The Deed (13 page)

Diana continued, using strategic pauses to divide her words into separate compartments for easy comprehension. “I need to know, if I, can count on you, to be…well, I hate to put it this way, but…a part of the team.”

The fingers of Diana’s right hand flexed and recurled sinuously around the curve of the coffee mug; through some freakish Darth Vader telekinetic transfer, Jason felt the pressure encircle his throat.
This is a goddamn loyalty oath,
he realized.
She’s actually going to make me say it.

“So, what do you think?” she prompted with a mocking little smile, opening her hands as if handing him an invisible book.

But Jason froze in place, robbed of the power of speech. Day passed into night, and night to day; suns rose and set faster and faster, in endless diurnal progression, until the seasons whirled in their passing; the moon spun madly about the earth, and great mountain ranges rose from the plains and eroded away again until finally he stammered out the necessary response.

“Yeah, of course,” he said nervously. “I’ll do whatever it takes. I mean, I want to stay on, if that’s what you’re asking.”

Somewhere, a cock crowed. Bells tolled and children cried as Jason wandered, bewildered, back to his office. He toyed with the idea of hanging himself in Potter’s Field, but decided instead to go on an unprecedented drunk.

LOWER EAST SIDE
, 10:00
P.M.

“Excuse me—excuse me, I hate to interrupt,” said Becky, knocking three times on the table, next to her beer. “But you guys have
got
to check out what’s going on over there.” She jerked her head once across the table and toward the main bar area, as if heading a soccer ball back into the crowd.

Seated just to Becky’s right and sharing her line of vision, Jason had already independently noticed the object of her amusement, so he instead watched J.D., Paul, and Nick turn as one to plot the trajectory of her nod and discover, at a table along the far wall, the biker couple. A massively bearded road warrior, forlorn and anachronistic in a “Pot for Peace” black T-shirt and a slowly disintegrating bomber jacket, stared in autistic fascination at a similarly leathered female partner who was meticulously sucking on his toes.

“Yeesh,” said Nick with a grimace. “Cancel those chicken fingers.”

“Now
there’s
something you don’t see every day,” drawled J.D. in his inimitable East Texas twang, grinning and shaking his ponytailed head in disbelief. “That’s
great.
”

“Talk about your hoof-and-mouth disease,” noted Jason with a wry smile, feeling positively giddy with contentment. This was where he’d longed to be all week, gathered around a crappy wooden table anchored with bottomless pitchers of cheap beer, embarking on yet another episode of this weekly libation ritual he shared with his four tightest friends. Already he felt the tension of the week beginning to leach out through his pores, edged out by fat molecules of alcohol.

“It seems clear she’s his ‘hog,’” Paul surmised, turning back around to face the table and pushing his wire-frame glasses back from the brink of his nose, a semiconscious tic endearingly familiar to everyone present.

“All right, everyone can stop staring now,” said Becky.

“On the plus side,” said Nick, “this saves us a trip to the Harley-Davidson Café. What the hell are we doing here, Becky?”

Becky pulled away from the table and threw back her palms in a don’t-look-at-me stance. “Hey, this is the part of the world where interesting things happen. If it’s too raw for you, go find yourself a Friday’s.”

A hardened former club kid who’d spent the lion’s share of her adolescence trolling for thrills at Tunnel and Limelight, Becky had long ago assumed the role of social director for this little clique. True, J.D., the Southern socialite, had an ironclad grip on the party scene—he was a tireless networker who morphed from job to job with the flipping of his
Maxim
calendar—and Nick or Jason could occasionally swing corporate show tickets or a Rangers skybox. But it was Becky, immersed in the shabby perks of women’s magazines, who provided the bread and butter: movie screenings, gallery openings, off-off-off-off-Broadway cast parties. She freely accepted sole responsibility for setting the scene, and generally tried to push the envelope as far as her more conservative friends would tolerate.

“Don’t get your panties in a bunch,” said Nick. “All I’m saying is, if we’re just going to drink beers and sit around talking to ourselves, as usual, we should find a place that doesn’t require body armor.”

Becky fixed him with a cold look of disdain. “And someday you’re actually going to have the gall to tell your kids you lived in New York.”

“Ladies, ladies,” said J.D., on the far side of Becky. “Have another refreshing frosty beverage and shut the fuck up.”

J.D.’s signature TV-speak rarely failed to bring a smile to Jason’s face. The lanky Houston boy, an eager and demonstrative performer in social situations anyway, was forever lacing his speech with idioms culled from real or imagined television conversation, describing his omelet, say, as being “full of creamery goodness,” or asserting, of just about anything, that “Moms love it.” Collectively, the patched-in expressions lent a weird cultural resonance to J.D.’s speech. It was pop culture ground up and sprinkled over everyday banality, performed by a mad method actor.

To J.D.’s left sat Paul, saying next to nothing as usual, bright eyes unerringly following the conversational ball from behind those glasses, quietly gathering data and concentrating the weight of his intellect into brief sardonic bursts. And Nick, already half crocked and belligerent, still dressed for work because he looked better that way; and Becky, with the blue eyes and the bottle-blond hair, with the smooth, fair skin and the generous melons, much too good-looking to be spending every weekend with the same four guys she already knew all too well. She was unconsciously sliding her beer glass around now, smearing a clear pool of condensate into lazy swirls, somehow both deeply dissatisfied and yet, in the moment, sincerely and viscerally happy.

A beery haze was beginning to cloud Jason’s concentration. The day’s events—Halloran’s bombshell, and the grilling he’d received at the hands of Diana—and fielding frequent questions and catcalls had put him squarely at the center of attention, and his friends, as usual, made no secret of their opinions.

“So wait a minute; go back,” said J.D. “Y’all
knew
your boss was gonna be fired, and you didn’t say anything?”

“No, I didn’t ‘know’ he was going to be fired,” Jason clarified patiently. “I’d heard an idle rumor.”

At this, Nick laughed aloud. “Define ‘idle rumor,’” he said, with evil good humor. “Did he get fired, or didn’t he?”

“Oh, leave him alone,” said Becky.

“I honestly, honestly didn’t believe it,” protested Jason. “Shit,” he added, half to himself, “I
hate
all this office-politics crap.”

“Because you suck at it,” observed Nick.

“So are you going to stay?” Becky wanted to know.

Jason shrugged. “I guess so,” he said. “For now, anyway.” He grabbed the half-empty beer pitcher with his left hand, met it halfway with the glass in his right. “I feel like I’m coming to a big fork in the road,” he said as he poured. “I want to keep holding all my options open as long as possible—”

“Because you’re a guy,” interjected Becky.

“—because I’m a guy,” he allowed. “But I think I’ve reached one of these quantum moments. I have to decide whether I want to really define this as my career with a capital
C,
or bail and keep looking.”

“I’m at the same crossroads,” said Becky, nodding. “I’m an associate editor right now, so I do writing
and
editing, and I’d love to keep doing both. But you can’t; if I’m going to climb any farther up the masthead, I either have to choose writing or choose editing.”

“Well,” said Paul, “that’s if you accept the assumption that you have to climb.”

“Oh, I have to climb,” she assured him. “Poverty stops being a badge of honor after about twenty-five.”

“But you could go freelance,” replied Paul. “Telecommute. Write the Great American Screenplay.”

She raised her eyebrows. “You picking up my health insurance?”

“The whole thing just makes me feel sort of…I don’t know, out of breath,” said Jason. He was edging uncomfortably close to a truth he wasn’t sure he wanted to state out loud, namely, that he wasn’t convinced he was actually
good
at what he was doing. He had enormous confidence in his creative powers, and still felt sure he could propel himself to excellence through sheer focus. But it seemed a long, uphill slog.

J.D. turned back to Jason. “Well, don’t have a big midlife crisis on us, pal. There’s no hurry.”

“There
is,
though,” said Jason. “I feel like I can still switch gears now, but it’s going to keep getting tougher to escape as a couple of more years go by. It’ll be a second career, then. There’ll be something vaguely pathetic about it.”

“What makes you so certain you’re not pathetic now?” wondered Nick.

“Well, that’s the nut of the issue, isn’t it?” said Paul to Jason. “
Is
this your career, or is it just a job?”

When Jason didn’t answer, J.D. filled the silence. “It’s
always
just a job,” he opined.

Jason grinned. J.D. had held an uninterrupted string of small jobs since college, using a natural handiness and a heaping helping of Texas bullshit to finagle his way into all manner of interesting, but short-lived, posts. He’d refurbished the wrought-iron gates of Brooklyn brownstones, he’d mixed martinis at Lincoln Center, he’d taught English to the toddlers of diplomats. Besides paying the rent, he used the jobs to fund hobbies—photography, computer graphics—that in turn opened up more job opportunities.

J.D. shrugged, smiling. “I think it’d be incredibly boring to do just one thing for the next sixty years, personally. But that’s me.”

Nick, nodding, replied, “I know, I know. I used to feel that way before I got
my
shit together, too.”

“Hey,
I
had a date,” said Jason, because he wanted to talk about it. “Two, actually.”

“Ah, that’s right!” replied Nick enthusiastically. “Pocahontas.”

“Wait, who’s Pocahontas?” said Becky.

“Oh, you know,” Nick replied. “She was an Indian princess who—”

Becky froze him with a look of unfiltered disdain. “Was I talking to you?”

Retracing his two encounters with Amanda, last night’s drinks and the lunch today, felt oddly liberating. Jason realized that he truly didn’t know what to think about Amanda’s proposition. The very idea felt slippery in his grasp. Yesterday, it had seemed no more than an intriguing, but implausible, fiction, but their lunch together had gone a long way toward undermining Jason’s certainty. Though the bare facts still resisted reason, her inexplicable conviction was proving tougher to sweep aside, and Jason realized he needed his friends to help him put things into perspective.

“Well, how about that,” J.D. gushed, when Jason had finished. “Who knew we had such a blue blood in our midst?”

“‘Glamis thou art, and Cawdor,’” said Paul.

“I don’t know if there’s anything to it,” replied Jason. “It seems pretty far-fetched, obviously. But I’m certainly willing to play along.”

“Oh, so she’s
hot,
” said J.D., suddenly comprehending. “See, you didn’t
say
that.”

Jason shrugged. “She’s on the hot side.”

“What if it’s true?” Becky interrupted, unable to contain her enthusiasm. “I mean, what would that mean for you?”

“Him? Fuck
him,
” said J.D. “What does it mean for
me?
”

“Exactly,” Nick agreed, flashing J.D. an appreciative smile. “
That’s
the point. What it means, Beck, is that our friend here owns this bar we’re sitting in, and the apartment you live in, and the Korean deli where you get your lemon-poppy muffin in the morning, and all the subway lines and skyscrapers and off-track-betting booths in between.” He put his arm around Jason’s shoulders. “It means that beers are on him, starting tonight, and right on through the end of time.”