“In three weeks. The day after Thanksgiving. Friday.”
“You want to?” Mason asked Craig.
“What the hell is it with this fall?” Craig said. He lifted and drained his wine. “I want to do everything.”
“Suddenly all our practice assumes a focus,” Jimmy said.
“Two songs,” Craig said. “Hell, we knew six or seven in the glory days.”
“Six,” Mason said, “We knew all the words to nine, at least Jimmy did. And this would be one of them.” Mason went to the CD player and adjusted the volume louder as the Zombies sang “Time of the Season.”
“You know this?” Jimmy said to Larry.
He shook his head no. Mason and Frank were already singing along. Kathleen joined them. Craig mouthed the drumbeat, and Jimmy took the lead, his ghosted tenor blending with Kathleen’s: “‘With pleasured hands . . . promised lands . . . It’s the time of the season for loving!’” When Jimmy stopped, his heart was pounding in his arms, and he closed his eyes.
“We’re in,” Frank said. “Life on Earth is in. On the application I put that we’d had a professional career sometime ago, but we’d taken a little time off for personal reasons.”
At this Jimmy Brand laughed out loud, the first time in a year at least, and it shocked him to laugh as if something had burst in his face, and he rode it out and along, his head against the back of the couch until he was coughing. “Oh god,” he said settling down. “Oh god.”
“Battle of the bands,” Craig said again. “That is a road trip. Marci, you up for that?”
“We’ll see. I may have to work.”
“Let me see.” Craig rose and stepped around the room pouring wine. “You can either road it with a dangerous rock ’n’ roll band, hang out, tell people near and far that you’re with the band, or you can go to work at a museum. A tough call for the modern woman. Kathleen, tell me what it is about the modern woman? What does the modern woman want?”
“The modern woman wants exactly what the modern man wants.” Kathleen swirled the last of her wine in the bright stemmed glass. “She wants to put out the fire and rescue everybody, and then when it’s safe, she wants to go back in and wait to be rescued. I know we’re among friends, but it hurts to tell the truth.”
“Is that it?” Craig said to Marci. “How do I arrange it?”
Marci turned quickly to Jimmy Brand, who had pushed his food around and eaten a bite of everything but not much more. “Jimmy?”
“I’m okay. It’s a wonderful meal.”
“Elizabeth, my wife, would have said a woman wants to have fungus-free toenails and the chance to dance once a season,” Mason said.
“I’ve got that,” Marci said, kicking her stockinged foot into the air. “It’s like everything else. They say there’s a cure, but there’s no cure.”
The basket of hot dinner rolls made a trip around the room hand to hand, and Craig brought in the gravy boat for a tour. “Take notes on this, Larry. It could save you some trouble.”
“Could but won’t,” Frank said.
The coffee table was as laden with dishes as a table gets. If one more were pushed onto the surface, another would fall off the other side. They all looked at it as if it were some strange altar that had arisen for rites not fully explained. Mason crossed his legs and sank deeper into the couch, his wine in two hands on his lap. “I am well nourished,” he said. Marci nodded at him, and he said, “What?”