Playland by John Gregory Dunne Page B

Unitarian get-together. Question:Why so many Unitarian singles? Answer: Because they’re Unitarians.
“I Don’t Want the Hassle and I Don’t Want to Be Alone.”
(Roundtable Singles, $5.) All hassle and a lonely night, bet the mortgage on it.
“Sexaholics and Sexual Selfishness.”
(Elizabeth Seabury-Walsh Singles Forum, Chatham Neighborhood Nondenominational Church, $7.) A beat-up session on male chauvinist pigs.
“Race & the Supreme Court—Constitutional Issues.”
(ACLU Singles Chapter, $6.) Chat, chat, chat, chat. No, no, no, no.
“The Death Penalty—Is It the Solution?
” (Socially Responsible Singles, Beachwood YWCA, $4.)
    Socially responsible singles. A type I knew. For whom I had a rap as polished as one of Maury Ahearne’s stories. An anodyne for a very difficult day, a chance to salve a wounded sense of self-esteem.

V
    I awoke and felt her side of the bed. She was not there. The digital clock on the bedside table said 3:47. I fumbled for the control switches and lowered the brightness level. The green fluorescent numbers always gave me a headache. A migraine warning. I wondered where she was, glad for the moment it gave me to remember her name. Frances. Francine. Fernanda. Fern, short for Fernanda. That rang a bell. Sort of. Her side of the bed was still warm. Meaning she had not been gone for long. Fern. Am I sure about Fern? The Socially Responsible Single. Divorced mother of two.
    “Did you know,” I had said at the mixer after the lecture earlier that evening at the Beachwood YWCA, “that before they strap a man into the electric chair they make him …”
    “What?” The questioner was the woman whose name I now could not remember.
    “I’m not sure this is a proper subject … what I mean to say is …” I searched for the precise phrasing. “It’s … it’s gross.”
    “The death penalty is gross. The state’s taking a life is gross. As you put it.”
    “Of course.”
    “Then what do they make the victim do?”
    No backing up now. Maury Ahearne was my source. His father had been a prison guard on the death row detail at Jackson State Penitentiary when Michigan still had the death penalty. “They make him … cram cotton up his anus.” There. It was out.
    “That’s barbaric.”
    I speared a wedge of stale Gouda with a toothpick and with my thumb eased it on top of a Ritz cracker. No wine at the Y. Only a nondenominational punch. “And then they make him wear a rubber diaper.”
    “I guess I don’t have to ask why.” She was the one who had asked most of the questions during the Q-and-A session after the public defender from the Death Watch Association had made his presentation. On the racial configuration of juries in death penalty cases. On homicide rates in states that had banned the death penalty versus those in states that exercised it. On the proportion of death penalty convictions in cases involving white against white, white against black, black against black, black against white. I concentrated on the questions. Or to be more specific the questioner. On the way she absentmindedly scratched her ribs when she talked, right hand left rib, left hand right rib, the action outlining her breast against the silk blouse she was wearing, some shade of tan or beige, the half acorn of her nipple pressed against the fabric until she stopped scratching. I focused on the way the woman’s glasses slipped down her nose when she talked, and on the way her eyes seemed to lock into some further plane as her thoughts took shape. It was disconcerting to be the object of that gaze. “How do you know this, Mr.…?”
    I was not wearing a paper name tag. Nor was she, I noticed. “Broderick. It’s research. For a project I’m working on.”
    “On the death penalty?” I wondered if her commitment to the abolition of capital punishment would outlast this session of social responsibility.
    “On the law enforcement community.” A tiptoe along the fault line of truth.
    “I thought