Tom Perrotta - The Wishbones

“Figures.” Stan shook his head. “I'm having one of those days, I'd forget my dick if it wasn't screwed on.”

Walter coughed out a dry chuckle. “My age, I'd be grateful for a day like that.”

A sudden image struck Stan like a wave of nausea. Susie drinking champagne in a fancy restaurant. Black dress, bare shoulders. Happy Birthday. He made a noise.

“You okay?” Walter asked.

“Not really. Mind if I sit down?”

He felt a little better once he unhooked his cummerbund. He hated the frigging thing, the way it squeezed all the air out of him. Walter sat beside him, thoughtfully gumming his cigarette.

“This must be a tough time for you,” Stan observed.

“How so?”

“You know.” He pulled the cummerbund out from under his jacket and laid it on the steps. “This thing with Phil. It must have been awful for you.”

Walter worked his cigarette like a baby sucking a bottle. “Phil was an old man. Everybody's got to go sometime.”

“Still, watching a friend die in front of you like that …”

“We had our differences,” Walter said curtly.

“What kind of differences?”

“Creative.” Walter ejected the cigarette from between his lips. It landed on the sidewalk in a small shower of sparks. “I thought the band was starting to get a little stale.”

“How long were you together?”

“Too fucking long. Thirty-three years I took orders from that sonofabitch. I finally feel like I can breathe again.”

Stan didn't bother to pretend he was shocked. He'd been a musician long enough to know how it could come to this. There were nights when he'd lain awake writing Artie's obituary in loving detail, nights when he'd imagined committing murder.

“Can you do me a favor?” Walter asked.

“What's that?”

“Help me find my car.”

“Whaddaya mean, find your car?”

Walter gestured at the world spread out in front of them. His voice was small now, a little bit frightened.

“It's around here somewhere,” he said.

“I think I'm going to askTammi to be my Maid of Honor,” Julie told him on their way to the mall on Saturday morning. “I'm just worried that Margaret's going to be upset.”

“She'll still be in the wedding, right?”

“Of course. But you know how she is. Any little thing could set her off. And the last thing we need is a disgruntled bridesmaid.”

She shook her head as though exasperated, but Dave wasn't fooled. He could see how happy she was to be talking about the wedding. Her face glowed with it; she spoke in a bright girlish voice he hadn't heard for a long time. It was gratifying to know that he could be responsible for such a major improvement in her mood, though it made him wonder if he hadn't been equally responsible for the mild depression that had plagued her for the past couple of years. He'd blamed it on the fact that she'd been unable to find a public school teaching job, despite her degree in Elementary Ed, and instead seemed resigned to a career in customer service. But maybe that was only part of her problem, and maybe not even the most important part.

“Do what you want,” he told her. “It's your wedding.”

She pulled down the sun visor and studied her face in the little mirror, puckering her lips as though preparing to kiss the glass.

“Ever since she got married, all she wants to do when we get together is complain about Paul. I mean, sometimes I just want to say, ‘Look, Margaret, if the guy's such a jerk, why don't you just divorce him?’ “

Dave punched on the radio and began fiddling with the tuner to dramatize his lack of interest in Margaret and Paul. Julie pretended not to notice.

“He's like from another era. She works longer hours and makes more money than he does, but it never even occurs to him to pitch in around the house.”

The radio was a Saturday-morning wasteland. The best song Dave could find was “Movin’ On” by Bad Company, a band about whom he had profoundly mixed feelings. As stale and mediocre as they seemed now, he could never forget what it had meant to hear them for the first time in Glenn Stella's bedroom in 1975—like being struck by lightning, visited by some rock ‘n roll version of the holy spirit. He'd walked home in a daze and announced to his parents at the supper table that he needed a guitar.

“You know what he does? He just sits in front of the TV playing his stupid computer games while she vacuums around his feet.”

“You think she should divorce him because of that?”

“That's as good a reason as any, considering that he has no redeeming qualities whatsoever.”

“He's not so bad,” Dave said, defending the guy out of some vague sense of gender loyalty, even though he despised him even more than Julie did. “He probably does a lot of chores around the house. Mowing the lawn and whatnot. Taking out the garbage.”

“That's not the worst of it.” Julie lowered her voice, in case people in passing cars might be trying to eavesdrop. “He insists on having sex with her every night, right after the weather report on the eleven o'clock news.”

“Every night?”

“That's what she says.”

“Even when she's sick?”

“I'm sure there are exceptions,” she conceded. “But the basic pattern is every night.”

Dave gave a small shiver of disgust that was only partly for Julie's benefit. Paul was a 240-pound furniture salesman who collected baseball cards and believed that Hotel California was one of the high points in the history of human civilization. Margaret was a formerly pleasant person whose personality had been ruined by constant dieting; Dave couldn't remember the last time he'd seen her when she wasn't carrying around a plastic baggie full of carrot slivers. The thought of the two of them having sex was almost as difficult to get his mind around as the thought of his parents getting it on in a motel room while vacationing at Colonial Williamsburg.

Julie pulled down her bottom lip and inspected her gum line in the mirror. Then she pulled up her top lip and did the same.

“He claims he can't get to sleep without it. If she says no he whimpers and thrashes around until she finally gives in just to get it over with.”

“Aren't there laws against that?”

“Every night,” Julie said, her voice touched by wonderment. “Imagine watching the news with that hanging over your head.”

A life-sized Cardboard cutout of Mr. Spock greeted them as they entered the mall, the normally expressionless Vulcan smiling enigmatically as he extended the live-long-and-prosper salute to the earthlings who drifted past, “MEET SCOTTY!” said a cardboard poster attached to Leonard Nimoy's cardboard shirt. “2 P.M. TODAY.”

It wasn't yet eleven-thirty, but a large contingent of Star Trek buffs had already begun forming a line in front of an empty table in the mall's central plaza. The table was surrounded by cardboard cutouts of Captain Kirk, Bones, and Lieutenant Uhura, who looked as sexy as ever in her skintight, probably somewhat itchy polyester uniform.

They had to cut through the line on their way to the escalator, drawing a surprisingly huffy response from a man in a plaid short-sleeved shirt who must have thought they were trying to usurp his position. Most of the people in line were nerdy-looking men, though Dave did notice a sprinkling of obese women and a number of people in wheelchairs, some of them severely disabled. It made sense, now that he thought about it, that Star Trek , and especially Scotty, might hold a special appeal for people who found themselves at odds with their own bodies.