175522.fb2
"Say, would you dance with me so my husband could take a picture of us?"
The woman, bigger than Tobin-which was not, after all, an especially impressive feat-had grabbed him just inside the restaurant where he'd gone in search of Cindy.
The woman was dressed as the Wicked Witch of the West and her husband as Teddy Roosevelt. The husband, drunk, tried aiming a Polaroid at Tobin. Everything here was, if anything, crazier than when Tobin had left. Two fat men did something like a polka with each other while their wives laughed so hard they pounded each other on the shoulder. The two fat men were up on a table. A waiter, in a snit, and probably a well-deserved snit, took a drunk's drink and poured it into a flower bowl, apparently telling the man he'd been cut off. The dance floor was darker now; only a feeble dawnlike hue of pink from a baby spotlight offered any illumination, and some of the scenes on the dance floor were reasonably pornographic, the frivolity of earlier hours having given way to pure-and understandable-lust.
"I've danced with everybody on 'Celebrity Circle,' " the woman said. "And Henry's taken my picture with every one. You're the last."
"Goody," Tobin said, letting her pull him onto the floor and into his arms as the trio played "The Impossible Dream" as a samba. "Smile," Henry said.
"I always liked you better than your partner on that review show," the woman said. "He was too snotty. He didn't like Robert Redford."
"Neither do I," Tobin said.
The woman, fiftyish, giggled. "Yes, but you're cute."
He supposed there was logic there somewhere.
As they danced, and Henry continued to punch out the Polaroids, Tobin glanced round the dance floor for sight of Cindy. But nothing. He saw all the others on the "Celebrity Circle" dais-and they all glowered at him whenever he made eye contact-except Cindy and Kevin Anderson.
My God, what if…
"It's such a great show," the Wicked Witch said. "Beg pardon?"
"The show. 'Celebrity Circle.' It's great."
"Oh. Thanks. But I'm only doing this cruise and then I'm gone."
"Everybody looks like they're having so much fun." She giggled her annoying giggle again. The song was interminable. "I'd pay to be on that panel. I really would."
"Yes," Tobin said, on autopilot now, and only half-listening to her.
He was fearing the worst. That Kevin had sweet-talked Cindy…
The song, at last, ended and the woman said, rather threateningly really, "Did you get some good ones, Henry?"
"I got some wonderful ones, honey." He said "shome" and he said "wunnerful" and saying so nearly fell over, from the booze, backwards.
"Thanks," Tobin said, extricating himself from her grasp. "I really enjoyed it."
And then he was off to the dais, pressing himself through dancers and sweet-talkers and boosters and sots, and at last he reached the dais and felt the laserlike collective glare of the "Celebrity Circle" group searing through him.
"Looks like Cindy dumped you again, Tobin," Jere Farris said.
"She wanted somebody who could get it up in less than a half-hour," said America's favorite school teacher, Cassie McDowell.
Only Susan Richards had the grace to look embarrassed at Cassie's drunken ugliness.
He turned back to the end of the table where Joanna Howard sat talking to a busboy who was obviously about her speed-neither one appeared to know how to put the moves on anybody.
He went up to her. "Have you seen Cindy?"
She glanced up and then frowned. "She… left."
Tobin cleared his throat. "Kevin?"
She paused. She tried to spare his feelings. "I really didn't see."
Which of course meant Yes.
The bastard had come back here after the confrontation in Tobin's cabin and taken Cindy away. But why, after the way he'd treated her last night, would she go?
Then he smiled to himself.
She'd go because women like Cindy seemed to derive perverse pleasure from men who treated them badly. Tobin had never understood this, and didn't care to, really.
When his gaze fell on Joanna again, he saw that she was watching her lover, Jere Farris, in the arms of his wife on the dance floor.
Tobin said, "You can do better than him, Joanna. You really can."
She smiled with her soft forlorn eyes and said, "Weren't you the one asking about Cindy a few seconds ago?"
"Good point," he said, and went back to his cabin.