In the Drink (20 page)

“Good,” I said dubiously.

“My mother called today and you know what? I didn’t even pick up the phone. She went on about how my father won’t take any interest in her fucking lawn ornaments and all I could do was lie there laughing at her. Isn’t that great?” She flung her arms around me and accidentally jostled Rima, who looked sideways at her with a complicated expression and sidled off to the dining room table, where the drinks were.
“Claudia,” Frieda breathed warmly into my ear, “I think I’m in love.”

“Good for you,” I said, hating myself for sounding so dry and pent-up. “That’s so exciting. Here he comes.”

Frieda looked at Cecil rapturously, without the slightest hint of coyness or subterfuge. I had a small twinge of fear for her when Cecil came into the room with a self-consciously impassive expression; it gave me the feeling that he would be put off by her naked ardor. But when he caught sight of her, his own face turned into a shining beacon that matched hers exactly. As Frieda and Cecil disappeared into each other I felt mean-spirited, toward whom or what I wasn’t sure. The party felt like a crowded subway, the way parties get when they haven’t quite begun yet but everyone has arrived, a tense waiting for the crowd to become a temporary village with mores and traditions and squabbles. We were in the history-making stage. People were cracking uncomfortable jokes, rubbing their tentacles and antennae against everyone else’s.

I went to the drinks table and examined the available bottles. Finding none to my liking, I went to William’s freezer and dug out the bottle of extremely expensive yuppie vodka he always had in there and poured myself a good slug.

“What you doing, Clow-dya,” came a hiss at my shoulder. “Give me some of that good stuff.” She elongated “good” and spat out “stuff,” but I heard her just fine. I poured an equally hefty amount into Rima’s glass and we clacked them together and drank deeply. A little while later she headed with fluttering eyes and lurching gait toward the bedroom.

Immediately—literally, two seconds—after she had rounded the corner, I heard another voice behind me. This one was stilted and upper-crust and said, “You know how it is in midtown when you’re walking around looking for Broadway? Is it west of Seventh Avenue? Is it east of Sixth Avenue?
Where the fuck is Broadway? It screws up the grid. It makes things more complicated, but more interesting by far. Well, I’m the Broadway of this party.”

I wanted another cigarette. “Your wife just passed out, in case you’re interested.”

“Come with me. Who is this, a Marsalis brother? William is such an unbelievable middle-aged square. Was he always like this?”

“No, he wasn’t,” I said, and allowed John to lead me over to the stereo. A few minutes later, some dirty old funk was on, the woofers boomed and the lights had been lowered, and John and I were engaged in some sort of dance that was half rhumba, half funky chicken. The crowd had made room for us without even seeming to notice, they had just softly shrunk closer together, leaving a space big enough for us to dance in; the party had coalesced in the last few minutes, and now we were like bees in a hive, thinking collectively with our bodies. William was nowhere in sight. The song changed to a slow groove and John shifted gears, his right hand firm on my back, his knees nudging mine so imperceptibly I began to think I was a pretty good dancer myself. He looked down at me; I studied his succulent mouth, his eyes sparkling under lazy eyelids. His stomach was pressed against mine. The hot, springy bass line and the singer’s grunts and moans implied that nothing mattered except fucking, so why didn’t we just get right down to it?

“Watch it,” I said. “I meant what I said on the phone.”

“I assumed you did,” he said promptly, without missing a beat, and the semi-sleazy amorousness between us fell away and we became two friendly animals on a dance floor.

“Would you do me a favor?”

“Anything.”

“I need some more vodka. The stuff in the freezer, not the shit on the table. Sneak it when William’s not looking.”

He planted his hands on my shoulders and said, “Stay.”

“Oh, hello, Margot,” said a girl in cat’s-eye glasses I knew vaguely from several other parties.

“Oh, hello, Margot,” I said with a grin that felt loopy and half-crocked.

There she was. She very pointedly didn’t smile back at me. The blunt-cut tips of her dark hair brushed the shoulders of her black velvet jacket. Her blue eyes were like marbles shot through with ribbons of clear glass; her nose was as small and perfect as a child’s.

“Did you get my message?” I asked her.

“She was so upset. I couldn’t believe you’d done that.”

“She fired me,” I said. “Basically.”

“Did she,” Margot said, in a tone that told me she’d already heard all about it from Jackie herself and was completely on Jackie’s side. “Excuse me, I’m going to get myself some seltzer.”

John bounded up to me and handed me my glass.

I tasted my new drink. “This is the shitty vodka, John.”

“You can tell? How can you tell? I could have sworn you’d never know the difference. William’s in the kitchen; I couldn’t get near the freezer.”

Margot was inspecting the bottles on the table with a snooty furrow between her brows; I could see her as a child, fiddling in consternation with her oysters Rockefeller, her hair in a big bow. “John,” I said, “my life is over.”

“Tell your Uncle Threadgill,” he said amiably.

I’d had about enough of him. “Maybe I just need some air,” I said.

“Breathe, my child,” he said, and let me go.

I went into William’s dark little bedroom and began digging around on his bed for my coat, intending to take a long solitary walk down to Times Square to stare at all the neon-lit perverts stumbling out of movie theaters, to feel the thick breath of the city’s intestines on my face. Something moved under my hands, something warm and soft that gave a strangled yelp. “Sorry,” I said. I gave up looking for my coat, having lost interest in walking all that way. I flopped down next to Rima on the pile of coats and stared up at the ceiling. My head was ringing.

“You’re crazy,” she muttered through a thick mouth.

“You should talk,” I said back. “What are you doing in here?”

“I’m at a party,” she said.

We lay there for a while. She lit a cigarette. Every so often the tip would hiss and brighten, then a cloud of smoke burst from her side of the bed, but other than that, we might have been asleep. My eyes were fixed on the ceiling, but my field of vision kept narrowing until it nearly blacked out, then expanded again, as if I were repeatedly zooming through a funnel to find myself on William’s bed once again. I had never lain in William’s bed before; I had never spent much time in his bedroom. Even through the coats I could feel how comfortable his bed was, how firm. The solidity of the parquet floor and low ceiling gave the room a kind of neutral coziness. Light filtered through the window, the artificial radiance of the city overlain with the dim supernal light of moon and stars. I inhaled deeply through my nose. His smell was everywhere, emanating from his shoes, his sheets and pillows, any laundry hidden in the closet.

A bulky shape, its head backlit with a red halo, appeared in the doorway. “Rima,” said John.

“What
you
want.”

“Do you want me to take you home?”

“I don’t need to go anywhere.”

“Come on, let’s go home.”

She sighed elaborately and fought her way upright in the mass of coats. “Don’t always tell me what to do,” she said.

He went over to her and helped her stand up, found her coat and his, and tried to help her on with hers. She shook him off roughly and jammed her arms into her coat sleeves. I lay there, invisible, watching.

“Do you have your keys?” John asked. “Don’t lose them again.”

She fished around in her coat pocket, then swiped him across his face with her key chain. His hand went to his cheek. “Yes, I have my keys, mister. My fucking, fucking keys.”

As they left, Rima staggered against him, I thought on purpose.

I got up and went into William’s bathroom and splashed my face with cool water.

Someone rattled the door handle, found the door unlocked, and came in.

“Oops,” said Jane Herman. “Sorry, Claudia.” She waved and began to back out of the room.

“That’s okay,” I said, glad to see her. “Come on in.”

She perched on the counter while I dried my face. “Having fun?”

“Not really.”

There was a brief, odd pause. “I’ve been wanting to ask you this for a while, and now I’m drunk enough. Is there anything going on between you and William?”

“Going on?”

“You know. Are the two of you an item?”

The old two-headed snake of hope and pain turned in its lair. “Me and William?”

“He’s always telling me about some bar the two of you went to, something you said. You’re together, right?”

We were looking into the mirror together, addressing each other’s reflection. Jane was too thin and she had a large beak of a nose and a low brow, but she carried herself with careless, glamorous self-assurance. Tonight she wore a tight red dress, cut low to reveal an elegant breastbone; her caramel-colored hair was piled into a loose knot on top of her head. She stood with one hip thrust slightly out, her hands at the back of her head, adjusting her hair. Next to her I looked pale and insignificant, but I was beyond envy tonight, or at least any awareness of it.

“Don’t I wish,” I said frankly.

“Yeah, well, don’t we all.” Her mouth was curved and humorous, her teeth small and charmingly discolored. “Who is he seeing right now, if not you?”

“No one that I know of.” I thought a moment. “No one, actually.”

She ran a finger over the dark red lipstick on her lower lip. “Well, he’s the most attractive man I’ve ever met and I’ve gotten nowhere with him, all these years.”

“All I can tell you,” I said, “is that Margot could do whatever she wants with him but she doesn’t appear to give a shit.”

“Maybe that’s the key,” she said. “Oh, well. What can I do? Me hungry, me eat.” We smiled at each other. She turned to me and ran her hands up the sides of my head and gripped my hair close to my scalp. “Cut your hair short. That’s another thing I’ve been meaning to say to you. Cut your hair short on the sides and full on top, like a French boy, and get yourself some good clothes, well-cut, to show off your sexy little body
and the lovely bones in your face. You look like an overgrown freshman, like you haven’t rethought your look since college.”

“I didn’t know I had a look,” I said, pleased. Her hands felt good on my head. And Jane, of all people, had called me sexy.

“Of course you do. You just need to take control of it.” She bunched my hair into a ponytail and used her grip on it to usher me out the door. “My bladder’s about to blow up,” she said. “Scoot.” Then I was out in the hallway and the door had been locked behind me. My scalp glowed. I was starstruck. I wanted to loiter in front of the bathroom door until Jane came out, but I wanted another drink even more.

I made my way into the living room and saw William and Margot sitting together at the dining room table, under a pool of light from the recessed bulb right above them, their arms folded on the table in exactly the same way, talking intently, dark heads close together. Margot was tracing a pattern on the table with her finger. William watched her, and from where I stood I could feel how much he wanted her to look back at him. He looked gangly, rawboned, the way he’d looked in high school. As I fixed my gaze on Margot, a ghostly second Margot glided up from the first and hovered there just above her. I squinted, trying to figure it out, until the two Margots resolved themselves back into one, and realized that I had reached the point at which the authentic and the alcohol-induced had become indistinguishable.

I veered into the kitchen, gestured to three people to bend their heads so I could open a cupboard, took out a cut-glass tumbler and poured from the freezer bottle, which was now almost empty. I took a sip. It went down like distilled ether, icy, poisonous, divine. I ambled over to William and Margot and stopped a few feet away from them. Without meaning to, I began to eavesdrop on them; I had intended for them to notice
me so I could join their conversation, but neither of them looked up, so there we were. They were talking, I soon gathered, about a magazine article Margot was writing.

“One tree,” she was saying. “Apparently that’s all it takes for them to be made aware of the sanctity of life. That’s why these Fresh Air programs are so essential.”

To his credit, William looked skeptical. “You’re telling me that a crack baby gets one look at a tree and he’s healed?”

“Studies indicate that he’s significantly less likely to perpetuate the cycle of violence if he understands that he belongs to a larger world.”

“One tree is a larger world?”

“Not to put too fine a point on it, but nature seems to be the source of morality.” She looked at him significantly. “If you don’t know you’re part of a larger order, there’s no good reason not to play God and shoot anyone who looks at you funny.”

“That strikes me as just a little simplistic,” said William.

“Or,” I said—they both looked up at me, startled—“if you surround yourself with fake ferns and cut flowers and bathe in distilled water, you might get the idea that the world exists solely to please you.”

I could see a slender green vein jump in the milk-white skin of Margot’s temple. “I’m talking about twelve-year-olds in the projects with automatic weapons,” she said.

“If you handed Jackie an AK-47 and told her you’d sent a letter to the wrong address, tell me she wouldn’t take you out.”

William laughed. “Is that one of my brand-new crystal tumblers?”

“Crystal?” I flicked the rim of the glass with one fingernail to produce a dead clicking sound. “Well, it sounds more like glass, but what do I know—” Naturally, I dropped it, but it fell on my foot and rolled, and didn’t shatter. My shoe got wet,
though. I bent down to retrieve the glass, taking care to keep my rather short skirt from riding up too high. “Oh, damn,” I said.

In the kitchen, which was empty now for some reason, I leaned against the counter and pressed the glass to my eyes and took a few deep breaths. Jane wandered in, looking dreamy and focused at the same time.