Ray

LIV

RAY meets Westy at the fancy yellow restaurant. She’s looking pretty tired and old now. In the deep sparkling blue of her eyes I see a certain dangerous blank. Is Ray to blame? The rings and the other jewelry twinkle on her. I am looking at the other side of the hill now, at the sunken eyes, at the grim desperation of the earlobes. On her forehead Westy wears the wide frown of surrender.

“I am an old woman,” says some voice.

“No no no no no no no,” says mine.

“Ray, you care more about the sorriest scum than you do me.”

“No, I don’t,” I say.

“Among your friends there is not one decent straight solid person. They are entirely the mange, as far as I am concerned.”

I say, “What about Charlie DeSoto? He wears a suit.”

She just looked at me hopelessly.

“There is something about you, Ray, that wants to set yourself deliberately in peril and in trash. One of these days you won’t come back alive. You are drinking again. You’ve had three vodka tonics.”

I ordered a fourth. Some old hideous baby in me wanted to see Westy pissed.

“You lousy ignorant bitch,” says Ray.

Westy got up and left, leaving me to bum a ride back to the office.

At the office there were a number of people in line. I went over to the back window and looked out over the creek, then down to it and the slick granite rocks through which it rushed. Who was it said we were invented by water as a means of its getting itself from one place to the other?