Stacy was twelve years older than Greta and originally from Cape Cod. No, he wasn’t a woman. But, his name being Stacy, he’d obviously been bullied as a kid, especially since he’d worn Coke-bottle glasses and spoken with a slight lisp. This was why you’d never want to fuck with him as an adult, because—well, buried rage, etc. By the time Greta met him, he wore contacts, his lisp was long gone, and he had muscles. Not huge, stupid muscles, but you could tell that he had abs, and not just in his ab region but, like, all over his body.
They’d met in Los Angeles while Greta was waitressing at a restaurant called Sylvette. Named after a portrait of a blond French woman by Picasso, the restaurant did not serve French, or even Spanish, food, but rather rustic Italian. It was family owned, which was nice, but the family was Indian. Until Greta came along, spaghetti was served by an exhausted woman wearing a sari. If you poked your head in the kitchen, you saw half a dozen Indian dudes in dhotis. But the family had lived in Rome for many years, and the food was authentic and delicious, and the restaurant, though tucked away in a strip mall surrounded by rehab centers, had a loyal, if mostly alcoholic, following. In fact, most of their customers were either on their way to one of these facilities or just getting out.
On the night they met, Stacy pulled into the parking lot in a grandma car from the seventies. Greta watched him step out of the car and sling a messenger bag over his shoulder. He was accompanied by a tall guy wearing a Red Sox shirt and hockey hair. The tall guy weaved rather than walked, and his face was shiny and red, but not from the sun. He had what Greta called a drunk tan.
Stacy, on the other hand, had a regular tan. He was thirty, maybe forty, maybe older, and dressed, unforgivably, in fleece. His gray fleece pullover reminded her of a giant lint trap, and his pants had weird cuffs, drawing attention to his long feet, which were stuffed into stiff black dress shoes. He looked like he might tap-dance his way into the restaurant.
They seated themselves, one of her pet peeves, choosing the small table by the window. Greta delivered menus. Drunk Tan, she imagined, was having a last meal before checking into Bridges to Recovery, and Stacy was his chaperone. Sponsor? Second cousin. He asked if she wouldn’t mind stashing his bag in the back.
“My cah doesn’t lock,” he explained.
She dropped the bag at the waitress station and returned to their table. It was her eleventh day without a cigarette, her eleventh month without sex. She’d been smoking her feelings since she was fifteen, and now, at age thirty-three, her real self was beginning to emerge. Unfortunately, her real self was horny, easily enraged, and no longer interested in making money.
With some effort, Stacy pulled the fleece over his head and deposited it on the floor, where it belonged. When she noticed his T-shirt, she immediately forgave him everything, even the Gregory Hines shoes. It was an old concert shirt for her favorite post-punk band, the Birthday Party.
“Nice shirt,” she said.
He looked surprised. “You like the Birthday Pahdee?”
An accent. A speech impediment. Which?
“Big fan,” she said.
“We just saw Nick Cave in consit,” Stacy said.
“Me too.”
“You were there?” Stacy said.
Greta nodded. “In the balcony.”
“We were up front,” he said.
Drunk Tan seemed on the verge of tears. He wasn’t drunk, she decided, but rather newly sober. He coughed, and then kept coughing. She thought he was faking at first, but he coughed with his entire body, arms and legs included. His eyes bulged and he turned away, but she caught the helpless look on his face.
“Pahdon me,” he said. “God!”
“You all right?” Greta said. “I can bring you hot water with lemon, if that helps.”
He looked insulted, as if she’d offered him apple juice in a sippy cup.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Greta,” Greta said.
“I’m Mahk,” he said. “That’s Stacy. Quick question: how long would you say it takes to get to Yosemite? By cah.”
Okay, so they weren’t newly sober, but rather newly arrived New Englanders. Transplants, maybe, like her. Although Greta had been born and raised in Los Angeles, she liked to tell people she was from New Hampshire, because that’s where she went to high school, and also because she was unable to bring herself to say, “It’s all good,” one of the more vapid verbal tics of Californians at the time. She could only ever say, “Well, that’s one good thing, I guess.”
“Five or six hours,” Greta said.
“Okay, Stace?” Mark said. “Too fah. Your cah won’t make it.”
“Yeah it will,” Stacy said. “It’s only got fotty thousand miles on it.”
“Lemme ask you,” Mark said to Greta. “Would you date a guy who drove that cah?” He pointed out the window. “The awful beige one.”
“It’s a Plymouth Volare,” Stacy said quietly. “Nineteen seventy-nine.”
The original owner probably smoked Old Golds or Benson & Hedges 100s. Greta would have killed for an Old Gold. She wondered if her craving felt more ungainly than usual because it was riding on the shoulders of nostalgia. She wasn’t nostalgic for the car so much as the cah. Somehow her hearing had improved since she’d quit smoking, or at any rate sounds she used to find grating were now euphonious. Helicopters, for example, the wild parrots living in the palm trees behind her apartment, mariachi music, Massachusetts accents.
“See?” Mark said, and coughed. “No ansa.”
“Yeah,” Greta said finally. “I’d go out with you.”
Stacy gave her a startled smile.
“She’s just being polite,” Mark said. “You’ll never get laid with that thing, not out here, not even if your cock was as long as my ahm.”
“Sorry,” Stacy murmured to Greta.
“Does it have bench seats?” Greta asked.
“Front and back,” Stacy said.
“Well, that’s one good thing,” Greta said. “Right?”
“The seats are made of foam,” Stacy said, “so you can spill an entire cup of coffee and it just sinks in.”
Mark rolled his eyes.
“Are you guys related?” Greta asked. “You’re cousins, right?”
“We were naybuhs growing up,” Stacy said. “He’s visiting from Boston, but I live around the conna.”
“At Sober Clarity?” Greta asked.
Stacy shook his head. “Blue house, white trim.”
“I was kidding,” Greta said.
“Well, just for the reckid, I’m sobah,” he said.
“She doesn’t care,” Mark said.
“Mahk’s upset I bought this cah for our road trip,” Stacy said. “He was hoping for somethin else.”
“He won’t even make an effit,” Mark said to Greta. “Everyone back home thinks he’s a homo.”
Stacy cleared his throat.
“What can I bring you to drink?” Greta asked.
Stacy ordered coffee as if it were Sunday morning, but it was Monday night, an hour before closing. Mark asked for a Bud.
“We only have Peroni,” Greta said. “The Italian Budweiser.”