O Body Swayed to Music
Read Part I
II
Edge against Softness
The waitress appeared. In these circumstances she drank what her client drank. Most of them preferred their lead followed. This man, she sensed, would neither know of the custom, nor care about it if he did.
“A martini. A Hemingway actually . . .”
Men of action, she had learned, liked references to Hemingway, and his penchant for hard drinking, but only the older ones. The younger ones didn’t know who he was, associating the writer’s name only with some kind of misplaced masculinity.
“I don’t know what that is.”
The waitress gave the expected reply. If she had pretended familiarity, she would have been faking it. Marlena had just made up the name.
“Heavy on the Tanqueray, light on the vermouth, two olives, and it isn’t to be stirred. If you can’t trouble yourself to shake it, let the Tanqueray sift naturally.”
She had elicited the first real smile from him. Score one. Her intuition rarely failed her.
“And you, Sir?”
“Water.”
“Bottled? We have some very nice Pellegrino but also almost anything you could ask for.”
