Edsel Read Free

parking was handy and if we hit it off my would-be employer might insist upon walking me to my car. Hedge’s Wigwam might give him the impression I was accustomed to cafeteria fare. Capistrano’s might make him think I was putting the arm on him for an expensive meal. The Lafayette Coney Island was right in the middle and downtown, where I could leave the Studebaker with the valets at Hudson’s and out of sight. His reaction when I made the suggestion was so brisk I felt an ass for wasting so much time on it.
    “Fine. See you there Wednesday at one-thirty, Mr. Meaner.”
    Now, grasping the door handle at precisely one thirty-five, I glimpsed my reflection in the glass—and all my confidence drained out the soles of my shoes. I looked like an old Greek. In my youth I had sometimes been taken for Italian, and once or twice for American Indian, but that was forty pounds ago, and my ears and nose had not stopped growing. Put me in a cloth cap and loose sport coat and I could be any one of those short, fat grouches you saw hanging around in front of the Grecian Gardens, drinking ouzo out of bottles wrapped in brown paper bags and cursing tourists in the old tongue. I belonged in a fluorescent-lit magazine office the way a clay pot belonged with the fine silver.
    Fuck it. I’d been through a machine-gun battle on the ice of Lake Erie. Who else could say that? I squared my shoulders and went in.
    “Good of you to come, Mr. Meaner. I’m Seabrook Hall.”
    I had trusses older than Hall. He was slender, a breath over my height, and wore a sleeveless argyle pullover on top of a pink shirt and a clip-on tie shaped like a butterfly if Lockheed designed butterflies, green with square black dots. His pegtops, which didn’t go with anything, were tan poplin. He had red hair, clipped short to disguise the fact it was thinning in front, and eyeglasses whose heavy square black frames made me think of scuba diving. His skin was astonishingly pale, blue-white like skim milk, and his eyes behind the thick lenses had a slightly pinkish cast. They looked weak and possibly unable to distinguish colors, which I thought might help explain his clothes. I didn’t know it then, but I was seeing the ivy league look in its earliest incarnation. It would get worse, much worse. Suit coats would grow another button, lapels and neckties would wither, shoulders would disappear and the brims of hats recede until you felt raindrops on your nose before you heard them strike the crown.
    His handshake was strong enough, his smile firm and white and unstudied behind a moustache that looked like cinnamon caught in cobwebs. I gave back as much, maybe too much in the grip, and then I made it worse.
    “Minor.”
    The pinkish eyes flickered. “I’m sorry?”
    “You said Meaner. It’s pronounced Minor. It’s an impossible name,” I added.
    “Nonsense. It’s real. All the names around here are real: Gunsberg and Butsikitis and Skjaerlund and Washington and Brennan. Where I come from they all sound like brands of English beer. I was born in Southampton, Long Island.”
    “I used to know a woman from Southampton.”
    “What’s her name? I might know the family.”
    “Probably not. She married a Jewish gangster here and dropped out of sight after he got shot to pieces.”
    “Sit down, Mr. Minor. What’s good here?”
    I recommended the Reuben, and of course it was bad that day. I was losing track of just how many ways a man can screw up when he’s playing with scared money. Hall had tea, I had coffee. As he bobbed the bag up and down inside his cup I noticed he wore a Princeton ring on his index finger, of all places. I twisted my worn U of D ring and wondered if we were going to be able to stand each other’s society.
    “My partner recognized your name,” he said. “He started as a copy boy for the Times. You left shortly after he came on.”
    “Friendly divorce. Mr. Hearst took a personal interest back then and it was tough writing around all