In the Drink (26 page)

I got off the train at Sixth Avenue, walked through the long bright tunnel to the IRT at Seventh Avenue and climbed aboard an uptown 9 that had just pulled in. My new car was the old, multi-placarded kind, its overhead ad slots filled with wife-beaters, torn earlobes, unwanted pregnancies, bunions. I looked with impersonal affection at the other passengers. “Lonely I came, and I depart alone,” I thought, inadvertently catching the eye of an old woman who smiled at me and didn’t look away. She could very well have been a horny old bull dyke looking for some nooky, but I didn’t care; I pretended she was my grandma for a couple of seconds, and then we got to my stop and I got off the train and left her to ride on without me.

I awoke the next morning pondering the possible repercussions and moral implications of what I was about to do, but when my phone rang and my machine clicked on and I received still another message from Miller concerning the rent I owed him, these qualms were squashed out of existence by the ineluctable pressure of necessity. I was doomed anyway. What did one more little thing matter? Look at the way I’d stolen her gold watch and shoes and sweater only moments after I’d found out I’d murdered her. What did that say about my character?

Swiftly and without flinching, I unearthed Jackie’s stolen checkbook and wrote myself a check, predated a month or two in hopes that Goldie would think it was an old paycheck I’d just gotten around to depositing, and Jackie would never know. I signed Jackie’s loopy scrawl of an autograph, which I was better at than she was, not that this was anything to brag about.

I was out the door and heading for the bank before I could change my mind. As I deposited it at the ATM, I looked over my shoulder to make sure no undercover cops were lurking behind me. The machine spewed a receipt back at me, which indicated that I now had a positive balance of six hundred and thirty dollars in my checking account, one hundred of which were immediately available. Unfortunately, I also had a negative balance of one thousand dollars in my cash reserve account, but the receipt didn’t mention that and I didn’t ask.

I withdrew an ill-gotten twenty-dollar bill, then crossed Broadway and peered through the window of the Skouros Coffee Shop. I recognized the guy behind the counter, Russell, a harmless pimply boy. There was no sign of my enemy with his great big mustache and cruel spatula and beady eyes, so I went in and inhaled with pleasure the comfortingly familiar smells of bacon grease and bleach. I sat somewhat apprehensively at the counter, hoping the whole staff hadn’t been instructed to give the heave-ho to any shifty-eyed blondes who wandered in, but Russell just smiled vaguely and asked what he could get for me. Within minutes I had a steaming plate of scrambled eggs and home fries, a fresh cup of coffee and a glass of orange juice. Things were looking up indeed.

I scarfed every bite, paid my check and left a nice tip, which didn’t exactly make up for walking out on my last one but at least prevented another black mark against my name. After I left the Skouros, I found myself strolling down Broadway behind a disembarked busload of tourists I guessed were from either Germany or the Midwest; they walked as slowly as a herd of large ruminants, and all of them had the enormous rumps and mottled, marbled, quivering faces of avid meat-eaters. I became strangely fascinated by them. I followed them all the way down to Seventy-second Street, and learned the following on the way: they were in fact German; they were
paired off two by two in married couples; some of these couples were more civil than others; and they were very hungry but couldn’t find a restaurant to their liking, so they were forced to march along, a starving, waddling diaspora.

It dismayed me how much German I was able to understand. I’d avoided learning German all my life, or so I’d always told myself, but every word these people said was as clear to me as if they were speaking English. I watched them peer at the menus plastered all over the windows of a diner, arguing amongst themselves, pointing to various items and weighing the merits of American food versus their good German dishes, for which they were clearly pining. Finally a tall round-faced man with psychotically good posture who appeared to have elected himself their leader gave the place the nod, and they began to stuff themselves through the door. When the whole gaggle of Krauts had disappeared into the steamy depths, there was nothing for it but to go home.

I went home. My apartment smelled stale and unoccupied. I fought with the window until it opened; a greasy little breeze ambled in. The afternoon went by, inexorably, as afternoons will. I sat at my table, looking down at a legal pad opened to a blank page, for much of it. I didn’t write “Chapter One” at the top of the page; I couldn’t bring myself to be so presumptuous. I was badly constipated today, which in my present state of mind I interpreted as a message from whatever low-rent muse had been assigned to me rather than any result of my diet. I pictured all that dense clayey matter adhering stickily to my tender pink insides, which writhed in futile peristaltic exertion, just as I was doing here at my table, confronted by the blank knowledge of the years I had spent not writing. They mounted before me, covered my lined yellow paper with their lined yellow faces, wasted and decayed, staring up at me like death
masks. The ingrained habit of that breathlessly vacuous Genevieve-voice clung to me like a cloying smell.

When I was caught cheating on a math test in fifth grade, I’d sat in a silent panic at the dinner table waiting for the phone to ring. My teacher had promised me that she would be calling my mother that night to inform her of my crime and ask that she make sure I didn’t repeat it. I dragged my fork through my rice, tried to get my green beans to stand upright on the plate like a row of teeth or fence posts; I couldn’t swallow. When the phone finally rang, I looked up, white-faced, and said, “I’ll get it, Ma.”

But she had already answered. I watched her face as she spoke to Mrs. Cleghorn, sat perfectly still until she replaced the receiver and met my wide-eyed, terrified gaze. “Ach, Claudia.”

“I’ll never copy again,” I said.

She sighed. “It isn’t the copying, it’s that your superego should be more deweloped by now!” I had occasionally heard her speak nearly unaccented English, usually when she was very tired.

“My what?”

“You copied because your superego is too immature. I don’t know why this is so; when I was your age I had a strongly deweloped sense of right and wrong.”

“But Ma, I didn’t do the homework yesterday. I didn’t know how to do the problems.”

“So?”

“So maybe I’m just lazy.”

“That is because of your superego,” she repeated.

“How do you know? Can you see it?”

I had never challenged her before. She drew herself up. “Claudia,” she said, “it is inwisible. You cannot see it, but it is there.”

“But how do you know?”

“Ach,” she said, “enough questions. I have too much to do tonight.”

“Just tell me,” I wailed.

“I told you, it is inwisible!” she roared.

I went up to my room in a funk, vowing to myself that my own children would be permitted to question the existence of anything, even their mother. I sat in my open bedroom window, telling myself sad little stories about orphans and runaways, sad because I wasn’t among them. A creaking rasp of cicadas gusted up from the wash in back of the house. I felt the wind leave a film of grit on my skin, mineral flecks in the hollows of my pores. I could almost smell it, like gunpowder, an acrid tang, and imagined that if I touched my face my fingers would come away sparkling. I listened to my mother crashing around downstairs like a beast whose thankless pup had bitten her milk-swollen teat.

Sitting in this seedy little room twenty years later, staring at the blank yellow page in front of me, I considered the burst of audacity that had caused me to set up that meeting with Gil Reeve on Monday. I had no superego at all; my mother had been wrong. I couldn’t believe that I’d taken that disk and erased the whole book from the computer’s hard drive. And I couldn’t believe that I was actually going to present myself at his office and demand some sort of ransom for the book. Maybe there were several different people inhabiting my body, not entirely unlike multiple-personality disorder; but rather than serving to repress some terrible childhood memory, my own pathology seemed to spring from the efforts of one haplessly ineffectual personality to dig out of some hole another equally hapless personality had landed in.

At five-thirty, it was time to go and wait for my mother on
the front steps of the Piermont House. I found the brochure she’d sent me, which I now recognized as a futile attempt to interest me in her work. She was at this very moment sitting on a “prominent panel of discussants” holding forth on the topic of “Messages from the Id: Preverbal Phenomena in the Analysis.” She probably would have been pleased, even delighted, if I’d told her I wanted to show up early to hear her lecture. Why hadn’t I thought of that?

The phone gave a precipitous jangle that set my teeth on edge. I snatched up the receiver. “Hello?” I said cautiously. It was probably one of the sneakier collection agencies.

“What’s wrong with you?” said William. “Why are you answering your phone?”

My heart did its usual trapeze routine. I forgave him completely for whatever he’d said last night. “It was making the most horrible noise,” I said.

“What are you doing right now?”

“I’m on my way to have dinner with my mother. Want to come?”

“No,” he said, “I’m too agitated. Will you come over later?”

“Why are you agitated?”

“Bring champagne.”

“What kind of champagne?”

“The kind you pop,” he said impatiently. “Come the minute you’re done with Gerda. Don’t dawdle.”

“I won’t dawdle, William,” I said. My voice sounded sparkly and ebullient; I couldn’t help it.

What was I wearing? Jeans, suitable for all occasions, my best pair, the ones that cleft where they should cleave and hung where they should hang, at least according to
Cosmopolitan
, which I consulted on all such weighty matters. Unfortunately I was also wearing a flowered shirt made of some slippery
man-made material, calculated to please my mother, who had given it to me; I hoped that the sight of it would help her get over whatever deep disappointment I was bound to cause her. William would just have to take me as I was. Not that he’d mind; not that he’d notice.

Clutching the flyer in one hand and a token in the other, I ran down the steps of the subway and almost collided with Margot Spencer, who was climbing them. “Hi,” I said, stopping reluctantly.

She stopped even more reluctantly. “Oh, hello, Claudia.” She said my name as if it were a venereal disease. She didn’t smile at me. She looked uncharacteristically ill-at-ease and her eyes bulged slightly, which meant that she was requiring herself to behave civilly because that was what one did, but she was finding it difficult.

“Well,” I said after an interminable silent staredown. “I’d better run. See you, Margot.”

Without a word, she turned on her heel and vanished. I went down the stairs and stood on the subway platform in a funk. A headlight plowing along a middle track lit the columns between the tracks, illuminating them and plunging them back into darkness as it passed. Then the express train appeared and streaked by, its windows filled with smug heads. My bowels had loosened in the icy shock of Margot’s goggle-eyed stare and were now urgently demanding to be voided, but short of losing a token and going back home, there was nothing to be done but clench my muscles and think about my date with William later. At his house. At his request. With champagne. I boarded the train that came nosing into the station on the heels of its swifter counterpart; a while later I emerged from underground into a golden, windless evening and goose-stepped rapidly to the Piermont House, which turned out to be a stately brownstone on West Fifty-seventh Street.

Although I’d had every intention of waiting on the steps, I had to go inside to use the ladies’ room. When I came out, I saw, at the end of the rather dim, coat-filled entryway, the glowing glass panels of old-fashioned French doors. Since I just happened to be passing by, I eased one open a crack and peered in. The room looked as if it had been the parlor back in the days when a family had lived here. Past the backs of the balding and blue-tinged heads of the audience, I saw my mother behind a long table with the other panelists. I’d imagined tiers of alert, professional faces in a big modern auditorium; there couldn’t have been more than forty-odd people present, including the panelists and me. I saw a few canes propped against chairs, heard wheezing and the shriek of a hearing aid. In this crowd, my mother looked youthful.

She was speaking. Her voice sounded strong and fullthroated. I slid into an empty chair in the last row. She leaned forward, her forefinger in the air, her glasses glinting; her voice rose in pitch and volume the way it always did when she was engrossed in her own ideas. And, as always when she was thus engrossed, I found that my mind automatically became a dark wet-walled cave around which her lecture bounced and echoed and resounded nonsensically.