In the Drink (14 page)

“It’s called a job,” I could hear the judge saying dispassionately, “and you could have spoken up if you thought you were
being treated unfairly, or you could have quit. I’m sentencing you to life without parole, and I hope that your incarceration will be a lesson for you.”

When I crossed the room and opened the curtains, razor-sharp sunlight slashed through the air and flattened all the rich winy colors to washed-out shadows, obliterating the lamplight, glinting in the mirrors. My reflection was the only vivid thing in the room. Who needed Jackie? She had been a liability, really. Now all that ladylike white-gloved crap could be thrown right out the window. The book could be witty and straightforward and maybe even have a cohesive plot. Eventually, once I’d convinced Gil that I could write a real book, I would start publishing under my own name. I could take William to dinner at Nobu, I could pay off my debts and move downtown, I could travel and sleep late and throw parties and do whatever else I wanted.

My spirits, so long compressed into a tight coil, burst forth like a released spring. I got up and prowled through her closet, rifled through her dressers and nightstand, went into the dining room and opened her liquor cabinet, ran my hands over the objects on the big desk in the living room. As I did so, I found myself accumulating a number of her things, all of which seemed to come into my possession of their own volition. They leapt into my hands like abandoned pets looking for a new owner: bottle-green suede pumps, gray cashmere sweater, gold watch, tortoiseshell fountain pen, gold-plated cigarette case inlaid with semiprecious gems, and an unopened bottle of rare and expensive Scotch. From my hands, they found their way into my canvas shoulder bag by the same force, guided by some mysterious magnetic pull.

As I stashed the bag of loot in the pantry, I heard Jackie’s voice somewhere in the apartment. I froze in my tracks, wide-eyed and terrified. She wasn’t dead after all. Ralph had made a
mistake—I cocked my head to hear what she was saying and realized that it was her answering machine, picking up a call. I hadn’t heard the phone ring. I stood over the phone, poised to pick it up if it was Ralph, but after the beep came Mr. Blevins’s voice: “Well, hello there, my dearest. I’ve been thinking about you all morning. How are you today? I’m at the office if you need anything.”

I leaned against the counter and closed my eyes, holding on to the countertop, wishing I’d had some sleep last night and hadn’t drunk so much. A thick, slow haze of unreality was coloring all my perceptions. I felt like a rudderless boat.

I shook myself awake and set up my office in the dining room, then sat down at my desk. My head was beginning to ache in earnest. The whiskey I’d drunk in the early morning hours had metabolized enough so that my body was suspended in the precarious gully between intoxication and hangover. Given a choice, I preferred to go back over to the drunk side, especially for the task ahead, so I got up and went to the liquor cabinet, found an opened bottle of Scotch and a tumbler, and sat down again with them on the table in front of me. I called Ralph’s number again. He answered. “Ralph, it’s Claudia,” I said.

“Oh, right, Louie left me this note to call you,” said Ralph. He sounded out of breath. “I’ll call you right back, okay? I have to deal with something right away.”

“Call me as soon as you can,” I said urgently.

After I’d downed half the good-sized slug in my glass, I braced myself and called Jimmy Blevins. Poor old man, now his life would be so sad and gray. “Oh, Mr. Blevins,” I said when he answered. “It’s Claudia.”

He wept when he heard the news, and to my astonishment I found myself weeping with him. He reminisced eloquently about her beauty, grace and charm, her inspiring rise from her
husband’s ashes on the wings of her literary career, her endearing vanities and foibles. In a way, it was true; there was no one else like Jackie, she had been one of a kind.

“What happened?” he asked.

“I think she died in the bathtub,” I said, my voice dripping with a thick purple emotion I tried to modulate into condolence. “She was there when I left at five. She’d had such a hard day, and she was exhausted.”

“I always told her she had to be careful, not to work so hard, not to worry so much. But she wouldn’t listen to me.”

One afternoon not too long before, I’d said good night to Jackie and Mr. Blevins, who were fiddling with her CD player in the dining room, trying to get it to work. Halfway down the block, I remembered that I’d left the outgoing mail on the dining room table. I went back up to Jackie’s and let myself in; I heard swishy, romantic music. I barged into the dining room saying, “I’m back, I just forgot—” and saw them dancing, Mr. Blevins and Jackie. I stopped in the doorway, as embarrassed as if I’d caught them in bed together. He held her in his arms and swirled her around, dipping her, holding her close, then turning deftly and bending his knee to turn again. She cleaved to him like silk. Her eyes were closed. Two flutes of champagne bubbled on the windowsill. She opened her eyes and said, laughing a little, “Come on in, Claudia, we’re just practicing for Cafe Society tonight!” I retrieved the mail and went back out, and on the way down in the elevator I thought about the way Mr. Blevins hadn’t missed a step when I’d come in or even seemed to see me.

I said, “Oh, Mr. Blevins, I’m not sure she ever told you this, but your friendship meant so much to her.”

“She was so fragile underneath it all,” he said. “I knew how hard it was for her. I tried to protect her as much as I could.”

“She appreciated that more than she could ever tell you.”

“She’s really gone?” he said wonderingly.

“I know, I know, it’s hard to believe.”

“Oh, Jackie.”

“Mr. Blevins, please let me know if there’s anything I can do for you.”

“If only you could bring her back,” he said.

Juanita wheeled the vacuum cleaner into the living room and whisked it over the rug, sucking up the rose petals, knocking its hard rubber nose against chair legs and coffee tables. I watched her solid figure move energetically, encased in pink uniform and thick panty hose and white sneakers. I wondered what she would do now, how she would survive. How was I going to explain to her? And everyone else?

I dialed another number. No matter what had happened recently, no matter what he currently thought of me, he was still my friend. “William,” I said when he answered.

“Claudia!” he said; my heart leapt at the frank gladness in his voice. “I meant to call you yesterday. Did you make it home all right the other night?”

“Yes,” I stammered. “William, I have some very strange news. I might be in a lot of trouble, actually.”

“Why? Tell me.”

“She’s dead.”

“Who’s dead?”

“Yesterday she made me dig through bags of garbage because she lost a photograph. And then she was just—struck down, after I went home. It’s like the gods were punishing her. Or someone.”

“Jackie’s dead?”

“I got here this morning and Ralph told me, and now—”

“What happened?”

“I don’t know yet for sure,” I said, “but—”

“Oh wait, shit, sorry, Claudia, I have to take this other call. Don’t go away.”

“I’ll hold,” I said. I pressed the receiver into my ear as tightly as I could. It was the only thing that tied me to the world of normal life.

“I’m back,” said William. “I have a call in three minutes with a big fat cheese, but I can keep him waiting for a couple of minutes. Claudia: she’s really dead?”

“You have to swear not to tell anyone,” I said. “Attorney-client confidentiality or whatever it’s called.”

“What did you do?”

As briefly as I could, I told him. There wasn’t much to tell; I’d left the radio dangling from a broken shower shelf over her bathtub, and now she was dead.

When I finished he was quiet for a moment, then he cleared his throat. I had a sudden horrible feeling that he was laughing at me. “But,” he said then, “do you know for sure that’s what actually happened?”

“William, the shower shelf broke; it’s in the wastebasket.”

“But who told you she was electrocuted?”

“When I got here, Ralph, the doorman, told me she was dead, then I came upstairs and looked at the bathtub and the shower shelf was broken and someone, maybe the paramedics, had unplugged the radio.”

“Find out for sure before you go confessing to anyone else,” he said, and I was sure I heard a smile in his voice. “I think the fuse would probably short out before enough juice went into the water to kill her. Oh, here’s my call. Don’t forget to come to my party. I’ll tell Ian to call you for an interview, just say the word.”

I sat motionless then for a long time in my straight-backed
chair, staring inwardly without blinking at a harsh and unambiguous desert. Finally the phone rang, the two short rings that meant someone downstairs was calling. “Ralph,” I said. “Finally.”

“Sorry, Claudia. What a day, boy. On top of everything. It just keeps hitting me, you know. I’m thinking of going home early.”

But he had called her a loon, a bat, a daffy duck; he had commiserated with me so many times and with such sincerity. I noticed that my glass was empty; I poured another good-sized shot and drank it straight off. Then I said, “I didn’t know the two of you were so close.”

He sighed. “We weren’t
close
close, but you never know how it’s going to hit you when someone dies. I should have listened to her more, helped her out more. I hope she knew how much I cared about her. I never told her. I complained about her all the time. Now it’s too late.”

“What happened, exactly?”

“Hit by a car,” he said. “Hit-and-run.”

My heart flew from its black cage back out into the broad skies of ordinary human emotion. “When? Last night?”

“Yesterday afternoon around three o’clock,” he said, “but I didn’t hear until I got home from work. Her neighbor was waiting for me on my front—”

“Whose neighbor?”

“Her friend, Mrs. Marengo. She was crying, ‘Oh, poor Ralph,’ on and on and I didn’t know what had happened, then I go inside and my phone is ringing and it’s my brother, telling me—”

“Wait a minute. Who are we talking about?”

“My grandmother, Claudia,” he said reproachfully.

I paused while my entire sense of reality rearranged itself,
then stammered before the implications could hit me, “Your grandmother died. Oh, my God. Oh, my
God
. That’s just terrible. Oh, my God, how absolutely awful. I can’t believe this.”

“It’s nice of you to feel so bad, Claudia. She was a great lady, believe me.”

Just then I heard Jackie’s front door open and shut, and someone’s heels tapping through the foyer, along the pantry, and into the kitchen.

“I’d better go,” I said in a rush.

“Thanks for calling,” he said.

I dialed Mr. Blevins’s number as fast as I could. When he answered I said, “Mr. Blevins, I made an awful mistake, I’m so sorry.”

“Who is this?”

“It’s Claudia, Mr. Blevins, I misunderstood the doorman, Jackie is alive and well and she just walked in. The doorman was telling me his grandmother died and I thought he meant—”

Mr. Blevins said in a thick drowning voice, “She’s not really dead?”

“She’s alive, Mr. Blevins, it was all a stupid misunderstanding, and if you wouldn’t mind, I think it’s best if you don’t mention—”

“Jackie is alive?” he said again, uncomprehendingly, and then I heard someone pick up another extension and begin punching in numbers. They beeped loudly in my ear.

“That’s her now, trying to call out,” I said, “so we’d better hang up. I’m so sorry, Mr. Blevins, I don’t know what to—”

“Hello,” came Jackie’s impatient bark. “Is that you on the line, Claudia?”

“I’m just hanging up,” I said, “good-bye.”

“Jackie,” came Mr. Blevins’s strangled cry, “Jackie, I can’t believe it’s really you, I can’t believe you’re really there, you’re
back, oh Jackie.” Apparently I wasn’t the only one who’d been holding a private whiskey wake this morning.

“Where else would I be, Jimmy? Okay, Claudia, you can hang up, I’ll talk to Jimmy for a moment although I must get ready for my meeting—”

In the split second between hanging up the phone and leaping into tracks-covering action, I felt three things simultaneously: gnawing hunger, a desire to laugh hysterically, and a strong resolve to behave to myself and everyone else as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened here. I stowed the whiskey and tumbler in the liquor cabinet, then turned on my computer and opened the file that contained the chapter I was currently working on. I scrolled through it, taking a running leap, correcting things here and there, adding and deleting words, moving sentences from one paragraph to another. When I got to the end, my fingers leapt over the keyboard, out of the gate like racehorses. Ten minutes later, when Jackie stuck her head into the dining room, I had written a whole page. I stopped and looked up at her. I was pretty gonzo from the whiskey, I realized all of a sudden. Everything had a mellow, fuzzy glow around it except Jackie, who seemed unnaturally in focus.

“I can’t find my sweater,” she said, “the cashmere cardigan, the gray one. Or my gold watch, the one my brother gave me for my birthday. Have you seen them? They were where I left them, and now they’re not, and I wanted to wear them to my meeting today with Gil Reeve.” She exhaled sharply. “Sometimes I think that girl steals from me. I’ve been missing things, little things, and that isn’t like me at all, I’m very well-organized. And what was Jimmy going on about? He didn’t sound like himself. The poor man was almost crying! I had to tell him to stop making such a scene!”

“I’ll look for your watch and sweater,” I said.

“What were you saying to Mr. Blevins just now?” She came into the dining room to stand directly over me, her favorite vantage point for inquisitions. She gave a sniff just as I exhaled a blast of whiskey breath; her nostrils were two little fully flared vacuums sucking the fumes from my lungs. “I don’t like the way you got him all riled up, he seemed to have got the idea from you that I was
dead
, and then I wasn’t, what can you have been thinking?”