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kind of thing, man trouble, isn't usually one of them. Why didn't I speak up? Lee knowing the wife made it sticky, that was one thing. The other was Isabel. Her divorce isn't that old, and adultery is still a touchy subject with her.
Not that I was contemplating adultery. God, no, I hate cheating, cheaters, infidelity, the whole sleazy package. But still. Something about Isabel, quietly sitting there with her gentle face and her Buddha smile, something in her that's fine, not judgmental, kept me from making any cynical, self-effacing quips about the crush I had on married Mick Draco.
We'd saved Rudy for last, as usual, because her fifteen-minute allotment has a way of stretching to thirty, forty, forty-five. Nobody minds; it's just better to plan ahead. She told a long, funny story about losing her job at the Help Hotline.
"Well, I knew you'd laugh," she said to me. "But I'm telling you, it wasn't that funny." "You really gave her Greenburg's phone number? Oh, Rudy." "Why not? He's a family therapist, he counsels adolescents. And if ever a girl needed-" "Because it's a violation of the rules," Lee said in that tolerant, teacher-to-student voice she uses a lot on Rudy. She doesn't use it on me, because if she does I use it right back. Only I exaggerate, make it sound even more irritating, which is saying something.
"I know," Rudy said, "but-" "Places like that aren't allowed to recommend individuals, Rudy. Didn't they explain that? Wasn't there any training before they let you start answering phones?" "Yes, there was training. They told us all about not recommending individual doctors or clinics or hospitals, not even programs. I know it was wrong, but I couldn't help it. If you'd heard her" - deliberately, she turned from Lee and me to Isabel-"you'd have done the same thing." Isabel smiled. "I hope I would have." "But you can't do that," Lee insisted, "because then the hot line becomes nothing more than an advertising service. Just think of the potential for abuse." Isabel sat back, fluffing her soft cap of ash-blonde curls-a dye job, she looks fabulous these days, not a minute over forty-five. "Rudy," she said mildly, "how many charitable organizations do you volunteer for?" "Right now?" She counted. "Four." "Really. What are they?" "Literacy, Sunday Soup Kitchen, humane society, and story hour." "Story hour-" "At Children's Hospital."
Moment of silence while we took that in. There's an old black lady who plays slide guitar on the corner of Fifteenth and G. Sometimes I drop a dollar in her cigar box as I'm rushing past. Except for some Christmas checks, assuming I'm flush, that's the extent of my charity work.
Isabel didn't press the point. She didn't have to. Lee stopped lecturing and I stopped laughing. Rudy, sweet, oblivious Rudy, asked the waiter for more water. She didn't even know Isabel had made a point.
Rudy caught me beaming at her. "What?" she said, smiling back.
"Nothing." I really love Rudy's squinty-eyed smile. Twelve years ago, on the student side of the reference desk at the Duke University library, she must not have smiled much, because otherwise I'd have noticed. We were only nodding acquaintances then, harried grad students who knew but never really registered on each other. Nowadays we love to marvel about luck, timing, providence-fate, if we're drinking-and what a tragedy it would've been if we hadn't moved to D.C. the same year, and then, clearly a miracle, joined the same book club.
"What did you first see in me?" We never get tired of asking each other that question, although we word it more artfully, less baldly. "You laughed at all my jokes," I always say; "nobody else in that group had any sense of humor whatsoever. Plus you've got a terrific laugh." True, but an even truer reason is because Rudy always said out loud the things I was only thinking. She had words for everything, and they fit with my inner life, meshed with my deepest feelings, as if she were me. It was as if I'd met my double. I'm her