The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

Mister Yummy

I

Dave Calhoun was helping Olga Glukhov construct the Eiffel Tower. They had been at it for six mornings now, six early mornings, in the common room of the Lakeview Assisted Living Center. They were hardly alone in there; old people rise early. The giant flatscreen on the far side started blatting the usual rabble-rousing junk from Fox News at five thirty, and a number of residents were watching it with their mouths agape.

‘Ah,’ Olga said. ‘Here’s one I’ve been looking for.’ She tapped a piece of girder into place halfway down Gustave Eiffel’s masterpiece, created – according to the back of the box – from junk metal.

Dave heard the tap of a cane approaching from behind him, and greeted the newcomer without turning his head. ‘Good morning, Ollie. You’re up early.’ As a young man, Dave wouldn’t have believed you could ID someone simply by the sound of his cane, but as a young man he had never dreamed he would finish his time on earth in a place where so many people used them.

‘Good morning right back at you,’ Ollie Franklin said. ‘And to you, Olga.’

She looked up briefly, then back down at the puzzle – a thousand pieces, according to the box, and most now where they belonged. ‘These girders are a bugger. I see them floating in front of me every time I close my eyes. I believe I’ll go for a smoke and wake up my lungs.’

Smoking was supposedly verboten in Lakeview, but Olga and a few other diehards were allowed to slip through the kitchen to the loading dock, where there was a butt can. She rose, tottered, cursed in either Russian or Polish, caught her balance, and shuffled away. Then she stopped and looked back at Dave, eyebrows drawn together. ‘Leave some for me, Bob. Do you promise?’

He raised his hand, palm out. ‘So help me God.’

Satisfied, she shuffled on, digging in the pocket of her shapeless day dress for her butts and her Bic.

Ollie raised his own eyebrows. ‘Since when are you Bob?’

‘He was her husband. You remember. Came here with her, died two years ago.’

‘Ah. Right. And now she’s losing it. That’s too bad.’

Dave shrugged. ‘She’ll be ninety in the fall, if she makes it. She’s entitled to a few slipped cogs. And look at this.’ He gestured at the puzzle, which filled an entire card table. ‘She did most of it herself. I’m just her assistant.’

Ollie, who had been a graphic designer in what he called his real life, looked at the nearly completed puzzle gloomily. ‘La Tour Eiffel. Did you know there was an artists’ protest when it was under construction?’

‘No, but I’m not surprised. The French.’

‘The novelist Léon Bloy called it a truly tragic streetlamp.’

Calhoun looked at the puzzle, saw what Bloy had meant, and laughed. It did look like a streetlamp. Sort of.

‘Some other artist or writer – I can’t remember who – claimed that the best view of Paris was from the Eiffel Tower, because it was the only view of Paris without the Eiffel Tower in it.’ Ollie bent closer, one hand gripping his cane, the other pressed against the small of his back, as if to hold it together. His eyes moved from the puzzle to the scatter of remaining pieces, perhaps a hundred in all, then back to the puzzle. ‘Houston, you may have a problem here.’

Dave had already begun to suspect this. ‘If you’re right, it’s going to ruin Olga’s day.’

‘She should have expected it. How many times do you think this version of the Eiffel has been assembled, and then taken apart again? Old people are as careless as teenagers.’ He straightened up. ‘Would you walk outside in the garden with me? I have something to give you. Also something to tell you.’

Dave studied Ollie. ‘You okay?’

The other chose not to answer this. ‘Come outside. It’s a beautiful morning. Warming up nicely.’

Ollie led the way toward the patio, his cane tapping out that familiar one-two-three rhythm, tossing a good-morning wave to someone as he passed the coffee-drinking coterie of TV watchers. Dave followed willingly enough, but slightly mystified.

II

Lakeview was built in a U shape, with the common room between two extending arms that comprised the ‘assisted living suites,’ each suite consisting of a sitting room, a bedroom, and the sort of bathroom that came equipped with handrails and a shower chair. These suites were not cheap. Although many of the residents were no longer strictly continent (Dave had begun suffering his own nighttime accidents not long after turning eighty-three, and now kept boxes of PM Pull-Ups on a high shelf in his closet), it was not the sort of place that smelled of piss and Lysol. The rooms also came with satellite TV, there was a snack buffet in each wing, and twice a month there were wine-tasting parties. All things considered, Dave thought, it was a pretty good place to run out the string.

The garden between the residence wings was lush – almost orgasmic – with early summer. Paths wandered and a central fountain splashed. The flowers rioted, but in a genteel, well-barbered way. Here and there were house telephones where a walker suddenly afflicted with shortness of breath or spreading numbness in the legs could call for assistance. There would be plenty of walkers later on, when those not yet arisen (or when those in the common room got their fill of Fox News) came out to enjoy the day before it heated up, but for the time being, Dave and Ollie had it to themselves.

Once they were through the double doors and down the steps from the wide flagstoned patio (both of them descending with care), Ollie stopped and began fumbling in the pocket of the baggy houndstooth check sportcoat he was wearing. He brought out a silver pocket watch on a heavy silver chain. He held it out to Dave.

‘I want you to have this. It was my great-grandfather’s. Judging by the engraving inside the cover, he either bought it or had it given to him in eighteen ninety.’

Dave gazed at the watch, swinging on its chain from Ollie Franklin’s slightly palsied hand like a hypnotist’s amulet, with amusement and horror. ‘I can’t take that.’

Patiently, as if instructing a child, Ollie said, ‘You can if I give it to you. And I’ve seen you admire it many and many a time.’

‘It’s a family heirloom!’

‘Yes indeed, and my brother will take it if it’s in my effects when I die. Which I’m going to do, and soon. Perhaps tonight. Certainly in the next few days.’

Dave didn’t know what to say.

Still in that same patient tone, Ollie said, ‘My brother Tom isn’t worth the powder it would take to blow him to Des Moines. I have never said as much to him, it would be cruel, but I’ve said so many times to you. Haven’t I?’

‘Well … yes.’

‘I have supported him through three failed businesses and two failed marriages. I believe I’ve told you that many times, as well. Haven’t I?’

‘Yes, but—’

‘I did well, and I invested well,’ Ollie said, beginning to walk and tapping his cane in his own personal code: tap, tap-tap, tap, tap-tap-tap. ‘I am one of the infamous One Percent so reviled by the liberal young. Not by a lot, mind you, but by enough to have lived comfortably here for the last three years while continuing to serve as my younger brother’s safety net. I no longer have to perform that service for his daughter, thank God; Martha actually seems to be earning a living for herself. Which is a relief. I’ve made a will, all proper and correct, and in it I’ve done the proper thing. The family thing. Since I have no wife or children myself, that means leaving everything to Tom. Except this. This is for you. You’ve been a good friend to me, so please. Take it.’

Dave considered, decided he could give it back when his friend’s death premonition passed, and took the watch. He clicked it open and admired the crystal face. Twenty-two past six – right on time, as far as he could tell. The second hand moved briskly in its own little circle just above the scrolled 6.

‘Cleaned several times, but repaired only once,’ Ollie said, resuming his slow ambulation. ‘In nineteen twenty-three, according to Grampy, after my father dropped it down the well on the old farm in Hemingford Home. Can you imagine that? Over a hundred and twenty years old, and only repaired once. How many human beings on earth can claim that? A dozen? Maybe only six? You have two sons and a daughter, am I right?’

‘You are,’ Dave said. His friend had grown increasingly frail over the last year, and his hair was nothing but a few baby-fine wisps on his liver-spotted skull, but his mind was ticking along a little better than Olga’s. Or my own, he admitted to himself.

‘The watch isn’t in my will, but it should go in yours. I’m sure you love all your children equally, you’re that kind of guy, but liking is different, isn’t it? Leave it to the one you like the best.’

That would be Peter, Dave thought, and smiled.

Either returning the smile or catching the thought behind it, Ollie’s lips parted over his remaining teeth and he nodded. ‘Let’s sit down. I’m bushed. It doesn’t take much, these days.’

They sat on one of the benches, and Dave tried to hand the watch back. Ollie pushed his hands out in an exaggerated repelling gesture that was comical enough to make Dave laugh, although he recognized this as a serious matter. Certainly more serious than a few missing pieces in a jigsaw puzzle.

The smell of the flowers was strong, heavenly. When Dave Calhoun thought of death – not so far off now – the prospect he regretted most was the loss of the sensory world and all its ordinary luxuries. The sight of a woman’s cleavage in a boatneck top. The sound of Cozy Cole going bullshit on the drums in ‘Topsy, Part Two.’ The taste of lemon pie with a cloud of meringue on top. The smell of flowers he could not name, although his wife would have known them all.

‘Ollie, you may be going to die this week, God knows everyone in this place has one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel, but there’s no way you can know for sure. I don’t know if you had a dream, or a black cat crossed your path, or something else, but premonitions are bullshit.’

‘I didn’t just have a premonition,’ Ollie said, ‘I saw one. I saw Mister Yummy. I’ve seen him several times in the last two weeks. Always closer. Pretty soon I’ll have a room visit, and that will be that. I don’t mind. In fact, I’m looking forward to it. Life’s a great thing, but if you live long enough, it wears out before it runs out.’

‘Mister Yummy,’ Calhoun said. ‘Who the hell is Mister Yummy?’

‘It’s not really him,’ Ollie said, as if he hadn’t heard. ‘I know that. It’s a representation of him. A summation of a time and place, if you like. Although there was a real Mister Yummy once. That’s what my friends and I called him that night in Highpockets. I never knew his real name.’

‘I’m not following.’

‘Listen, you know I’m gay, right?’

Dave smiled. ‘Well, I think your dating days were over before I met you, but I had a pretty good idea, yes.’

‘Was it the ascot?’

It’s the way you walk, Dave thought. Even with a cane. The way you run your fingers through what remains of your hair and then glance in the mirror. The way you roll your eyes at the women on that Real Housewives show. Even the still-life drawings in your room, which form a kind of timeline of your decline. Once you must have been so good, but now your hands shake. You’re right – it wears out before it runs out.

‘Among other things,’ Dave said.

‘Have you ever heard someone say they were too old for one of America’s military adventures? Vietnam? Iraq? Afghanistan?’

‘Sure. Although what they usually say is they were too young.’

‘AIDS was a war.’ Ollie was looking down at his gnarled hands, from which the talent was departing. ‘And I wasn’t too old for all of it, because no one is when the war’s on one’s native soil, wouldn’t you say?’

‘I guess that’s true enough.’

‘I was born in nineteen thirty. When AIDS was first observed and clinically described in the United States, I was fifty-two. I was living in New York, and working freelance for several advertising firms. My friends and I still used to go around to the clubs in the Village once in a while. Not the Stonewall – a hellhole run by the Mafia – but some of the others. One night I was standing outside Peter Pepper’s on Christopher Street, sharing a jay with a friend, and a bunch of young men went in. Good-looking guys in tight bellbottom pants and the shirts they all seemed to wear back then, the kind with the wide shoulders and narrow waists. Suede boots with stacked heels.’

‘Yummy boys,’ Dave ventured.

‘I guess, but not the yummy boy. And my best friend – his name was Noah Freemont, died just last year, I went to the funeral – turned to me and said, “They don’t even see us anymore, do they?” I agreed. They saw you if you had enough money, but we were too … dignified for that, you might say. Paying for it was demeaning, although some of us did, from time to time. Yet in the late fifties, when I first came to New York …’

He shrugged and looked off into the distance.

‘When you first came to New York?’ Dave prompted.

‘I’m thinking about how to say this. In the late fifties, when women were still sighing over Rock Hudson and Liberace, when homosexuality was the love that dared not speak its name instead of the one that never shuts up, my sex drive was at its absolute peak. In that way – there are others, I’m sure, many others – gay men and straight men are the same. I read somewhere that when they are in the presence of an attractive other, men think about sex every twenty seconds or so. But when a man’s in his teens and twenties, he thinks about sex constantly, whether he’s in the presence of an attractive other or not.’

‘You get hard when the wind blows,’ Dave said.

He was thinking of his first job, as a pump jockey, and of a pretty redhead he’d happened to see sliding out of the passenger seat of her boyfriend’s truck. Her skirt had rucked up, revealing her plain white cotton panties for a single second, two at most. Yet he had played that moment over and over in his mind while masturbating, and although he had only been sixteen at the time, the memory was still fresh and clear. He doubted if that would have been the case if he’d been fifty. By then he’d seen plenty of women’s underwear.

‘Some of the conservative columnists called AIDS the gay plague, and with ill-concealed satisfaction. It was a plague, but by nineteen eighty-six or so, the gay community had a pretty good fix on it. We understood the two most basic preventive measures – no unprotected sex and no sharing of needles. But young men think they’re immortal, and as my grandma used to say when she was in her cups, a stiff dick has no conscience. It’s especially true when the owner of that dick is drunk, high, and in the throes of sexual attraction.’

Ollie sighed, shrugged.

‘Chances were taken. Mistakes were made. Even after the transmission vectors were well understood, tens of thousands of gay men died. People are only beginning to grasp the magnitude of that tragedy now that most folks understand gays don’t choose their sexual orientation. Great poets, great musicians, great mathematicians and scientists – God knows how many died before their talents could flower. They died in gutters, in cold-water flats, in hospitals, and the indigent wards, all because they took a risk on a night when the music was loud, the wine was flowing, and the poppers were popping. By choice? There are still plenty who say so, but that’s nonsense. The drive is too strong. Too primal. If I’d been born twenty years later, I might have been one of the casualties. My friend Noah, as well. But he died of a heart attack in his bed, and I’ll die of … whatever. Because by fifty, there are fewer sexual temptations to resist, and even when the temptation is strong, the brain is sometimes able to overrule the cock, at least long enough to grab a condom. I’m not saying that plenty of men my age didn’t die of AIDS. They did – no fool like an old fool, right? Some were my friends. But they were fewer than the younger fellows who jammed the clubs every night.

‘My own clique – Noah, Henry Reed, John Rubin, Frank Diamond – sometimes went out just to watch those young guys do their mating dances. We didn’t drool, but we watched. We weren’t so different from the middle-aged hetero golfing buddies who go to Hooters once a week just to watch the waitresses bend over. That sort of behavior may be slightly pitiful, but it’s not unnatural. Or do you disagree?’

Dave shook his head.

‘One night four or five of us dropped by a dance club called Highpockets. I think we had just about decided to call it a night when this kid walked in on his own. Looked a little like David Bowie. He was tall, wearing tight white bike shorts and a blue tee with cut-off sleeves. Long blond hair, combed up in a high pompadour that was funny and sexy at the same time. High color – natural, not rouge – in his cheeks, along with a spangle of silvery stuff. A Cupid’s bow of a mouth. Every eye in the place turned to look at him. Noah grabbed my arm and said, “That’s him. That’s Mister Yummy. I’d give a thousand dollars to take him home.”

‘I laughed and said a thousand dollars wouldn’t buy him. At that age, and with those looks, all he wanted was to be admired and desired. Also to have great sex as often as possible. And when you’re twenty-two, that’s often.

‘Pretty soon he was part of a group of good-looking guys – although none as good-looking as he was – all of them laughing and drinking and dancing whatever dance was in back then. None of them sparing a glance for the quartet of middle-aged men sitting at a table far back from the dance floor and drinking wine. Middle-aged men still five or ten years from quitting their efforts to look younger than their age. Why would he look at us with all those lovely young men vying for his attention?

‘And Frank Diamond said, “He’ll be dead in a year. See how pretty he is then.” Only he didn’t just say it; he spit it out. Like that was some kind of weird … I don’t know … consolation prize.’

Ollie, who had survived the age of the deep closet to live in one where gay marriage was legal in most states, once more shrugged his thin shoulders. As if to say it was all water under the bridge.

‘So that was our Mister Yummy, a summation of all that was beautiful and desirable and out of reach. I never saw him again until two weeks ago. Not at Highpockets, not at Peter Pepper’s or the Tall Glass, not at any of the other clubs I went to … although I went to those places less and less frequently as the so-called Reagan Era wore on. By the late eighties, going to the gay clubs was too weird. Like attending the masquerade ball in Poe’s story about the Red Death. You know, “Come on, everybody! Kick out the jams, have another glass of champagne, and ignore all those people dropping like flies.” There was no fun in that unless you were twenty-two and still under the impression that you were bulletproof.’

‘It must have been hard.’

Ollie raised the hand not wedded to his cane and waggled it in a comme ci, comme ça gesture. ‘Was and wasn’t. It was what the recovering alkies call life on life’s terms.’

Dave considered letting it go at that, and decided he couldn’t. The gift of the watch was too dismaying. ‘Listen to your Uncle Dave, Ollie. Words of one syllable: you did not see that kid. You might have seen someone who looked a little like him, but if your Mister Yummy was twenty-two back then, he’d be in his fifties himself by now. If he avoided AIDS, that is. It was just a trick your brain played on you.’

‘My elderly brain,’ Ollie said, smiling. ‘My going-on-senile brain.’

‘I never said senile. You’re not that. But your brain is elderly.’

‘Undoubtedly, but it was him. It was. The first time I saw him, he was on Maryland Avenue, at the foot of the main drive. A few days later he was lounging on the porch steps below the main entrance, smoking a clove cigarette. Two days ago he was sitting on a bench outside the admission office. Still wearing that blue sleeveless tee and those blinding white shorts. He should have stopped traffic, but nobody saw him. Except for me, that is.’

I refuse to humor him, Dave thought. He deserves better.

‘You’re hallucinating, pal.’

Ollie was unfazed. ‘Just now he was in the common room, watching TV with the rest of the early birds. I waved to him, and he waved back.’ A grin, startlingly youthful, broke on Ollie’s face. ‘He also tipped me a wink.’

‘White bike shorts? Sleeveless tee? Twenty-two and good-looking? I may be straight, but I think I would have noticed that.’

‘He’s here for me, so I’m the only one who can see him. QED.’ He hoisted himself to his feet. ‘Shall we go back? I’m ready for coffee.’

They walked toward the patio, where they would climb the steps as carefully as they had descended them. Once they had lived in the Reagan Era; now they lived in the Era of Glass Hips.

When they reached the flagstones outside the common room, they both paused for breath. When Dave had his, he said, ‘So what have we learned today, class? That death personified isn’t a skeleton riding on a pale horse with a scythe over his shoulder, but a hot dancehall kid with glitter on his cheeks.’

‘I imagine different people see different avatars,’ Ollie said mildly. ‘According to what I’ve read, the majority see their mothers once they reach death’s door.’

‘Ollie, the majority sees no one. And you’re not in mortal—’

‘My mother, however, died shortly after I was born, so I wouldn’t even recognize her.’

He started for the double doors, but Dave took his arm. ‘I’ll keep the watch until the Halloween party, how’s that? Four months. And I’ll wind it religiously. But if you’re still around then, you take it back. Deal?’

Ollie beamed. ‘Absolutely. Let’s go see how Olga’s doing with La Tour Eiffel, shall we?’

Olga was back at the card table, staring down at the puzzle. It was not a happy stare. ‘I left you the last three pieces, Dave.’ Unhappy or not, she was at least clear on who he was again. ‘But that will still leave four holes. After a week’s work, this is very disappointing.’

‘Shit happens, Olga,’ Dave said, sitting down. He tapped the remaining pieces into place with a satisfaction that went all the way back to rainy days at summer camp. Where, he now realized, the common room had been quite a bit like this. Life was a short shelf that came with bookends.

‘Yes it does,’ she said, contemplating the missing four pieces. ‘It certainly does. But so much shit, Bob. So much.’

‘Olga, I’m Dave.’

She turned her frown on him. ‘That’s what I said.’

No sense arguing, and no sense trying to convince her that nine hundred and ninety-six out of a thousand was a fine score. She’s ten years from a hundred and still thinks she deserves perfection, Dave thought. Some people have remarkably sturdy illusions.

He looked up and saw Ollie emerging from the closet-sized craft center adjacent to the common room. He was holding a sheet of tissue paper and a pen. He made his way to the table and floated the tissue onto the puzzle.

‘Here, here, what are you doing?’ Olga asked.

‘Show some patience for once in your life, dear. You’ll see.’

She stuck out her lower lip like a pouty child. ‘No. I’m going to smoke. If you want to take that damn thing apart, be my guest. Put it back in the box or knock it on the floor. Your choice. It’s no good the way it is.’

She stalked off with as much hauteur as her arthritis would allow. Ollie dropped into her seat with a sigh of relief. ‘That’s much better. Bending’s a bitch these days.’ He traced two of the missing pieces, which happened to be close together, then moved the paper to trace the other two.

Dave watched with interest. ‘Will that work?’

‘Oh yeah,’ Ollie said. ‘There are some cardboard FedEx boxes in the mail room. I’ll filch one of them. Do some cutting and a little drawing. Just don’t let Olga have a tantrum and disassemble the damn thing before I get back.’

‘If you want photos – you know, for matching purposes – I’ll get my iPhone.’

‘Don’t need it.’ Ollie tapped his forehead gravely. ‘Got my camera up here. It’s an old Brownie box instead of a smartphone, but even these days it works pretty well.’

III

Olga was still in a snit when she came back from the loading dock, and she did indeed want to disassemble the not-quite-complete jigsaw, but Dave was able to distract her by waving the cribbage board in her face. They played three games. Dave lost all three, and was skunked in the last. Olga was not always sure who he was, and there were days when she believed she was back in Atlanta, living in an aunt’s boardinghouse, but when it came to cribbage, she never missed a double run or a fifteen-for-two.

She’s also really lucky, Dave thought, not without resentment. Who winds up with twenty points in the goddam crib?

Around quarter past eleven (Fox News had given way to Drew Carey flogging prizes on The Price is Right), Ollie Franklin returned and made his way to the cribbage board. A shave and a neat short-sleeved shirt made him look almost dapper. ‘Hey, Olga. I have something for you, girlfriend.’

‘I’m not your girlfriend,’ Olga said. There was a small, meanly amused glint in her eye. ‘If you ever had a girlfriend, I’ll be dipped in bearshit.’

‘Ingratitude, thy name is woman,’ Ollie said without rancor. ‘Hold out your hand.’ And when she did, he dropped four newly constructed jigsaw pieces into it.

She glared at them suspiciously. ‘What’re these?’

‘The missing pieces.’

‘Missing pieces to what?’

‘The puzzle you and Dave were doing. Remember the puzzle?’

Dave could almost hear the clicking beneath her frizzy cloud of white hair as old relays and corroded memory banks came to life. ‘Of course I do. But these will never fit.’

‘Try them,’ Ollie invited.

Dave took them from her before she could. To him they looked perfect. One showed that lacework of girders; the two that had been close together showed part of a pink cloud at the horizon; the fourth showed the forehead and pertly cocked beret of a tiny boulevardier who could have been promenading on the Place Vendôme. It was pretty amazing, he thought. Ollie might be eighty-five, but he still had game. Dave returned the pieces to Olga, who tapped them in, one after the other. Each fit perfectly.

‘Voilà,’ Dave said, and shook Ollie’s hand. ‘Tout finit. Wonderful.’

Olga was bent so close to the puzzle that her nose was touching it. ‘This new girder piece doesn’t quite match up with the ones around it.’

Dave said, ‘That’s a little thankless, even for you, Olga.’

Olga made a hmpf sound. Over her head, Ollie waggled his eyebrows.

Dave waggled back. ‘Sit with us at lunch.’

‘I may skip lunch,’ Ollie said. ‘Our walk and my latest artistic triumph have tired me out.’ He bent to look at the puzzle and sighed. ‘No, they don’t match. But close.’

‘Close only counts in horseshoes,’ Olga said. ‘Boyfriend.’

Ollie made his slow way toward the door opening on the Evergreen Wing, cane tapping its unmistakable one-two-three rhythm. He didn’t appear at lunch, and when he didn’t show up for dinner, that day’s duty nurse checked on him and found him lying on the coverlet of his bed, with his talented hands laced together on his chest. He seemed to have died as he lived, peacefully and with no fuss.

That evening, Dave tried the door of his late friend’s suite and found it open. He sat on the stripped bed with the silver pocket watch laid on his palm, the cover open so he could watch the second hand go around in the little circle above the 6. He looked at Ollie’s possessions – the books on the shelf, the sketchpads on the desk, the various drawings taped to the walls – and wondered who would take them. The ne’er-do-well brother, he supposed. He fished for the name, and it came to him: Tom. And the niece was Martha.

Over the bed was a charcoal drawing of a handsome young man with his hair combed high and spangles on his cheeks. On his Cupid’s-bow lips was a smile. It was small but inviting.

IV

The summer came full, then began to ebb. Schoolbuses rolled down Maryland Avenue. Olga Glukhov’s condition declined; she mistook Dave for her late husband more frequently. Her cribbage skills remained, but she began to lose her English. Although Dave’s older son and daughter lived close by in the suburbs, it was Peter who came to visit most frequently, driving in from the farm in Hemingford County sixty miles away and often taking his father out to dinner.

Halloween rolled around. The staff decorated the common room with orange and black streamers. The residents of Lakeview Assisted Living Center celebrated All Hallows with cider, pumpkin pie, and popcorn balls for the few whose teeth were still up to the challenge. Many spent the evening in costume, which made Dave Calhoun think of something his old friend had said during their last conversation – about how, in the late eighties, going to the gay clubs had been too much like attending the masquerade in Poe’s story about the Red Death. He supposed Lakeview was also a kind of club, and sometimes it was gay, but there was a drawback: you couldn’t leave, unless you had relatives willing to take you in. Peter and his wife would have done that for Dave if he had asked, would have given him the room where their son Jerome had once lived, but Peter and Alicia were getting on themselves now, and he would not inflict himself on them.

One warm day in early November, he went out onto the flagstone patio and sat on one of the benches there. The paths beyond were inviting in the sunshine, but he no longer dared the steps. He might fall going down, which would be bad. He might not be able to get back up again without help, which would be humiliating.

He spied a young woman standing by the fountain. She wore the kind of shin-length, frilly-collared dress you only saw nowadays in old black-and-white movies on TCM. Her hair was bright red. She smiled at him. And waved.

Why, look at you, Dave thought. Didn’t I see you not long after World War II ended, getting out of your boyfriend’s pickup truck at the Humble Oil station in Omaha?

As if hearing this thought, the pretty redhead tipped him a wink and then twitched up the hem of her dress slightly, showing her knees.

Hello, Miss Yummy, Dave thought, and then: Once you did a lot better than that. The memory made him laugh.

She laughed in return. This he saw but could not hear, although she was close and his ears were still sharp. Then she walked behind the fountain … and didn’t come out. Yet Dave had reason to believe she would be back. He had glimpsed the life-force down there, no more and no less. The strong beating heart of beauty and desire. Next time she would be closer.

V

Peter came into town the following week, and they went out to dinner at a nice place close by. Dave ate well, and drank two glasses of wine. They perked him up considerably. When the meal was done, he took Ollie’s silver watch from his inner coat pocket, coiled the heavy chain around it, and pushed it across the tablecloth to his son.

‘What’s this?’ Peter asked.

‘It was a gift from a friend,’ Dave said. ‘He gave it to me shortly before he passed on. I want you to have it.’

Peter attempted to push it back. ‘I can’t take this, Dad. It’s too nice.’

‘Actually, you’d be doing me a favor. Because of the arthritis. It’s very hard for me to wind it, and pretty soon I won’t be able to at all. Darn thing’s at least a hundred and twenty years old, and a watch that’s made it that far deserves to run as long as it can. So please. Take it.’

‘Well, when you put it that way …’ Peter took the watch and dropped it into his pocket. ‘Thanks, Dad. It’s a beaut.’

At the next table – so close Dave could have reached out and touched her – sat the redhead. There was no meal in front of her, but no one seemed to notice. At this distance, Dave saw that she was more than pretty; she was downright beautiful. Surely more beautiful than that long-ago girl had been, sliding out of her boyfriend’s pickup with her skirt momentarily bunched in her lap, but what of that? Such revisions were, like birth and death, the ordinary course of things. Memory’s job was not only to recall the past but to burnish it.

The redhead slid her skirt up farther this time, revealing one long white thigh for a second. Perhaps even two. And winked.

Dave winked back.

Peter turned to look and saw only an empty four-top table with a RESERVED sign on it. When he turned back to his father, his eyebrows were raised.

Dave smiled. ‘Just something in my eye. It’s gone now. Why don’t you get the check? I’m tired and ready to go back.’

Thinking of Michael McDowell