“ALL SET for drinks here?” It’s the cocktail waitress again. She wears a tight little satin skirt, and Matthew decides, after a quick review of his mental notes, that she has the most beautifully shaped bottom he’s seen in weeks.
Richard looks up at her face, but then he moves his eyes up and down her body without tilting his head. Matthew can see this, but Effie can see only the steady back of his head, angled upward. When Richard’s eyes reach the waitress’s again, he smiles at her with great warmth. “What’s the most popular drink here?” he asks.
“Probably a Paul Revere’s Ride.”
“What’s that?”
“Supposed to be based on something the original Colonists drank. Rum and applejack.” She reaches across Richard to pick up, from the center of the table, a card describing the drink. Matthew notices that, although her breasts do not brush Richard’s face, they come close enough so that, if he had chosen to, he could have stuck his tongue out and licked them. She hands the card to him, and he glances at it.
“What about those drinks with obscene names?” he asks.
“‘A Sloe and Comfortable Screw’?”
“Right. Or ‘Sit on My Face.’”
“Not in this bar,” she says, and she bursts out laughing. “We get a lot of families, you know. Tourists.”
Richard orders a round of drinks, and the waitress wiggles off. Richard and Matthew watch her bottom move, and Matthew’s embarrassed to find that it fetches the memory of an afternoon during college when he was delivering laundry to earn spending money. The boozy man who drove the laundry truck, watching a girl in a tight skirt cross the street, took a long drag on his cigarette and said, “Two piglets in a sack.” When Richard turns toward Matthew, there’s a look in his eyes that makes Matthew decide that all is not perfect with the Parkers. Perhaps Effie really is too much for Richard, and Richard has begun fooling around to shore up his ego. Immediately Matthew wonders how he would fare with Effie, not someday, but this evening, if Richard’s flirting with this waitress becomes intolerable and Effie turns to Matthew suddenly and asks him to take her home. Would he be up to her, tonight? If whatever might happen between them tonight were to turn into something more, if Matthew said all the right things in the cab, if Effie asked to stay at his place, then surely a congenial divorce could be arranged, very quickly, so that everyone could be happy as soon as possible. He wonders if it would be all right to call a separate cab for Belinda if Effie asks him to take her home.
The drinks arrive. Matthew notes that this is his third martini of the evening and resolves not to have another.
“So tell me what you’ve been up to, Effie,” he says.
“Oh, I’ve got myself set up with a nice little office at home, and I’ve been doing a lot of pro bono work, and I’ve done some ‘regular lawyer stuff,’ real estate mostly, enough to pay for my office equipment, and more than enough to convince me I don’t want to do any more of that than I have to. I leave that to Richard.”
Richard’s a successful lawyer with a respected old firm, not one of the largest, but one of the oldest. His income makes their easy life possible, Matthew knows, but he also knows that Effie pays her share, and he knows that her needs aren’t great. If she were living alone, she wouldn’t charter a boat in the Caribbean every winter, but since Richard wants to, she goes along, and happily. What Effie wants for herself, she earns and pays for, and often all she wants is time, time to do what she wants to do, good works. Sometimes Matthew can’t help thinking of her as saintly. He has begun to allow himself to say to himself, “I’m in love with her,” and it seems as if it may be true, but he isn’t sure. Perhaps he has always been in love with her. Perhaps not. Perhaps he just admires her.
I bet she’d be great in bed, though, and I bet we’d have a wonderful time in a cabin in Maine, snowbound.
In Topical Guide 437, Mark Dorset considers Drinking: Cocktails, Real and Fictional from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can listen to “My Mother Takes a Tumble” complete and uninterrupted as an audiobook through YouTube.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of Little Follies and Herb ’n’ Lorna.
You’ll find overviews of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy (a pdf document) and at Encyclopedia.com.
🎧 437: “All set . . .?”