The Good Guy

“I’m absolutely sure it wasn’t a gay relationship.” She stopped at a red traffic light and turned that analytic green gaze on him.

“There you go again with those things,” he said.

“What things?”

“Those eyes. That look. When you go carving at somebody with that look, you should have a medic standing by to sew up the wound.”

“Have I wounded you?”

“Not mortally.”

The traffic light didn’t change. She continued to stare at him.

“Okay,” he said. “Me and Pete, we went to a Peter, Paul and Mary concert once. It was hell. We got through that hell together.”

“If you don’t like Peter, Paul and Mary, why did you go?”

He said, “The holy one was dating this girl, Barbara Ellen, she was into retro-folk groups.”

“Who were you dating?”

“Her cousin. Just that one night. It was hell. They sang ‘Puff, the Magic Dragon’ and ‘Michael, Row the Boat Ashore,’ and ‘Lemon Tree’ and ‘Tom Dooley,’ they just wouldn’t stop. We’re lucky we got out of there with our sanity.”

“I didn’t know Peter, Paul and Mary performed anymore. I didn’t even know they were all still alive.”

“These were Peter, Paul and Mary impersonators. You know, like Beatlemania.” He glanced at the traffic light. “A car could rust waiting for this light to change.”

“What was her name?”

“Whose name?”

“The cousin you were dating.”

“She wasn’t my cousin. She was Barbara Ellen’s cousin.”

“So what was her name?” she persisted.

“Susannah.”

“Did she come from Alabama with a banjo on her knee?”

“I’m just telling you what happened, since you wanted to know.”

“It must be true. You couldn’t make it up.”

“It’s too weird, isn’t it?”

“What I’m saying,” she said, “is I don’t think you could make anything up.”

“All right then. So now you know—me and Pete, our bonding experience, that night of hell. They sang ‘If I Had a Hammer’ twice.” He pointed to the traffic signal. “Light’s green.”

Crossing the intersection, she said, “You’ve been through something together, but it wasn’t just Peter Pauland Marymania.”

He decided to go on the offensive. “So what do you do for a living, besides being self-employed and working at home?”

“I’m a writer.”

“What do you write?”

“Books.”

“What kind of books?”

“Painful books. Depressing, stupid, gut-wrenching books.”

“Just the thing for the beach. Have they been published?”

“Unfortunately. And the critics love them.”

“Would I know any titles?”

“No.”

“You want to try me?”

“No. I’m not going to write them anymore, especially not if I end up dead, but even if I don’t end up dead, I’m going to write something else.”

“What’re you going to write?”

“Something that isn’t full of anger. Something in which the sentences don’t drip with bitterness.”

“Put that quote on the cover. ‘The sentences don’t drip with bitterness.’ I’d buy a book like that in a minute. Do you write under the name Linda Paquette, or do you use a pen name?”

“I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

“What do you want to talk about?”

“Nothing.”

“I didn’t clam up on you.”

She glanced sideways at him, cocking one eyebrow.

For a while they rode in silence through an area where the prostitutes dressed only slightly less brazenly than Britney Spears, where the winos sat with their backs against the building walls instead of sprawling full-length on the pavement. Then they came into a less-nice precinct, where even the young gangsters didn’t venture in their low-rider street rods and glitterized Cadillac Escalades.

They passed grungy one-story buildings and fenced storage yards, scrap-metal dealers that were probably chop-shop operators, a sports bar with windows painted black and the air of a place that included cockfights in its definition of sports, before Linda pulled to the curb in front of a vacant lot.

“According to the numbers on the flanking buildings,” she said, “this is the address on the registration for that Chevy.” A chain-link fence surrounded a weed-filled empty lot.