Carol Tinning came over to where we were sitting on the grass. “Isn't it wonderful? It's just like the old days at the beach. How I used to cook!”
“You were the worst cook in California,” I said. “I still get ill when I think of your fried eggplant.”
“Those electric ranges at the beach! Mexican was my best style.”
“Was it? A Spanish artist I know who ate at your place said he almost died from your food.”
“He must have been a modern painter,” said Carol, who knew nothing about art and enjoyed that,
A large native came over to us with a tray of desserts. Ka boobuibui o na lichee ante ka avocado— a salad that I knew only as the litchi and avocado. And maia me ka niu, bananas with coconut, which I am mad about. Carol was drinking the manako uaina, a native wine, and bragging about all the husbands she had had.
“Have you ever thought of getting married?” she asked Mike.
“Too many times.”
“I'm a lousy romantic,” Carol said. “I'm just romantic in every pore, that's my trouble. I like all men and I cry a lot about it later, but you can't keep a romantic old gal down. I'm only fortyfour.”
I knew she was lying by several years. but to me she is always the lady, and anyone you have been fond of in the past, you feel close to. So I took; her up to her hotel and got the clerk's wife to put her to bed. I was reading when Mike came in, sat down, and took off one shoe and looked at it.
“You know that old bag is right … it's a romantic place.”
“Carol is an old, dear friend of mine; she's no old bag.”
“Sorry, that middle-aged bag is right.
Maybe it's the moonlight, or the surf on the shore, or the way the roads wind up to the pineapples, but I feel like a young calf in a green field. Hell, there I go getting full of moonlight and roses. When do we get home?”
“As soon as we get some money wired us for the films we shipped. It costs money to live in all this moonlight.”
Mike decided to sleep on the idea of money, and I rolled over and woke up with the phone ringing in my ear.
“Hello, rise and shine. It's Carol, ”
“What time is it, dawn?”
“You didn't come here to sleep, did you? There's a party at a fruit farm a friend of mine runs. I'm bringing you.”
“Do I have to go? We're getting older, Carol; it isn't like the old days with you breaking every law known to man, beast, or traffic cop.”
Pinterest
