In the Drink (5 page)

“You’re going to work here?”

“No,” he said. “I brought it to fool my conscience. As long as it’s with me, I’m safe.” He had a crease in each cheek, not exactly dimples, but hollows that deepened when he smiled. I felt light-headed, as if I’d inhaled a balloonful of helium. I exhaled but it didn’t go away. “Those old-boy fucks,” he was saying now; I’d been watching his mouth with involuntary hunger instead of listening to what he was saying, and so had missed the topic change, but I suspected that he was referring
to the senior partners at his firm. “They cornholed each other at Choate, married each other’s sisters, they probably borrow each other’s clothes. Every day I have to go to the men’s room and look in the mirror and say to myself, I’m as good as anyone from a Connecticut charm school. But even though I look and talk and dress just like them, and now I even take a leak just like them, they know I’m an outsider, they can smell it in my DNA.”

“How do they take a leak?”

“Like soldiers. Shoulders squared, weapon in hand, ready, aim, fire. I used to just slouch and dribble at the urinal like a wild animal until I noticed someone looking at me funny. Regulation pissing! Can you believe it?” He shook his head, half angry, half proud of himself.

“I have to watch Jackie on the john, too. What’s up with that?”

“Speaking of Jackie, I ran into Margot the other day.”

I smiled uneasily. “Really? How was she?”

“She was unfriendly. Well, not unfriendly exactly. Sort of polite and distracted. After about two minutes she said, ‘Well, nice seeing you again.’ Nice seeing you again. Like I was some asshole who had tried to pick her up at a party.” He studied his hands, which were cupping his glass and rolling it back and forth against the table. “Next time you talk to her, maybe you could ask her what I’ve done to offend her.”

“William, we aren’t friends. If it weren’t for Jackie, we would have nothing to talk about. Anyway, speaking of Jackie, she gave me another lecture today about American girls. So what if I didn’t grow up knowing a bunch of dukes and earls and viscounts? In what way are viscounts useful?”

“They’re like peacocks. They can’t sing, and you can’t eat them, but they look great in the yard.” He took a mouthful of whiskey and held it on his tongue with a sensual grimace that
should have made me tell him to cut out the yuppie affectation but instead ignited the little pilot light in my loins. “Ian Macklowe’s secretary just quit, in case you’re interested.”

“Ian Macklowe,” I said. A wave of depression crested and broke over my head. “That senior partner who gets three-hundred-dollar haircuts? Who buys his girlfriend hundred-dollar pairs of white cotton underwear? I can’t work for that scumbag. My God!”

“You’d make fifty grand a year,” said William. “I’d recommend you even though you keep telling me what a shitty secretary you are. You can type, can’t you?”

“I’d be totally miserable.”

“You’re miserable now.”

“What do you mean? I’m writing a book. I can’t just leave.”

He looked at his glass, which was almost empty, and then at mine. “Well, there’s always the next round. You in?”

“Why not.”

We smiled at each other. To keep myself from leaping at him and devouring him alive, I looked over at Wanda, who was upending a case of Rolling Rock into a bin of ice. Her features were crumpled with the effort into a dented button at the center of the vast white pillow formed by her brow, cheeks and chin. If I had expected the sight of her to steady me, I was disappointed; I floated on a heady, expanding current that almost lifted me from my chair.

“Well hello, you two,” said a voice above us, a sharp clear needle piercing the roar. Gus Fleury. His hair was slicked artfully back from his brow in one cohesive wave. A veneer of sweat gleamed on his sharp face. His hair gleamed; his sharkskin jacket gleamed. He was drinking a thick concoction in a tall glass, a swirl of chalky pastel-colored liquids.

“What’s in that drink?” I asked. “It looks like barium.”

“Crème de this, crème de that,” he said, seating himself at
our table. He had emerald-green, almond-shaped eyes, which he widened or narrowed as necessary for maximum theatrical effect. “Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of a Vanderbilt, Claudia.”

The moment, or whatever it had been just now with William, had evaporated. “I bet you haven’t,” said William. “How’s it going, Augustine?”

“If you call me that again, I swear I’ll put a contract out on you, and I have connections, as you’ll hear. I’m in a complete panic, thank you. I’m trolling desperately for a new site for my play. It was supposed to go up next week.”

In the mid-eighties, during his final semester at NYU film school, Gus had shot a low-budget movie about East Village drag queens,
Apocalipstick
, which became an art-house hit, won a prize at Sundance and was snapped up by a major distributor; he’d made an additional small fortune from foreign, video and cable TV rights. Because he had invested all this money wisely, he now had the luxury of producing one “original” play after another without having to worry about overhead or profit or the opinions of downtown-weekly theater critics, one of whom had described his work as “precious, icky tripe” and another of whom had written, “The show began with a snot-nosed, self-important whimper, and I have no idea how it ended, because I ran away.”

“We had a factory building in Dumbo,” he was saying, “but last week the owners, two Jersey wiseguys who wouldn’t know artistic integrity if it kneecapped them, heard there was nudity involved. They told me, and I quote, ‘No naked fags or no deal.’ I told them she’s not technically a man any more, but that cut no ice with Dom and Vinnie, and I frankly didn’t want to end up feetfirst in a bucket of concrete at the bottom of the East River. So we’re homeless now.”

“A lot of plays have naked men in them all of a sudden,” I
said to no one in particular. “I don’t get it. Women can be nude and in total command of the situation, but men without their clothes on look like wet cats. I think Eve ate the apple to give Adam a little dignity.”

“The Waste Land: A Musical Tragedy,”
said Gus to William. “I wrote the music, for synthesizer and drum machine, very seventies, a sort of disco extravaganza. The text speaks so clearly to that whole era, you know what I mean?”

“No,” said William, “I don’t have a clue. All I read is law crap. Come on, Gus, give us a few bars.”

“Let’s see.” Gus made a show of resting his pointer finger against his cheek and rolling his eyes ceilingward while he mentally scanned the score. Then he took a deep breath and whined in a breathy Bee-Gees falsetto, wagging his head to indicate the drum-machine beat, “ ‘Here is no water but only rock, rock and no water and the sandy road. Here is no water but oh-honely rock, rock and no water and the sa-handy road.’ ”

I laughed. William didn’t.

“Eliot’s text is
chillingly
apropos,” said Gus piously. “ ‘I had not thought death had undone so many,’ for example, and the drowned sailor, the sterility, the aura of decay. ‘Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.’ ”

“Apropos of what?” I asked. “Disco? I don’t get it.”

Gus turned to me as if he’d forgotten I was there, which he probably had. “Of course, Claudia,” he said, “you
have
heard of metaphor.”

Now William laughed. I looked away as if I’d just seen something mildly interesting at the bar, even though there was a hockey game on TV and Wanda was sitting on a stool in the back, smoking a cigarillo and reading the
Post
. Gus talked on and on, but I wasn’t listening; I wasn’t even pretending to.

“Blah blah blah, me me me,” he said after a while, as if to
sum up the essence of his personality in six words for anyone who hadn’t caught on yet, then rested his chin on his hand and gazed at William through intensely green, deeply interested eyes. “So what have you been up to, career boy?”

“Not much,” said William. “Churning out the bullshit, billing the hours.”

“Stalking the paralegals,” I blurted; I was in the grip of a merry recklessness and something else, a hard emptiness underneath the whiskey glow that made me finish what was left of my drink in one gulp and smile edgily at no one.

“Watch out,” said William, nudging Gus, “she’s on the warpath tonight.”

“I’m not that bad,” I said defensively. Then I saw by the startled look that flickered across his face that he’d only been teasing me back. “Oh,” I said with a brittle laugh. I closed my eyes for a second and felt the room begin a slow reel, then opened them again and squinted at Gus, who gave a wide-eyed start, as if he’d just remembered something of enormous interest and couldn’t wait to share it.

“Have you heard the good news about Margot?”

“What good news?” asked William.

“Her memoir just won the Clark Foundation Award,” said Gus. “It was totally unexpected. A bolt from the blue. It couldn’t have happened to a better person.”

Steep black cliffs closed in on me from the corners of the room. “That’s a lot of money, isn’t it?” I asked. My voice sounded hollow.

“Not to mention the prestige,” said Gus. “She can pretty much write her own ticket from here on in.”

“Can she,” I said. I felt him monitoring me for my reaction, and did my best to look unperturbedly back at him. There was a smudge of mascara on his lower left eyelid, but I didn’t tell him.

“That’s amazing!” said William. “Good for her. She deserves it.” I heard in his voice equal parts respect, wistfulness and affection.

I burst out in a harsh voice, “She probably knows someone on the committee.”

They looked at me.

“That’s how it works. Of course she’s a good writer, but it’s amazing the way she seems to have connections to everyone who can help her. She schmoozes like the rest of us breathe. She’s known all the right people since she was born.” With an enormous effort, I made myself shut up.

“Is that so,” said Gus. He studied me for a moment with a canny appraisal that made me cast about for a way to modify what I had said. I didn’t look at William; I hadn’t been able to look at him since he’d laughed at me.

“She’s lucky,” is what I came up with. “We need all the help we can get.”

Gus raised his eyebrows at me over the top of his glass. “We certainly do,” he said. He drained the last drops of his drink; the ice cubes rattled against his teeth. A peculiar look crossed his face then, a flicker of queasy self-doubt. “Excuse me just a moment,” he said. He set his glass, empty now except for a sticky adherence, on the table, and stood up. The bar had become very crowded in the last few minutes. He leaned into the press of bodies behind him until they parted enough for him to insert himself and disappear among them.

“FYI, Claudia,” said William, “there’s no such drink as a Vanderbilt. He loves to make people feel like barn animals for not having heard of something he’s just invented.”

“How hilarious that must be for him,” I said. FYI? Did he think he was writing me a memo? “Why are you friends with him?”

“Why is anyone friends with anyone?” he said mildly, and went off to buy another round. Behind the bar, a string of flashing colored lights pulsed like tiny hearts right where real hearts would have been if the bottles of alcohol had been human figures. High overhead, propellers mixed air with smoke and sent it downward; faces bloomed in the dim light, talking and sending smoke ceilingward. A country song ambled out of the jukebox. The metallic plaint of the slide guitar stirred up a squall in my chest; the whiskey spread a thick, fuck-it-all paralysis through me that made me go limp in my chair. I was so envious of Margot my arms ached, but it was the pure, hopeless envy of a paraplegic watching an Olympic runner win another gold.

Oh, buck the hell up, I told myself. What would it matter in a hundred years? It would all be over by then; maybe no one would even be around to know or care. We were all just shoring fragments against our ruins.

The jukebox went silent. Where was William? God, I loved him. The same hopeless paraplegic feeling doused me again. The process by which men and women fell in love and coupled off had always been about as clear to me as quadratic equations or Masonic rites. I’d grown up without being exposed to many actual men besides teachers, who didn’t really count. I had cobbled together a composite picture for myself out of the limited source material at hand. My mother had naturally weighed in heavily with the opinion that the male sex was a lower order without common sense or the capacity to behave responsibly, but Gothic novels and fairy tales had inculcated in me the equally strong but contrary expectation that either a prince of some kind would carry me off to his castle or Mr. Rochester would eventually marry me if I waited for him to go blind. By the time I was eight years old, I’d absorbed the idea that courtship
and marriage happened when the perfect man came along and chose you from the lineup. All you could do, as the girl, was stand there and wait.

After living for so many years with such precise and deeply ingrained expectations, being confronted with an actual flesh-and-blood man was like trying to understand a spoken foreign language whose dictionary I had read. Every now and then I caught a glimpse of a familiar word, but these brief flashes of comprehension never evolved into an ongoing conversation. Getting drunk and having sex with strangers seemed to open lines of communication in a physical, temporary sense, but I never remembered afterwards whatever it was I’d learned. William and I were friends, but there seemed to be no bridge between friendship and romance.

The jukebox exploded; the crowd yelled at each other, blowing smoke. I looked around in a panic, feeling as if my eight-year-old self had been whizzed through the intervening years and set down here at George’s, alone and drunk.

William returned then from the other direction. I took the fresh glass of cold whiskey he offered me and took a sip; it tasted like cold sweat. “Thanks,” I said. “This is the last thing I need, but thanks.”

“Where’s Gus?” he said. He looked around, puzzled, as if the presence of Gus weren’t an odious burden to be avoided at all costs. The whiskey rose in my gorge, now tasting like bile.