Simple Hearts by Barry Rachin (early readers .TXT) 📕

Luther blinked and cleared his throat but didn't say anything. "All you gotta do is get Marna jibber-jabbering about some dumb-ass topic and the rest will take care of itself.
"Like what?"
"Oh, that's the easy part! Just mention you heard how devoted she is to her sister's kids." Drake waved a fist in the air for dramatic effect. "You see, here's the thing: the woman's gorgeous, voluptuous... a regular Italian sex goddess, right?"
"Yeah, I guess so."
"The only thing Marna Copparelli really cares about is finding a mate so she can copulate and bear children. The male of the species is sort of incidental,… nothing more than an anatomical means to an end. She wants a dozen babies of her own to cuddle and spoil rotten. So you talk about Marna being a doting auntie and motherhood and all that sappy bullshit and everything will be peachy keen."
Luther reached for the car keys. "Maybe we should go pick out a shirt… something trendy."
"Yeah, yeah…" Drake gave his brother the once over. "We should also do something with your hair."
Luther reached up and patted the top of his head as though the scalp was hot to the touch. "What's wrong with my hair?"
"Well, nothing. Not really. It just sort of lies there." Drake tried to assume a more upbeat tone. "Maybe an hour before the big date, wash it with a good shampoo and conditioner. Then blow dry it and try to fluff up the front."
"Details," Luther picked up on the thread of his brother’s previous remark. "Everything in life is about getting the details right."
Ever so gently, Drake felt his spirits lifting. "That's a good way to put it."

• * * * * *

At the mall, Drake rejected every shirt Luther showed him. Finally, he went off by himself, collected an armload of designer originals and stood outside the dressing room. On the fifth try Drake said, "That's the shirt."
"You don’t think it's a bit loud… garish?" The wine-colored shirt featured coppery stripes zigzagging diagonally across the chest. The collar was done in a slightly darker, crimson shade.
"Remember who you're going out with," Drake counseled. "No, that's the perfect shirt - most definitely!" For good measure, Drake bought his brother a new leather belt with a wide buckle in the shape of a horseshoe. Afterwards, they went to the food court for supper. "My treat," Luther reached for his wallet. Luther, all five foot six of him, was grinning foolishly. His lumpy features that no one ever paid any attention to seemed more relaxed, though, now that his wardrobe was complete
"Flaubert," Luther blurted the solitary word as though in response to an ongoing conversation. They were sitting in the food court at the mall. Drake was nursing a cup of coffee and jelly donut.
"Flow what?"
"Flaubert," Luther clarified. "He wrote Madam Bovary. I don't suppose -"
Drake waved him off. "Now don't go talking crazy when you're out on the town with Marna, or it's gonna be a very short night."
"Flaubert was a nineteenth century writer." Luther's expression had altered noticeably. The excitement having ebbed, he seemed more pensive, grim. "He wrote a short piece of fiction, A Simple Heart, about a French peasant woman, Félicité... a very kind and decent soul."
"Yes, okay." Drake was only half-listening. He had called Lois five times since six-thirty in the morning. No luck! Should he try again? Did it make a difference?
"I'm a nice guy, don't you think?"
Again, there it was - that twisted doughy smile. Luther, the brainiac with an IQ of one hundred and twenty-four - it wasn't exactly genius level, but way the hell up there. He sure had the goofiest smile on the goddamn planet! "Yeah, yeah. You're one swell sonofabitch."
"She had a nephew who died travelling to America."
"Who did?"
" Félicité."
"The peasant woman in the stupid story from two hundred goddamn years ago?"
"Her mistress' young daughter caught pneumonia and passed while away at boarding school. Then Félicité. found a lover but that didn't work out so well either." Luther cleared his throat. "Later still, she adopted a parrot named Loulou. The parrot caught a chill during the winter and keeled over in its cage so Félicité had the bird stuffed and kept, like a religious relic, in a place of honor in her cluttered room."
"Jesus, Mary and Joseph! What the hell are you talking about now?"
"Félicité was one saintly sonofabitch, but. I don't want to end up like her." Luther crooked his head to one side. His hair that he had just washed the night before already looked dull and greasy "I don't want to end up like the heroine in Flaubert's masterpiece."
"Aw shit, Luther,” Drake blustered, gulping down the last of his coffee. “I might be one pathetic loser, what with my philandering, but you run a close second."

• * * * * *

Monday afternoon, Drake took Marna aside. "How'd things go the other night?"
"Good. My nephew, Ralphy, peed the bed but that was no big deal, because I found a set of clean sheets in the bedroom drawer."
Drake stared at the woman incredulously. "My brother… I was referring to the date not you freakin' babysitting gig."
"Good. Real good." She went off to clean a mess left by table of DPW state workers that rushed off after wolfing down their lunch.
Well. That was a relief! Drake had this fantasy - more like a ghoulish nightmare - of a first date that that resembled a wake with open casket rather than a romantic soiree. "So you had a good time?"
Marna was refilling the napkin holders. "Your brother made dinner reservations over at the Blue Grotto. After the meal, he took me to a movie on the East Side."
"Which movie?"
"I dunno, some foreign flick?" She flashed a tepid smile. "The film was in subtitles… Mongolian or something. There was this baby camel. The mother wouldn't nurse it so the nomads, who lived in tents, had to feed the animal from a bottle."
"Then what?"
"Don't remember. I fell asleep after about the first ten minutes. Slept through the whole movie." "Afterwards we went over to the Pancake House for coffee and dessert." Finishing with the napkins, Marna grabbed a broom and began sweeping up the entryway. "Your brother's a swell guy. I bent his ear for a good half an hour about my sister's kids and he never interrupted once."
Drake knelt down and held a plastic dust tray while Marna steered the dirt up to the lip. "Luther isn't much of a talker."
"On the contrary, he held his own just fine."
"Is that so?"
"He was telling me all about this book he's giving a lecture on at some college gathering - Under Western Skies."
"The Conrad book?" Drake couldn't imagine Luther telling Marna Copparelli about bomb-throwing anarchists.
“This college student, Razumov, comes home one night from classes to find some guy who just assasinated a government minister in his room. He don't even hardly know the jerk but can’t toss him out in the cold because maybe the asshole will finger him as an accomplice.” She looked up. “You familiar with the plot?”
“Well, sort of.” Drake eyed Marna uneasily. The poor slob, Razumov, cooped up in his tiny apartment with the murderer - that’s how far as he got in the text before throwing the classic aside.
“The student runs to the authorities and tells them where they can find the shit-for-brains who threw the bomb that killed the official. But then, Razumov becomes a secret agent and travels to Switzerland where he meets the sister of the guy he just betrayed and they fall in love.”
“I didn’t read that far,” Drake decided to cut his losses.
“Luther says it’s not really one of Conrad’s better novels.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, he said the author should have cut the story short after the first hundred pages or so, because the ending was real draggy and dumb.”
Draggy and dumb... Drake couldn’t quite picture his brother using terms like that in an academic presentation but wasn’t about to argue the point.
“So you had a good time?”
“Yeah and I learned a thing or two about current events.”
“The story took place over a hundred years ago.”
"Whatever," Marna shot back dismissively. “Luther says that, when Conrad began writing the book, Razumov was gonna marry the bomb-throwing nutso’s sister, have a child and then confess to her years later, but changed his mind.”
“So there was no happy ending.”
“No,” Marna confirmed. “Just like in real life, everything ultimately turns to shit.”
“You got a succinct way of putting things.”
“I only got my GED,” Marna blurted, "but that don't make me no intellectual retard!" She leered at him as he stood up with the dust tray. "What's so funny?"
Drake didn't realize he was grinning. "You keep saying all men are shit. Maybe you'd like to reconsider."
Marna shook her head violently. "Nothing's changed. My nephew and you brother are the two exceptions that make the rule." She compressed her pretty lips in a pensive expression. "That sure was a smart looking shirt he had on and his hair didn't look quite so ratty."

• * * * * *

Back at the apartment, Drake found his thirty-two inch Pullman suitcase resting in the middle of the living room. The sofa bed was closed, the bedding heaped in a pile on the floor. "Since you weren't making any progress, I went over to plead your case with Lois," Luther said.
"And?"
"Your wife insists that you're still a deceitful, horny asshole, but the woman is letting you come back. Of course, you'll have to grovel and act the part of an indentured servant until you go on Medicare."
"Okay."
"And you only get one shot at the marital brass ring. Next time the one-eyed sailor goes missing in action, your marriage is caput."
Drake sat down and began to cry - a weepy, little-boy-lost-in-the-woods sobbing. "I learned my lesson," he blubbered, "I'll be good."
"I'm not finished," Luther spoke in a flat, business-like tone.
"What else?"
"I want another date with Marna Copparelli."
"The original arrangement was one date, no contingency plan."
"Yeah, well, I want to see her again."
"You don't need my permission, but it might help if you spoke directly to the party concerned." Drake wiped his eyes with a Kleenex. Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a cell phone and dialed a number.
Luther took the phone and pressed it to his ear. "Hello, Marna? Luther Buttafuoco here… I had a real nice time the other night and was wondering…"
Drake cleared his clothing out of the hall closet then went and collected his shaving gear and toothbrush from the bathroom. He would have to stop by another time to recoup his cell phone as his brother was still gabbing away as he let himself out. Luther's hair had died again, gone totally flat and lifeless. But maybe it didn't matter. He could take the ravishing Marna Copparelli to Mongolian foreign flicks where the indigenous folk nursed baby camels; he could fill her head with nineteenth century Russian politics and that seemed to work just fine for the girl who loved her nieces and nephew to distraction. On the far side of the door, a burst of laughter was followed by a whispery-soft exchange. The last thing Drake remembered as he let himself out was the intricate filigree of wonder suffusing his brother's homely face.