In the Drink (16 page)

I wrote like a fiend all afternoon, feeling as I wrote that this was some of the best work I’d ever done. I finished with a scene in which Genevieve was asked by Tony Roper to interrogate a handsome Brazilian masseur under the pretext of getting a massage at a spa near Monaco. It opened with Genevieve on her stomach on the massage table, naked except for the towel draped modestly around her buttocks. While Raoul vigorously pummeled and kneaded and karate-chopped, Genevieve asked the questions she’d been sent to ask, and elicited a few intriguingly inconclusive answers. But at some point, toward the end of the section, she began to flirt with Raoul, telling him that his hands were the strongest she’d ever felt, that his beautiful, rumbling voice was a perfect accompaniment to a massage because it sent shivers along her spine. Their conversation wrote itself:

“I am flattered,” Raoul said smoothly.

“I’ve never had a massage like this before in my life.”

“Your husband does not rub your back like this?”

“Sometimes he rubs my neck, but never like this.”

“Every man should massage his wife,” said Raoul firmly.

“I’d rather have you do it.”

The hussy! Didn’t she know any better, after all those years away from New Jersey? How could she make me look through the garbage? How
dare
she be alive after I’d already told Mr. Blevins and wept with him and said all the right things?

Before I could stop her, she added in a low, barely audible murmur: “I sometimes wonder what goes on during all those business trips he takes to New York. He always stays with my sister, even though a hotel is so much more practical.”

Raoul was silent a moment, then said delicately, “Madame fears that—”

“Oh, I’m not afraid of anything,” Genevieve said stoutly, and leapt up from the table.

Ralph had already gone off duty at five o’clock; the doorman who ushered me out was Grover, the one I didn’t like because I always got the feeling that he was spying on me, looking for something he could use against me to get in good with Jackie. I didn’t answer him when he told me to have a good weekend; I’d have any damn kind of weekend I wanted. Jackie didn’t like him, anyway; she thought he was ugly, which was the worst sin you could commit with her, and no amount of fawning on his part could ever compensate for that.

The air outside was shot through with greenish light and a fine drizzling rain that adhered to my skin like spider webs as I moved through it. I hadn’t eaten anything since those potato pancakes with John early this morning. I was so hungry now I felt as if I would float away on the next strong breeze, so I got a hot dog with mustard at the first stand I came to and wolfed it down in four bites, then bought another one and washed it down with an Orangina, which made me feel bloated, and definitely not strong enough to walk all the way home. I climbed onto a crosstown bus belching its way toward Central Park.

I found a seat by a window and rested my hot temple against the cool glass. As the park went by in a brown blur, exhaustion overcame me all at once, and I fell asleep. I jerked awake with a panicky start I didn’t know how long afterwards and pulled the cord. I tumbled off the bus, sure I’d gone too far, then saw that I hadn’t gone far enough. The neighborhood
looked small and brown in the setting sun; the rain had stopped and the sky was clearing. I walked blinking and yawning through a sudden thicket of people with outstretched arms, shaking coffee cups and asking for change in a hostile drone. When I came to my street, it looked barely familiar, like an amalgam of four different streets in a dream. The traffic light behind me changed and a rattling fleet gunned past. Automatically I gave a quarter to the man in the doorway with a sign propped in front of him, and just as automatically he nodded his thanks.

In my mailbox I found a disconnect notice from the phone company and a threat from a collection agency concerning the most delinquent of my Visas. I shoved them into my coat pocket and climbed the stairs, let myself in without turning on the light, shed my coat and shoes, closed the blind that was open, fell onto my bed, and sank into a coma.

I emerged from it the next morning thirsty and groggy, but still alive. It was Saturday, I thought immediately; oh joy, two days off, I could go to the Skouros for breakfast. Then I remembered what had happened in the past couple of days and groaned out loud and put the pillow over my head and went back to sleep. When I next awoke, it felt like late afternoon, but according to my clock it was only eleven in the morning. I had slept for seventeen hours straight. I would have liked to sleep some more, but I was hungry, and so thirsty my eyes had dried in their sockets and my mouth contained beef jerky instead of a tongue. I got up and immediately had to sit down again while the blood rushed to wherever it needed to go to enable me to stand, and then like an old man I gimped into the bathroom and put my face near the sink faucet, turned on the cold water, and drank until my stomach could hold no more, until it bulged at the seams. Then I groped through the shower curtain, turned on the hot water, stood like a zombie
with my hand under the stream until it reached the proper temperature. Standing in the shower I thought, Here I am, another day, oh Lord. There was a scratch mark on my left breast. John Threadgill; I had slept with him again. My arms were covered in downy blond hair that sworled like tiny river grasses as the water coursed over it. Were my arms thickening a little? Was that the beginning of cellulite there, on the back of my thigh? My body couldn’t withstand this kind of treatment much longer. I needed to get my shit together. What was I waiting for? At this rate I was going to become a crazy old bag lady sleeping on subway-station benches, reeking of piss and howling to myself. My life was a farce, my body accrued debt and trouble and scratch marks, my psyche was a runaway train. Yee-haw.

I got out of the shower and dried off, put on some jeans and a sweatshirt and a sweater, opened the blind and peered out at the airshaft and determined that it was raining again. I put on my raincoat and locked the door behind me and headed up Broadway to the Skouros Coffee Shop.

I should have gone somewhere else, I decided fifteen minutes later. First of all, I spent three of my remaining dollars on a Danish and it arrived leathery and incompletely heated. The guy behind the counter had poured me the sludge from a near-empty pot on the top burner; now he was ignoring me, watching a burger patty on the grill metamorphose from raw meat into melted fat. An oversized mustache rode his upper lip like Don Quixote on his spavined nag, gallantly, its purpose obscure. Its presence on his otherwise unremarkable face tipped me off to the possibility that he had ideas about the rest of his life grander in scope than serving the likes of me. This made me want to sympathize with him, but I couldn’t. There was a cruel arrogance to the way he slashed at the grill with his
spatula that suggested he would have tilted at windmills and chopped them to smithereens.

The old man two stools away was leaning toward me, staring openmouthed at my calves. His gaze didn’t strike me as intentional enough to be lascivious: he had apparently fallen into a trance, in whose blind path my legs just happened to be. We were the only customers. Just outside the plate-glass window, people and traffic went to and fro in the rain like fish in an aquarium. The door had blown slightly ajar; wet bus exhaust mingled with the fried steam rising from the grill.

The
Times
lay beside me on the counter, folded open to the help-wanted ads. It had seemed like a good idea to start getting a sense of what was out there, jobwise, but one quick glance at the ads told me what I already knew—without Jackie, I was lost. Potential jobs for me fell into the following housewifely categories: child care, which didn’t pay enough, and anyway, children were serious business and I couldn’t hack it, cleaning houses, serving food, typing letters and selling sex in one form or another. A number of temp agencies had put in requests for fresh blood, but I knew all too well what awaited me there: when I sat at those dinosaur typewriters they all had, hearing the clock ticking away, staring at the nonsense they expected me to flawlessly reproduce on demand, my fingers turned into thick stubs that stumbled crazily over the keys. And my devil-may-care sense of appropriate corporate attire made the nice girls who staffed these agencies understandably nervous about sending me out on jobs under their aegis. “Desperately seeking Gal Friday for midtown architectural firm,” said another: what was a Gal Friday? Wasn’t that someone who could do anything anyone needed at a moment’s notice with a cheerful smile? I chewed a hangnail.

I no longer even read the “adult entertainment” ads: years
ago, I’d gone one fine spring day to an “agency” in the Flatiron Building, where I’d stripped obediently to my underwear and gyrated to a cheap disco number on a boom-box at the behest of a chain-smoking woman in her mid-forties. She turned off the music after several bars, leaving me wriggling in silence for a beat or two, and said, “Get yourself a G-string, shave your pubes, and be at this address at eight Saturday night. And be nice to the customers when you’re not onstage, that’s how you make your money.” She handed me the address of a place called Mama’s in a part of Queens I’d never heard of; Rima probably worked there. My next stop was Adele’s Intimates on Delancey, where I threw away twenty dollars on a tiny spandex contraption I left on the subway “accidentally” half an hour later, to my great relief. Saturday night found me nowhere near anyone I had to be nice to for any amount of money.

A few months later I’d answered an ad that read: “Female Voiceovers Needed—No Experience Necessary,” which turned out to be the phone sex industry drumming for rain; this I could do, because it didn’t involve contact with any “customers.” All I had to do was sit twice a week on a Vaseline-stained couch in the Channel J studio in midtown, reading my hastily written two-minute scripts into a microphone for ten bucks a pop, simulating a histrionic orgasm at the end while Guillermo the sound guy counted down the seconds, three, two, one, blastoff. I hyperventilated every time. After each session I went out and spent my whole check right away, on anything at all.

So far, I had circled one ad: “Make hundreds of $$$ per week stuffing envelopes at home,” which I already knew was a scam because I had once sent twenty dollars for further information, and received back a pamphlet that instructed me to run a classified ad like the one I’d answered, wait for the checks to pour in, then stuff the return envelopes with a photocopy
of the pamphlet I’d been sent. I had circled it just for show, trying to make as much commotion about it as possible to dislodge the unbroken stare of the old man to my left.

I put the newspaper down and worked on a cottony wad of Danish for a while, then washed it down with the rest of my coffee. There was a full, fresh pot on the bottom burner of the coffeemaker. I looked longingly at it. But when I gestured to my cup for a refill, the counter guy picked up that same old pot, swirled the inch or two of coffee it contained to reassure himself that it hadn’t solidified, then splashed a vile dollop into my cup.

“Could you reheat my Danish when you get a chance?” I asked as inoffensively as I could, which wasn’t very.

He gave me a limpid glance and returned to the grill to pulverize the home fries banked along its edge.

“Excuse me,” I said.

Chop chop, replied the spatula.

“Okay,” I said. “I think I know how to use a microwave.”

I got up and carried my plate around the counter and put it into the microwave. I was punching buttons and minding my own business when he pretended to notice me for the first time. “What do you think you’re doing?” he asked indignantly. “You’re not allowed back there.”

“So bring it to me when the little bell goes off,” I said. I returned to my stool to the roar of the studio audience: Customer, one, Counter guy, zero.

He deposited the plate in front of me two minutes later with a clatter and an averted glare. I dug my fork through the Danish and tried a bite. It was now soft and perfectly hot. The sweet chemical stuff on top had melted into a delicious creamy goop. I leaned over the counter, emptied my cup into the sink, and, curling three fingers around the handle of the fresh new pot of coffee, poured myself a cupful.

“Okay, but I’m gonna have to charge you for a new cup,” said my enemy, not looking at me.

“The hell you will,” I said back. I took a sip. The slender margin of its superiority to the other stuff was enough to make it all worthwhile.

Out of the corner of my eye I espied the old man. He was laboring now over a word search puzzle book he’d dug up from somewhere. Breathing hard, he dragged the pencil in a narrow oval that no doubt left grooves in the next five pages, a dead-on imitation of my futile perusal of the help-wanteds. I stole a sidelong peek, playing a little game with myself: if his tongue protruded from between his teeth as I suspected it did, I would score another point. Before I could look away, he caught me on the sharp hook of his vehement old stare. The skin on his face drooped as if it had melted. Under caterpillar eyebrows, his eyes were big as hard-boiled eggs in their hoary sockets. He leaned in toward me, his head wagging dangerously, until he came to a trembling halt at the last point of his resistance to gravity. He lifted a forefinger. He seemed to be about to speak.