The Extinction Event Read Free Page A

photogravure of Rae Ann Best, and the faded snapshot of Eleanor Fitzpatrick, called Fizz by everyone in town, who died at ninety-seven in 1976.
    Jack sat in a banquette with a law-firm colleague—a former colleague now that Jack was no longer employed by Milhet & Alverez—Robert Flowers.
    â€œShe’s been in the firm, what … three months?” Jack said. “I’ve been there five years. And she’s telling me what’s good, what’s not good for business.”
    Robert wasn’t paying attention to Jack. He was gazing at a beautiful woman with red hair and long legs.
    â€œRobert,” Jack reached across the table and tapped a finger in front of his friend. “Robert…”
    â€œWhy don’t I ever date women with seams on the back of their stockings?”
    â€œYou’re lucky to date women with seams on the back of their legs.”
    Robert, who was thirty-one, nearly half Jack’s age, had the square jaw and slicked-back hair of a model in a Forties Arrow Collar ad. The old-fashioned aristocratic look of a Berkshire boy, raised over the Massachusetts border in Great Barrington, who prepped at a third-tier school, not Choate or Andover, but Wilbraham Academy, and was educated at Amherst; who, in Mycenae, set himself apart by emphasizing his Congregational roots and, in Great Barrington where he still lived in his ancestral home, a forty-minute commute to Mycenae, played up his New York style. A kind of patroon superciliousness compared to his hometown, Indian-pudding, down-home, Minuteman Massachusetts ways.
    Robert set himself apart chronologically, too, wearing old-fashioned clothes: blousy shirts that made him look as if he were one of Paul Revere’s Sons of Liberty, large turn-of-the-century bohemian floppy bow ties, and his great-grandfather’s moth-eaten frock coats. He could have been a character from one of Washington Irving’s tales or, on alternate days, from a story written during Melville’s Pittsfield days.
    Jack was eating deep-fried scrod—today, as usual, cod—his daily lunch, which daily Robert noted by telling the old joke about the Bostonian in San Francisco who asked a cop where he could get scrod and the cop replied, “That’s the first time anyone asked in the pluperfect tense.”
    But today Robert missed his cue. He was eating sausage, white boudin , and drinking heavily, rye and bitters.
    â€œJack, getting caught in a motel that charges by the hour with your boss’s corpse, an unconscious hooker, and a roomful of drugs … Maybe Caroline’s got a point.”
    Robert spotted a diner at the next table who was about to fork an oyster into his mouth.
    â€œDon’t eat that oyster!” Robert cried.
    The diner lowered his fork. Robert leaped to his table and shook the oyster off the fork back into the shell.
    â€œYou’re not from here…?” Robert asked the stranger.
    â€œI was born here,” the stranger said.
    â€œThen it’s time you learn how to do this thing right,” Robert said. “Mycenae’s a seaport! Though,” he muttered, “you’d never know it today.” He doused the oyster with Tabasco and raised the shell. “Pepper sauce and no fork. Open your mouth.”
    The stranger opened his mouth, into which Robert tilted the oyster. As the stranger, gasping because of the Tabasco, reached for water, Robert sprinkled the hot sauce onto the other eleven oysters.
    â€œYou’ll get used to it,” Robert said to the stranger, who was gulping water. “See?”
    Robert took one of the oysters from the man’s plate and swallowed it, then returned to his own table, where he caught the waiter’s eye and pointed at his empty whiskey glass.
    â€œThe boss sure liked the ladies,” Robert said.
    â€œRobert…,” Jack started.
    â€œOne night, Frank took me to Angie Carmen’s house,” Robert said.