If the River Was Whiskey Read Online Free PDF Page A

through
The Terminator
at the Circle Shopping Center theater. We had a late-night drink at Rigoletto’s Pizza Bar (and two slices, plain cheese), and I dropped her off. The moment we pulled up in front of her apartment she had the door open. She turned to me with the long, elegant, mournful face of her Puritan ancestors and held out her hand.
    “It’s been fun,” she said.
    “Yes,” I said, taking her hand.
    She was wearing gloves.
    “I’ll call you,” she said.
    “Good,” I said, giving her my richest smile. “And I’ll call you.”
    On the second date we got acquainted.
    “I can’t tell you what a strain it was for me the other night,” she said, staring down into her chocolate-mocha-fudge sundae. It was early afternoon, we were in Helmut’s Olde Tyme Ice Cream Parlor in Mamaroneck, and the sun streamed throughthe thick frosted windows and lit the place like a convalescent home. The fixtures glowed behind the counter, the brass rail was buffed to a reflective sheen, and everything smelled of disinfectant. We were the only people in the place.
    “What do you mean?” I said, my mouth glutinous with melted marshmallow and caramel.
    “I mean Thai food, the seats in the movie theater, the
ladies’ room
in that place for god’s sake…”
    “Thai food?” I wasn’t following her. I recalled the maneuver with the strips of pork and the fastidious dissection of the glass noodles. “You’re a vegetarian?”
    She looked away in exasperation, and then gave me the full, wide-eyed shock of her ice-blue eyes. “Have you seen the Health Department statistics on sanitary conditions in ethnic restaurants?”
    I hadn’t.
    Her eyebrows leapt up. She was earnest. She was lecturing. “These people are refugees. They have—well, different standards. They haven’t even been inoculated.” I watched her dig the tiny spoon into the recesses of the dish and part her lips for a neat, foursquare morsel of ice cream and fudge.
    “The illegals, anyway. And that’s half of them.” She swallowed with an almost imperceptible movement, a shudder, her throat dipping and rising like a gazelle’s. “I got drunk from fear,” she said. “Blind panic. I couldn’t help thinking I’d wind up with hepatitis or dysentery or dengue fever or something.”
    “Dengue fever?”
    “I usually bring a disposable sanitary sheet for public theaters—just think of who might have been in that seat before you, and how many times, and what sort of nasty festering little cultures of this and that there must be in all those ancient dribbles of taffy and Coke and extra-butter popcorn—but I didn’t want you to think I was too extreme or anything on the first date, so I didn’t. And then the
ladies’ room…
You don’t think I’m overreacting, do you?”
    As a matter of fact, I did. Of course I did. I liked Thai food—and sushi and ginger crab and greasy souvlaki at the corner stand too. There was the look of the mad saint in her eye, the obsessive, the mortifier of the flesh, but I didn’t care. She was lovely, wilting, clear-eyed, and pure, as cool and matchless as if she’d stepped out of a Pre-Raphaelite painting, and I was in love. Besides, I tended a little that way myself. Hypochondria. Anal retentiveness. The ordered environment and alphabetized books. I was a thirty-three-year-old bachelor, I carried some scars and I read the newspapers—herpes, AIDS, the Asian clap that foiled every antibiotic in the book. I was willing to take it slow. “No,” I said, “I don’t think you’re overreacting at all.”
    I paused to draw in a breath so deep it might have been a sigh. “I’m sorry,” I whispered, giving her a doglike look of contrition. “I didn’t know.”
    She reached out then and touched my hand—touched it, skin to skin—and murmured that it was all right, she’d been through worse. “If you want to know,” she breathed, “I like places like this.”
    I glanced around. The place was still empty, but for