Donald Westlake - Smoke

"I am not, " Freddie announced, "gonna wear that thing. I'd rather make believe I was scalped by the Indians."

"They don't do that anymore, Freddie," Peg said. "In fact, I think it hurts their feelings if you remind them."

"I am not gonna wear that thing."

"Listen to my idea, will you?"

"I'll listen," Freddie agreed, "and then I still won't wear it. But I'll listen."

"Thanks, Freddie," she said, once again wasting sarcasm on an invisible man. "What we'll do," she told him, "we'll make up your face first, and then we'll fit the wig to see how it works, with these Velcro things on the inside here to get the size right, see them?"

"Oh, God, Peg."

" Then, " she insisted, "I'll cut some of the hair off, to shape it a little, and we'll put it in a ponytail, with a rubber band. There's a lot of guys going around with ponytails."

"Wimps. Nerds. Guys with peace signs on their four-by-fours."

"Not all of them. Now, come on, Freddie, cooperate with me on this. It's worth a try, isn't it?"

"If I'm gonna look like an idiot," he warned her, "I won't do it."

"Freddie," she said, "if you look like anything at all, it'll be a step forward. Now sit down, and let me start." She waited, hands on hips. "Go on, don't argue anymore, just sit down."

"I am sitting down," he said.

Slowly, stroke by stroke, the face began to appear. It was like magic, or like a special effect in the movies. Cheeks, nose, jaws, all emerging out of the air, the slightly woodsy tan color of Max Factor pancake makeup. Freddie complicated matters by flinching away from the brush a lot, and even sneezing twice, but nevertheless, slowly and steadily, they progressed.

Partway along, with just the major areas roughed in, the forehead and on down, Peg reared back to study him, and said, "I don't remember you like that."

"Like what?"

"That that's the way you look. Freddie? I think I'm beginning to forget what you look like."

The parts of the face that now existed contrived to express surprise. "You know what?" he said. "Me, too. I was just thinking this morning, when I was shaving. I'm not sure I really remember what I look like, either. If I saw me on the street, I don't know that I'd recognize me."

"This is really strange, Freddie."

"It is. You don't have any pictures of me, do you, Peg?"

She shook her head. "Of course not. You never wanted any pictures, remember? You said they didn't go with your lifestyle."

"Well, I guess that's true, they didn't."

"Maybe what we'll do," she suggested, "when we get you all set here, I'll take a Polaroid."

The partial face now conveyed extreme skepticism. "It's gonna come out that good, huh?"

"Let's wait and see," she said, and went back to work with the brush.

"It doesn't look half bad," she said.

Then I must be looking at the other half," he told her.

They were standing together in the bedroom, in front of the floor-length mirror on the closet door, Peg and the Creature from the Fifties Horror Movie. With that sandalwood skin color, and sort of pinkish-gray lips, and bristly dark eyebrows (the paint had stiffened the eyebrow hairs), and the black fake hair swagged around his ears — the ears were a bitch to make up, with all those curls and convolutions — and the dark dark sunglasses, he didn't actually appear to be a human being at all. The way drag queens manage to stop looking like men without ever really looking like women, Freddie now looked as though he might be some sort of extraterrestrial in human drag. Or as though the Disney people had decided, next to their moving lifesize Abraham Lincoln doll at Disneyland, to put a Bobby Darin doll.

Peg was determined to put the best possible face on things, even if the best possible face was this store-window Freddie. "We're talking about after dark," she pointed out, "in a restaurant. Freddie, we've got to at least give it a try."

"Well, I'm all dressed up," he acknowledged, the pancake furrowing on his brow. "Might as well go for it."

"Thank you, Freddie."

"But, Peg."

"Yeah?"

"We can skip the Polaroid," Freddie said.

Peg called five different restaurants before she found one that sounded like it would work out okay. Yes, they prided themselves on their dim candlelit romantic atmosphere. Yes, they had high-backed booths, if that was what madam would prefer. Yes, they understood that madam's husband had been in an industrial explosion recently and was self-conscious about his appearance these days, and this would be his first time out in public since he came home from the hospital, and they would bend every effort to make his dining at the Auberge a pleasant and relaxing experience. And would that be smoking or nonsmoking? "Are you kidding?" Peg asked. "After my husband's explosion?"

"Nonsmoking, then. See you at nine, madam."

There are three kinds of restaurants in the country. There are the joints that are really just bars with kitchens, and that's where the local citizenry goes. There are places that try to be trendy by doing what the city restaurants were doing ten years ago, and that's where the weekenders and the summer people go. And there are very pretentious places with dim echoes of Maxim's, with tassels on the huge menus and too much flour in the sauces and too much sugar in the salads, and that's where everybody takes Mother on her birthday.

It wasn't Freddie's birthday, but here they were. It was true the maоtre d' was in a tux, and true the busboy sported a bow tie, and true the waitress was dressed like Marie Antoinette in her milkmaid phase, but these were people who were used to making mothers feel at home away from home on that special day, so they were very good with an explosion victim, hardly looking at Freddie's gloved hands at all, not acknowledging by word or glance that there might be anything odd about his face, and not even acting surprised when he moved and talked like a normal human being.

They were shown to a dim booth in a corner, high-backed purple plush seating, dark paisley tablecloth, and a low candle inside a gnarly glass chimney of such thickness and such dark amberness that the light it produced looked mostly like the last sputtering effort of energy from a galaxy that had died long long ago, on the other side of the universe.

"We can be happy here," Peg decided.

"I can't see my menu," Freddie complained.

"Good. That means your menu can't see you, either."

"Aw, Peg, is it that bad?"

"No, Freddie," she lied, reaching out to take his Playtex and give it a squeeze. "I was just doing a gag."

Through experimentation, they learned that if they held their menus just so, there was almost enough illumination from the indirect lighting in troughs up near the ceiling so they could make out a lot of the words flowingly scripted there. But then it turned out, when Marie Antoinette came back, that they hardly needed to think about the menus anyway, since she had forty-two specials to describe.

Slowly, Peg relaxed, grew easier in her mind. Slowly, she got back into the swing of things, the idea of being out at a restaurant for a nice dinner with your guy, and candlelight, and even pretty good music piped in, ballet stuff, Delibes, and like that. They ordered drinks, and they ordered wine, and they ordered special appetizers and special main courses, and they began to talk together like any normal couple out on a date, discussing the house they were living in, and how the summer was shaping up, and what they might do the next time they dropped in to the city to develop some fresh cash, and the whole evening was just being very nice.

Their drinks came. An extra special little treat from the chef came, being a kind of pвtй on toast points that wasn't half bad. Their wine came, and Freddie forgot to be self-conscious while he went through the tasting-and-approving ritual. They toasted one another, and Freddie said, "I'm glad you talked me into this, Peg."