Two weeks later it was Wednesday again, and it was still May, and a little before one o’clock I hung the clock sign on my door to let the world of book lovers know I’d be back at two. Ten minutes later I was at the Poodle Factory with lunch for two.
I opened containers and dished out the food while Carolyn locked up and hung her own CLOSED sign in the window. She sat down opposite me and studied her plate. “Looks good,” she said, and sniffed. “Smells okay, too. What have we got here, Bern?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“It’s the daily special,” I said.
“And you didn’t even ask what it was?”
“I asked,” I said, “and the guy answered, and I have no idea what he said.”
“So you ordered it.”
I nodded. “‘Give me two of them,’ I said, ‘with brown rice.’”
“This is white rice, Bern.”
“I guess they only had white rice,” I said. “Or maybe he didn’t understand me. I didn’t understand a word he said, so why should I expect him to understand everything I said?”
“Good point.” She picked up her plastic fork, then changed her mind and chose the chopsticks instead. “Whatever it is, it tastes okay. Where’d you go, Bern?”
“Two Guys.”
“Two Guys From Abidjan? Since when do you get chopsticks with African food? And this doesn’t taste African to me.” She picked up another morsel of food, then paused with it halfway to her mouth. “Besides,” she said, “they closed, didn’t they?”
“A couple of weeks ago.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“And just reopened yesterday, under new management. It’s not Two Guys From Abidjan anymore. Now it’s Two Guys From Phnom Penh.”
“Say that again, Bern.” I did. “ Phnom Penh,” she said. “Where’s that?”
“ Cambodia.”
“What did they do, keep the old sign?”
“Uh-huh. Painted out Abidjan, painted in Phnom Penh.”
“Must have been a tight fit.”
Indeed it was; Two Guys From Phnom Penh was what it looked like. “Cheaper than getting a new sign,” I said.
“I guess. Remember when it was Two Guys From Yemen? And before that it was Two Guys From Someplace Else, but don’t ask me where. It’s got to be a hard-luck location, don’t you think?”
“Must be.”
“I bet there was a restaurant there back when the Dutch owned Manhattan. Two Guys From Rotterdam.” She popped a cube of meat into her mouth and chewed it thoughtfully, then chased it with a swig of Dr. Brown’s Celery Tonic. “Not bad,” she announced. “That was Cambodian food we had up near Columbia, wasn’t it?”
“Angkor Wok,” I said. “Broadway and a Hundred and twenty-third, a Hundred and twenty-fourth, somewhere around there.”
“I think this is better, and God knows it’s handier. I hope they stay in business.”
“I wouldn’t count on it. A few months from now it’ll probably be Two Guys From Kabul.”
“Be a shame, but at least that would fit on the sign. Did you get the celery tonic at Two Guys?”
“No, I stopped at the deli.”
“Because it goes really great with Cambodian food, doesn’t it?”
“Like it was made for it.”
We ate some more of the daily special, sipped some more celery tonic. Then she said, “ Bern? What did you see last night?”
“The Roaring Twenties,” I said.
“Again? Didn’t you see that Monday night?”
“You’re absolutely right,” I said. “They tend to run together in my mind.” I closed my eyes for a moment. “Conflict,” I said.
“Conflict?”
“And Brother Orchid.”
“I never heard of either of them.”
“Actually, I may have seen Conflict years ago on late-night TV. It was vaguely familiar. Bogart’s in love with Alexis Smith, who’s his wife’s younger sister. He hurts his legs in a car crash, but then he hides the fact that he’s recovered so that he can kill his wife.”
“Bernie-”
“Sydney Greenstreet’s the psychiatrist who sets a trap for him. See, the way he does it…You don’t care, do you?”
“Not hugely.”
“Brother Orchid was pretty interesting. Edward G. Robinson was the star. He’s a gangster, and Bogart takes over the mob while Robinson’s in Europe. He comes back and Bogart’s men try to rub him out, and he escapes and takes shelter in a monastery, where he takes the name Brother Orchid and spends his time growing flowers.”
“What did you do after the movie, Bern? Take shelter in a monastery?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean. You went out for coffee, right? Espresso for two at the little place down the block from the movie house.”
“Right.”
“And then you went home to your place, and Ilona went wherever Ilona goes. I’ve never met anybody named Ilona before. In fact the only Ilona I’ve ever heard of is Ilona Massey, and I wouldn’t know her if it weren’t for crossword puzzles. ‘Miss Massey, five letters.’ She’s right up there with Uta Hagen and Una Merkel and Ina Balin.”
“Don’t forget Ima Hogg.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it. The two of you went your separate ways after the movie. Right?”
I sighed. “Right.”
“What’s going on, Bern?”
“For God’s sake,” I said. “It’s the nineties, remember? Dating’s a whole new ballgame. People don’t jump in bed on the first date the way they used to. They take time, they get to know one another, they-”
“ Bern, look at me.”
“I wasn’t avoiding your eyes.”
“Of course you were, and I don’t blame you. ‘People don’t jump in bed on the first date.’ How many dates have you had with this woman?”
“A few.”
“Try fourteen.”
“It can’t be that many.”
“You’ve been out with her every night for two weeks. You’ve seen twenty-eight Humphrey Bogart movies. Twenty-eight! And the closest you’ve come to physical intimacy is when your hands bump into each other reaching for the popcorn.”
“That’s not true.”
“It’s not?”
“Sometimes we hold hands during the picture.”
“Be still my heart. Is it some sort of platonic thing, Bern? You’re soul mates and there’s no real physical attraction?”
“No,” I said. “Believe me, that’s not it.”
“Then what’s going on?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Have you just been playing it ultracool? Waiting for her to make the first move?”
“No,” I said. “The first night I offered to see her home. I didn’t really have anything in mind beyond possibly kissing her good night, but she said no, she’d take her own cab, and I didn’t press it. I was just as glad. Why ride all the way across town just so I could ride all the way back again?”
“Is that where she lives? On the East Side?”
“I think so.”
“You don’t know where she lives?”
“Not exactly.”
“Not exactly?”
“I mentioned that I lived just a few blocks from the Musette. And she said I was lucky, that she lived a long ways away.”
“Didn’t you ask where?”
“Of course I did.”
“And?”
“‘Oh, a great distance,’ she said, and then she changed the subject. What was I going to do, cross-examine her? And what real difference does it make where she lives?”
“Especially since you’re never going to wind up there.”
I sighed again. “The third or fourth date, I forget when, I suggested she might like to see my apartment. ‘Someday,’ she said. ‘But not tonight, Bear-naaard.’”
“‘Bear-naaard.’”
“That’s how she says it. You know something? I hate rejection.”
“How unusual.”
“I mean I really can’t stand it. She was very nice about it, but all the same I felt like an oaf for asking.”
“So you never made another move?”
“Of course I did, a few days later, and I got to feel like an oaf a second time. And then Saturday after the movies I said I hated to see the evening end, and we wound up going for a walk.”
“And?”
“We walked up Broadway as far as Eighty-sixth Street, and then we walked downtown again on the other side of the street, and we stopped here and there along the way for what you might call a heated embrace.”
“Hugs and kisses?”
“Hugs and kisses. And when we got to Columbus Circle we kissed again, and then she leaned back and looked into my eyes and told me to put her in a cab.”
“And she didn’t want you to get into it with her?”
“’Zis is not ze right time, Bear-naaard.’”
“I didn’t realize her accent was that heavy.”
“It is when she’s delirious with passion.”
“And her passion propelled her-”
“Straight into a cab.”
“What do you figure, Bern? Is she a tease?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Or a freeloader, just stringing you along, taking you for all you’re worth.”
“Then I can’t be worth very much,” I said. “She buys her own ticket and pays for her own cab.”
“Who buys the coffee afterward?”
“We take turns.”
“How about the popcorn?”
“I buy the popcorn.”
“Well, there you go. She’s only in it for the popcorn. Maybe she’s a little bit married. Ever think of that?”
“I thought of it right away,” I said. “Then I asked myself how a married woman could possibly sneak out for four hours every night.”
“She could tell her husband she’s taking a course in Crockpot Macramé at the New School.”
“Seven days a week?”
“Who knows? Maybe she doesn’t have to tell him anything, maybe he works from seven to midnight hosting a talk show on an FM station. ‘All right, callers, the topic tonight is Wives Who Don’t Cheat and the Men They Don’t Cheat With. Let’s see those boards light up now!’” She frowned. “The thing is,” she said, “she’s doing things sort of ass-backward for a married woman. The ones I’ve been fool enough to get involved with just wanted to go to bed. The last thing they wanted was to go out in public, let alone do a little smooching on a street corner.”
“I don’t think she’s married.”
“Well, what’s her story?”
“I don’t know. She doesn’t seem in any great rush to tell it. We had four or five dates before she got around to telling me where she came from.”
“I remember. For a while the best you could do was narrow it down to Europe.”
“It’s not as though I didn’t ask her. It’s not an impolite question, is it? ‘Where are you from?’ I mean, that’s not like asking to see her tax return or hear her sexual history, is it?”
“Maybe it’s a sensitive subject in Anatruria.”
“Maybe.”
“You want to know something, Bern? I never heard of Anatruria.”
“Well, don’t feel bad. Most people never heard of it. See, it never used to be a country, and it still isn’t. I heard of it, but that’s because I collected stamps when I was a kid.”
“It never used to be a country, and it still isn’t, but they issued stamps?”
“Around the end of the First World War,” I said. “When the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires broke up, a lot of countries declared themselves independent for about fifteen minutes, and some of them issued stamps and provisional currency to increase their credibility. The first Anatrurian stamps were a series of overprints of Turkish stamps, and they’re pretty rare, but they’re not worth all that much because overprinted stamps have always been easy to counterfeit. Then there was an actual series of Anatrurian stamps printed up during the winter of 1920-21, with the head of Vlados I in a little circle in the upper right corner and a different scene on each stamp in the series. Churches and public buildings and scenic views-you know the kind of things they put on stamps. They were engraved and printed in Budapest.”
“Wait a minute. Budapest ’s in Anatruria?”
“No, it’s in Hungary.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“The stamps never got to Anatruria,” I explained. “As a matter of fact, the only government independent Anatruria ever had was a government in exile. A little band of patriots scattered all over Eastern Europe proclaimed Anatrurian independence. Then they tried lobbying the League of Nations, but they didn’t get anywhere. They even put Woodrow Wilson on one of their stamps, for all the good it did them.”
“Why Woodrow Wilson? Did he have relatives in Anatruria?”
“He was big on self-determination of nations. But by the time they got the stamps printed, Warren G. Harding was president. I doubt the Anatrurians ever heard of him, and I’d be willing to bet he never heard of Anatruria.”
“Well, neither did I. Where is it, exactly?”
“You know where Bulgaria and Romania and Yugoslavia come together?”
“Sort of. Except there’s no more Yugoslavia, Bern. It’s five different countries now.”
“Well, part of one of them is part of Anatruria, and the same thing goes for Bulgaria and Romania. Anyway, that’s where Ilona was born, but she hasn’t been home in quite a while. She lived in Budapest for a year or two, or maybe it was Bucharest.”
“Maybe it was both of them.”
“Maybe. And she was in Prague, which used to be in Czechoslovakia.”
“Used to be? Where’d it go?”
“There’s no more Czechoslovakia. There’s Slovakia and there’s the Czech Republic.”
“Oh, right. You know what’s weird? At the same time that Europe is deciding to be one big country, Yugoslavia ’s deciding to be five little countries all by itself. Now you’ve got the former Yugoslavia and the former Soviet Union and the former Czechoslovakia. It’s like Formerly Joe’s. Remember Formerly Joe’s?”
“Vividly.”
“Oh, right, we didn’t like our meal, did we? I guess lots of people felt the same way, because they didn’t last long. There was this restaurant called Joe’s at the corner of West Fourth and West Tenth, and it was there for years, and then it was out of business for years. It just sat there vacant.”
“I know.”
“So then, when a new restaurant finally moved in, they called it Formerly Joe’s. And now it’s gone, in fact it’s been gone for a long time, and when somebody finally takes it over what are they gonna call it? Formerly Formerly Joe’s?”
“Or Two Guys From Anatruria.”
“I guess anything’s possible. You seeing her tonight, Bern?”
“Yes.”
“And seeing more Bogart movies?”
“Uh-huh.”
“How long’s this festival going on, anyway?”
“Another ten or twelve days.”
“You’re kidding.” She looked at me. “You’re not kidding. How many movies did the guy make, anyway?”
“Seventy-five, but they didn’t manage to get them all.”
“What a shame. How long are you gonna stay with it, Bern?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m kind of enjoying it. The first week there were times when I was wondering what I was doing there, but then it became this magical other world that I would slip into for a few hours every night.” I shrugged. “After all,” I said, “it is Bogart. He’s always interesting to watch even in some dog of a movie you never heard of. And when it’s a picture I’ve seen a dozen times, well, who can get tired of Casablanca or The Maltese Falcon? They get better every time you see them.”
“What’s the program for tonight?”
“The Caine Mutiny,” I said, “and Swing Your Lady.”
“I remember The Caine Mutiny. He was great in that, playing with those marbles.”
“Ball bearings, I think they were.”
“I’ll take your word for it. What’s the other one? Swing Your Partner?”
“Swing Your Lady.”
“I never heard of it.”
“Nobody did. Bogart’s a wrestling promoter in the Ozarks.”
“You’re making this up.”
“I am not. According to the program, Reagan has a small part.”
“Reagan? Ronald Reagan?”
“That’s the one.”
“Well, at least it’s only a small part. Wrestling in the Ozarks. And square dancing, I’ll bet. Why else would they call it Swing Your Lady?”
“You’re probably right.”
“Wrestling and square dancing and Ronald Reagan. You know what, Bern? I bet you get lucky tonight. Any woman who’d make a man go through all that has got to reward him for it.”
“I don’t know, Carolyn.”
“I do,” she said. “Better pack your toothbrush, Bern. Tonight’s your lucky night.”
And, after Bogart had followed his electrifying portrayal of Captain Queeg with a stint as barnstorming wrestling promoter Ed Hatch, and after his wrestler had quit the business to marry a lady blacksmith and spend the rest of his life shoeing horses, we’d gone across the street for a quick espresso and a little holding of hands and trading of long looks. Then we went outside and I hailed her a cab, and when I held the door for her she came into my arms for a kiss.
“Bear-naaard,” she murmured. “Come with me.”
“Come with you?”
“Come home with me. Now.”
“Oh,” I said, and was ready to stammer out some lame excuse when fifteen nights at the movies came along and rescued me. “Not tonight, sweetheart,” I drawled. “I’m afraid I’ll have to take a rain check.” And I kissed her lightly on the lips and tucked her into the cab and watched her ride away from me.
Some lucky night.