"Do you?"
A longer pause. "Day guys left a box. Honey dipped. There's two left. Don't touch the jelly, it's Barney's."
Nicky came back with a box from the Dunkin' Donuts on Broad Street, two honey-dipped doughnuts and one jelly in it, and set it on the floor in front of the couch, and took one and handed the other to Theda, and then went back and pressed play, and they both leaned forward and watched Clark Gable explain to Claudette Colbert, with withering contempt, that she was dunking her doughnut wrong. That dunking was an art. That you didn't soak it, you didn't let it get soggy, you dipped it in and you got it out again, quick, before it went to pieces; that you had to have some nerve about it.
Nicky stopped the tape. He picked up his paper cup of coffee from the vending machine, which had gone lukewarm, and held his doughnut over it, and looked at Theda.
"Okay," he said. "Watch me."
"I'm watching."
He dunked. He did it, she had to admit, with a certain flair: a quick, confident plunge, a twist of the wrist, out again. He bit into it. A large piece of it fell off into the cup with a soft, final plop and sank.
They both looked into the cup.
"Father Albanese," said Theda.
"Don't."
"He's seventy-four. He's got experience. He's probably been dunking doughnuts since the Coolidge administration."
"He dunks in milk," said Nicky darkly. "Carmela says. Like a little kid." He fished the drowned piece out with two fingers and ate it anyway. "You do it."
"I'm not the one in the play."
"You're the one with the presentation. You've got doughnut earrings. You need to know about the doughnut."
So she dunked. She dunked in his coffee, since she'd finished hers, and she did it quickly and with nerve and didn't let it get soggy, and when she took it out and bit into it, it stayed in one piece, and she chewed it with her eyes closed and her chin in the air, and when she opened them again he was watching her with an expression of such frank admiration, mixed with such frank misery, that she nearly choked.