In the Drink (11 page)

Slouching in opposite doorways at either end of the pantry, we eyed each other with the wary uneasiness of combatants too tired to go on with the fight, but unable to surrender. “Well,”
she said finally, “this is really the last straw, Claudia. I’m so exhausted the rest of the day is just shot. I had wanted to get going on the new book, but I suppose it’ll have to wait until tomorrow.”

“I need to wash my hands,” I said. I went to the bathroom just off the foyer and locked the door. I stuck my hands into a stream of warm water and lathered for several minutes with expensive camellia soap, dabbed at my skirt with a dampened embroidered hand towel and more camellia soap, then took another warm soapy little towel and plunged it around my armpits. I found a comb in my skirt pocket, wet it, and ran it through my hair. I washed my face thoroughly and dried it on yet another monogrammed scrap of terry cloth, then left all the towels in a sodden heap for Juanita to deal with: I didn’t give a shit.

Jackie was pacing up and down the hall outside the bathroom when I emerged. She silently took me by the arm and marched me the few yards to the foyer, to the marble table by the front door where all her outgoing mail waited for me to take it down and mail it. “Look at that,” she said with insistent eagerness.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know, what is it?”

“It’s addressed to Doris Loewenstein,” I said. “In your handwriting.”

“Look inside,” she said.

I shrugged and opened the manila envelope. She hovered right at my elbow. Inside was a note Jackie had scrawled to her accountant, paper-clipped to a thick form the IRS had sent her. Under the form was an eight-by-ten black-and-white photograph of four people, two short and dumpy, two tall and elegant. “Here it is,” I said expressionlessly. “I suppose you must have thought the envelope was empty.”

“Oh, of all the silly—” She gave a brief conspiratorial giggle. “I wrote that note right before I went to bed. I was half-asleep. Well, there we go. The mystery is solved. It’s very lucky we found it, Claudia; I was afraid that things would never have been the same between us if you’d lost this picture. We’ll have to hurry now, that man is coming to get it.”

It took everything I had not to slap her. I should have slapped her.

At four-thirty, the messenger arrived and bore away the accursed thing. At four thirty-five, Jackie took off her suit and stockings and underwear, and sank gratefully into a steaming tub to soak away the day’s cares.

She was fanatical about her bath. Juanita was under strict instructions to clean it only with a chamois cloth and supersoft liquid soap imported from England. A sterilized water tank had been installed next to the tub; a man came twice a week to refill it with distilled water, pure molecules of hydrogen and oxygen free of all minerals, chemicals and biota. He also changed the filter which had been placed at Jackie’s insistence over the mouth of the tap in case the water met any germs on its short journey through the foot or two of immaculate copper pipe that ran from the tank. The cost of all this was enormous, but it was worth any amount of money not to have to bathe in “that dreadful city water, just absolutely disgusting, and it’s full of I don’t know what diseases, it makes me sick just thinking about it!” She said this with evangelical intransigence, her delicately flared nostrils borne aloft above the cloacal stench of the municipal water mains. I sometimes wondered what she thought about, lying there; I pictured the surface of her mind, seething with all the sharp and irritating discrepancies between what she felt and what she wished she felt. How soothing it must have been for her to know that the water she lay in held nothing but what it seemed to hold.

Just before five o’clock, as I was wheeling my computer table into the pantry, Jackie summoned me tubside. She lay immolated in water clear as plastic wrap, encased like a sandwich. “My dear,” she said, smiling beguilingly up at me as if that terrible episode had never happened, as if a whole new Claudia blew in on the winds of each mercurial change of mood like a series of memoryless Venuses, “would you mind getting my radio for me?”

I looked down at her through narrowed eyes. She wore a puffy clear plastic cap. Her body was long and pale as a shoal of sand, her pubic hair a bloom of seaweed. I was suffocated by this terrible intimacy. No one should have been so bound to another person. No one should have needed someone to do the things she asked of me.

I unearthed her radio and brought it into the bathroom, where I plugged it in and adjusted the dial to the AM station that featured her old and very dear friends Sammy, Perry, Frank, Dean and Bing. “Put it where I can adjust the volume,” she said. “It has a way of creeping up. If it gets too loud it’ll give me a headache.”

I cast a flinty eye at the plastic shower shelf that hung from the nozzle overhead, a rickety contraption she was too cheap to replace. It had descending shelves for soap and shampoo bottles, and prongs at the bottom for washcloths and back brushes. Its hook, which was all that kept it suspended from the showerhead, had a crack in it, and was on the verge of breaking. With black-hearted insouciance, I hung the radio handle on one of the washcloth prongs, taking care to give the radio provisional purchase against the tiles so it would stay put until someone touched it, at which point the hook could very well snap off and the whole thing, including the radio, would quite possibly come tumbling down right into the water. The cord might be too short, and she might catch it in mid-air or fail to
apply enough force to break anything. I had no idea what would happen, and I didn’t care.

I put on my coat and scarf, but I stuffed my woolen hat into my pocket: I would never wear it again. I didn’t say good-bye. As I left I heard, echoing against the bathroom tiles, the mellow, perfectly phrased voice of Frank Sinatra: “Night and day, you are the one, only you, ’neath the moon or under the sun …”

I gave Ralph a radiant smile as I walked through the lobby.

“How’d it work out?” he asked.

“Fine,” I said as I swept through the door he held open for me.

“So you didn’t lose anything?” he called after me.

“No, I didn’t,” I called back over my shoulder, and set off for home.

That night, as I was sitting in front of my black-and-white TV watching an incomprehensibly manic sitcom, and just as my stripped nerves were beginning to feel the effects of a big bolt or two of vodka, the phone rang. I looked at it for a moment, then turned down the TV volume and picked up after the third ring. If she asked where her Post-its were I would hang up on her. “Hello,” I snarled.

“Claudia?”

“Oh, hi,” I said. It was Frieda Mackintosh. I’d known her since we were freshmen in college. I had no idea any more how I actually felt about her, because college friends weren’t like other friends, they were more like family: you didn’t choose them, they happened to you, and they were yours forever. “How are you, Frieda?”

“A little depressed, actually.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing new. You know. Do you want to go hear that band I was telling you about? The Flukes? They’re playing tonight, the one with the oboe. They probably suck, but I’m so tired of the old guitar-bass-drums combo I could just die.”

“Where and when?”

“Eleven at the Blue Bar.”

“The
Blue
Bar,” I said.

“I’ll pay your cover, Claudia. We don’t have to stay if they’re awful.”

“All right,” I said. “I’ll meet you there.”

“Meet me
there
?”

She was silent, breathing pleadingly into the phone. I always gave in, but I made a point not to make it too easy for her. “Okay, I’ll come and get you,” I said finally. “But you have to be ready when I ring the buzzer, Frieda. I’m not coming up.”

But when I rang her buzzer, she buzzed me in. I waited a few minutes, then rang again, and she buzzed me in again. I pushed the building door open and climbed up to her fifth-floor apartment, rapped on her door, then opened it. “I’m sorey,” her voice said in its Canadian accent from somewhere just beyond the door. “Really, Claudia, it’s just that I don’t know what—everything makes me look so—” I went in. She stood in the glaring overhead light of her kitchen. Her short black hair stuck out at several angles as if it had been slept on. She had a streak of dark blue paint on the back of one hand and wore a baggy gray smock over a knee-length black skirt; even so, she was ravishing.

“You’re trying out for Cinderella?” I said.

“Claudia,” she said desperately, “I don’t think I can go anywhere, actually. I’m feeling so self-conscious. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, I just can’t take it any more.”

Frieda was six feet tall and freakishly beautiful. She had an extravagant but simple face with perfect bones, a wide, full
mouth, black hair and dark blue eyes, skin that was at once luminous and creamy, an iconic orchestration of flesh and bone that seemed to belong not to her but to everyone who saw it. She rode along inside, cringing. She tried to camouflage herself in unbecoming clothes, but no matter what she did, everyone stared at her wherever she went as if she were a giraffe. Why she couldn’t get over her self-consciousness and enjoy being gorgeous was beyond me, but I tried to understand for the sake of our friendship.

“Sit down a minute,” I said sympathetically, and squeezed my way through the stacked boxes to the refrigerator. I managed to get the door open enough to see what was in there: a withered lemon, a jar of mustard, three rolls of film, and most of the six-pack of beer I’d brought last time I came over. I plucked two from the cardboard holder, found an opener in a drawer, and handed one bottle to Frieda. “Drink this,” I said as if it were medicine, which it was.

She sat droopily down on a stack of boxes and took a sip. In the six years she’d lived in this apartment, she hadn’t yet got around to unpacking her boxes. She was always just about to, and meanwhile she had accumulated stacks of newspapers and magazines, each containing an article or photo she was always just about to clip, and more boxes filled with castoff clothes and worn-out shoes she kept meaning to throw away; more distressingly, in recent months she’d started picking up trash off the street: spools of thread, colored Chinese circulars, interesting-looking bits of wood and glass and metal. She stored them in more boxes, stacked on top of the ones she’d moved in with. When I asked her what she was collecting them for, she told me that she planned to use them in her paintings. Her painting studio, a spare bedroom in another apartment around the corner, was clean and austere, bare except for a table filled with jars of brushes and tubes of paint, several canvases tacked to
the wall, and finished paintings rolled or framed and stacked neatly in a corner. Her paintings themselves were meticulously organized variations on an overall theme of spare Manitoban quietude in brown and blue, without one extraneous brushstroke. I couldn’t imagine where her trash collection would fit in, and it amazed me that someone so particular about her work space was able to function in this apartment.

“Frieda,” I said, partially to distract her from her own misery, “last night I tried to make out with William and he sent me home in a cab.”

“What did you do, exactly?”

I told her.

“Well,” she said, thinking hard, “either one day he’ll come to his senses and realize that you’re the one for him, or he’ll be flattered for a while, then forget all about it.”

“That’s not all,” I said. “I asked my mother for money, and she said no.”

Frieda gasped. I could always count on her to side with me against my mother. “How could she? She’s your mother!”

“And today at work I really lost it; I think I might actually kill Jackie one of these days.”

“She deserves it.”

“No one deserves to be
killed
, Frieda. Sometimes it’s all I can do to restrain myself. I think there’s something really wrong with me.”

“With
you?
What about me? It’s all I can do to leave the house.”

“Frieda,” I said firmly, “it isn’t just you who gets stared at all the time, it’s everyone. We’re like dogs sniffing each other’s butts, but we do it with our eyes.”

“That’s so disgusting,” she said, and took a big swallow of beer.

Our friendship was predicated on this ritual of mutual self-laceration
and assuagement. I wondered what would happen if I said to Frieda, “Why are you such a damn weirdo?” and she said to me, “Why are you always
drunk
?” and I said back, “At least I can go out in public by myself like a normal adult!” and she said, “At least
I
can get through a day without making a complete ass of myself!” I had no idea what would happen if we said these things, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to find out. I preferred to muster the energy it took to be reassuring and sympathetic. My sympathy was sincere, but afterwards I tended to feel as if I’d sold her a bill of goods. Maybe I had no credibility with myself, maybe that was the problem.

It was already eleven-thirty when we came out of Frieda’s building onto Rivington Street. Everything started right on time at the Blue Bar, that was one of the things I hated about the place. By the time we got there, the band was onstage and, according to the guy who took Frieda’s money and stamped our hands, well into their set. As we pushed our way forward, Frieda endured a thicket of stares, but, probably because I was prodding her in the ribs, she bravely bushwhacked a path to a little clearing not too far from the bar. Three guys in torn T-shirts and horn-rimmed glasses stood crowded together on the tiny stage, posturing and grimacing as if they were all playing air guitar in a suburban basement somewhere, but managing to generate a lot of noise with actual instruments. The singer, a big girl with a brassy voice, held her mike stand in both hands and made strange cross-eyed kissy-faces at the mike when she wasn’t singing. Standing off to one side was the oboe player, a short bespectacled black guy in a suit who looked as if he’d been borrowed from the Philharmonic. The comical snort of the oboe was a nice touch, I thought, but Frieda turned to me, shaking her head. “What an incredibly ridiculous idea,” she said. “I can’t believe it. Rock oboe. Want to go?”