Two Much!

7

“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.”

“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.”