Last Call (Last Call 1)

"I've got to have peace and quiet, get my treatment typed up today," said Hans. "Mike at the Golden Nugget knows a guy who knows Harvey Korman. If he can get him to read it, that's just about a sure fifty K."

Since the boys were in the room, Diana made herself smile and knock the underside of the table.

But after they'd finished their cereal and put the bowls in the sink and gone charging out of the apartment to get on their bikes, she turned to Hans.

"I thought you weren't hanging around with that Mike guy any more."

"Diana," said Hans, leaning forward over the newspaper, "this is biz. Harvey Korman!"

"How did you find out that he knows somebody who knows somebody? You must have been talking to him."

"I'm a writer. I have to talk to all sorts of people."

Diana was standing at the sink, rinsing the cereal bowls. "He's a dope dealer, Hans," she said, trying to speak in a reasonable tone and not seem to be nagging. "And the one time we went to his place he was all over me like a cheap suit. I'd think you'd … resent that."

He was giving her his lordly look now, and it looked particularly foolish with his snagged-up beard. "Writers can't be judgmental," he told her. "Besides, I trust you."

She sighed as she toweled her hands. "Just don't get into anything with him." She yawned. "I'm going to bed. I'll see you later."

He was making a show now of being absorbed by the newspaper, and he waved and nodded distractedly.

The sheets were still warm from him, and when she had pulled the covers up to her chin, she blinked around in the dimmed room and wondered if he would come back to bed when he was done with the paper.

She hoped he would and she hoped he wouldn't. In the springtime, around Easter, she was always … what? Hornier? That was a word Oliver would use, and if she rebuked him, Hans would say, in his most satirical tone, To me, sex is something beautiful shared by two people in love.

Over the buzz of the air conditioner she heard the kitchen chair squeak, and she smiled derisively at herself when she became aware that her heart was beating harder. A minute later, though, she heard the muted snap-snap-snap of the electric typewriter, and she rolled over and closed her eyes.

He's better than nothing, she thought. Is that what they all are, just better than nothing? Wally Ryan was a pretty sorry excuse for a husband, bringing home the clap because he had to go screw other women. He told all his friends that I was frigid, but I think any of them could see that he was just intimidated by being married to a woman, and having actual children. Women are safely two-dimensional, hardly more than magically animated animals from the pages of Penthouse, if you don't have to … live with one of 'em, deal with her, every day, as a actual 'nother human being.

She wondered how Scott had got along with his wife. Diana was pretty sure it had been the wife's death that had upset him so badly just before New Year's. It had been a strong, deeply personal emotion of loss. She had thought she ought to call him then, but after a week or so she had decided it would be awkward to call so late, and she had let it go. Still, his grief had kept her from sleeping well for a week or so.

Diana had always thought of Scott's wife as that slut, though she knew it wasn't fair; after all, she had never met the woman or spoken to her or even seen her.

Diana had tried to rationalize her strong disapproval by telling herself that her foster-brother was a drunken Poker-bum, and that any woman who would marry a man like that wasn't worthy of her brother, who was, after all, a good person at heart; but she knew that her real resentment stemmed from the shock she'd felt on that summer day in her eighteenth year when she'd realized he was in the process of getting married, was actually saying I do to some priest somewhere and staring into some woman's eyes.

By that time she hadn't seen him for nine years—but she had always somehow assumed that he would marry her. After all, they weren't blood-related.

She could admit now that she had married Wally Ryan a year later just as a kind of revenge on Scott, knowing that he would be aware of her wedding, too.

Wally had been big on fishing and hunting, and he was tanned and had a mustache, but he had been uncertain and blustering and mean behind his macho front. So were all the boyfriends she'd had since. She was just a sucker for broad shoulders and squinty, humorous eyes. But by the time of the inevitable breakup she had been sick of every one of them. When she'd learned from the divorce lawyer two years ago that Wally had died drunk in a car crash, she hadn't felt anything more than a faint sadness that had been mostly pity.