“Awesome!” said John Smith. “Do me a big favor. Wear the suit and some leather shoes.”
“I don’t know if it even fits me anymore. I got it before—well, it must a been three or four years ago.” Nestor relived the whole mortifying scene then and there… Mami taking him into the men’s department at Macy’s… him standing there like a wooden idiot… Mami and the clerk talking—in Spanish—about how far down this should go and how far up that should go… only speaking to him twice… Mami saying, “¿Cómo te queda de talle?” and the clerk saying, “Dobla los brazos y levanta los codos delante”… and him caring about only one thing… the horrible chance that somebody he knew might see him like this.
“Before you started working out at Rodriguez’s?” John Smith smiled.
“Well… yeah,” said Nestor.
“Awww… just do the best you can, Nestor. You can squeeze into it.”
“I suppose next you’re gonna want me to wear a tie,” said Nestor, inflecting it with a touch of sarcasm.
John Smith’s eyes lit up. “Hey, you own one?”
“Yeahhh…”
“Wear it!” said John Smith. “I will, too! We’ve got to look serious! That building’s full of Active Adults. You know? They’re not going to appreciate it if we show up as if we’re going to the Honey Pot. Not even a twisted geek like Igor will appreciate it. We are serious men!”
15
The Yentas
Seven hours later, 10:30 a.m., Nestor and John Smith were driving… or, strictly speaking, John Smith was driving… into the parking lot of the Alhambra Lakes once more, this time in John Smith’s brand-new gray two-door Chevrolet Assent. John Smith thought it would be rude to park Nestor’s Camaro in an Active Adults’ parking lot in daylight. The Camaro was a muscle car from back when muscle cars were muscle cars, and it was pimped out so ferociously, it would shove its mug into any Active Adult’s face and snarl, “I’m a youthful offender. You got a problem with that?”
Of course—hah!—John Smith didn’t say “rude” or anything close to it. He expressed it in carefully hedged, gentler words, but on this killer-bright day John Smith’s good manners annoyed Nestor… his manners, among a dozen other things. Still inside the Assent’s air-conditioned cocoon they trolled slowly toward the building Igor had disappeared into last night. In flagrant sunlight like this, the place looked even worse than it had in the dark. All around the base was a stretch of raggedy bare ground that no doubt at one time had been flush with lush green shrubbery. Here and there about the rim of the parking lot you saw a palm tree here… and two there… and then a gap… and three there… gap… then another lone palm tree… The whole place appeared snaggletoothed. The palms were limp and wan… the leaves bore puce-colored splotches. On the building’s facade the little iron balconettes and the aluminum frames for the sliding doors looked as if they were about to fall off and die in a pile.
John Smith pointed and said, “Hey, look… Igor’s Vulcan’s gone.”
So far, so good. Before they confronted him, they needed to know a lot more… such as what he was doing here last night… and what and where was all that stuff he hauled inside. John Smith made a U-turn at the end of the row of cars and parked in the most remote section, the one for visitors.
When they got out of the car, Nestor was really annoyed. He put on the jacket of the suit John had talked him into wearing and slid the necktie up. The jacket was too small, as he knew it would be. On top of that, John Smith insisted that Nestor carry a 9½-inches-long, 3½-inches-wide, 1½-inches-thick dosimeter—a device for measuring noise levels—in an inside jacket pocket. If anybody challenged them, Nestor was to pull out the dosimeter, and he, John Smith, would explain that they were taking noise levels. A too-tight suit bulging with a fifty-cubic-inch machine on one side—great. Before he had taken his first step, he could feel the inside of his shirt collar turning sodden with sweat… and sweat soaking through his jacket, creating big dark half-moons under his armpits. The suit, the tie, his black leather cop shoes… he looked like a real guajiro… John Smith, on the other hand, had on a light-gray suit that fit perfectly, a white shirt, a navy tie with some kind of stuffy, orderly print on it, and black leather shoes