In the Drink (23 page)

“Her figure is absolutely perfect,” Frances announced to me; she sounded like Julie Andrews as Mary Poppins; she had that trapezoidal mouth, the high-tea vowels. “She’s just gorgeous. But she’s so little.”

“I know,” I found myself saying with mild apology, as if I had been presumptuous to bring her here.

“Southern European girls are much smaller than Americans, of course,” Frances went on, “which isn’t to say that we never use them. But this one is just so tiny. I’m not sure she’s suited for too much over here, quite frankly.”

“We could send her to Rafe,” said Andrea.

“Yes, that’s right,” said Frances, “Rafe.”

I smiled at Lucia, not sure how much of this she understood. I wished that I could save her from Rafe, who I instinctively knew was a squat semi-gay Casanova with champagne on ice in his studio and brunch jazz coming from speakers on the ceiling. Frances produced a business card, wrote something on it with a fountain pen, handed it to me, shook both our hands, and strode briskly away on her low-heeled slingback pumps.

In the cab, Lucia said, “I don’t care about this, I do for Jackie.”

“Then why—”

“She want me to have something to do. I don’t care.” She pouted and waved her hand dismissively. “I don’t like so much, all this.”

“So don’t do it,” I said. “Jackie thought you wanted to.”

“No,” she said. “I want—” She rummaged around in her bag, took out a map of New York City, and opened it. She
pointed at the lower half of Manhattan. “You know good places?”

“Clubs?”

“Yes, clubs, and—places to go, at night.”

All of a sudden New York seemed like one big urinal. I tried to imagine where someone like Lucia would want to spend an evening. I pointed to the map. “This part of town is called the East Village. That’s where people go.”

Lucia smiled and handed me a pad and pen, and obediently but not without misgivings I scribbled the names and approximate addresses of a few bars and clubs, including the Blue Bar, since all the Europeans instinctively honed in on that place; if she didn’t like it, she could leave.

I checked my watch: almost twelve-thirty, perfect timing. Lucia would be back in time to change for lunch; Jackie wanted to show her off to Bitsy Abbott and the Countess Robles, otherwise known as Dorcas, who would surely have her little dog Pepe stuffed into her Chanel pocketbook like a furry hankie. I didn’t envy Lucia this outing. While she sat imprisoned at Mortimer’s between the emaciated and alligator-skinned Dorcas and the quivering wattles and quavering voice of the frightening Bitsy, I’d be free and clear and on my way home, whistling through the park, concocting the next installment of the adventures of Genevieve.

When the cab pulled up in front of Jackie’s building, Lucia looked into her wallet, then said, “Oh! I have no more American money. You can borrow me some?”

Of course, I was low on cash myself, but I paid the man as if it were no big deal. As we walked through the lobby, Ralph gave us the formal smile he gave all the ladies in the building, and sent us up in the elevator without a word. I felt a disturbance in the air between us, a breach in our usual easy rapport, which I attributed to Louie’s having told him that I’d said he’d
told me Jackie was dead. Ralph had probably thought I was joking, which he would have seen as disrespectful to his grandmother. On my way out tonight I would explain everything to him and apologize. Not in front of Lucia, though.

Jackie was hovering in the foyer when we came in, waiting for us, but this time she didn’t look even slightly relieved to see me, she looked—distraught.

“Oh, hello, Claudia,” she said, stammering slightly. She had the wild-eyed look of a spooked racehorse, as if she might start to foam at the mouth any minute. “Lucia, dear, I can’t wait to hear all about your interviews, but first I’ve got to—”

She caught herself and switched to Italian. “Okay, Jackie,” called Lucia over her shoulder as she dashed off to the guest room.

I could feel the exact instant that Jackie’s attention returned to whatever terrible thing I had done; the air drew up around us, sealing us off from the world, from everything but the business at hand. Maybe Goldie had found a mistake in last year’s taxes, maybe I’d forgotten to follow up on a refund from a store—I felt the way a sky diver must feel in the door of the plane, staring down at the earth.

“What’s wrong, Jackie?” I asked.

She took a shaky breath. She looked haggard and tragic. “Well,” she said in a hoarse, hollow voice, “Claudia. You’d better come in here.” She turned with her usual brusqueness and led me down the hall toward the room she called her office but used primarily as an adjunct dressing room. As we passed the closed door of the guest room I heard a hip-hop beat from Lucia’s radio, faint but steady as a cricket in the underbrush. I stepped into Jackie’s “office” and she shut the door.

“While you were at those agencies, I read the new pages,”
she said, grazing both palms over the shellacked cuirass of her hairdo, not quite looking at me, or rather, looking at the general area of my collarbone and avoiding my eyes, which were trained on her face in hot little pinpoints of stunned but newly comprehending panic.

The day went dark. My heart began to thud slowly and a cold, glue-thick clamminess welled from all my pores and encased me in a bind of sweat. “You didn’t go to your aerobics class?”

“My aerobics class? What on earth does that have to do with any of this?” I hated that stare of hers, hated it so much I wanted to put my hands around her goosey neck and wring the life out of her, then throw her like a rag doll to the ground and leave her to be discovered by Juanita. “Claudia, I don’t understand at all what led you to write those things about—I find it completely incomprehensible that you would—how could you think—I’m not sure what you did think, frankly, and I don’t like what it implies about your loyalty, your character—what if I hadn’t read it, what if it had gone to Gil Reeve and been published? Can you imagine? It horrifies me, Claudia. It makes my blood run cold.”

She stopped. It was my turn. What was I supposed to say? What could I say? I’d written the accursed scene, I’d already admitted it, and I’d already acknowledged that I knew it would upset her, so I couldn’t pretend I’d done it by accident.

“Friday just wasn’t my day, I guess.” My attempt at a laugh sounded like no human sound ever made before.

“Well, we all have our bad days. We do.” I could see the flicker of neurons firing, like the lights in a pachinko game. When she was thinking, I knew that she was particularly vulnerable to suggestion.

“I can delete the whole thing,” I said with sham decisiveness.
“We have a lot of good ideas for that chapter. The strange woman in the limousine, the Argentinean Nazi’s daughter—”

“Mr. Blevins has convinced me that it might be the best thing for everyone if we stopped working together on this book.” She looked me right in the eye then. “And I agree with him, Claudia, I really do. It isn’t so much those pages, although they did tip the scales. I’ve been feeling for quite a while that I’d like to do all the work myself from now on. I’ve been very uneasy about having you write so much of my books. It’s kept me awake at night, honestly. My readers believe that I wrote them, and it isn’t right to give them less than they expect.”

Never mind the insult to my writing skills, such as they were. And never mind that she had every right to write her own books, every reason to boot me out. Where would I go now? What would I do? “Well, I could still help you with editing and revising,” I said hopefully. “You’d do the actual writing. That way it’ll be all your own words.”

She sighed and shook her head. “That’s what Gil Reeve is for. I wouldn’t want to step on his toes. And Jimmy, Mr. Blevins, has offered to look over anything I have doubts about. No, I think it’s best if we simply make a clean break. Which isn’t to say that I don’t deeply appreciate all the work you’ve done—” I could feel how excited she was to be getting rid of me; she was almost exploding with relief. “I just don’t feel any more that I can trust you, and if I can’t trust you, there’s just no way we can work together. It just isn’t possible, I’m afraid, Claudia.”

If she said another word to me I would burst into terrible, desperate sobs and cling to her ankles. I put my hand on the doorknob.

“Oh,” she said, holding up a hand to forestall me.
“Please write yourself a check for the money I owe you, Claudia dear.”

“We’re all caught up,” I said, “except for today.”

I turned the knob and opened the door and was almost out when she called after me, “You know, I could have you come in the mornings, just for this week, to help Goldie with anything—”

“She doesn’t need any help,” I said. I paused, struck by what I thought was nausea and then identified as words stuck in my craw. “I’m glad it’s come to this,” I blurted, “because frankly, Jackie, I can’t take it any more. Do you have any idea how impossible you are? Any idea? A person would have to be a
saint
to put up with you. Maybe Margot was a saint, but I’m absolutely not.
You
lost that photograph, not me.
You’re
the one who pretends to be an author and can barely read the newspaper, not me. You drive me up the wall and I hope I never have to work for someone like you again as long as I live. Good-bye.”

I went out without giving her a chance to answer. I closed my eyes and braced a hand against the hallway for a moment. I could feel her in there, mentally brushing me off, reminding herself that she was much better off without me.

All at once I had a plan.

I pulled myself together and went into the dining room. “Hi,” I said to Goldie.

“Hey,” she said. “You know, it was the same Doris? I couldn’t believe it! After so many years!”

“That’s amazing,” I said with a horrible grimace I hoped resembled a smile. “Listen, I’m on my way home, but I forgot to finish one small thing on the computer. It’ll only take a second.”

“It’s all yours,” she said. “I’ve got to go report on a couple things to the crazy lady, so I’ll be out of your way.”

I sat down at the computer and in under a minute had deleted all the files containing the new, almost-finished book. Then I got my coat from the closet and put it on. On my way out I pocketed, as if in a trance, one of Jackie’s spare checkbooks, the only existing backup disk of the new book, and the agreement I’d signed promising I’d never try to get credit for my work or more money from her, which wasn’t even remotely legally binding, according to William.

The next thing I was conscious of was waving with manic, phony cheer to Ralph on my way out. He tipped his cap to me, coolly, I thought, but it wasn’t worth defending myself now. I’d probably never see him again.

I spent the next several days dawdling around the city in a fog, spending money I didn’t have on various small and cheerful nonessentials—lipsticks named Lust for Life and Siren Song; lavender-scented soap that gave off a sharp chemical reek, but whose wrapper reminded me of an English garden in full bloom and calmed my soul with intimations of Wordsworth; pink platform jelly sandals I might wear in another life but almost certainly never in this one. These purchases momentarily cheered me up, like little bumps of cocaine, but let me down hard right afterwards.

At night I slept solidly for eight, then ten, then twelve or fourteen hours at a time, awakening in a panic, feeling as if I’d been heavily drugged into a near-death coma and had barely managed to drag myself back from the brink of total annihilation. I had to sit up and hold my throbbing head in my hands for several minutes before I was oriented enough to begin my
day, then drank cup after cup of strong coffee as the windowshade darkened. I came to know intimately my old armchair, a fusty behemoth I’d rescued from the sidewalk years ago, its nubbly worn rough-weave plaid, its sagging but capacious seat. Constantly at the forefront of my beclouded brain was the plan I’d hatched just before leaving Jackie’s, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to go through with it. I held the disk in my hands as if it could give me the answer: it was as hard and black as a June bug, with the same sinister sheen. I had never done anything so purely self-interested before, so utterly Machiavellian. This was a corner I hadn’t decided whether or not I could turn.

Things had to get worse before I could act, and they did. Toward midnight on Thursday, I found myself at a rathskeller on Avenue A where a very loud, very raucous band was playing. I turned to the man who’d been buying me drinks in exchange for whatever dipsomaniacal maunderings I’d been shouting into his ear, his face a shiny blur in the refracted lights from the stage. I shouted something else into the air between us, he shouted something back, and we laughed. Far away, as far below as the sewers, I heard the slimy wash of everything I didn’t want to think about.

I finished my drink and set it on the edge of the bar. He put his hand on the back of my neck and we spun slowly around to the music, our mouths connected by twin warm fumes of breath. What seemed to be a few minutes later I followed him several flights up some stairs somewhere to an apartment, where I must immediately have passed out. I awoke thirsty and confused at daybreak to find myself lying under someone’s coat on a couch with all my clothes on and no memory of the previous night. I didn’t recognize the skinny guy in white briefs who emerged tentatively from another room and looked at me
with equal befuddlement. Politely he sent me on my way, and politely I went.