2
Andrew and Anneke drive to Dunkin Donuts and have coffee (his with cream, hers as black as a raven’s beak), then farther into Oswego to shoot pool at the waterfront bar. They are both far enough along in their sobriety to be comfortable in a bar, and they both enjoy pool enough to tolerate the clientele. In the twenty years Andrew has made his home in nearby Dog Neck Harbor, he has come to Oswego periodically for those things one goes to town for when one lives in a hamlet, pool and bowling being two of them, but he has never understood Oswego’s denizens.
Oswego hurts his feelings a little, with its redbrick waterfront buildings still faintly overlettered with hundred-year-old advertisements (Enjoy refreshing Coca-Cola! It still has cocaine!) wasted on its aesthetically impaired youth; with just a little artistic umph, just a thimbleful of intellectual zeitgeist, just one really banging university, this town could have been a tiny Amsterdam, a waterfront Ithaca. Instead, it . . . well, isn’t.
In the twenty years Andrew has been coming here, he has watched the town smother almost every good restaurant it birthed. French bistros, Indian buffets, from-scratch hippie bakeries, quirky greasy spoons. And the names . . . Casa Luna, The Coach House, Wahrendorf’s Diner, the Little While. Oh, the closing of the Little While hurt. The seafood marinara fed three; it was so thick with garlic that slivers of it stuck to your fork, and so generous with seafood that you had to push aside the shrimp and fish to get to the mussels, then opened a mussel to find it packed in with more shrimp and fish.
And the pancakes at Wahrendorf’s.
“Fucking Wahrendorf’s,” he says, punching the last word to give his cue more chi as he breaks. Sinks a colored and a stripe.
“Fucking Wahrendorf’s,” Anneke agrees.
A lad in droopy shorts, a wife beater, and a baseball cap (twenty years and the Oswegian wardrobe hasn’t changed any more than the appetite for cheap fried food and sports bars) saunters over with three quarters in his hand, but Anneke stacks six quarters on the table and shoots him a look that makes him veer to the jukebox instead. Andrew ignores him and turns his icon eyes to the task of sinking two more solids.
The boy goes back to his friends, also wearing their regulation tank tops and baseball caps, and makes them whinny with laughter at something. Andrew looks too small and exotic to be worth punching, and Anneke looks like she might throw a good punch herself.
No glory there.
• • •
“I’ve been thinking about your middle name. Why Ranulf?”
He pauses, hip on table, just about to take a flashy behind-the-back stab at a tough corner-pocket shot, and thinks about his long-ago ancestor.
“I mean, from what you’ve told me about your parents, I don’t see them pulling out some King-Arthury name like that.”
Andrew imagines Ranulf Blenkenshope, the first known proto-Blankenship, dodging piles of sheep pellets near the smoky Northumberland hovel in which a wife stirs the bland bubbling blankenfood that will keep them and their wan brood alive through another rainy thirteenth-century winter.
“It beats Randolph. I changed it when I was in college. For funsies.”
He misses his shot, his concentration bifurcate.
“And since when is an Anneke Zautke so ready to spar about names? It sounds like you should be wearing clogs.”
Suddenly curious about what she is wearing on her feet, Andrew glances at her Middle-Easternish sandals, sees the slightly chipped green toenail polish. Anneke has handsomely shaped feet. She has handsomely shaped everything. And she dresses well, not just well for a lesbian.
She hates that word.
3
“I hate that word,” she had said. “It sounds like something cold-blooded.”
“It is,” he had said, and she had frog-knuckle-punched him right between the scant muscles of his arm.
Hard.
That had been the night they first attempted to be lovers; the movie they had watched together was over, the bruschetta she had made all gone save for the sliver of basil and crust of cheese drying to the plate. She kissed him more out of loneliness than passion, finally taking him to bed for a self-conscious romp they both mostly laughed through, especially the application of the condom.
• • •
Now I Ranulf, king of the Britons, draw my weapon, sheathe it (lo, it droopeth) (a little help, please) (Ah! Excalibur!), and sheathe it again, as is my right.
Shut up and do this if you’re going to.
Verily, Lady.
• • •
It was clear that her love for him was above the waist, and always would be, no matter how feminine his bone structure or how exotic the scents he wore in his long black hair. His deeper scent was masculine, his angles too hard, his tongue too big in her mouth.