In the Drink (15 page)

I gave a bark meant to sound like a carefree laugh. If I could throw up a smoke screen of meaningless chatter, she might just get bored and let it drop. I often used this technique when she confronted me directly with something I’d done; her short attention span generally did her in before we got to the heart of the matter. I always knew, though, that she had filed this latest transgression away in the vault with all the other ones. “Oh, that,” I said airily over the hot coals burning in my stomach. “Ralph was all upset when I came in this morning, something about his grandmother—”

We had a staredown; what else was I supposed to say? I looked away finally, and she said, “See if you can find those things, would you?” She went back to her bedroom to do whatever the hell she did in there.

My whole body had gone into some kind of deep freeze from all the various biochemical substances it had been forced to produce today, each one canceling out the next, shock, euphoria, fright, craftiness, venality, weepiness, shock again. It had run out of juice for the time being and I didn’t blame it. I got up, went numbly into the pantry, took from my bag all the things I’d stolen from her, and set about returning them to their rightful places, the fountain pen and cigarette case to the desktop, the whiskey to the cabinet, the suede pumps (damn it, I’d really wanted those) to the shoe closet in the hall. I went
into her bedroom and handed her the sweater and the watch. “I found them,” I said.

She took them without a word and put them on. “I’ve been meaning to tell you, Claudia,” she said. “My great-niece is coming next week from Italy to learn English and meet some of the young people in New York. She’s a famous aristocrat in Italy although you’d never know it; she’s absolutely unspoiled.”

“What’s her name?”

“Gianbattista Santa Maria Lucia di Paolo del Castellano,” Jackie rattled off in her hard-edged Italian. She was a different person when she spoke Italian, scarier and more legitimate. “She’s called Lucia and she’s only twenty years old. I’m afraid she won’t have enough to do while she’s here. I want to set up a dinner party, we’ll talk about the guest list later. I set up an interview for her on Monday at eleven with my friend Frances Gray, she has a modeling agency. Did you get that?”

“Frances Gray,” I said. “Monday at eleven.”

“Of course she’s done a lot of modeling in Italy. She’s terribly famous there, everyone always recognizes her on the street. That’s one of the reasons she wants to live for a year in New York. ‘I have to escape the paparazzi, Aunt Jackie,’ she told me; they’re very bad in Italy, like mosquitoes. Make sure she brings her portfolio with her.” She put her hands on her waist and looked over her shoulder at the mirrored wall, one leg extended behind her in a 1950s cheesecake pose. “I’m putting on weight,” she said. “I’ve got to take it off immediately. No more cream sauces for me. Claudia, what exactly did you tell Mr. Blevins?”

This was one of her interrogatory tactics, to lull me with blather, then blindside me with a direct question. I had been anticipating this; I’d sensed, behind her monologue, the ticking in her brain—one, a weeping Mr. Blevins filled with wonderment
that she was really still alive, two, the missing items so quickly restored by the whiskey-reeking secretary—she knew they added up to something and she would ferret it out eventually.

No plausible lie presented itself. “I misunderstood Ralph,” I said frankly and apologetically, my heart like a trapped quail against my rib cage. “When I came in he looked really upset, and I asked why, and he said, ‘She’s dead, she passed away yesterday.’ I came upstairs thinking the worst. I called Mr. Blevins to let him know immediately. But then, when I called Ralph to find out how it had happened, he said it was his grandmoth—”

“Who else did you call?”

“No one,” I said; William didn’t count.

“I can’t have it getting out all over town! This is just too preposterous. Jimmy told me that he’d already notified some of my friends! Well, I gave it to him. ‘Always verify anything that girl tells you,’ I said to him. ‘You can’t take anything she says at face value, she gets very mixed up sometimes.’ I’m just beside myself, Claudia; this makes two days in a row. What on earth is the matter with you?”

“I’m sorry, Jackie,” I said.

“This whole thing is absolutely crazy. You sound like a crazy person. It upsets me very much, Claudia, I don’t know quite what to—and you smell as if you’ve been drinking.”

“I had a little whiskey, Jackie. I thought you were dead and I was upset, and I needed to steady myself.”

The picture clicked into place then, I could see its ugly shape cohere in her head: the person she most depended on could not be trusted for a minute. The illusion of my essential integrity had allowed her not to fire me so many times I’d lost count; my mistakes were just the careless errors of a well-intentioned
and devoted if deeply flawed employee. I saw the knowledge come to her that I was no good, and then I saw the shutters close on that knowledge. If she played it out to its inevitable end, who would finish this book and write the next one? She blinked several times, shook her head as if to clear it, looked me right in the eye and said firmly, “This is unacceptable.”

“I know,” I said.

She nodded as if something had been settled and sat down at her vanity table to inspect the damages our conversation had done to her face. Whatever she saw in the mirror reminded her of something else. “Oh, and one more thing, I almost forgot. You broke my soap holder yesterday, putting that heavy radio on it. It came down right on my head, it’s a lucky thing I didn’t get a concussion. Please go out now and get me a new one at the drugstore. Get a good one this time, that old one was so shoddy.”

“All right,” I said, “I’ll go right away.”

I took a twenty from her change jar in the kitchen and put on my coat. When I came out of the elevator, Ralph was sitting slumped on the bench by the door.

He looked up with a wan smile as I came through the lobby.

“Maybe you should take the rest of the day off,” I said to him, glad to have the opportunity to worry about someone else for a little while.

“I wish I could,” he said. “She complained a lot about her arthritis, her Social Security didn’t come, her lightbulbs burned out, and I tried to listen but sometimes I just—”

“You can’t always be a saint,” I said.

“Yeah, but sometimes I got on her, ‘You shouldn’t be so negative, Grandma, visualize your potential!’ I got into this
thing, Lifespring. She told me to get off my high horse and go to confession. We didn’t speak after that for a time. But I stayed close by.”

“That’s all that matters,” I said. “I’d better run along. Her Highness needs a new shower shelf.”

“Don’t want to keep her waiting,” he said, and opened the door for me and gestured me through.

I went immediately to a phone booth and called William’s office. “I’ll hold,” I told his snotty little bitch of a secretary, Elissa, when she informed me that “Mr. Snow” was in a “meeting”. She took it upon herself to treat me like William’s out-of-control neurotic sister, and I took it upon myself to roll right over her. Forty cents into the call, William came on the line. “Claudia,” he said.

“William,” I said. “You’re going to think I’m a total idiot and I am. Not only did I not kill her, she’s not even dead. You didn’t tell anyone, did you?”

“She’s not dead,” he repeated.

“William, I can’t explain now, it was a perfectly understandable mix-up. It’s not like I do this kind of thing all the time. Did you tell anyone?”

“Um,” he said, and paused. “Actually, I mentioned it to Margot a few minutes ago. You might want to call her and set her straight. I invited her to my—”

“Oh shit,” I said, “will you call and tell her? I’m at a pay phone.”

He laughed. “I can’t, I have another meeting in two seconds. Anyway, she’s probably going to call you any minute. Don’t worry, Claudia, we all make mistakes. See you tomorrow night.”

“Wait,” I said, but he had already hung up. What was Margot’s number? I called Information and was told it was unlisted;
no big surprise. I had it in my little red book on my desk upstairs—Margot was probably calling me there right now.

Things couldn’t get much worse with Jackie than they already were. I went to the drugstore on Lexington, bought a sturdy metal shower shelf and headed back to Jackie’s. My conversation with William had sent me into a prickly heat of self-loathing. I wished suddenly, not for the first time, that I didn’t have any friends. Friendship was so risky, so painful and tentative. How could you ever trust anyone? Conversations were a series of leaky, fragile paper boats launched with foolish optimism toward a distant shore, too heavily freighted to do anything but sink or flounder or go blundering into other hemispheres. It had been a mistake to call William just now; it had been a mistake to tell him every single awful thing about myself for the past five years. The way he had laughed made me see myself the way he must see me, the way everyone must, and I couldn’t afford to see myself as a total joke because all I had was the frail hope that I wasn’t. How could I have actually thought Ralph had meant that Jackie was dead? It seemed impossible that I could have made such a mistake. Maybe I was really crazy. Maybe my perceptions, all of them, were the semi-hallucinations of a permanently addled brain.

I crossed Park Avenue and headed toward the familiar facade of Jackie’s building. There it sat like a big protective dog, surrounding her with its burly and respectable flanks. She was still alive, I still had a job, nothing had changed.

I took the new shower shelf into her bathroom and hung it carefully on the shower rod, then arranged on it her bottles of shampoo, her fancy lavender soaps, her back brush. I put the receipt in the household receipt folder in the files, put every penny of the change in the change jar in the kitchen, made myself a cup of tea, and sat down at my desk.

I had written a paragraph when Jackie came in.

“Claudia,” she said, “it’s all just too much. Who do you think called while you were out?”

“Margot?” I said.

“At first she thought I was you. ‘No,’ I said, ‘it’s Jackie.’ She said, ‘Jackie! You wouldn’t believe what I just heard about you!’ Of course I knew very well already. She said she had heard that I was dead! Which someone, she couldn’t say who, had told her just a few minutes before. Claudia, there is a rumor circulating now about this, and I want it stopped immediately before anyone else hears. This is truly the most unsettling thing that has ever happened to me. So unsettling I’m not quite sure what to do. Margot, telling me she thought I was dead!” She fluttered around me, pacing over the old rug, smoothing her hair nervously.

“I’ll call her right away.”

“She’s a good girl, that Margot. I could count on her every minute; I trusted her with my life. No matter what happened I knew she was honest and loyal.” She sighed, eyeing me unhappily. “I just can’t fathom how this happened.”

“I know.”

“Really, Claudia, this time it’s not something I can just overlook. This puts everything in a different light. It makes me feel as if I can’t leave you alone in my house, and that makes me so uncomfortable, I can’t tell you.”

“I understand.”

“Do you? Well, maybe you do.” She took a deep breath and said without looking at me, “I’m thinking of hiring a full-time secretary and having you work only on the book, maybe at your own house. Mr. Blevins suggested it, actually, and I think he’s right. What do you think?”

“It’s a great idea,” I said. I considered this a promotion, in a way.

She looked at me then, obviously relieved. “Do you think so? I’ll have to see if I can afford to pay two salaries, of course. I think it might be the ideal solution to all the troubles we’ve been having together. I like you very much, please don’t misunderstand me, you’re a very sweet dear girl, but you must see that I can’t have these rumors that I’m dead and so forth.”

“Oh yes,” I said. “I do see that, absolutely.”

“Good,” she said, “oh, good, I’m glad we agree about this.” She gave a nod in my direction and went off to meet with Gil Reeve.

I called Margot and got her answering machine. “You’ve reached the home of Margot Spencer,” came Margot’s fluted tones; of course her junior four on West End Avenue was a “home,” unlike my rathole on an airshaft, and of course her tones were fluted on her outgoing message when everyone else’s, mine for example, sounded as if the speaker were trapped at the bottom of a well, “and I’m either out or unable to take your call at the moment. Please leave a very brief message and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.”

“Hello, Margot,” I said in a singsong like a playground taunt, then hastily lowered my pitch and tried to sound a little more adult, “it’s Claudia, calling to apologize for the false news; I didn’t know William was going to tell you. As you discovered yourself a few minutes ago, Jackie’s alive and well and in quite a state about this whole misunderstanding, which I caused single-handedly and which I’ve now been instructed to undo. So if you told anyone else, I’d appreciate it if you’d let them know it was a mistake. Thanks. I guess I’ll see you tomorrow night; William mentioned that he’d invited you to his—” Her machine cut me off with a scolding little beep.

One more call. “Hello,” said Mr. Blevins.

“Mr. Blevins, it’s Claudia.”

“I have nothing at all to say to you and I don’t know why
You’re calling me again. That was a mean trick you played on me this morning, you know that? You’ve got a strange sense of humor if you thought that was funny.”

“No, you don’t understand. I misunderstood the doorman, and it was all a big mistake, and I got myself in a lot of trouble.”

“I understand that you ought to have your head examined. I don’t take kindly to being made a fool of and God knows I’m a fool about Jackie, but this was different.”

“I’m calling first to say how sorry I am and second to ask if you told anyone else. She’s worried the whole town’s going to think she’s dead.”

“Well, I did tell some people, and I’ve already called them back, and they said they’d call whoever they called to tell them, but it seems to me you’ve already upset the apple cart, no sense in trying to chase after all the apples. The damage has been done and it’ll just have to mend itself. I’m glad you don’t work for me, and that’s the truth. Good-bye now.”