Smoke Page 23

  “Hold still,” Peg said.

  “I am holding still,” Freddie said, though of course he wasn’t.

  Peg knew he was twitching because the brush tickled him, particularly under the nose, but there was no help for that. He just had to stand it for a minute, the baby. “I don’t want to stick this brush in your nose,” she pointed out.

  “That makes two of us,” he said.

  The problem was cabin fever. It does exist, and not just in snowbound log huts in the frozen north. You can have cabin fever in a nice house in upstate New York in the summer, too, even with a swimming pool and a VCR and all the rest of it, if you can’t go anywhere.

  They both felt the same way about this. That is, Peg felt this way, and Freddie assured her he did, too.

  So it was time to do something about it. And the something was a meal in a restaurant, a nice candlelit dinner that did not come out of their own kitchen. A restaurant meal was all either of them asked for. That was all, in fact, that either of them talked about or thought about these days. They had all this money, they had all this leisure, they were living in the middle of a resort and vacation area speckled with charming restaurants, and all they did was eat at home, and not even together. In separate rooms, gloomily, not even shouting stuff to one another anymore.

  How to do it. How to have a nice dinner out. They could always go for drives, with Freddie inside one of his heads, but he couldn’t very well eat a meal with a latex head on, and if he took it off in the restaurant there’d really be hell to pay.

  He even volunteered at one point to just come along and escort her and sit there and watch her eat, only pretending to join in the meal himself, but she wouldn’t let him do it. It would drive them both crazy, and she knew it.

  So here was the idea. It had come to her this morning when she woke up, three days after Call Me Tom had come by with his warning that the forces of evil were still out and about. “Hmmmmm,” she said, sitting up.

  “Nothing’s happened yet,” the voice of Freddie said, from over by the dresser. “So maybe Call Me Tom did keep his mouth shut.”

  “Of course he did,” Peg said, looking at a different corner of the room. “I told you he would. And I got an idea.”

  “What kind of an idea?”

  “A way, maybe, maybe a way we can go out and have dinner somewhere.”

  “Peg?” Hope and skepticism battled in his voice. “Are you serious?”

  “I think we could try it.”

  “Try what, Peg?”

  “Makeup,” she said.

  “What?” Now disappointment and scorn battled there in that voice. “Come on, Peg.”

  This time she looked directly toward where she thought he probably stood. “Women wear makeup all the time,” she explained.

  “Not all over their face,” Freddie objected.

  “That’s what you know. There are women you see on the street, in stores, you aren’t seeing one speck of their actual facial skin, not their real face, not even a teeny little bit. Maybe some of the forehead, but that’s it.”

  “Are you putting me on, Peg?”

  “We are talking about women,” Peg went on, “who wake up in the morning all wrinkled, and when they leave the house there’s no wrinkles on their faces at all. That’s the kind of makeup I mean.”

  “And you could do my whole face?”

  “Sure. And your neck, and your ears. That’s not normally done, but I don’t see why not. And we’ll buy you a wig.”

  “What about my hands? Can I eat with makeup all over my hands?”

  “Oh,” Peg said, and suddenly crashed. “No, you can’t.” She hadn’t thought about his goddam hands. A great weight that had just begun to lift from her shoulders now dropped down on her again, heavier than ever. “Forget it,” she said. Slumped in seated position on the bed, she sighed and said, “Nobody’s gonna think those Playtex gloves are real hands, not up close in a restaurant.”

  There was a little silence, in which she gazed at nothing at all, and then he said, “Burns.”

  She frowned in his general direction. “What?”

  “What I’ll do,” he said, “I’ll explain to the waiter, whoever, when I go in. I got burned, I got scalded or something, I got ointment on, I gotta wear these gloves.”

  The smile that spread across Peg’s features was like day-break. “Could you do that, Freddie? Say that?”

  “Why not? Could you do the thing with the makeup?”

  “Why not?” she said, and bounded out of bed with fresh enthusiasm and hope.

   

  * * *

   

  Makeup was easy. In a drugstore—not in Dudley—while Freddie waited in the van, Peg went through the displays of Cover Girl and Max Factor. Freddie would have to wear sunglasses in the restaurant, of course—another result of that horrible accident that so messed up his hands—but the eyebrows would show (or not show), so she bought black and brown eyebrow pencils, on the assumption that if she painted his invisible eyebrows, the color would show on top of the invisible hairs, and look realistic enough for a dim-lit restaurant after dark.

  Let’s see, what else? Skin-tone lipstick. Blush. But not too much stuff; she wasn’t up for a night on the town with Bozo the Clown. So she paid for her purchases—they were paying for everything these days, they were gonna need some more cash soon—and went back out to the van. It was parked under a tree down the block, windows open, Freddie invisible in back. “Now the wig,” she said, sliding behind the wheel, as though that would be just as easy.

   

  * * *

   

  No. Men’s wigs were not easy. They were expensive, and there weren’t very many places that sold them, and they had to be fitted. That last was the killer.

  They were driving around, Freddie consulting various telephone Yellow Pages in the back of the van, and it wasn’t looking good. “There are places,” he said, “they say here for chemotherapy patients and like that, but they all say ‘fitting.’”

  “Women’s wigs are easier, I guess,” Peg said, driving aimlessly around Columbia County, “because they’ve got more hair and they can do different styles and things.”

  “I dunno, Peg,” Freddie said. He was sounding gloomy again. “I don’t think I can go as Kojak,” he said, “with makeup all over my whole head.”

  “I don’t think so, either,” she agreed, and thought a while as she drove, and then she said, “I think I got an idea. Another idea. Can you find a shopping mall in those Yellow Pages?”

  “What’s the idea?”

  “I’ll tell you later,” she said, because she was afraid he’d say no if he knew what it was.

  He said, “You’re afraid I’ll say no.”

  “No, come on, Freddie, it’s just to be a surprise, that’s all. Find me a mall.”

   

  * * *

   

  From where they were at that moment, the nearest mall was over in Massachusetts, in the Berkshires, miles and miles away. They went there, and of course there were no trees or shade of any kind in the parking lot, baking in the July sun, so Peg said, “I’ll be as quick as I can,” and left both windows open, so he wouldn’t roast in there.

  She was as quick as she could be, and came back with a purchase in a plain brown paper bag. When she got into the van Freddie said, “Some guy tried to steal the radio.”

  “Freddie! He did?” The radio, she saw, was still there. “What’d you do?”

  “I guess he figured,” Freddie said, “the windows being open, might as well. So he got in, and he lay down on the seat there, facedown, so he could reach under the dash.”

  She had the windows rolled up now, and the engines and air-conditioning on, but she didn’t drive yet. “Yeah?”

  “So first I picked his pocket,” Freddie said, “and then I pulled his hair.”

  She giggled. “You did? What’d he do?”

  “He jumped, and hit his head on the steering whe
el, and sat up, and looked all around, and then he decided it wasn’t anything and he was gonna go back to the radio again, so I tapped him on the shoulder and when he looked back I poked him in the eye.”

  “Ooh,” she said. “That wasn’t nice.”

  “He’s boosting our radio, Peg.”

  “Well, then what?”

  “He still didn’t get out of the van,” Freddie said. “He had one hand up over his eye, like he’s reading the eye-chart, and he’s lookin around and lookin around with the other eye, and I figured, time to make this guy get out of here, so I slapped him on both ears at the same time. The palms, you know, whack against both ears. You know what that’s like?”

  “I’m not sure I want to know.”

  “It’s like a firecracker went off in the middle of your head,” Freddie told her. He didn’t sound at all penitent. “So then he got out of the van.”

  “I bet he did.”

  “And took off running. I bet he’s halfway to New Jersey by now. What’s in the bag, Peg?”

  “I’ll show you when we get home,” she said, and shifted into “drive,” and steered out of the parking lot.

  “Pretty crummy wallet that guy had,” Freddie commented from the back, once they were on the road. There came the sound of money rustling, and then, his voice disgusted, Freddie said, “Twenty-seven dollars.”

  “I was just thinking,” Peg said, as she watched the road, “we’ll need more money soon.”

  “Off of radio-stealing guys at the mall is not where we’ll get it,” Freddie commented. “We’ll make another trip to the city. Open your window a little, will you?”

  She opened her window a little, and a pretty crummy wallet sailed past her ear and out onto the roadway. She shut the window, and they drove on.

   

  * * *

   

  He did not want to wear the wig, just as she’d expected. “It looks like a horse’s tail,” he said. “And the horse’s tail goes on top of the horse’s ass, and that ain’t me.”

  “It isn’t that bad, Freddie,” she insisted, even though his description was more or less accurate.

  The thing is, for women, but not for men, there are inexpensive wigs for sale in low-cost department stores, many of them with a famous person’s name attached, like Zsa Zsa Gabor. Most of these wigs are short and curly, like the Zsa Zsa Gabor, but a few are long and straight, like the Cher. The one Peg had chosen was long and straight, shoe-polish black, thick coarse fake hair coming down from a narrow almost invisible part in the middle. If you were to cut it a little shorter, and wear it with armor, you could look like a roadshow Prince Valiant.

  “I am not,” Freddie announced, “gonna wear that thing. I’d rather make believe I was scalped by the Indians.”

  “They don’t do that anymore, Freddie,” Peg said. “In fact, I think it hurts their feelings if you remind them.”

  “I am not gonna wear that thing.”

  “Listen to my idea, will you?”

  “I’ll listen,” Freddie agreed, “and then I still won’t wear it. But I’ll listen.”

  “Thanks, Freddie,” she said, once again wasting sarcasm on an invisible man. “What we’ll do,” she told him, “we’ll make up your face first, and then we’ll fit the wig to see how it works, with these Velcro things on the inside here to get the size right, see them?”

  “Oh, God, Peg.”

  “Then,” she insisted, “I’ll cut some of the hair off, to shape it a little, and we’ll put it in a ponytail, with a rubber band. There’s a lot of guys going around with ponytails.”

  “Wimps. Nerds. Guys with peace signs on their four-by-fours.”

  “Not all of them. Now, come on, Freddie, cooperate with me on this. It’s worth a try, isn’t it?”

  “If I’m gonna look like an idiot,” he warned her, “I won’t do it.”

  “Freddie,” she said, “if you look like anything at all, it’ll be a step forward. Now sit down, and let me start.” She waited, hands on hips. “Go on, don’t argue anymore, just sit down.”

  “I am sitting down,” he said.

   

  * * *

   

  Slowly, stroke by stroke, the face began to appear. It was like magic, or like a special effect in the movies. Cheeks, nose, jaws, all emerging out of the air, the slightly woodsy tan color of Max Factor pancake makeup. Freddie complicated matters by flinching away from the brush a lot, and even sneezing twice, but nevertheless, slowly and steadily, they progressed.

  Partway along, with just the major areas roughed in, the forehead and on down, Peg reared back to study him, and said, “I don’t remember you like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “That that’s the way you look. Freddie? I think I’m beginning to forget what you look like.”

  The parts of the face that now existed contrived to express surprise. “You know what?” he said. “Me, too. I was just thinking this morning, when I was shaving. I’m not sure I really remember what I look like, either. If I saw me on the street, I don’t know that I’d recognize me.”

  “This is really strange, Freddie.”

  “It is. You don’t have any pictures of me, do you, Peg?”

  She shook her head. “Of course not. You never wanted any pictures, remember? You said they didn’t go with your lifestyle.”

  “Well, I guess that’s true, they didn’t.”

  “Maybe what we’ll do,” she suggested, “when we get you all set here, I’ll take a Polaroid.”

  The partial face now conveyed extreme skepticism. “It’s gonna come out that good, huh?”

  “Let’s wait and see,” she said, and went back to work with the brush.

   

  * * *

   

  “It doesn’t look half bad,” she said.

  Then I must be looking at the other half,” he told her.

  They were standing together in the bedroom, in front of the floor-length mirror on the closet door, Peg and the Creature from the Fifties Horror Movie. With that sandalwood skin color, and sort of pinkish-gray lips, and bristly dark eyebrows (the paint had stiffened the eyebrow hairs), and the black fake hair swagged around his ears—the ears were a bitch to make up, with all those curls and convolutions—and the dark dark sunglasses, he didn’t actually appear to be a human being at all. The way drag queens manage to stop looking like men without ever really looking like women, Freddie now looked as though he might be some sort of extraterrestrial in human drag. Or as though the Disney people had decided, next to their moving lifesize Abraham Lincoln doll at Disneyland, to put a Bobby Darin doll.

  Peg was determined to put the best possible face on things, even if the best possible face was this store-window Freddie. “We’re talking about after dark,” she pointed out, “in a restaurant. Freddie, we’ve got to at least give it a try.”

  “Well, I’m all dressed up,” he acknowledged, the pancake furrowing on his brow. “Might as well go for it.”

  “Thank you, Freddie.”

  “But, Peg.”

  “Yeah?”

  “We can skip the Polaroid,” Freddie said.

   

  * * *

   

  Peg called five different restaurants before she found one that sounded like it would work out okay. Yes, they prided themselves on their dim candlelit romantic atmosphere. Yes, they had high-backed booths, if that was what madam would prefer. Yes, they understood that madam’s husband had been in an industrial explosion recently and was self-conscious about his appearance these days, and this would be his first time out in public since he came home from the hospital, and they would bend every effort to make his dining at the Auberge a pleasant and relaxing experience. And would that be smoking or nonsmoking? “Are you kidding?” Peg asked. “After my husband’s explosion?”

  “Nonsmoking, then. See you at nine, madam.”

  There are three kinds of restaurants in the country. There are the joints
that are really just bars with kitchens, and that’s where the local citizenry goes. There are places that try to be trendy by doing what the city restaurants were doing ten years ago, and that’s where the weekenders and the summer people go. And there are very pretentious places with dim echoes of Maxim’s, with tassels on the huge menus and too much flour in the sauces and too much sugar in the salads, and that’s where everybody takes Mother on her birthday.

  It wasn’t Freddie’s birthday, but here they were. It was true the maître d’ was in a tux, and true the busboy sported a bow tie, and true the waitress was dressed like Marie Antoinette in her milkmaid phase, but these were people who were used to making mothers feel at home away from home on that special day, so they were very good with an explosion victim, hardly looking at Freddie’s gloved hands at all, not acknowledging by word or glance that there might be anything odd about his face, and not even acting surprised when he moved and talked like a normal human being.

  They were shown to a dim booth in a corner, high-backed purple plush seating, dark paisley tablecloth, and a low candle inside a gnarly glass chimney of such thickness and such dark amberness that the light it produced looked mostly like the last sputtering effort of energy from a galaxy that had died long long ago, on the other side of the universe.

  “We can be happy here,” Peg decided.

  “I can’t see my menu,” Freddie complained.

  “Good. That means your menu can’t see you, either.”

  “Aw, Peg, is it that bad?”

  “No, Freddie,” she lied, reaching out to take his Playtex and give it a squeeze. “I was just doing a gag.”

  Through experimentation, they learned that if they held their menus just so, there was almost enough illumination from the indirect lighting in troughs up near the ceiling so they could make out a lot of the words flowingly scripted there. But then it turned out, when Marie Antoinette came back, that they hardly needed to think about the menus anyway, since she had forty-two specials to describe.

  Slowly, Peg relaxed, grew easier in her mind. Slowly, she got back into the swing of things, the idea of being out at a restaurant for a nice dinner with your guy, and candlelight, and even pretty good music piped in, ballet stuff, Delibes, and like that. They ordered drinks, and they ordered wine, and they ordered special appetizers and special main courses, and they began to talk together like any normal couple out on a date, discussing the house they were living in, and how the summer was shaping up, and what they might do the next time they dropped in to the city to develop some fresh cash, and the whole evening was just being very nice.