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minutes she’d be forking up fettucine or angel hair with black olives and sun-dried tomatoes while Jason regaled her with a satiric portrait of his day and all the crazies who’d passed through his shop. The little man with the white hair didn’t require a dissertation, and besides, he couldn’t begin to appreciate the difference between what she was doing and the ritualistic farce of the tobacco-spitting, crotch-grabbing “athletes” all tricked out in their pretty unblemished uniforms up on the screen over his head, so she just smiled, like a babe, and said, “Yeah.”
    Truly, the race was nothing, just a warm-up, and it would have been less than nothing but for the puzzling fact that Zinny Bauer was competing. Zinny was a professional, from Hamburg, and she was the one who’d cranked past Paula like some sort of machine in the final stretch of the Ironman last year. What Paula couldn’t fathom was why Zinny was bothering with this small-time event when there were so many other plums out there. On the way out of Clubber’s, she mentioned it to Jason. “Not that I’m worried,” she said, “just mystified.”
    It was a fine, soft, glowing night, the air rich with the smell of the surf, the sun squeezing the last light out of the sky as it sank toward Hawaii. Jason was wearing his faded-to-pink 49ers jersey and a pair of shorts so big they made his legs look like sticks. He gave her one of his hooded looks, then got distracted and tapped at his watch twice before lifting it to his ear and frowning. “Damn thing stopped,” he said. It wasn’t until they were sliding into the car that he came back to the subject of Zinny Bauer. “It’s simple, babe,” he said, shrugging his shoulders and letting his face go slack. “She’s here to psych you out.”
    He liked to watch her eat. She wasn’t shy about it—not like the other girls he’d dated, the ones on a perpetual diet who made you feel like a two-headed hog every time you sat down to a meal, whether it was a Big Mac or the Mexican Plate at La Fondita. No “salad with dressing on the side” for Paula, no butterless bread or child’s portions. She attacked her food like a lumberjack, and you’d better keep your hands and fingers clear. Tonight she started with potato gnocchi in a white sauce puddled with butter, and she ate half a loaf of crusty Italian bread with it, sopping up the leftover sauce till the plate gleamed. Next it was the fettucine with Alfredo sauce, and on her third trip to the pasta bar she heaped her plate with mostaccioli marinara and chunks of hot sausage—and more bread, always more bread.
    He ordered a beer, lit a cigarette without thinking, and shovelled up some spaghetti carbonara, thick on the fork and sloppy with sauce. The next thing he knew, he was staring up into the hotgreen gaze of the waitperson, a pencil-necked little fag he could have snapped in two like a breadstick if this weren’t California and everything so copacetic and laid back. It was times like this when he wished he lived in Cleveland, even though he’d never been there, but he knew what was coming and he figured people in Cleveland wouldn’t put up with this sort of crap.
    â€œYou’ll have to put that out,” the little fag said.
    â€œSure, man,” Jason said, gesturing broadly so that the smoke fanned out around him like the remains of a pissed-over fire. “Just as soon as I”—puff, puff—“take another drag and”—puff, puff—“find me an ashtray somewhere … you wouldn’t happen”—puff, puff—“to have an ashtray, would you?”
    Of course the little fag had been holding one out in front of him all along, as if it were a portable potty or something, but the cigarette was just a glowing stub now, the tiny fag end of a cigarette—fag end, how about that?—and