The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted (30 page)

Oh, my God, he’s on to her. “Yes, I’ve seen them,” she says evenly. One of her hands begins to knead the other, and she separates them, makes them lie innocently on her lap. She’ll never admit it. She won’t admit anything. It’s none of his business.

But now he looks into her face to say, “My name isn’t Red Barton.”

“Henley,” she says.

“Pardon?”

“You said your name was Red
Henley.
”

“Oh. Right, I was trying to decide between Barton and Henley. But neither is my name.”

Rita smiles. “You know what? I lied to you, too. I guess . . . Well, I guess we were kind of up to the same thing.
Sin City.
”

“My real name is Herman Miller.”

“I’m Rita Thompson.”

“You look like a Rita,” he says.

“You don’t look like a Herman.”

“Thank you. I’ve hated that name all my life.”

“I could call you Red. I’m kind of used to it.”

He sighs. “Nah, I’m Herman.”

“I’m glad to meet you, Herman,” she says. “Did you lie about anything else?”

“Everything,” he says, and she says, “Me, too!”

“This would make a great ‘how we first met’ story,”

Herman says.

“Well,” Rita says.

The flight attendants are coming through with their
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cart, and Herman puts his tray table down. “May I buy you another drink, Rita?”

“Sure, but I’ll pay this time.”

“Modern woman!”

“It’s only fair.”

“Let me buy. It’s my pleasure. And then I’d like to tell you only the truth.”

“I’d be happy to hear it.”

“In fact,” he says, “I have a radical idea. Let’s be the friends who
only
tell each other the truth, no matter what.” Rita says she likes the idea—she does!—and he goes on to tell her that he lives in a duplex on Dupont in South Minneapolis, that he has never been to Las Vegas or Paris, and that he was happily married for twenty-eight years, then widowed. He says, too, that when they had that turbulence—the worst he’s ever experienced—he got so frightened, he began to sweat profusely.

“Bullets?” Rita asks, and he says no, just your basic salt water, and she laughs.

“I really thought we might go down,” he says, “and I was thinking of writing a note to my children. But I didn’t know what to say, because I had too much to say. And then, after everything calmed down, I kept thinking about it, you know? What if I had only one sentence that I could say to my children? One sentence that tried to let them know everything I wanted to tell them. Something more than ‘I love you.’ ”

“Interesting thing to contemplate,” Rita says.

“What would you say to your child?”

“Well, I have two, actually,” Rita says. “And no grandchildren on the way.”

“Oh, you’ll love grandchildren,” Herman says. The cart 234

t h e d a y i a t e w h a t e v e r i w a n t e d has made its way to them, and he orders a scotch. Rita gets a beer. After he’s paid, Herman tells her, “I love a woman who likes beer,” and Rita says, “So do I.”

“So what
would
your sentence be?” Herman asks.

“Ummmm . . . You go first.”

“All I could come up with was ‘You are the best part.’

Dopey, huh?”

“I think it’s nice.”

“Now you,” he says. “And remember, we’re the friends who tell the truth.”

Rita takes a long swallow of beer. As soon as Herman suggested such a sentence, one had popped up in her brain as though coming out from behind a curtain where it had been waiting for a long time. She’s not sure she wants to share it. Still, she does. She says, “My sentence would be:

‘Please come to me for comfort.’ ”

“Huh,” he says.

She shrugs.

“That’s . . . I mean, don’t they?”

Rita looks at her watch. Plenty of time to tell him.

Late Sunday morning, Rita awakens in her pitch-black Egyptian hotel room and opens the drapes. It is a child’s drawing of a day, the sky nearly navy, the clouds so puffy and well-defined, it seems they are there for the plucking.

She is going to meet Herman at the buffet for breakfast, then they’re going to get in a little more gambling before they have to leave for the airport. They gambled last night, as they did on Friday night. Rita sticks with the slot machines, but Herman is game for anything, though he does not appear to be reckless—he seems to know when to cut his losses. Rita has lost fifty dollars thus far, no big deal in this city, but it is to her, as she expected to win immedi-

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ately. She puts it to not having found the right slot machine, the one with cherries, in the middle of the row.

She’ll find it today; she just knows it. And she’ll win. The victory will be all the sweeter, for having had to wait for it.

After she showers, she puts on her lime green pantsuit and silk shell, and sprays herself liberally with perfume, Herman having told her how good she always smells. She applies her makeup with care and surprising accuracy, given the fact that there’s no magnifying mirror in the bathroom. Rita has taken note of the median age of the gamblers here; they really ought to put magnifying mirrors in the bathrooms. She packs her bags, regretting only a little the fact that she didn’t go to any of the shows after all; they were harder to get into than she’d thought; you really needed to call ahead. “Next time,” Herman told her, when they were at dinner last night. “Next time we’ll see Johnny Mathis and Jerry Seinfeld and Elton John and Bette Midler and Barry Manilow
and
Liberace.”

“I don’t want to see Barry Manilow,” Rita said, and Herman said, “I don’t want to see Liberace,” and so she said okay, if they came out here again, she’d see Barry Manilow, even though he seemed to her the kind of performer who would pad himself, if Herman knew what she meant.

“No,” he said. “What do you mean?”

“
You
know,” Rita said. “Remember John Denver?”

Still Herman stared at her blankly.

Rita leaned over and spoke quietly. “He put Kleenex in his crotch.”

Herman looked down at his own crotch and then up at her. “Is there something wrong with that?” Then he said he knew what she’d been talking about all along and she punched him and he said not so hard, his padding might 236

t h e d a y i a t e w h a t e v e r i w a n t e d fall out. And then they ordered sinful desserts after what had been a sinful dinner: steak and lobster, potatoes au gratin, broccoli with hollandaise. Helping himself to the hollandaise, Herman had asked her if she knew CPR and she said she had just been going to ask him that very thing.

In the lobby of the hotel, Rita sees Herman standing by a statue of a sphinx, waiting for her. He hasn’t spotted her, so she is free to take full appraisal of him. He is handsome, but in an unself-conscious way that she likes very much.

He is manly, but sensitive. He is financially stable, but not rich. Last night, he had asked if he might kiss her good night. She said she wasn’t sure; she would hate to ruin what seemed like it was going to be a beautiful friendship.

Herman said, “My seven-year-old granddaughter says it’s okay to kiss someone if they’re rich.” And when Rita asked if he were rich, he looked into her eyes and said,

“Right now I am,” so what could she do, she kissed him.

But first she said, “I have to warn you, I’m way out of practice.” He leaned over and very gently put his lips to hers and she grabbed the back of his head and pressed him hard into her and kissed him but good. And he stepped back and said, “Wow. If this is you out of practice, I’d love to see you when you’re not.”

Rita licked her forefinger, put it on her rump, and made a sizzling sound, and they both laughed. Then Rita made her face get as serious as three Manhattans would allow, and she said, “I’m not kidding.” And Herman said, “I’ll bet you’re not.” He looked at his watch and winced.

“Breakfast at noon?” he said, and she said, “
Thank
you.”

He started to walk down the hall, then turned around to say, “Oh. One last thing I need to tell you the truth about. That French I spoke at the airport? I memorized
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that off some postcard. I don’t even know what it means. I don’t speak French.”

“Well,” she said, laughing, “I know. I do speak it.”

He put his hands in his pockets, embarrassed. Then he said, “Will you go to Paris with me sometime?”

She nodded. Nodded again. Then once more.

And now, the next day, free from the influence of alco-hol, she looks at him and says yes all over again. Then she calls his name, and there is such gladness in his eyes as he walks toward her.
Oh, Herman,
she thinks, and then, just for the briefest moment,
Oh, Ben.
It is a sweet moment, though, only a step away from hearing Ben say,
“Have a ball, kiddo.”

“Here it is!” Rita says. She is standing in front of the slot machine she was destined to find. They are at Bellagio, the machine is in the middle of the row, there are cherries painted on it, and Rita has five quarters and about ten minutes left.

Herman pulls up a stool and sits down beside Rita. She takes in a deep breath, and deposits the first quarter. Nothing. The second. Nothing. After she puts the last quarter in, she hits. Coins come rushing out, and Rita puts her big cup beneath the mouth of the machine and yells to Herman to go get another cup and she begins jumping up and down and then the coins abruptly stop. Rita looks into the cup, then up at Herman.

“Well, how much?” he asks.

She counts the quarters and tells him: seven dollars and seventy-five cents. “Seven dollars!” she says. “What can I do with that?”

“Why don’t you call your children with it, and tell them your sentence?”

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t h e d a y i a t e w h a t e v e r i w a n t e d

“Oh, for—” Rita says. But then she thinks of Howard Bernstein telling her, “You’ll win big,” and wonders if he meant something besides money. “Can you still do that?”

she asks Herman. “Are there still pay phones?”

“Of course,” Herman says, and they go off in search of one, the coins rattling in the cup.

It isn’t until they get to the airport that they find a pay phone. It is in a dark corner, in a part of the building that it seems time has forgotten. It ought to be in black and white; that’s the feeling. Rita will call Alice’s number; she happens to know that Randy will be there, too; once a month the siblings and their spouses get together for Sunday dinner. She has sent Herman away to wait for her at the gate—this is private.

She deposits over half of the quarters for the first three minutes, and when Alice answers, she tells her daughter where she is, and then says, “Honey? I don’t have much time, but I wonder if you’d put Randy on with you. I want to say something to both of you.” Her heart is hammering inside her.

“Is something wrong?” Alice asks, alarmed.

“No, no,” Rita says. “I just want to say something I’ve been meaning to tell you for a while.”

When Randy comes on the line, Rita says, “Okay, I just . . . I would like to say something to both of you, this one thing. Just one sentence. I would like to say, Come to me for comfort.”

Silence. “Please,” she adds.

“What do you mean, Ma?” Randy asks. She can practically hear him scratching his head.

“I mean . . . Well, I just want to offer you that. I always wanted to offer you that and it seems I never did. Or I did, but you didn’t know I did.”

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“Mom,” Alice says. “We knew that.”

“It’s just that your dad was always the one to . . . He did everything, and I think it must have seemed to you that I didn’t care or something. But I always did.”

“We knew that!” Alice says. “Mom!”

“I know what she means,” Randy says. “He did always do everything before Ma had the chance. And remember that time we were both calling for her, I think it was a Saturday morning, and Dad came in and told us, ‘Shhhh!
We
don’t wake Mommy up!
’ Remember?”

“No,” Alice says.

“Well, I do, and I remember it made a big impression on me.”

“Obviously,” Alice says. She’s miffed that she can’t remember something Randy does, Rita knows. Alice is proud of her usually infallible recall.

A recorded voice asks for more money and Rita puts in more quarters. Alice says, “Are you on a
pay phone
?” and Rita says yes and they all for some reason start laughing and Rita thinks of how good it is to be in a family where certain things are shared, where there are common genes that make you all laugh about being on a pay phone.

Randy says, “Mom, I think we thought of Dad as being both of you, you know? But we
never
doubted that you were there for us. Then or now.”

Alice starts to sing:
“You were always on our minds . . .”

“Uh-oh, gotta go,” Randy says, but then he says, “Seriously, Mom, you were.”