Free Compromising Positions by Susan Isaacs Page B

asked.
    “Wouldn’t you rather discuss the revisionist view of Kennedy?”
    “No.”
    She opened her pocketbook and extracted her car keys. “He went to dental school with my nephew Roger. I suggested to Roger that he practice here, but his little boy had asthma, so they moved out West. But he told Bruce about Shorehaven, and when Norma and Bruce first moved here, I had them over to dinner a couple of times. Mainly to introduce them to some couples of their age.”
    “That was very thoughtful of you,” I commented. She smiled and shrugged her shoulders. “Fay, what was he like? Really like?”
    “Well, you wouldn’t be able to comprehend him. You lead a decent, uncomplicated life.” She opened the door to her car with some difficulty, unable to get a tight grip on the handle.
    “For God’s sake, Fay. What’s this decent business? What are you going to do, explain the situation to me when I grow up?”
    She looked up at me, coloring a bit. “I’m sorry. I really didn’t mean to sound condescending. Look, let’s get to the restaurant and I’ll tell you everything I know about the Flecksteins. If you’re interested.”
    “If I’m interested? Would I be here if I weren’t interested?”
    “All right,” she sighed. “But it’s not a pleasant story. And you’ll see why Bruce didn’t live happily ever after.”

Chapter Six
    “How many, s’il vous plait?” asked the hostess, a heavy middle-aged woman dressed in a beribboned French provincial costume.
    “Deux,” I replied, and followed her across the dark red linoleum floor, embossed in a brick design, to a small table in a corner.
    “Ees zees hokay?” she inquired. She had the inept French accent of Americans who have never studied the language.
    “Oui,” I answered, and she smiled warmly at us and departed, no doubt pleased because she had carried on a conversation in French.
    Quelle Crêpe had opened in the early sixties, when masses of young couples, thousands of little Jacks and Jackies, moved to Long Island from Brooklyn and Queens. Refusing to adopt the suburban Eisenhoweresque style of their neighbors—the crew cut, the circle pin, and the barbecue—they served coq au vin to each other and spent Saturday nights in Manhattan at the theater or the opera. Their sons, it is true, joined the Little League, but physical fitness did have the Kennedy imprimatur. And the ladies—they weren’t women then—marched right by the tea rooms of the Old Wave suburbanites and into Quelle Crêpe, where for a few dollars you could have a glass of wine and a crêpe with fromage or fromage et oeufs or fromage et oeufs et jambon or even fromage et oeufs et jambon et asperges, like a francophile’s Dagwood sandwich.
    We declined the proffered menus and ordered our salads and coffee. Fay ran her arthritic fingers through her massacred hairdo and smiled.
    “So?” I asked.
    “So? You want to know about the Flecksteins?”
    “Everything.”
    “Well, Judith, ‘everything’ is a little beyond me. I made certain never to cross over the barrier of intimacy.” Our salads arrived. Fay carefully picked out the anchovies and put them on the side of her plate. “Well, the most interesting thing was that there was nothing interesting about either of them.” She paused.
    “What do you mean?” I inquired.
    “Well, they weren’t uninteresting, in the sense of being stupid or dull. Bruce was quite pleasant really. The first time they came over, he chatted with everybody and even managed to sound interested in Lou Sherman—he’s on the board of the North Shore Historical Society. Well, Bruce asked him a lot of questions about the history of Shorehaven, and Lou was quite voluble. But I don’t know why, it wasn’t anything Bruce actually said, but I knew he really wasn’t interested in what Lou was saying.”
    “You mean he was just trying to make a good impression?”
    “No. More than that. It was as if he felt that a little bit of local history might