Magic Hour, Susan Isaacs [life changing books txt] 📗

I ran past a small farm, just like any on the South Fork, although here there was no sweet ocean tang in the air to obscure the harsh perfume of fertilizer and pesticides. Pretty, though: a brown field of russet potatoes, almost ready for harvest. It was edged by a border of dark-pink clover and white trumpet vines. The potatoes look good, I was thinking.

A lot of Long Island farmers don’t like russets because they can get all knobby, but there’d been just enough rain—

Bonnie! Not a fantasy this time. A true recollection.

Labor Day, about four in the afternoon. Inside the bar—yeah, Gideon, the Gin Mill—it was murky, and packed, like the Friday night of Memorial Day weekend. But the season was over, and the too-old-to-be-yuppies were no longer cruising loose, happy, expectant. The same hot-shit Yorkers now jammed against the bar, pushing each other.

They were overtanned and overdesperate, with stiff, extended, sun-dried arms, hands grasping for their margaritas (“No salt!”), drinking too hard to hide their despair that another summer had passed without their falling in love, or at least finding someone who wouldn’t humiliate them by guffaw-ing—Har! Har! Har!—in a movie on the Upper East Side, or by being fat in

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TriBeCa, or by wearing brown suede Hush Puppies on Central Park South.

It was the perfect time for a local like me, bored with a June, July and August of receptionists and nurses, who wanted (for one night) a grown-up, dressed-for-success lay.

Easy pickings: By that first Monday in September, I knew the thirty-five-year-old lady corporate vice presidents would have stopped playing the Geography Game, with an auto-matic You’re Out for Hamptons hicks. I also knew all those frosted-haired, lip-glossed, scrawny-necked financiers would no longer be muttering “Really?” and then two seconds later going to the ladies’ room when they heard I was a cop. These women at the Gin Mill hadn’t caught themselves a banker or a doctor or even an accountant without his CPA. So now it would be: “I envy you, living here year round” and “A homicide detective! Tell me, how can you stand looking at…what’s the best way to express it? Looking at the dark side of the human condition day after day?”

Except instead of hitting on one of those, I spotted Bonnie.

If I had to say why I chose her, it could have been because it was the Summer of the Perm, and she was the only woman without cascades of frizzles. Or because she wasn’t wearing an outfit, one of those things with plaids and stripes and flowers, where nothing matches on purpose.

Bonnie leaned against the bar, foot up on the rail, standing tall among the other women. She was working her way through tissues and keys in the side pocket of a short red-and-yellow-plaid skirt, on her way to money to pay for a beer. She wore a red tank top. As I maneuvered toward her, I could see the sheen of her broad, tanned shoulders. Silky skin, I thought, not leathery. I put my hand on her shoulder.

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It was silky. I said: “I’ll buy,” and gave the bartender three bucks for her beer. She smiled. “Thanks.”

But that was all that would come: an image. I kept on running, sweat dripping down onto the blacktop, for another two miles, all around the farm, then back past the grassland, into that pathetic stretch of aluminum-sided Long Island. I’d been hoping to clear my head. But all I could recollect in that killing heat was Bonnie Spencer in the crisp, conditioned air of the Gin Mill, holding her beer in front of her with two hands, the way a bride would hold her bouquet. Her hair was short then, a little choppy; maybe she’d tried to give herself a sophisticated haircut, but she’d wound up looking like a wood nymph’s older sister instead. The recessed lights over the bar made her arms and shoulders gleam.

I walked around the parking lot a few times to cool down, except the air was so thick and humid all I was able to do was stop wheezing. I hung around for another five minutes, hoping for a breeze, but none came, so I got into the car and used the oil-streaked T-shirt as a towel. The pager had rubbed against my skin, and there was a dark-red bruised spot on my right side.

I got into the Jag, sprayed a little Right Guard under my arms and then contorted myself to get back into my shirt, tie and suit fast, before some housewife could peer down and catch me humping the steering wheel as I pulled up my zipper. I kept replaying the scene in my mind.

“I’ll buy.” Putting down my drink—vodka with a wedge of lime—and handing three folded singles to the bartender.

Bonnie’s smile, so radiant that for a second I felt light-headed. “Thanks.”

I went into the supermarket and bought a big bottle of club soda. My face must have been close to MAGIC HOUR / 247

purple, because the express-line cashier said, “Y’oughta watch it, hon. This heat and all.”

“I’ll buy,” I said to Bonnie.

“Thanks.”

I sat in the car again, glugging down the soda, trying to re-create what happened next. Logically I would have said

“Steve Brady” and she would have said “Bonnie Spencer,”

and a couple of minutes later maybe we would have chuckled about two Bridgehampton rubes having to meet in East Hampton, in a phony “genuine” gin joint with a bullshit ceiling fan and bartenders who deliberately didn’t shave because scruffy was a Great Look, surrounded by city slickers in two-hundred-dollar sandals.

Except I couldn’t remember anything more. Maybe nothing more had happened. Maybe, for some reason, she had just recalled what turned out to be an aborted pickup attempt.

Being a screenwriter, she’d whipped up a little love story around it and, casting herself in the leading role, said to her lawyer: Here, maybe you can use this. Except Gideon had remembered her euphoria, remembered hearing my