where the sun is black and the clouds lie on the earth; Enola, tortured for the moment and for her own good by a friend who loves her; and Betsy, with voltage to spare.
"Robby, babe—why don't you loosen your tie?"
Enola's Wedding, from Writers Club Press, is now on sale at Barnes & Noble online. Author Jack Mauro will do a book signing at B. Dalton's on Saturday, Aug. 17, from 1:00 to 3:00.
July 25, 2002 * Vol. 12, No. 30
© 2002 Metro Pulse
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