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“Waiter!”
We hardly stopped laughing as the waiter poured the second bottle.
“Well, we have one thing in common,” said Harry Stadler.
“What’s that?”
“This whole cockamamie silly stupid wonderful day, starting at noon, ending here. We’ll tell this story to friends the rest of our lives. How I invited you, and you fell in with it not wanting to, and how we both tried to call it off before it started, and how we both came to dinner hating it, and how we blurted it out, silly, silly, and how suddenly—” He stopped. His eyes watered and his voice softened. “How suddenly it wasn’t so silly anymore. But okay. Suddenly we liked each other in our foolishness. And if we don’t try to make the rest of the evening too long, it won’t be so bad, after all.”
I tapped my champagne glass to his. The tenderness had reached me, too, along with the stupid and silly.
“We won’t ever have any dinners back home.”
“No.”
“And we don’t have to be afraid of long talks about nothing.”
“Just the weather for a few seconds, now and then.”
“And we won’t meet socially.”
“Here’s to that.”
“But suddenly it’s a nice night, old Leonard Douglas, customer of mine.”
“Here’s to Harry Stadler.” I raised my glass. “Wherever he goes from here.”
“Bless me. Bless you.”
We drank and simply sat there for another five minutes, warm and comfortable as old friends who had suddenly found that a long long time ago we had loved the same beautiful librarian who had touched our books and touched our cheeks. But the memory was fading.
“It’s going to rain.” I arose with my wallet.
Stadler stared until I put the wallet back in my jacket.
“Thanks and good night.”
“Thanks to you,” he said, “I’m not so lonely now, no matter what.”
I gulped the rest of my wine, gasped with pleasure, ruffled Stadler’s hair with a quick hand, and ran.
At the door I turned. He saw this and shouted across the room.
“Remember me?”
I pretended to pause, scratch my head, cudgel my memory. Then I pointed at him and cried:
“The butcher!”
He lifted his drink.
“Yes!” he called. “The butcher!”
I hurried downstairs and across the parquetry floor which was too beautiful to walk on, and out into a storm.
I walked in the rain for a long while, face up.
Hell, I thought, I don’t feel so lonely myself!
