Valley of Ashes (17 page)

Bittler smirked at him, pleased. “One of the Marine Corps guards says, ‘Nice dog, Mr. President. Is he new?’ ”

I took a nice, long, deep sip of cold gin.

“ ‘Why, he sure is,’ says Bill…”

Bittler’s “Clinton” was half asthma, half Gomer Pyle.

He gave the imaginary dog a pat on the head. “ ‘In fact,’ says Bill, ‘I got the little fella for Hillary.’ ”

Well, this martini wasn’t going to drink itself. I took another gulp.

“The marine smiles and salutes,” said Bittler, right hand now snapping crisply to his forehead. “ ‘Congratulations, Mr. President.
Excellent
trade.’ ”

This was greeted by a Stooge-ian
Nyuk-nyuk
chorus of appreciation from around the table, with a second wave of reprise guffaws from the visiting dignitaries once Setsuko had finished translating.

Bittler, meanwhile, was getting loudly high-fived by his frat-boy lackey.

“Another drink?” asked Cary.

“Please
God
,” I said.

He raised two fingers in a Churchillian vee and I swear our waiter rematerialized within a nanosecond.

The guy was ostensibly gifting the important end of the table with a full fifth of Johnnie Walker Blue, but even so he gave Cary a nod and shortly bustled backward toward the bar on our behalf.

Bittler lurched to his feet beside me, fixated on that bottle of Johnnie Walker.

I figured he’d be shunned by the heavies down there, but they thought he was a regular laugh riot—their very own Dean Martin, deserving of a very full glass and lots of hearty
Kanpai!
s to ensure he drank it down quickly.

Bittler didn’t disappoint.

The big boss raised his own bottle to offer him a refill, laughing his ass off.

Bittler shoved between Dean and Setsuko, reaching across the table until his glass rattled against the boss’s bottle.

He wobbled badly, pawing at Dean’s shoulder with his free hand until he got a decent grip.

Mr. Boss uncapped the bottle, grinning, then slyly pulled it out of reach when Bittler pushed forward with his glass.

“Someone should feed these people before things get
ugly
,” I said.

Bittler swayed forward… back… forward… the crowd’s volume of encouragement swelling/fading/swelling as he arced through each gyration.

“Oh!” said Mr. Boss, snatching the bottle away once more. “So
close
that time!”

Frat puppy was up on his feet, applauding.

Everyone else was red-faced with laughter, some pounding the table.

Well, not Setsuko, of course, but even Dean was trying to look wildly amused, despite Bittler’s death grip on his shoulder.

I sucked down more gin and glanced at Cary, who was looking about as enthralled as I felt.

“Dude,” I said, “you need to be
laughing
. Serious bad employment juju if you don’t join in, right? Not to mention Bittler will probably shank you at the Xerox machine.”

“Say something funny.”

I gave him a little elbow nudge to the ribs. “Ten bucks Bittler cops a Setsuko-boob feel at the very
moment
Mr. Boss finally pours him a drink.”

“Sucker bet,” said Cary, lifting his beer, teeth bared in a totally lame smile.

“
Totally
lame smile, my friend. Like, transparent.”

“Be funnier.”

“How many Dada-Surrealists does it take to change a lightbulb?”

“I don’t know.”

“The
fish
.”

“Not helping,” said Cary, gulping beer as camouflage.

“Oh! Poor Setsuko!” I said, wincing.

“What?”

“Bittler just nailed her with a full-on groin grind to the shoulder, right as he was getting his Scotch poured.”

“
Harsh
,” said Cary, wincing right along with me.

“They should give her a huge fucking bonus for this. She totally deserves it.” I raised my martini glass in her honor, then drained it.

“You, Madeline,” Cary said, looking at me very seriously, “are a very nice person.”

“I just hate seeing people treated like shit, is all.”

“They want to send her home.”

“Setsuko?”

He nodded.

“Why the hell would they do that?” I asked. “She’s really good at all this crap.”

“She’s almost twenty-five. Time to trade her in for a dewier model.”

“The whole ‘office flower’ thing? Are you fucking kidding me?”

“Not at all,” he said.

“Isn’t that illegal, here?”

“Well, all they have to do is not back her up on the visa extension, make some excuse.”

“Does she want to go?”

“She thinks she’s a freak in Japan. She’s so tall, you know?”

“Oh, come on, she’s hardly ripe for the WNBA.”

“Over there, she’s huge.”

“So we need to keep her here.”

The woman bored the shit out of me, but still.

Cary did the Churchill thing again, garnering two more drinks for us without even having to ask me.

“Your appetizers will be out momentarily,” said the waiter, before vanishing again.

I looked down at the small hand-lettered menu on my butter plate, announcing which non-optional delicacies had been ordained for us as this evening clanked painfully onward.

Pâté de lapin au campagne
was first up. With fucking organic whole-grain toast points and a tarragon-mango coulis.

“Culinary fascism,” I said. “First time I get to eat with grown-ups in, like,
forever
, and some VP back at you guys’ office dictates what we get served? And who the hell puts tarragon with
mangoes
?”

“O ye of little faith,” said Cary, rubbing his hands together as waiters appeared bearing little white first-course plates. “Our God is a merciful God.”

“In what tiny, begrudging way?”

“The Lord hath given us catsup. And the miracle of A.1. Sauce, I sayeth unto you.”

I winced.

“What’s
lapin
, anyway?” Cary asked as our waiter deposited the tidbits before us, with a flourish.

“Wabbit,” I said, Fudd-like.

Cary took over in the wincing department.

Everyone at the other end of the table started pounding their fists in unison, egging Bittler on as he chugged the boss’s bottle of Johnnie Blue.

“Fuck it,” said Cary, reaching for his beer. “You and me need to drink up and
be
somebody.”

“
Kanpai
.”

“Here’s to your new journalism career,” he said, tapping my glass with his bottle.

“You read the
New Times
? I thought I was the lone member of their audience.”

“I’m a huge fan,” he said. “And I had Daddy Bruce ribs last night for dinner. Your article was pretty convincing.”

“Well, shit. Thank you. I haven’t even told Dean yet.”

“Why not?”

“Um…” I looked down at the tablecloth. “… hasn’t really been a good moment? I don’t know.”

“Want me to leave a copy on his desk?”

“Let me think about it.”

“So what are you going to review next?” asked Cary. “This place?”

“Why write about a meal that was already free?” I asked.

“Hey, we work
hard
for the bunny,” he said, waving a forkful of wascally wabbit in my direction. “You and me both.”

I smiled. “Even so. I’m big into the whole reimbursement thing.
Few enough perks in this life. Maybe that Thai place out by you guys’ office, next.”

“Why don’t you come out with the girls tomorrow and we can all go for lunch?”

“That’d be great, actually.”

“Want me to soften Dean up for you?”

“Sure,” I said. “What the hell.”

Figuring that halfway through my third martini, I’d better sponge up a little gin with some carbs, I loaded a toast point and dragged it through the mango goop.

Cary doused his forkful of rabbit with A.1. and swallowed it nearly whole, with his eyes shut.

“I’m also working on a bigger piece,” I said. “Less fluffy, more hard-ass.”

“About?”

“The fires around town.”

“They’re definitely arson?”

I nodded.

He put his fork down. “What’s the matter?”

“That’s really the part I’m not sure how to explain.”

“To Dean?”

I nodded again.

“Why?” he asked.

“I suspect he might not be too excited about me doing a crime-beat story. Given, you know, motherhood and all that.”

“It’s not like you’re chasing ambulances, right? Or serial killers.”

“Well… not just at the
moment
.”

He raised an eyebrow. I cleared my throat.

“I mean, these things can snowball,” I said. “I’ve worked at papers before.”

“It’s Boulder, Madeline,” he said. “Not Polanski-town.”

Exactly what I myself would once have said of Syracuse, or Stockbridge, Massachusetts, or—well, okay, perhaps
not
Manhattan and Queens—but still, I had made rather a habit of inadvertently churning
up dark scary shitstorms in climes of heretofore pastoral serenity. Shitstorms Dean had been forced to weather. My husband’s “lightning rod for entropy” comment referenced a
Titanic
iceberg’s worth of subtext juju, not just my deficiencies as a housekeeper.

“Sure,” I said to Cary. “Nice little town, Boulder. Except for the arsons, which are, you know, sort of…” My voice trailed off.

He leaned toward me, more serious. “What were you going to say?”

“Just… fire. Kind of central to my family’s mythology, actually.”

“What’s
your
family fire story?” he asked.

And then I realized he’d pursued this line of conversation because he had a fire connection of his own. I could tell just by looking at him: sad and pale and suddenly exhausted. Some bad, bad memory weighing him down.

“Tell me yours,” I said. “You look like you might need to.”

Cary nodded. “I will. But ladies first.”

B
ittler had rejoined us. I glanced at him to see if it’d be kosher to talk about something this dark and personal out loud, but we might as well have been invisible to Boss-man and his frat minion.

Bittler stood there swaying awhile, then stuck his hands in his pants pockets and tried to sit down at the same time. Not a great plan: He managed to knock over his chair, simultaneously dropping his keys and a bunch of change to the floor.

Frat puppy kept him from falling.

I knelt down, scooped the contents of his pockets off the floor, and put everything on the table next to his pâté.

Bittler had a Playboy Bunny key ring. Ewwww.

The shrimpy little bastard didn’t thank me, either. Again.

I turned back toward Cary.

“My father was the youngest of nine children,” I began, “and this happened when he was seven years old, sometime in 1945. His father and the six older brothers who’d served were just home from the war, I guess.”

“Where did they live?” asked Cary.

“Purchase, New York. About an hour north of Manhattan. Dad went to school in the city—a place called Buckley—so he probably didn’t have a lot of friends to play with when he got home. The kid he hung out with most was called Hazy.”

“Your grandparents drove him an hour each way to school?”

“Not exactly,” I said, taking the last sip of my third martini.

“How’d he get there, then, train?”

“Chauffeur.”

Cary looked skeptical.

“And Hazy was the son of one of the gardeners,” I said.

“So you’re
totally
fucking rich,” he said.

“Actually, no. I’m what you’d call nouveau broke.”

“Seriously?”

“Have you ever heard the expression ‘shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three’?”

“No.”

I sighed. “Okay, it means that you can pretty much guarantee that a family will go through a fortune in three generations, no matter how big it was.”

“So that’s, like, by the third generation they’re not wearing suits and ties anymore?”

“Exactly.”

“And you’re the third generation?”

“Fourth. My generation mostly sits on the front stoops of Section Eight apartment buildings in our undershirts with a pack of Kools and a scratch ticket. When we’re not screaming at our feral offspring in Laundromats.”

“Wearing real pearls, though, I notice,” he said.

“Damn right. I’m trying to claw my way back into the middle class.”

“Sure,” he said, chuckling, “like
that
would be a huge leap.”

I sighed anew. “My father’s lived in a VW van since 1976, and my mother just married her death-row pen pal. That would be husband number five.”

Cary stopped chuckling, his eyes gentle again. “That’s pretty, um…. Wow.”

The waiter arrived with our elk medallions in port-wine-shiitake reduction with roasted balsamic baby root vegetables. Somehow, both
these foodstuffs had been teased into utterly phallic twinned towers: cockstand comestibles, Leggo-My-Lingams, a priapic
plat du jour.

Cary was still mulling over what I’d said.

This is always kind of the tricky point of opening up to anyone I hope will become a bona-fide friend.

We get to the actual personal-history stuff and some just decide I’m a pathological liar, or otherwise nuts—at which point they move right the fuck along.