the wedding. Her face glowed with it; she spoke in a bright girlish voice he hadn't heard for a long time. It was gratifying to know that he could be responsible for such a major improvement in her mood, though it made him wonder if he hadn't been equally responsible for the mild depression that had plagued her for the past couple of years. He'd blamed it on the fact that she'd been unable to find a public school teaching job, despite her degree in Elementary Ed, and instead seemed resigned to a career in customer service. But maybe that was only part of her problem, and maybe not even the most important part.
“Do what you want,” he told her. “It's your wedding.”
She pulled down the sun visor and studied her face in the little mirror, puckering her lips as though preparing to kiss the glass.
“Ever since she got married, all she wants to do when we get together is complain about Paul. I mean, sometimes I just want to say, ‘Look, Margaret, if the guy's such a jerk, why don't you just divorce him?’ “
Dave punched on the radio and began fiddling with the tuner to dramatize his lack of interest in Margaret and Paul. Julie pretended not to notice.
“He's like from another era. She works longer hours and makes more money than he does, but it never even occurs to him to pitch in around the house.”
The radio was a Saturday-morning wasteland. The best song Dave could find was “Movin’ On” by Bad Company, a band about whom he had profoundly mixed feelings. As stale and mediocre as they seemed now, he could never forget what it had meant to hear them for the first time in Glenn Stella's bedroom in 1975—like being struck by lightning, visited by some rock ‘n roll version of the holy spirit. He'd walked home in a daze and announced to his parents at the supper table that he needed a guitar.
“You know what he does? He just sits in front of the TV playing his stupid computer games while she vacuums around his feet.”
“You think she should divorce him because of that?”
“That's as good a reason as any, considering that he has no redeeming qualities whatsoever.”
“He's not so bad,” Dave said, defending the guy out of some vague sense of gender loyalty, even though he despised him even more than Julie did. “He probably does a lot of chores around the house. Mowing the lawn and whatnot. Taking out the garbage.”
“That's not the worst of it.” Julie lowered her voice, in case people in passing cars might be trying to eavesdrop. “He insists on having sex with her every night, right after the weather report on the eleven o'clock news.”
“Every night?”
“That's what she says.”
“Even when she's sick?”
“I'm sure there are exceptions,” she conceded. “But the basic pattern is every night.”
Dave gave a small shiver of disgust that was only partly for Julie's benefit. Paul was a 240-pound furniture salesman who collected baseball cards and believed that Hotel California was one of the high points in the history of human civilization. Margaret was a formerly pleasant person whose personality had been ruined by constant dieting; Dave couldn't remember the last time he'd seen her when she wasn't carrying around a plastic baggie full of carrot slivers. The thought of the two of them having sex was almost as difficult to get his mind around as the thought of his parents getting it on in a motel room while vacationing at Colonial Williamsburg.
Julie pulled down her bottom lip and inspected her gum line in the mirror. Then she pulled up her top lip and did the same.
“He claims he can't get to sleep without it. If she says no he whimpers and thrashes around until she finally gives in just to get it over with.”
“Aren't there laws against that?”
“Every night,” Julie said, her voice touched by wonderment. “Imagine watching the news with that hanging over your head.”
A life-sized Cardboard cutout of Mr. Spock greeted them as they entered the mall, the normally expressionless Vulcan smiling enigmatically as he extended the live-long-and-prosper salute to the earthlings who drifted past, “MEET SCOTTY!” said a cardboard poster attached to Leonard Nimoy's cardboard shirt. “2 P.M. TODAY.”
It wasn't yet eleven-thirty, but a large contingent of Star Trek buffs had already begun forming a line in front of an empty table in the mall's central plaza. The table was surrounded by cardboard cutouts of Captain Kirk, Bones, and Lieutenant Uhura, who looked as sexy as ever in her skintight, probably somewhat itchy polyester uniform.
They had to cut through the line on their way to the escalator, drawing a surprisingly huffy response from a man in a plaid short-sleeved shirt who must have thought they were trying to usurp his position. Most of the people in line were nerdy-looking men, though Dave did notice a sprinkling of obese women and a number of people in wheelchairs, some of them severely disabled. It made sense, now that he thought about it, that Star Trek, and especially Scotty, might hold a special appeal for people who found themselves at odds with their own bodies.
They stepped onto the escalator and began their slow, effortless ascent. Julie gazed down at the Trekkies and shook her head.
“It's sad,” she whispered.
“What?”
“That,” she said, gesturing at the lower level. “All of it.”
Dave didn't answer. He had never cared for Star Trek and wouldn't have wanted to spend the better part of a beautiful Saturday stuck inside the mall, but he'd stood on enough lines for concert tickets in all kinds of weather—sometimes even camping out for really important shows—to feel an instinctive sympathy for the people below. They didn't seem particularly sad or strange to him. They were just waiting for Scotty.
“With diamonds,” Kevin explained, “you got four basic variables to consider. You got size, you got cut, you got color, and you got clarity. Within each of these categories, you got separate variables to consider.”
Kevin was a pixieish man in a brown suit, maybe forty years old, with curly gray hair slicked back behind his ears and an orangey tan whose origins could probably be traced to somewhere other than New Jersey. Dave made an effort to look fascinated as he droned on about point size, empire cuts, and the alphabetical grading scale for color, but his mind had already begun to wander. He almost wished he were downstairs, standing in line. At least then he'd have something to look at besides pale pink walls, diamond rings, and Kevin's tropical explosion of a necktie.
“The range is enormous,” Kevin said, in response to a question from Julie. “The vast majority of diamonds aren't even precious stones per se. They're used for industrial purposes.”
Kevin paused for a reaction, so Dave dutifully pretended to be impressed by this information, though he really didn't give a shit about it one way or the other. The whole concept of engagement rings struck him as an enormous scam perpetrated by the jewelry industry to force you into making the single most expensive useless purchase of your entire lifetime just to avoid looking like a cheapskate to your future wife, her family, friends, and co-workers.
“But let's face it,” Kevin said, finally bringing his filibuster to a close, “unless you have a lot of money to spend, most of what I just told you isn't going to be directly relevant to your purchase. You're not going to be in the market for some flawless oval-cut diamond of exceptional luster. You'll be looking for a decent-quality round-cut stone, maybe in the H-I-J range.”
“What do you mean by a lot of money?” Julie asked.
This question appeared to cause Kevin a certain amount of difficulty. His face cycled through a number of contortions before settling into its default mode of enthusiastic sincerity.
“It's all relative, you know what I'm saying? I mean, you can get a ring like these here for four, five, maybe six hundred bucks.” He caressed the air above the left side of the display case; the rings below were sad-looking specimens with stones that resembled pumped-up grains