Two Much! (5 page)

“You look a lot like your sister,” I said. I tell you, I'd never been funnier.

“Oh, she's prettier than I am,” Betty said, adding artificial coyness and artificial demureness to her artificial smile.

“Not at all,” I said. “You're a terrific-looking girl.” I admit I wasn't being exactly brilliant, but you try complimenting a twin.

We chatted on in that sprightly way a bit longer, and then Betty said, “Well, shall we go?”

“After you,” I said, with a little bow. Christ!

Liz did not reappear, which was just as well. Betty and I strolled along the dark lanes past the quaint old-fashioned streetlights—imitation gas lamps, very pseudo-London—and did not hold hands. How to proceed? Glibness now would not only be out of character for the persona with which I'd saddled myself, but would also be inappropriate for this Senior Prom beauty tripping along at my side. I was here to ball her, not terrify her.

In point of fact, just why
was
I here? In order to get away from Candy and Ralph for a while, to some extent. And because the impersonation was a comic challenge that appealed to me. And because I'd suddenly realized I'd always wanted to fuck twins. And because they were rich orphans.

Let's not downgrade that final consideration. I've never been familiar enough with money to feel contempt for it, so I wasn't about to kick a girl out of bed for being rich. Money and those who possessed it had always held a certain appeal for me. My one descent into marriage, to a bitch named Lydia whom I'd met in college, had been based partly on the mistaken notion that my bride's family was well off. A publisher, I'd thought, is a publisher is a publisher; but not, it turned out, when the things published were four weekly newspapers in rural areas of New England.

So I was here to amuse myself by rubbing against a rich body. Which meant we were now in the seduction scene. Of course. I was the male lead in a Doris Day comedy. Simplicity itself. Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream. “It's charming here,” I said.

A
ND THE LADY WILL HAVE
the beef stroganoff,” I said.

The waiter, a slender youth dressed like a musical comedy star, pocketed his pad and pranced away. “I've never been here before,” Betty said, looking around in polite approval.

Neither had I. “I've always liked it,” I said. “There's something … intimate about it.”

She gazed out across the huge deck polka-dotted with tables, half of them occupied. “Yes, isn't there,” she said.

So far tonight I had done everything exactly right, though often for the wrong reason. The boat, for instance. Feeling I couldn't spend the rest of the summer stealing bicycles every time I visited a Kerner sister, I had this afternoon made an arrangement with a local Fair Harbor teen-ager who possessed a motorboat. For fifteen dollars he would chauffeur me along the bay to Point O' Woods, wait for me to pick up my date, transport us here to the Pewter Tankard in Robbins Rest, and come back for us at eleven. At that time I would give him a prearranged signal as to whether or not he was to wait for me after returning us to Point O' Woods.

Well, I'd prepared all that only because the alternative—assuming no bicycles to steal—was a two-mile walk in each direction. I would not have been in love with that option in any event, but with these awkward glasses confounding me at every step it would have been impossible. Thus, the boat. But now that I was in a seduction comedy, the boat had become the most quintessential of romantic gestures.

Similarly the restaurant. This was Friday, and my first three dinner choices in Ocean Beach had already been full when I called. But the Pewter Tankard, being slightly off the beaten track—it catered to boat people, and was accessible only by water—had been happy to take my reservation. Romance, again; I had found that little out-of-the-way restaurant, barely half full on a Friday night in August, where we could sit on an open deck built out into the bay and watch the distant lights of Long Island beneath a sky full of stars.

Betty sipped at her sherry, while I pulled gently on my rum and tonic. She said, “I understand you and your brother are in business together.”

“That's right,” I said, and prompted by her friendly inquisitive look I added, “We're in publishing.”

“Oh, publishing!” she said happily, making the same mistake I'd made with Lydia. “Do you mean books?” More cautious than I'd been, you'll notice.

“Oh, nothing that grand,” I said, in my modest way. “We have a small line of greeting cards. Like Hallmark, you know.”

“Oh, really! That's fascinating.” And apparently it was, since she went on from there to ask several hundred questions about the company. My answers were generally more descriptive of Hallmark than of Those Wonderful Folks, but the gist was there.

Meantime, nothing was happening on the food front “Excuse me,” I finally said to Betty, and snagged the waiter as he pirouetted by. He assured me our appetizers were scant seconds from delivery, but his manner struck me as shifty-eyed, so I ordered another sherry for Betty and another rum-and for me. “By Pony Express, all right?”

“Certainly, sir.” And he gamboled off.

“You're very masterful,” Betty told me. Her disappointment that I was not my brother seemed to have waned. In fact, she now said, “I bet you have the business head in the family, don't you?”

“Oh, we both do our share,” I said.

Still, she pursued the subject, and I gradually permitted myself to admit that Art was more the clever intuitive member of the family, while I was the practical one who kept the company stable and afloat. “Liz and I are like that,” Betty said. “She's just so clever and witty sometimes, and I'm the plain practical one.”

“Not plain,” I assured her. Reaching across the table, I squeezed her hand. “Anything but plain.”

She squeezed back. “You
are
nice,” she said.

Then it was back to the greeting card company, and now she wanted to know if we did all the “verses” ourselves, or did we accept work from “free-lancers.” On the assumption that Mr. Hallmark doesn't do all his own writing, I said, “Oh, we buy most of our verses from professionals.”

Something flustered and coy overtook her now, and she said, “You may not believe this, but I write verses myself.”

My heart sank. “Do you really?”

“Oh, not for publication, just for family occasions. I don't suppose I'm good enough to be a real professional.”

Nor did I. However, I now had no choice; it was required of me that I coax her, blushing and reluctant, to quote me some of her crap. Which at last, of course, she consented to do.

“I wrote this for my mother's fiftieth birthday,” she said. “Mother, when I think of all/The things you've done for me,/I know no other mother could/Compare on land or sea./I think you're sweet, I think you're great/In short, I think you're nifty—”

“Oh, good!” I said. “Here come our drinks.”

“G
OOD MORNING, SWEETHEART.”

I must be awake; nobody could dream a headache this bad. Cautiously—or incautiously, as it turned out—I opened one eye, and a needle of sunlight struck straight through into my brain. “Holy Mother of God!” I groaned, and snapped the eyelid shut again over my charred eyeball.

A smell of coffee threatened my stomach with upheaval, and a voice I recognized said, redundantly, “I brought you some coffee.”

This time I squinted, which was safer, and vaguely made out her female form. Liz, or possibly Betty. Which one was it? Come to think of it, which one was I?

“Do you want your glasses?”

Ah hah, a clue. Glasses = Bart. “Sweetheart” said to Bart = Betty.

Sweetheart? Betty? What bed was I in? “Glasses,” I muttered, feeling sudden urgency, and waved a hand in the air until my spectacles were thrust into it. I donned them without sticking the wings in my eyes and blinked around at a bedroom I knew from somewhere. Good God, there was the closet, its door demurely closed. I was upstairs once more in the Kerner house, and had apparently spent the night.

Oh, really? I struggled to a sitting position, my back against the knurled wood headboard, and looked fuzzily around. This room was furnished with twin beds, in one of which I was roiling about and on the edge of the other of which Betty was sitting, cheerful and not at all hung over, crisp and cute in white shorts and a pale blue top.

She smiled at me. “Hung over?”

“I think it's terminal.”

“I brought you some aspirin.”

“Gimme.”

She watched me struggle the aspirin down with gulps of coffee, and her expression was fond and indulgent and maternal, three of my least favorite mannerisms in a woman.

It was hard to think and swallow aspirin at the same time, but I forced myself. Last night: romantic evening, motorboat, Pewter Tankard. Betty had informed me she never drank anything stronger than wine, so I'd seen to it the table flowed with the stuff. Sherry beforehand, Moselle with the appetizer, Médoc with the entree, and stingers with dessert. (The wine limitation had fallen by then.) I did remember the stingers, but from then on memory faltered. There was a scene involving hilarious laughter and me failing to get out of a boat There was something to do with whether or not we were going to steal bicycles. Beyond that, a veil covereth all.

At last I abandoned the effort and put the coffee cup on the night table between the beds, saying, “God, what a head.”

“I guess you're just not used to wine.”

“That might be it.”

“You know, you look a lot more like your brother with your glasses off, and your hair tousled that way.”

I whipped a guilty hand to my head, but could do nothing effective there, and permitted it to drop again to my side.

“Have you ever thought of trying contact lenses?”

“Oh, well,” I said. “Glasses are good enough for me.” They were hurting my nose.

“You're really very good-looking, you know,” she said, and when I looked at her it seemed to me there was something possessive, possibly triumphant in the set of her head and the glint of her eye.

Had we? There are things you don't forget, aren't there? Aren't there? I was naked beneath the sheet and thin blanket. Speak, memory. Goddamn it to hell. But memory remained silent. And that is one question it is never possible to ask a woman. They don't take kindly to the thought of being forgettable. “I think,” I said, “you should take cover. I believe my head is about to explode.”

“I'll massage your temples,” she offered. “I do that for Liz sometimes when she has hangovers, and she says it helps just wonderfully.”

“Anything,” I said.

So she moved over to sit on my bed, remove my glasses, and began stroking my temples with her cool fingers. It did nothing for me in any medical way, but it did put her in arm's reach, so I slid a hand around her waist The smile she gave me was very nearly as lewd as her sister's, and she said, “Again? You'd better rest.”

Ah hah, another clue. Again, was it? I stroked a breast and drew her close and murmured, “It's the only known cure. A medical fact.”

“Now, Bart,” she said, and we kissed. Despite my throbbing head I enjoyed it.

But when I tried to roll her into the bed with me she pulled back, becoming at once serious. “Not in my father's bed!”

“Your fa—” I glanced toward the other one. “Not that one either, I guess.”

“You can understand, can't you?” She petted my chest, seeking forgiveness.

“Oh, sure. But—” How to phrase this, without tipping the fact that our previous encounter wasn't on the tape? “Last night,” I suggested, “didn't we, uh? …”

She looked at me, with humorous shock covering the true shock. “You don't remember!”

“Of course I remember.” I sat up straighter, astounded that she could doubt me. “I remember
you
. But you know the condition I was in, and the dark, and …” I let it trail off, with a vague wavy gesture of the hand “I just don't remember
where
” I said.