**Ba-dum-tss-bam**

 **Ba-dum-tss-bam** 

“Is this a good time?” Roz asked. This was yesterday. Just after three in the afternoon. I wasn’t sleeping, but the phone woke me up, and Roz was in the earpiece saying, “Is this a good time?”

     “For what?” I said, thinking why was she calling me, she never calls me?

     “You know,” she said. Then I did. Ten days is not so long a time that a conversation cannot be resumed where it left off. At our stage of enervated life, exasperated love, and patched-together conversation, ten days is not that much different from ten minutes or ten hours. “Enervated” and “exasperated” are my words, incidentally; she wouldn’t use either of them.

     “It’s not something to talk about on the phone, maybe?” I said hopefully but not full of hope. But then:

     “Maybe not,” she said. “But be thinking about it.” She took a breath. “For next week!” she said.

     “Yes,” I said. “Of course.”

I meant “yes,” but I added “of course” because “yes” didn’t seem enough. I needed to sound more enthusiastic, less enervated, to sound more engaged, less exasperated, than I felt. Not that Roz would be fooled about what I was really feeling, but she might give me credit for the effort. She usually does.

     Some people have all the luck. I’m one of them. My life seems to run into more than its share of difficulties these days, and maybe I make them though maybe bad chemistry does. In either case, I’m a difficulty for others. Yet people stick by me. Roz especially: she sticks by me when it must be far easier to slide away. She doesn’t even take a rest while she’s sticking by. She’s one of those people that are never distracted. When she’s there, she’s there, nowhere else.

     So I added, “Of course” to sound like I really was going to be thinking about it. And I tried to though I don’t think very well at all these days. There's too much noise, too many voices all talking at once. I can’t keep one thought separated from another; every one is whirled into every other one.

As another sign of enthusiasm, I made spaghetti for supper. It’s one of the few things I can cook and have any sense that it’s going to turn out. It’s going to turn out because I make it the same way every time with Paul Newman’s Sockarooni sauce, which I’ve poured over minced onions and peppers and apples sprinkled with basil and fennel and powdered thyme and sautéed in olive oil and red wine. When the sauce begins bubbling, I stir in a teaspoon-and-a-half of sugar and turn the burner down to as close to nothing as it will go. I boil the noodles for twelve minutes so they are just past al dente.

     I set the table and poured Roz’s wine. I don’t drink wine because of some medicine that I’m taking - that I’m still taking:  It’s been two years. I won’t say I never drank a glass of wine - or had a beer - in those two years, but if I did I don’t remember it.

We sat down to eat.

     “Thanks,” she said.

     “You’re welcome,” I said.

     “What do you think?” she said.

     “Brenda Lee.”

     “That’s not what I meant,” she said. “I meant when. We were talking about when. I said I thought this next week sometime.”

     “Okay,” I said. “I remember. Only not Saturday. Axel doesn’t do Saturday.”

     “I figured as much.” She ate three bitesful. “Brenda Lee is a terrible idea,” she said.

     “How do you know?”

     “I just do.”

     “Patsy Cline, then,” I said.

to be continued

01.19.19