386

Crystal

Chuck and Crystal were lying in Chuck’s bed, or “rack,” as he liked to call it. “Guess I’ll hit the rack,” he would say to his orange and white cat circa nine o’clock every evening.

Crystal was fast asleep. She had rolled onto her left side, and her left hand was fetchingly draped over her right shoulder. Chuck studied the barely perceptible freckles on Crystal’s back and the graceful contours of Crystal’s fingers and thought that he’d never seen a more exquisitely feminine hand. And he had not noticed until then that her nails cleverly matched the onyx ring on her middle finger. The onyx was square with rounded corners, in a silver or white-gold setting, and had a small diamond inset at about five o’clock. And Crystal’s nails, glossy black, each had a tiny white dot at five o’clock, too.

“Snot,” thought Chuck. “I owe all this to snot.”

Barely over the emotional mayhem of the first episode, which had happened when she was in grade-school, Crystal had experienced another devastating snot-bubble just as she was being introduced to Chuck at Starbucks. It wasn’t a blind date, per se, but it had been orchestrated by Queenie in full-on yenta fashion. Chuck and Crystal were perfect for each other, Queenie thought, and her only regret was that it had not dawned on her sooner.

Crystal had rushed out of Starbucks like the proverbial bat out of hell, clasping her nose with both hands and slamming against the corner of a table with her hip, mid-flight. Chuck would be kissing the resultant boo-boo a few hours later during a languorous session of letting Daddy make it better—which didn’t do much for the woman whose triple-shot Americano got sloshed all over her designer jeans.

Chuck had caught up with Crystal as she was fumbling with the handle of her Camry and had taken her in his arms and said all of the soothingly right things and had even wiped a tiny snot-dot from her upper lip with his thumb.

Now the two of them were ensconced in his bed, the venue for most of his musings, and Chuck was musing about the yin-yang quality of nasal secretions, and the happy promise of helping Crystal get over the yin part, all over again, however long it might take.

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535

Crystal

Chuck was still pondering a man’s painted toes when Queenie walked in.

“What is up, Chuck,” she said, pulling out the wooden chair directly across from him. The chair made fingernails-on-chalkboard sounds as it scraped along the floor’s heavily textured tiles. Queenie plopped down and lifted the chair while skooching closer to the table. “Damn, man! That’s some kinda ‘noxious noise, ain’t it? Sorta ruins the whole mellow vibe, dontcha think? All these chairs screeching?”

Chuck grinned and nodded and said, “Can I get one of your trademark chai lattes for you, Helen?” He was the only person in her acquaintance authorized to use her given name, because Queenie somehow found her given name magnificent whenever Chuck said it.

“Well, ain’t you the fuckin’ gentleman, gentle man. That’s the best offer I’ve had all year. Only, get this, Charles, I’ve moved on in life: I’m doin’ dark-chocolate raspberry mochas these days—if the offer’s still good.”

“That sounded so tempting I got me one, too,” Chuck was saying six minutes later.

“Nectar of the goddamn gods,” Queenie said, “and don’t go scrapin’ that chair.”

Chuck gingerly completed the process of sitting back down, swept his half-drained iced tea a few inches to the left, and took a generous swig of his inaugural dark-chocolate raspberry mocha. “Wow! That’s really fantastic.”

“You damn right, Mr. Farley,” Queenie said. “A seriously bangin’ beverage.”

Chuck sat sipping and savoring for thirty or forty seconds before pointing to an empty table. “Just before you came in, a man, a woman, and a young boy were sitting right there. I couldn’t hear everything they were saying, but they were talking cordially and laughing and so on, and after a while I realized that the man evidently was returning the boy to the mother after an overnight stay, and I thought how sad that was, you know, that they were divorced and all, because they made what seemed to be a really sweet family.”

Queenie flashed Chuck the cut-to-the-chase face he’d seen a thousand times. “Yeah, life’s a bitch, baby. So what else is new?”

Chuck chuckled and replied, “Well, what else is new is that when their little party broke up and they were saying their good-byes I noticed that the man was wearing sandals and that his toe nails were painted a vibrant pink—with sparkles.”

“No lie?” Queenie said. “Pardon the pun, but that sure paints a whole ‘nother picture.”

Chuck watched Queenie’s attention shift suddenly to the door. “Hey! Over here!” she shouted. Nearly everyone in the café looked toward Queenie and then toward the young woman for whom Queenie’s flailing waving clearly was intended.

Crystal waved back and beamed and threaded her way to their table.

“Chuck,” Queenie began, as Chuck was rising from his chair, “this here’s Crystal, the young woman I told you about. Crystal, this here’s Chuck Farley.”

“You didn’t tell me Crystal was drop-dead gorgeous, Helen,” Chuck said, directing a lavish smile Crystal’s way. “Glad to meet you, Crystal.”

“Same here,” Crystal said, blushing to beat the band—until, like a chameleon or a cuttlefish or a peacock flounder, she went from beet-red to bone-white as a snot bubble erupted from her nose.

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