In the Drink (33 page)

As I went through the door of my building, someone else came in hard on my heels. I turned blithely to hold the door open for whatever neighbor was behind me and beheld instead the big buffalo head of my landlord. He saw me, too, which was potentially calamitous. “Miller,” I said stupidly. “I’ve been away for months.”

“I’m glad to see you’re still alive, sweetheart,” he said, crowding me into a corner of the entryway. “I was worried. I’ve been leaving you messages.”

“Yes, well, I lost my job and had to go out of town to take care of my—my aunt, who’s got a brain tumor, she needed me to—” I tried to avert my nose from the stink of his aftershave. “Anyway, sorry about the rent.”

He repositioned himself to circumvent my nostrils’ escape ploy; his dewlaps quivered with another silent fart of cologne that went straight to my stomach and roiled around the emptiness
with all the enzymes and acids. “No hard feelings. Can you get it to me by this afternoon?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “I’ll see what I can do.”

“February, March, April. Three months.” He held up the appropriate number of fingers. His chest hairs were pushing like insect antennae through his shirt’s pores.

“The thing is, I don’t have any money, Miller, I lost my job.”

“Did you? Aw, I hate to lose a good tenant like you. I was just on my way up to see you, actually, so you saved me a trip all the way upstairs. Listen, get me one month’s rent today, and I’ll wait a week on the other two. Otherwise—” He spread his hands to show how helpless he would be otherwise.

“Today,” I repeated. There was about half a month’s rent left in my checking account out of the money I’d stolen from Jackie. William would have lent me the rest in a heartbeat, and my mother would have given it to me outright, but I preferred not to ask either of them for anything right now. I could have “borrowed” from Jackie, I supposed, as an advance on my salary, but the thought of her reaction if she found out—“I’ll see what I can do,” I said again, as if I were planning a flurry of financial activity upstairs.

“Okay, I got someone else to see in the building,” he said. “So I’ll come by in ten, fifteen minutes and pick it up.”

“Listen, Miller,” I began.

“Ten minutes? See you then.” His broad backside heaved itself up a flight of stairs. His knock on someone’s door echoed through the stairwell. As soon as the door opened to admit him and closed behind him, I raced upstairs, the back of my throat meeting my intestines in a clenched handshake. He wasn’t going to evict me physically today, he couldn’t; these things took time, there were legal channels to be gone through, possession was nine-tenths of whatever, I’d get the money together eventually.
He couldn’t throw me out of my own home; I didn’t even have to answer the door when he knocked, I could pretend I’d gone back to my aunt’s brain tumor.

Jeans, toothbrush, legal pad, pen, cat food, cat litter, what else? A couple of paperback poetry anthologies, three shirts, shampoo, bras and underwear. I shoved everything into my enormous old canvas backpack, not breathing. I didn’t have time to think it all out clearly, but I knew with a blinding flash of instinct, as much as I’d ever known anything, that the most important thing in the world right now was to get out and stay out and never have to tell Miller another lie again as long as I lived. It was time to move on. I was finished here for good. I found Delilah’s cat carry box, which she hadn’t been in since she was a kitten going to the vet for her shots; she’d loathed it then and there was no reason to think her feelings had changed in the meantime, but of course I couldn’t leave her here because for some reason, I wasn’t ever coming back. To my amazement, she went in without a peep, as if she knew.

I took a last look around at the room, saw it as clearly as if I’d never seen it before. I hadn’t really lived here, had I, not the way other people inhabited their homes. No, this room had been more along the lines of a holding cell, a way station. Or a launching pad. That was it, a launching pad, that was a much more comforting way of looking at it, as if I were about to fire up my engines and scorch the earth.

In the last seconds before blastoff I remembered William’s crystal tumbler. I found it in the cupboard: even though I was in a hell of a hurry, I stood still for a moment and held it to the weak light, turned it so the facets winked and glinted. It looked like Cinderella’s other glass slipper, the one that had come home with her while its mate stayed behind at the ball. I wrapped it in a sock and packed it, then turned my attention to the heap of unpaid bills I’d been toying with for weeks. If I left
them here, I could just forget about them, because I wasn’t leaving any forwarding address, but the same blind instinct that was commanding me to leave told me sternly and in no uncertain terms that those bills were coming with me. So I packed them into an outside pocket and zipped it shut.

I shouldered my pack, picked up Delilah’s box, then abandoned ship without a backward glance, nine years of my life left behind, the rest of it a cipher in front of me. I left my bag of groceries on my armchair; how was I going to toast an English muffin when I was leaving my toaster behind? As I locked the door behind me, the phone rang. On my way down the first flight of stairs I heard my own voice explaining that I was unable to come to the phone right now. I wished this narration would follow me like a film voice-over, but it stayed behind with all my work outfits, the shed skins of whatever former self I was leaving behind.

I heard Miller’s amiable mumble behind the door of 2B, getting louder as I passed as if he were just on his way out. His aftershave stood guard on the landing like a pit bull. I made it down the last flight and out the door. I stood on the street while people plowed around me and jostled Delilah’s box, unwilling to lose their hard-won momentum by cutting a wider swath around us. Here it was. I had gone over the waterfall without a barrel. The man I always gave quarters to was sitting as usual in his doorway behind his sign, and looked up as I went by. I shook my head and kept going.

Jackie had said she was leaving at one, which was in less than half an hour. Once she was gone, I could go to her house and raid her fridge and figure out what to do next. I carried my cargo to a bench on an island in the center of Broadway, across from the pigeon-feeder, who was hard at it. I grinned at him. He was completely out of his tree and had nothing in the world
but his blanket and some bread crumbs, but he was a free man. There were worse lives you could have. He caught me looking, and without acknowledging me began to improvise: a dip, some soft-shoe, a batlike flap of his blanket. The pigeons stayed right with him, pecking at the small handful he let fly every now and then.

Out of nowhere, I was hit by an idea for a novel I might write. I saw the whole story laid out before me like a meal in a restaurant, probably because I was near starving by that point, and my low blood sugar was making me a little daft—there it hung like a mirage, superimposed on the pigeon man, who was now directing traffic, or at least he thought he was.

When I next looked at my watch, it was after one o’clock. I hailed a cab and gave Jackie’s address to the driver, whose turban looked suspiciously like Madame Sosostris’s; he repeated back a garbled rendition and we were off. He muscled the car’s nose into a clot of traffic, honked at a chubby jogger crossing against the light, and said, “God damn it” with an odd cadence. I craned my neck to spot openings in the next lane, blanched as the meter clicked off another quarter so soon after the last one, pounded an imaginary accelerator as we burst forward into a clear stretch of street.

In front of Jackie’s I allowed Ralph to help me out of the cab. “Hello, Claudia,” he said warily. He looked spiffy today, his uniform buttons shining in the sun, his hair freshly clipped.

“Hello, Ralph,” I said. “Did I miss Jackie?”

“She just left,” he said.

We looked at each other.

“I wanted to explain about the other day,” I said.

“I heard she canned you,” he said with a grudging smile.

“Only for a little while,” I said, laughing. “Did she mention I was working for her again?”

“She didn’t say anything about it.” He carried Delilah’s box through the door for me. “Actually, she didn’t mention you’d be coming by today at all.”

“She might have forgotten to tell anyone. You know how she is. Can I run these things up? I’ve got a key.”

He shot a glance at the cat carry box he’d set on the marble floor, obviously full of cat, and the backpack, obviously mine: just the merest flick of his eyeball, since he didn’t want to be rude. I carried everything into the open elevator and prayed to a deity newly invented just for this. Delilah scratched the floor of her box; her back humped up against the lid and she let out a small pleading yowl I wanted to echo, a yowl which must have confirmed beyond a doubt Ralph’s correct suspicion that all was not kosher here. He stood deliberating by the elevator control panel: he had no idea what I was up to, he didn’t trust me anyway, the super would fire him. He owed me nothing. But his fellow-feeling prevailed in the end, which was exactly what I’d banked on. “Up you go, then,” he said. The doors slid shut and I rose slowly to the fourth floor. “Good man,” I whispered to myself, vowing never to forget him, no matter how far my fortunes might take me.

Jackie’s apartment smelled as if the windows had been sealed shut for years. I stepped inside and inhaled a thick stew of perfume and dead flowers and trapped city air. It was dark and chilly in here, and too quiet. I freed Delilah, who bolted stiffly for a corner of the living room, then I opened the dining room curtains. The roses on the table had hardened into little knobs on brittle stalks; the fallen petals were as brown as old banana peels. Juanita must have got the sack right after I did. I carried the whole mess into the kitchen and ran it through the garbage disposal. The grinding din did me good: it reminded me that life’s functions continued through fair times and foul.

The refrigerator offered a compost heap of half-rotted iceberg
lettuce and green peppers in the vegetable crisper, a bottle of expensive champagne, some flat seltzer, condiments in jars with hardened brown stuff around the rims, and a loaf of extra-thin sliced gourmet white bread. The freezer was much friendlier: four frozen lasagna dinners, a half-gallon of peach frozen yogurt, a bag of mixed vegetables and a wad of hamburger meat. I unwrapped one of the frozen lasagnas and stuck it into the toaster oven to bake, then popped open the champagne and took a few swigs. This reminded me of William, which gave me an intense pain in my sternum that radiated outward in spokes like a red-hot bicycle wheel.

I wandered into Jackie’s bedroom, which seemed to be filled with the wreckage left behind by a teenager going on her first date. Bottles and pots sprawled on her vanity as if she’d swirled a hand through them. Drawers had been left open, stockings hanging out like arms and legs dangling over the side of a boat. Her bed was covered with a tangle of hangers and crumpled dresses. More from an excess of nervous energy than anything else, I began hanging up her dresses, folding the stockings, closing the bureau drawers, righting the bottles on the vanity. The very act of doing this caused a tender shoot of some wholly new feeling to poke a pointy green head up through the loam. I felt protective. Of Jackie, of all people. She would have hated to come home to find all her things where she’d left them; I knew exactly how it would have made her feel: let down, uncared-for, lonely. No matter that it was her own fault for being too cheap to hire a full-time maid—she couldn’t help that, it was just the way she was. Poor Jackie, she had such a shallow store of self-possession. The news that her career as an author was over would quite possibly bring her whole world crashing around her ears, that was how shaky her world was. Her illusions were all she had, except for Jimmy Blevins. And, it appeared, me.

In the wastebasket, where I just happened to glance on my way out, I spotted a receipt from the neighborhood lingerie shop. Picking it up to get a better idea of the nature of Jackie’s purchase, I deduced that this morning she’d gone out and bought herself a silk teddy which cost just over a hundred dollars, the very morning she was about to go to Long Island to stay in a secluded country house with a bachelor friend. This was very interesting, although it was not technically any of my business. I hoped they were having a swell time together, waltzing along the porch at sunset; maybe she even held his hand when they walked along the beach. I bet he was in seventh heaven right this minute.

I sighed, then went into the living room and tried for quite a while to coax Delilah out of her hiding place in the dark region under the couch. Finally I gave up and got two mixing bowls and a big flat baking dish from the kitchen and filled one bowl with water, then set all three by the far end of the couch and filled the other bowl with cat food and the baking dish with cat litter. It would have to do until I could convince her to come out from there and get into her box again before Jackie came back from Southampton. If I couldn’t get her out, the worst that could happen was that I’d inform Jackie that my cat was stuck under her couch, and she would have to deal. This didn’t scare me as much as it would have a month ago, but it still wasn’t something I looked forward to with any enthusiasm.