In the Drink (31 page)

The Adult Editorial Department of Wilder and Sons, Publishers, was on the sixteenth floor of a medium-sized skyscraper. I landed in an overstuffed violet chair in the waiting room. The receptionist was so charismatically ugly I stared at her as directly as I could without offending her: her upper lip beaked over her lower, her hooded eyes were set in dark rings, and her head emerged from between her shoulder blades. She whispered into the phone; audible words stood out from the general hiss in twos and threes: “told her yet … he’s been so … just awful … screaming like a …” I strained to hear the rest.

William hadn’t called me and I hadn’t called him, and now it was Monday and my whole chest felt aching and bruised, as if it had been pummeled from the inside repeatedly and determinedly.

I shared the plush violet waiting area with three others,
a bald sunburned man with a paprika beard who looked as though he could have captained the
Kon-Tiki;
an intensely thin woman quivering slightly like a greyhound, black fedora artfully crowning a long silver sheet of hair; and a young babyish man with pursed lips. They shared an eerie conformity of self-absorption, like figures in a wax museum or a lunatic asylum. The receptionist’s phone bleated twice. “Hold on a second. Yes? Okay, I’ll tell her.” She looked over at me with eyes like black ancient stones over which the hinged hemispheres of her eyelids slid together and apart. “Claudia Steiner? Janine will be right out.”

I gathered my bag and coat and made sure my blouse was buttoned properly. A fat, red-haired young woman appeared in the doorway. “Claudia?” she said doubtfully to the woman with aluminum-foil hair.

“Janine?” I said with equal skepticism.

“Oh!” she said, and laughed. “You’re Claudia. Come on in.”

The framed book jacket of
The High-Heeled Gumshoe
hung halfway along the hallway she led me through. On the front was an artfully out-of-focus photograph of a model who was supposed to be the young Genevieve. She wore a formfitting sheath that gloved her bony frame; her fashionable slouch made her hipbones jut upward at an angle. An absinthe-colored wash (foggy rain, overhead streetlamp) gave her skin a hepatitic tinge. She appeared to be too weak to stand up straight, burdened by the demands of her genre.

Gil Reeve was exactly as I’d thought he’d be: choleric, well padded, his face mottled like a good rump roast. Small crimson veins spidered along the bulb of his nose and threaded through the whites of his eyes. He offered me a warm, thick hand, which I shook with a nervous expression I did my best to ameliorate into a smile. I felt tongue-tied and woolly-headed.

“So you are an ingenue after all,” he said in that mellow, ironic drawl I knew so well. “Come on in.”

He closed the door of his office behind us.

“Thanks so much for agreeing to meet with me on such short notice,” I said as I sank into a chair that seemed to have no bottom. My knees rose around my ears; I resisted the urge to flail. I pulled myself out and moved over one seat to the right, tugging my skirt down.

He leaned back in his own chair, his neat football of a stomach rolling a little under his shirt. “What can I do for you?”

I wrestled momentarily with the slippery eel that was my reason for being here, then pulled from my bag the computer disk I’d stolen from Jackie. I held it up. He peered at it over his reading glasses. The sudden meaty impassiveness of his face made me feel as if I had to talk very loudly to penetrate it.

“This contains the only copy of Jackie’s new book,” I said.

“I was hoping she’d deliver it in the usual way.”

“She doesn’t have it any more,” I said. “I took it with me when she fired me. I didn’t steal it, because it’s mine. I wrote it. Here.”

I pulled out the agreement I’d signed three years ago and offered it to him, prepared to explain that it wasn’t legally binding, but instead of taking it, he swiveled around in his chair to face the window. I waited. His phone buzzed three times and then stopped. Down in the street, an ambulance wailed against a honking wall of traffic. I thought of the passenger, dying in all that noise. Then I noticed that the top of Gil’s head was bouncing gently; I heard a small snort, like the sound of a bathtub plug being pulled. When he turned back around, his eyebrows were still knit with mirth, although the rest of his face was all business.

“I take it,” he said dryly, “that you’re here to sell me the book.”

We looked right at each other for a brief moment of charged silence. “Look,” I said. “How would you feel if someone else had been taking credit for your work for three years? I know she paid me, I know it was the deal from the beginning. But—” This wasn’t coming out right. I started all over again. “You know I can write,” I said earnestly. “Jackie’s books are the proof.”

He burst out laughing.

I had to laugh a little too. “Okay,” I said, “but at least you know I can string words together. Eventually I want to write my own books, but for now I’d settle for some money in exchange for this disk. Nothing major. Just enough to bail me out.”

He silenced me with a raised hand. “First of all,” he said crisply, “the shocking fact that you wrote this book and the one before it is pretty much common knowledge. Second, if you were anticipating my slavering thirst to get my hands on that manuscript you might be disappointed to learn that the general public is finding accounts of unapologetically lavish lifestyles increasingly distasteful. It’s not the eighties any more; the tide has turned. People don’t care about the super-rich unless they’re incest survivors or alcoholics or lost all their money. We don’t forward negative letters to Jackie, but they’re becoming fairly regular. In fact, a certain amount of energy has gone into protecting her from several unpleasant truths, among them the fact that this will be her last book, and it won’t earn out a tenth of its advance. Also, she’s becoming something of a laughingstock among our younger editorial staff. It would be a relief, frankly, if she were unable to meet the terms of her contract. Of course, in that case, she would be required to
return her advance. Her agent is aware of this situation; I gather that she herself is not.”

I opened and closed my mouth.

“It goes without saying that if she submits an acceptable draft, we will abide by our agreement and publish it.”

“I see.”

“You may find that she’s willing to listen to whatever terms you’ve come up with. I think you’re wasting your time here.”

“Poor Jackie,” I said in a rush.

He nodded over his bifocals. We looked at each other for a moment. I felt like a wriggling bug at the business end of a microscope.

“Thank you for meeting with me,” I said, and stood up. He shook the hand I extended to him, but I wondered whether he wiped his own hand on a napkin as soon as I’d left his office. I wouldn’t have blamed him.

The receptionist was talking once again with great intensity into her telephone. The chairs were all empty now. As I went by her desk, I was pierced by the keen ray of her gaze: here she sat, as steady as a turtle in the maelstrom of her life. I went soberly out to the elevator.

I walked over to Fifth Avenue and made my way up to Fifty-ninth Street to sit for a while on a bench at the bottom edge of Central Park. Nearly bare trees struggled out of the mud, their branches fuzzed with the tenderest green. Horses stood in line along the sidewalk, hitched to buggies, minding their own unfathomable business and shitting at will, big soft grassy dumps that billowed against the asphalt. A flock of pigeons lifted off into the trees like one huge bird that shattered to bits against the underside of the branches. A man lay upwind of me on another bench. He smelled like grapefruit or paint thinner, the bitter metallic stench of ketones, un-metabolized
alcohol digesting his body from within. Some biochemist I’d met in a bar had explained the process to me. I felt a rush of fear, thinking of the chain of events that had brought him to this pass.

After a while, I crossed the street to the small plaza where the garish bright-gold monument to General Sherman stood. I circled it a few times, compelled by its frank gilded vulgarity, and by the giant testicles dangling from the general’s stallion. A black pigeon perched like a winged helmet on the top of the general’s bright-gold head, unfazed by the evident speed at which his horse galloped behind the swiftly flying angel leading Sherman God knew where. She held an olive branch that looked like a gigantic feather, and she looked sly, as if she knew something Sherman didn’t. I thought for a moment about various kinds of victory: pyrrhic, hollow, hard-won, certain, winged, final.

The memory of my meeting with Gil was like a tribe of stinging ants just under my skin. I decided to walk all the way uptown. As I strode through the fresh blue evening, I permitted myself to imagine that I was a nice, well-adjusted, gainfully employed person going home to William, who’d made something homey and nourishing for dinner, roast chicken and steamed broccoli, and had opened a bottle of good red wine. On the whole, as fantasies went, this one was pretty good. It acted like a jet pack on my back; before I knew it I had walked nearly all the way home. But it all crash-landed as I stood in line at the corner Chinese take-out place and read the menu I already knew by heart, having eaten everything on it at least three times.

I trudged up the stairs to my apartment carrying my white paper bag of overcooked vegetables in slimy gray goo. I kicked my door open and strode into my little domain, turned on the light and beheld several fat, calm roaches nosing their unruffled
way along the floor, the sink edge, the counter, the wall. I stamped my foot and they vanished reluctantly and desultorily, without fear. I had been deposed, toppled, eliminated from their cosmogony in the course of one day.

Delilah lay right smack dab in the middle of my bed, licking herself. Her mouth on her nether parts made a wet clicking noise that disturbed me intensely.

And there were no blinks on my answering machine. The light held steady, like a watchful eye looking straight into my soul.

I set my bag of food on the table and reached for the phone.

Frieda answered, laughing, on the first ring. Her voice sounded warm and ardent. “Oh good, I’m so glad you called back, I forgot to tell you—”

“Frieda?”

She paused. “Who is this?”

“It’s Claudia.”

“Claudia, oh my God, hi!”

“Is this a bad time?”

“No, no, how are you?”

“I’m—I’m okay. How are you?”

“Great.”

There was a silence. The wires hummed. “How’s Cecil?”

“Great. Things are just great. I feel so boring now. I have not that much to report. Isn’t happiness dull?”

“I wouldn’t know,” I said with a wry laugh. It came out wrong.

Her voice changed immediately to a treacly coo. “Oh no, really? Why, what’s wrong?”

“Forget it. Tell me what’s going on with you. How’s your work?”

“Remember all those things I kept picking up off the street?
Well, I’ve started a whole new series, using them. They’re supposed to be funny and beautiful, though, not some heavy moralistic eco-thing. I feel like I’m making finger paintings and mud pies again.”

“I sense Cecil’s influence,” I said, trying to keep my tone light. It was very difficult. I felt sour and jealous and lonely.

“Damn it, everyone keeps saying that. Like I can’t change on my own?”

“I feel like we haven’t talked in years, Frieda.”

“The phone works both ways, you know,” she said, but lightly.

“You’re right,” I said. “I’m sorry I haven’t called. Do you want to get together sometime soon?”

“Actually, we’re leaving for San Francisco first thing tomorrow morning. Cecil’s band has a gig there, and then we’re taking a little vacation. Maybe we’ll rent a car and drive up the coast and go camping.”

I couldn’t say anything for a minute. I could see the two of them sitting shoulder-to-shoulder by a campfire on the beach. The cliffs along Highway 1. The fog, the Pacific, the stars, the golden light. “Well, roast a weenie for me. Have a great time, Frieda, I mean it. I’m so happy for you.”

“Thanks,” she said, her voice softening. “I’m sorey I haven’t called you in so long. It’s just, I don’t know, things have changed.”

“You mean you’ve been taken over by aliens and forced to behave like half a happy couple.”

“I’ll give you a call when I get back.”

When I hung up and turned around to look at the bed, Delilah was still there. She was watching me as steadily as the answering-machine light, but she had two eyes to its one, and hers could really see. I sat down next to her cautiously. She stayed where she was. I touched her spine with my fingertips. I
stroked her, once and then again. A few strands of fur rose and hung there, riding the current. She lay back on her haunches and slid her eyes half-shut, licked her chops, and then began to purr. I barely breathed as I nuzzled my hand around her ears, and when she butted her head against my hand I almost burst into tears.

When I awoke, I was curled around an empty space on the bed; the whole place reeked of vegetable chow mein. I stretched, got up and threw the take-out bag into the garbage, found my keys and wallet, put on a jacket and went out. I threw the garbage in the can on the sidewalk and headed toward Broadway.

I took myself out to dinner at a bistro on a corner, where I was shown to a cozy little table with a lit candle in a glass jar and cloth napkins; the waiter whisked away the other place setting and presented me with a menu as thick as a program. I didn’t need to look at it; I knew what I wanted. After a salad of baby greens and a glass of the Cabernet the maître d’ had recommended, I tucked into a plate of roast chicken with mashed potatoes and broccoli. I finished with a mousse au chocolat and a snifter of an old brandy so potent it almost vaporized on my lips. When I’d eaten and drunk everything, I put down my napkin and signaled for the check. When it came I glanced at it without blanching, paid in cash and tipped generously.

I strolled down to Times Square, looking into the faces of the people I passed as if I were new in town and had never seen anyone like them before. As I made my way back up Broadway, I passed a movie theater showing something I wanted to see; by chance, the last showing started in fifteen minutes. I bought a ticket, went in and found a seat, and sat quietly, thinking my thoughts, until the lights went down and the movie started.