Movie night for the Fern foursome, since Dinah had insisted upon bundling up and coming over to escape Ida, who was beginning to drive her crazy, although what she really wanted, she said, was a smoke with her old pal Bill Bender. “The least, the last, and the lost,” they were fond of saying whenever the two of them stood hacking and coughing on the sidewalk. “To quote the Salvation Army.” “Give me some news,” Dinah commanded. “I’ve rented Two for the Road from Tony,” said Harriet. (Tony was the owner of the only video store in town that had copies of Trapeze and The Pajama Game; a tiny man with an English accent who filed everything alphabetically, “excluding definites and indefinites.”) “We had a most interesting conversation. He told me the women men go for. Greta Scaachi. They see her once and never forget her. Charlotte Rampling. Kathleen Turner, for a while, and now this new one, Catherine Zeta-Jones. Ellen Barkin, even though she isn’t pretty, because she has something men respond to, a magnetism.”
