Donald Westlake: Two Much!

I have never been in this house before , I reminded myself, and said, “Nice place you have here.”

“Sorry,” she said, “we already got a buyer.”

“Oh, yes. Art told me you’re selling.”

She gave me a sardonic look; I wasn’t being any fun. “I’ll tell Betty you’re here,” she said, and left before I could thank her.

What was happening to me? I paced around the room, frowning inside my glasses. Usually I’m fairly good at casual chitchat, but just now I’d done a very good imitation of that entire party from the other night All I do is put on spectacles and I suddenly become a baby Frazier; why?

I suppose partly it was the physical unease caused by the glasses themselves. If you’re constantly afraid you might lean just a bit too far to the left and do half a cartwheel you really can’t devote full attention to bon mots. And also there’s a certain tension involved in facing a girl you’ve recently screwed in the upstairs closet and convincing her she’s never met you before.

Well, probably it was all to the good. I hadn’t thought in terms of a personality change when I’d decided to have a go at being Bart, but why not? It could only reinforce the physical changes I’d wrought.

An oval mirror in an ornate frame hung on the wall near the dining room arch, and in it I studied again the new face I’d made for myself. The glasses made me seem more serious, perhaps a bit older, and I’d combed my hair straight back to reveal the receding hairline I usually camouflage. I am thirty now, and for the last year the hair has been retreating from my temples like the tide going out. Never to come in again, unfortunately.

“Well, hello.”

I turned around, and Betty had entered, wearing the same white dress and the same hostess smile as the other night. “Now,” I said, “ you must be Betty.”

“Why, you don’t look like your brother at all,” she said, and through the artificial smile it seemed to me I detected disappointment.

“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.

“And 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.”