In the Drink (24 page)

As I went down the stairs to the subway, I caught the eye of a man coming toward me. He was slightly shorter and probably slightly younger than I was. His dark receding hair was combed back from a broad forehead that rose over concise features, sharp nose, hint of a double chin. His eyes were a faded denim blue; I knew without looking that his body was slope-shouldered and haunchy. “I can’t believe it,” he said, smiling. “Claudia. Do you remember me? Ned Keller.”

Ned Keller? He did look familiar, some night last summer—oh, no, Ned
Keller
—“Hello,” I said, my eyes widening. “What are you doing here?”

He quirked his mouth at my obvious discomfort. “I’m on my way to work,” he said. “And you?”

One evening last August I’d found myself attending an outdoor performance of
Madama Butterfly
in Central Park. I had gone to the park in search of relief from my furnace-hot apartment, and found it in the form of Ned Keller, opera buff. He’d entertained me during the first act with a running stream of derision: the soprano was shrill and elderly, the violins were out of tune with the woodwinds. He’d had little trouble persuading me to go with him to an air-conditioned bar. One drink had led to another, which in turn led to my bed, where the night had ended rather badly for both of us: I had thrown up on him. He was very gentlemanly about it; he’d extricated himself with a minimum of fuss, showered and dressed and crept away. I hadn’t seen him since; I’d hoped never to lay eyes on him again.

“I’m on my way home,” I said.

“Late night?”

“Well, sort of—” Oh, fuck it all, why did I have to explain
myself to him? “Anyway,” I said with a horribly awkward little wave, “take care, Ned, nice seeing you again.”

He gave a nod, then turned and headed up the stairs to the street.

When I stood on the platform and leaned over to see if the train was coming and saw the light plunging toward me, I felt a familiar prickling of the hair on the back of my neck: as I so often did, I sensed a pair of hands just behind me, beady eyes boring into the back of my head. It would be so easy: one slight push at the right instant.

My presence in my own life had become so tenuous, so half-hearted, that I had simply fallen through a tear in the flimsy fabric, slid into an alternate universe where only I existed, or conversely, where everyone existed but me. And it didn’t matter. I felt a sucking undertow, pulling me down: I had failed to engage, I had failed to connect; I had failed.

Worse than that, yesterday morning, all at once, I had run out of toilet paper, shampoo, toothpaste and coffee, and had been forced to use instead, respectively, a dirty sock, a gray sliver of Ivory soap, some old baking soda from my refrigerator and a tea bag so old it was practically dust and contained about as much caffeine as a stick of licorice. I found this extremely demoralizing, but the idea of replacing everything depressed me even more. How wearying and pointless it all seemed. All I ever did was produce waste in one form or another, Jackie’s books being the most egregious example. I measured out my life in toilet paper rolls.

I leaned a little further over the tracks. Please, I thought, and waited as the train rushed on. I willed it to happen, silently begged whoever it was to deliver me from all this.

Then I realized that I could jump. Such a simple idea, but it hadn’t occurred to me until now—I didn’t have to depend on those invisible hands at my back: I could do it myself.

A pang of wild longing ripped through me. I closed my eyes and swayed in the thundering wind. As the train plunged through the mouth of the tunnel into the station, I felt myself begin to let go. My mind was ready for it, had accepted the necessary bone-crunching pain before the release. Ahhh, I thought, finally—I looked into the yellow eye and spread my arms to embrace it.

Then some wholly involuntary reflex made me lean back and regain my balance. It felt as if the train itself had pushed me back out of its way. I boarded with everyone else, shaken. I had never before wished for extermination quite that intensely.

On the way home I bought coffee and toilet paper, toothpaste, milk and shampoo; this cheered me up a little. I came into my apartment and turned on the overhead light and allowed the roaches to slide into their cracks, then jumped, truly startled. I’d caught Delilah in her cat box; she was hunched over the gravel, her spine steeply curved, her daily turd halfway out. She looked up at me, I looked down at her. There was in her gaze something of Jackie’s imperiousness when I’d walked in to find her naked on the toilet. I looked away apologetically, as if I were the one caught in an awkward position, while she finished her business and stalked under the bed. Only then did I dare cross the room to the phone.

“I need to talk to Gil in person, as soon as possible,” was all I would, or could, tell Janine. At first she didn’t want to even bother Gil with such a vague request, but I wore her down on the strength of our three-year association. She had a Southern accent; I’d always pictured her with a sulky Cupid’s-bow mouth and a fetching cascade of golden curls, although I’d never met her. She put me on hold for a few minutes, then returned to say, politely enough but with her usual miffed undertone, that “he” had an opening on Monday at five o’clock, actually, and he could give me fifteen minutes. I was used to that tone by
now and didn’t take it personally. I knew how it went; Gil was probably hovering over her with a stack of manuscripts he wanted her to read and a reservation he needed for tomorrow’s lunch and folders to file and messages to return for him. She must have heard that I was out of Jackie’s life for good, so she no doubt wondered what the hell I could possibly have to talk to Gil about now, but she said only, “All righty then, Claudia, see you then.”

I put down the receiver, out of breath for some reason, as winded as if I’d just sprinted away from an attacker on the sidewalk.

I went out and found the nearest beauty shop and plunked myself down and told the woman what to do. Half an hour later, I walked out with a strange light-headed feeling. I’d had the lady cut it exactly to Jane’s French-boy specifications. Longish layered bangs fell forward to brush the tips of my lashes; the sides and back lay in pinfeathers to the bare nape of my neck. All the way home I kept peering into plate-glass windows to inspect my unfamiliar reflection; I wasn’t sure whether or not I liked it, but it was certainly a change, and at the moment, all change was for the better.

By five-thirty, the windowshade was almost dark and the evening loomed like a mine shaft I would have to descend without a light. I could see a movie or go downtown and drink with whoever happened to be on the next barstool, I could take a walk down Broadway, I could call Frieda and convince her to meet me for a sandwich somewhere, there were always a hundred things to do to fill time, but I was tired of filling time.

As I ruffled through the opened envelopes on my table, I unearthed the
Waste Land
card Gus had given me, cast an idle eye over it, and realized that the first performance started at eight. For the first time in days, I felt something almost akin to anticipation. A disco extravaganza, campy and awful and more
ludicrous than anything I’d ever done or thought of doing. I was saved. That was just what I needed. I dialed William’s work number and told Elissa in my most officious voice that I was calling from the White House with some vital top-secret classified information for Mr. Snow. She wasn’t fooled, I didn’t think, but William came on the line right away. “Claudia?” he said. “Where have you been? Why haven’t you returned my calls?”

“ ‘What shall I do now? What shall I do? I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street with my hair down, so.’ ”

“Are you drunk already? It’s not even six o’clock.”

“William! Am I really that bad?”

“Worse,” he said. “I can’t believe you haven’t called me back. You’re lucky I still take your calls. Are you calling about Gus’s play? Where should we meet?”

I decided to dress as if William and I were going on a real date. I put on a dress I’d bought a long time ago on a whim and never worn, an old-fashioned dress in a silky material, gray with a pattern of tiny dark blue flowers and a row of pearl buttons down the front, whose gently pleated skirt came almost to my knees and made me feel like a sexy librarian about to take her bun down and wow the world. I wore some of my new lipstick, the one called Lust for Life, which I found rather apt just now; I managed to apply a little mascara without getting any on my cheeks. After thrusting an arm out the window to gauge temperature and precipitation, I put on a dark gray cardigan sweater. From deep in my sock drawer I dug up a pair of sheer champagne-colored stockings and from the inky hellhole of my closet a not-too-battered pair of high-heeled Mary Janes that made me walk with a cantilevered daintiness. Then I was out the door and on my way to Brooklyn.

I got out at the Bedford stop and met William at the noisy, narrow Thai place across the street from the subway.

“Don’t you look swell,” he said, smiling, when I came in.

“Don’t I just,” I said.

“I like your hair,” he added earnestly after a moment, sounding surprised and bemused, as if he were taking it personally that I’d cut it.

I smiled enigmatically and let it go at that. I’d never fully understood why men were so funny about women’s haircuts.

We sat side by side on stools at the counter, ate a couple of oily, ambrosial curries and drank cold bottles of Thai beer and watched the silent cooks toss handfuls of diabolical red powder into smoking woks. I didn’t tell him I’d lost my job; I didn’t tell him anything, I just kept up a running patter of nonsense to avoid all the unwholesome, undesirable topics: my rupture with Jackie, his dance with Jane, anything to do with Margot, my recent bout with John Threadgill. William acquiesced to my mood with a parallel and complementary banter of his own.

After dinner we walked west toward the river and then north along Kent Avenue. It was a warm, windy evening, the sky heavy and pink, spitting a tepid little rain, but in a friendly way; we walked past old warehouses and factory buildings whose broken rain-beaded windowpanes were the same color as the sky. I breathed the saturated, enlivening air that came off the river, filling my lungs with it, moving my limbs easily through it. My head felt shorn and downy, like an invalid’s. I felt weak but newly alive, as if I had been suffering from a severe and debilitating illness and had just begun the upswing back into normal health. My skirt blew against my legs; William walked calmly by my side, tall and handsome in his suit, close enough to me so that I could have taken his arm if I’d dared. We hardly talked, but our silence was comradely and even affectionate, or so it seemed to me.

The Waste Land Site, as Gus had portentously dubbed it on the card, turned out to be a squat factory building on a
littered lot right on the water. The river looked menacing and inimical in the rain, swollen with riptides, glossy with industrial runoff. There was quite a crowd already gathered outside the building. Without looking directly at anyone, I sensed that I knew several of them. We barreled through until we found the ticket seller at a table near the door to the building, who was, I realized, the hatchet-faced, beturbaned Madame Sosostris on the card; tonight he was wearing a low-cut evening gown and false eyelashes, but there was no mistaking that chin, as long and heavy as an andiron.

The tickets were ten dollars each. I paid for both, money that wasn’t mine, a credit-card cash advance, because I couldn’t stand being William’s charity case any more. “Oh—I forgot,” said William. “Sorry, I think I’m on the list. Hector,” he said to the ticket guy, “I’m on the list.” So much for trying to treat him to something. “Here, Claudia, it’s on me.”

“No, stop,” I said. “I wanted to treat you, for once.”

“Why don’t you just thank me and shut up?”

“Thank you,” I said grievously, and shut up.

We were in a long, low-ceilinged room with a concrete oil-stained floor. A curtain hid the back section of the room, a big black cloth with diadems glittering on it; a hundred or so metal folding chairs had been arranged in front. Almost all of the chairs were still empty, since the entire audience seemed to be loitering outside. William and I sat off to the side, in the next-to-last row. Hector had handed William two programs; William gave me one of them now and we read them to ourselves, waiting for the rest of the audience to straggle in. Our shoulders touched. I could feel his warmth through several layers of cloth.

“I can’t believe this,” I said, pointing at a note at the back of the program. “Listen to this: ‘The composer wishes to thank the librettist for his insight and compassion, for being so far ahead of his time, for shaping the pain of a generation and a
culture and giving it voice.’ Excuse me, William, is he serious? I’m going to gag.”

“Well, try to control yourself,” said William swiftly. “He’s HIV positive.”

“Oh,” I said, shocked, immediately contrite. “So that’s why.” I wasn’t sure what I meant by that, and William didn’t ask. Everyone came crowding in. The lights dimmed. The huge disco ball overhead, with its thousand mirror shards, began to turn, shedding beads of light through the room. A swelling tremolo synthesizer chord resolved into another chord, the drum machine kicked in with the relentless beat of a piston. The audience whooped as a chorus line of men in tight spandex sailor suits came scissor-kicking onstage, singing in reedy unison to a flimsy and fatuous tune: “April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire …” All the scorn that rose in my throat had to be tamped down right away. I wished William hadn’t told me. What difference should it make to my experience and opinion of this play that a life-sapping virus had taken up residence in Gus’s immune system? He was still a vicious, snide, egocentric prick; it wasn’t fair that I was now required to feel sympathetic and open-minded toward this piece of crap. “Stirring dull roots with spring rain,” they sang, Adam’s apples bobbing, hips twitching, biceps swelling as they raised their arms above their heads and pumped them to the beat.