In the Drink (6 page)

“The Waste Land: A Musical Tragedy,”
I said passionately. “How pretentious can you get? He’s so fucking full of himself.”

“I’m back,” came a voice from just above our heads. Then Gus seated himself primly, sipping from a brand-new Vanderbilt.

“There you are,” said William.

“This play is just not going to happen,” said Gus. He
looked frustrated. “No one can give me any leads. There is no available space in all of New York City.”

“You can use my apartment, if it comes to that,” said William.

Gus put his arm around William’s neck and kissed his cheek. “Is he the most beautiful thing you ever saw?” he asked me.

I nodded mutely, aware of the electric proximity, under the table, of William’s leg to mine; I pulled my knee away from his just before it made contact. When we’d finished our new drinks, William said, stretching and yawning, “Well, kids, time to go and do my homework.”

“Pity you can’t stay,” said Gus. “I think I’ll drift over to the bar and chat up that blond boy who’s been giving me the eye.”

“Are you going toward the subway?” I asked William.

“Sure,” he said. “I’ll meet you outside; I’ve got to go to the john.”

“By the way, Claudia,” Gus said as I was putting on my coat, “maybe you should come and see
The Waste Land
before you decide it’s pretentious. You just might be surprised.” His pointy dog teeth stabbed his lower lip. We exchanged a frank look; I recognized in his expression the fact that he didn’t like or respect me very much, either.

For some reason, now that the animosity between us was out in the open, I was filled with a sudden strange goodwill toward him. “Fair enough,” I said. “And good luck with the blond.”

“Some people don’t need luck,” he said, batting his eyes.

“We all do, remember?” I said, and made my way out of the bar to the sidewalk, where I took deep breaths to clear my lungs. Rain dropped out of a white sky and ran through the gutters. I hadn’t brought an umbrella; icy raindrops struck my
forehead and trickled into my eyes and went down the back of my coat collar.

As I turned to the plate-glass window that fronted the bar, I thought I saw blue light sliding along the top of an oily pompadour right next to William’s face. William’s eyes were closed, and he was smiling. It looked as if Gus had his face buried in William’s shoulder, but the air was smoky, and the crowd was thick. I shook my head to clear it, then looked into the bar again just as William emerged through the door a moment later. “Sorry,” he said, “there was a line.”

I felt even drunker out here in the cold, wet, windy street, like a marionette lurching loose-jointedly along. We were walking along St. Marks Place, past basement boutiques, fluorescent-lit fast-food joints, a fleabag hotel. We dodged a clump of drifting Trustafarians, their pimply teenaged suburban skin pierced, tattooed, track-marked, dirt-encrusted. “Hey,” I blurted with soggy belligerence to one tall, emaciated lad who stepped into my path, or maybe I stepped into his. “Go home to your mother.”

“Steady there.” William steered me away with his hand on my elbow.

I leaned against him. “What was Gus doing to your neck?”

“When?”

“Like a vampire, right before you came out of the bar.”

“Gus is a vampire.”

“Well, it was disgusting,” I said, but without much heat; I didn’t care what we said as long as I was leaning against him. I slid my arm around his waist and he rested his arm across my shoulders; through the layers of his clothes and coat his body felt sturdy but malleable, as if it could hold its own against mine but would accommodate anything I cared to do to him. One of his shirt buttons bumped against my tooth. I closed my
eyes dreamily, gave myself over to a haze of happiness, and let him lead me. He didn’t seem to mind.

When he brought us to a stop I opened my eyes. We were, I saw, on the island at Cooper Square, standing at the curb, waiting for the light to cross Lafayette.

“Do you want me to get you a cab?” he said.

“Let me just stand here for a minute.”

“Okay, but don’t fall asleep, because I don’t think I can carry you home.”

“I would never ask you to,” I murmured contentedly.

The light changed and people flowed by us, but we made no move to cross. We were swaying a little, holding each other upright. I put my face on his neck, right where Gus’s face had been. I nuzzled my nose against him and closed my eyes. His pulse beat under my mouth, intimate and strange. It felt wonderful; my breathing slowed. I drank in the smell of his skin, raised my hand to the back of his neck and crushed the bristly hairs at the nape. I felt his head move against mine, heard the crackle of hair in my ears, the crunch of his coat. When I looked up at him, his face was a blur, his eyes one long eye. When I moved my mouth closer to his, a warm, living, pliant creature surrendered itself to my lips fleetingly and was gone. It happened so fast I wasn’t sure I hadn’t imagined it. Then we were standing a few feet apart, looking at each other. “Whoa,” he said, laughing. “What was that?”

My face was burning; the cold rain felt good on it. The memory of his mouth recoiling from mine replayed itself viscerally. My mind felt as if a dark curtain had gone down in it. “I’m sorry, I just couldn’t help it,” I said, or meant to say; my words were probably indistinct, because my mouth wasn’t working right. “I can’t believe we’ve known each other for—why haven’t we ever slept together?”

“Claudia,” he said with a gleam in his eye, a rakish deflecting flash of—not amusement, surely, I must have been imagining it, “you are smashed.”

“Could you hail me a cab?”

He raised his arm at the oncoming traffic and a taxi shot to the curb. He handed me into it, gave the driver a bill and told him my address. “Keep a good tip, and give her the change,” he told the driver. When the man began to protest, William said, “Hey. You have change. It’s a rainy night. Take care, Claudia, I’ll call you tomorrow.” He shut the car door and went off into the night, heading down the middle of Lafayette with his coat-tails billowing behind him, his briefcase bumping against his leg. Where was he going? He lived way up on York in the East Nineties.

Colored lights blurred together in one long streak all the way uptown. The driver stopped in front of my building, hit the meter, and turned on the overhead light. I waited passively, relaxed in the warmth of the cab, for what I didn’t know. He handed me some money and I waved it away. My head lolled against the high back of the seat. “That’s all right,” I said, as if I were the Queen of Sheba, which was how I needed to feel.

“But he gave me a hundred bucks.” He pushed the wad of bills at me.

Oh, William. He couldn’t afford that. His mortgage and law-school loan payments made my own debts look like a joke. Did he think I was some kind of charity case? Damn him. Fuck him, in fact.

“Keep it,” I said regally, as if it were too much of a nuisance to have to cope with change so late at night. The moment I got out of the cab, it tore off down the street and slid, fast, around the corner. I lurched to the front door of my building and fumbled with my keys. I took the stairs slowly, pausing on my way up to lean my head against the wall. At the top of the
second flight I sat down on the landing and leaned against the wall and stared at the earwax-yellow paint of the stairwell. I couldn’t face my apartment. All those unopened envelopes were still on the table where I’d left them. The cockroaches. The unmade bed.

Oh, shit, I thought, remembering. I stood up and climbed the stairs rapidly, dreading everything.

I came in: no roaches in sight, and no Delilah, but I knew they were all around somewhere. I stood in the middle of my room, feeling unspeakably lonesome. I don’t know exactly how long I stood there, but at some point, the phone rang. I went over to the telephone and picked up the receiver with a pang of joy. He was calling to apologize for laughing at me, for sending me home. To tell me he loved me.

“Claudia.”

“Ma?”

“Am I calling too late?” She always stayed up until the “wee-wee hours,” as she persisted in calling them, grading papers or reading the latest anti-Freudian propaganda and gritting her teeth.

“No,” I said. Oh, well. “How are you, Ma?”

“Oh, I’m all right,” she said, then added something in German,
which I pretended not to understand. “Everything all right with you?”

To my enormous shame, I heard myself asking her for a loan. “It’s just that my rent is overdue,” I said. “And I’m afraid he might actually evict me this time.”

She sighed. “Ja, liebchen, I can’t lend you any more money. It’s not that I can’t afford it; I don’t think it’s goot for you to owe me so much.”

She was absolutely right, as always, but I had never quite allowed it to register in my mind that she expected me to pay her back the same way Visa or my bank did. I’d always managed to lull myself into a false sense of immunity, assuming that simply because she was my mother, she might call it a loan but would staunchly wave me away if I ever actually tried to pay her back. Her expenses were nil, and her salary as a tenured psychology professor at a state university got bigger all the time. How expensive could acrylic sweaters be? How else was she going to spend her savings, if not on occasionally bailing out her ne’er-do-well daughter? I liked thinking of myself as her ne’er-do-well daughter; unfortunately, she didn’t.

“Maybe it might be time to find a better situation.” She was talking through a mouthful of something that sounded like oatmeal but was probably instant chocolate pudding. “Maybe it’s time to decide what you really want to do.”

Now we were at the heart of things. It had taken under a minute to get there. “I have a good job,” I said obdurately. “I’m writing a book.”

“I know how hard it is to establish a career as a young person,” she said as if writing a book were roughly on the same level as washing dishes in a diner. She had endless theories about youth and its attendant delusions and weaknesses; what would she tell herself about me in a couple of years when I
could no longer be considered a “young person” by any stretch of interpretation? What theory would she trot out then? “I did it myself, five years in that city, without anyone to help me, only hard work. I know exactly what it’s like.”

This was true; my mother had lived all through graduate school on powdered milk, and had lived in a room the size of an elevator, but this was meaningless to me right now. Her poverty was over, and mine was upon me. I listened mutely as her sergeant of a jaw put the spoon through its paces. She was wearing, I was sure, the usual green khaki flood pants and neon-bright acrylic sweater pulled straight down as far as it would stretch over her square mannish hips, not to hide them, but because she thought that was the way to wear a sweater.

“You know,” she went on, and I braced myself, because I knew many things, none of which I wanted to hear from her, “maybe it’s time to consider going to graduate school.”

“I don’t want to go to graduate school,” I said. I scratched my head to dissipate some of the pent-up static electricity in there; I knew all my lines for this conversation, even stone-drunk. “And I don’t think graduate school wants me. We have a mutual understanding.”

She laughed with the gruff formality of someone not used to joking around. “Anyway, I’m coming down to New York soon, there’s a conference. The first Saturday in April. Maybe you might have time for dinner with your old mother? Not too many dates with all the hendsome men?”

“Of course I have time,” I said. “We can go to that Ukrainian place you like, remember?”

“Oh, they’re all alike, all the cockroaches they got back there, no one washing hands. Better maybe we should stay in, better we cook for ourselves, you’re probably too busy that night anyhow.”

“If you want, we could eat at my place, but my kitchen isn’t much, remember.”

“I’m not sure whether we’ll go late, in which case I don’t want to keep you waiting, so we might as well wait until the next night if you can do it then. I wouldn’t be able to concentrate, knowing you were standing out there, so hungry.”

“I live here. I can distract myself. I like to watch people. I’ll be okay.”

And so it went, for five more minutes or so, until finally she agreed that if the conference went late she could assuage her conscience with the knowledge that I’d buy myself a hot dog. “On the steps, then,” she said.

“Six o’clock.”

“Or later.”

“Or later, it doesn’t matter how much,” I said.

All of our conversations, even in better times, were patterned according to an identical blueprint. She pushed me to the brink of my patience but never quite over it, and I hid behind a shield of grim daughterly cheer that kept her at bay but never pushed her away entirely. With just the slightest increase of pressure from either side, the phone line would have sizzled and shrunk like a lit fuse toward both of us.

After I mouthed a farewell and we hung up, I noticed that the light on my answering machine was blinking. I pressed the play button with a lump high in my throat. Jackie’s voice rasped out at me like the croak of some awful bird.

“Claudia,” she said; I felt my ribs tighten around my lungs, “I just remembered something else I meant to ask you when I called earlier, but I can’t think right now what it was. You must come straight in and see me first thing tomorrow. I know it’s very important, something you’ll have to do right away.”