THURSDAY EVENING, at eight o’clock, Matthew and Belinda are waiting in the lounge at Flynn’s. Matthew’s nervous. So is Belinda. She has never met any of the people she’s about to spend the evening with. In fact, she has never met any of Matthew’s friends; that is, she has never met anyone who is a friend of his alone, not a friend of Liz and Matthew, that former couple. The lounge is crowded, noisy with conversation.
“Why is this place so popular?” Belinda asks.
“It’s mostly popular with tourists,” says Matthew. “It’s probably listed in every convention package and in all those guidebooks you find in hotel rooms.”
“Why is that, I wonder?”
“You mean, who’s being paid off? Why doesn’t one of the more interesting restaurants get the business instead? I don’t know. Maybe this is really the sort of thing tourists expect. Maybe they’d be disappointed by something better, or something different, anyway. They want beans cooked to mush, fried fish, Indian pudding. But why did Jack choose this place?”
Belinda shrugs.
“A gag, probably,” Matthew suggests.
“All set for drinks here?” asks the waitress, grabbing up empty glasses, napkins, plastic toothpicks. Matthew orders two more martinis.
He and Belinda chat, but Matthew keeps checking the lobby for Jack or Effie, mostly for Effie. There is already a long line of people waiting for a spot in the lounge, where they will wait for a table in one of the dining rooms. Later in the evening there will be a line of people outside, waiting to get into the line of people waiting inside. Many of the waiting people have children with them, and many of the children are wearing sweatshirts that tout Boston, the Celtics, the Red Sox, the Boston branches of Tower Records and the Hard Rock Cafe, and Flynn’s itself.
Matthew spots Effie as soon as she walks into the lobby. She stands on her toes, looking over the crowd. She looks much the same as she did when he last saw her, and in the essentials much the same as she did twenty years ago when she stood in front of a classroom full of kids and tried to tell them everything at once, as if electrified. She and her husband, Richard, are just back from two weeks on a chartered sailboat in the Caribbean. She has a great tan, and she’s wearing white. Her hair has always been very light; now there’s some white mixed with the blond, and that makes it lighter still, like the exaggerated bleached-blond that Matthew has noticed on much younger women.
She looks great, he thinks, just great, a little bundle of energy, bouncing on her toes.
She doesn’t see Matthew in the line, so she comes into the lounge, wary and curious, as if this were the first cocktail lounge she’d ever entered. Richard is behind her, wearing a puzzled look.
He always has that look, puzzled by Effie, Matthew thinks, by the way she makes her way through life. She must wear him out. There’s just too much coming from her all the time, too much energy, too many ideas, too many words. I’ll bet she wears him out in bed, too. It’s her body type: those thin, wiry ones just never stop.
Matthew has had two cleaning ladies of that type — ectomorphs — and they astonished him with their energy. The vacuum seemed to run on a higher speed when they used it. What an exhausting pleasure a night with Effie would be! Matthew’s heart would be racing like a bird’s, and he’d be panting by the end, goofy with pleasure and fatigue.
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