In the Drink (12 page)

“We just got here,” I said. “Let’s have a drink.”

“That’s okay,” she said. “I just had one.”

“A beer isn’t a drink.” I insinuated myself through the crowd to the bar and bought two vodkas and gave the bartender a dollar tip, which left twenty-odd dollars in my pocket, and just under thirty in the bank.

“What’s this?” said Frieda when I handed her the glass. “I thought I said—”

“To your health,” I said, and tapped my glass against hers.

“Hey, there’s John Threadgill,” said Frieda. My mouth went dry. “And that guy, what’s his name—”

“Gus Fleury,” I said unhappily, trying to hide behind her, a bad idea.

John slid his hand up the back of my neck and kissed my cheek. “Well, Claudia,” he said. “At last we meet again.”

“Hello, John.”

I hadn’t seen him in months. He smelled like himself, and his cheek was stubbly; he stroked the nape of my neck in a firm-fingered, dexterous way reminiscent of things he had done to other parts of me. I tried not to think about the fantasy I’d had about him this morning, but I could feel my crotch getting warm, opening hungrily like a flytrap. I had never understood why this happened every time he got within ten feet of me. He was a large, ruddy, barrel-shaped poet whose head was crowned with what appeared to be a red fright wig, but was actually his own growth; he had enough hair for three or four regular people. His magnum opus was a poem called “The Bricklayer’s Dilemma,” already thousands of pages long, with no end in sight. From the choice bits I’d heard him read aloud and the things he’d said about it, it was written with one eye on posterity and the other on a potential movie deal. He used archaisms such as “shan’t” and “doth”; he invoked the Muse; he had his poor bricklayer look within his humble breast and quail to see the darkness there, but he also embroiled him in
car chases, shady schemes and affairs with double-crossing femmes fatales. And still the monster grew. He didn’t seem to mind the lack of closure; actual success would have been distasteful to him, because he identified piously with all underdogs, with the suffering downtrodden masses. He cried at news stories about Rwandan orphans. He told homeless men, “I have nothing to give you, my brother, we’re in the same boat,” with a world-weary, owl-like sadness that was for the most part genuine, but was also interlarded with a certain amount of secret pleasure.

I reached up and removed his hand, stifling the urge to remind him that we had had some fairly entertaining sex, it was true, but there were several very good reasons why we had stopped. First, he was married, and second, although reasonably good-natured, he was no prince, and a prince was what I still, even after all these years, longed for.

“Well, if it isn’t Miss Frieda,” Gus was saying. “Don’t you look adorable. Little Miss Muffet meets Maria von Trapp.” He pinched the fabric of her smock.

Frieda cringed and leaned against the wall, glaring at the band. Gus sidled off to the bar without a glance in my direction just as the band launched into an up-tempo circusy number. It felt wild and festive in here suddenly, like a gypsy camp.

When the song ended, Frieda turned to me with a rapturous smile. “I love the oboe,” she said. Her glass was almost empty. For her, this was guzzling. “He’s so good! What’s he doing in this stupid band?”

“His name is Cecil Sperduley,” said John.

“You know him?”

“We were bike messengers together. We used to drink beer in the stairwell. I bet he’d love to meet you.”

“I’m going up there where I can hear better.” She disappeared toward the stage, leaving John and me alone.

“That girl is one olive short of a martini,” he said. “Gorgeous, but—” He waggled his hand. His whole body felt as if it were pressed against mine, although it was just his shoulder.

“But nothing,” I said. I relaxed, which involved inadvertently returning the pressure of his shoulder. “What are you doing here?”

“I ran into Gus on the street a couple days ago,” he said. “He said he needed a site for his play, I mentioned Cecil’s mother’s building, one thing led to another, and here I am at the fucking Blue Bar. At least you’re here.”

The Blue Bar was designed to attract people who had money, namely European tourists and Wall Streeters who wanted to hang out in the East Village without actually having to slum it, and keep away those who didn’t, namely me. The bar was a long glowing blue tube with mushroomy stools whose glowing blue seats rose from black opaque stalks. Set into the cobalt depths beneath the surface of the bar was a long aquarium, paved with phosphorescent greenish-blue gravel, filled with tropical fish who slid their fan-shaped or ribbon-bedecked or polka-dotted bodies through neon-bright coral. The jukebox was stocked with rare vintage 45s by long-dead Delta musicians, “Little” Willie this and “Blind” Jimmy that. Neon tubes ran around the periphery of the little dance floor and stage, and along the backs of the booths. The walls held various framed movie posters (
The Blue Angel, Betty Blue, Blue Velvet
). This might have been someone’s idea of a hip and happening place, but it gave me a deep, unscratchable itch just under the surface of my skin. I finished my vodka and plunked my glass down hard on a nearby tabletop. Several goateed, ponytailed men sitting at the table looked up, then realized that no one had fired a gun and went back to their conversation. One of them was actually wearing dark glasses. Germans.

I handed John a five. “Vodka on the rocks, please, if you’re
going that way. The good stuff.” The good vodka cost six dollars; this was my way of teasing him, because John lived on a narrow but largely self-imposed tightrope. He scrounged up freelance copyediting jobs for a living, which were few and far between, and given mostly to post-collegiate go-getters on their way up. Like me, he was forced to supplement his earnings with the occasional handout from his mother, which caused him to loathe himself but which enabled him to scrape by without going into debt. I suspected that she bailed him out much more often than he let on, but he also came from that New England tradition which values the well-researched investment over the happy impulse buy. His spending habits were eccentric and fanatically rigid, but they enabled him to live on the edge without actually going over it. He bought three button-down shirts and two pairs of trousers a year. When he ate in restaurants, he ordered a bowl of soup and ate the whole basket of bread or crackers, or showed up at BBQ in time for the $6.95 Early Bird Special and took his leftovers home. He’d finagled a deal with his landlord that involved minor custodial duties in exchange for a very small rent, which had turned out to be almost more trouble than it was worth, and he and his wife Rima split all their shared expenses down the middle like college roommates. His friends teased him for his skinflint behavior, but he took it with a sheepish acquiescence that caused my opinion of him to swing from scorn to comprehension to amused sympathy, because I saw finally that he did this not wholly because he was a Yankee cheapskate, but also because he had carved tight parameters in the world for himself and was bound to stay within them.

As he elbowed his way in and spoke to the bartender, I stood my ground uneasily, in the grip of that same fatalistic languor that had come over me last night at George’s. So what if I slept with John Threadgill one more time? I was essentially
just the tenant of a bag of chemicals and minerals animated by electricity; my body was going to dry up and blow away sooner or later. What did it matter what another person did to it, as long as it didn’t hurt, as long as it gave me a kind of pleasure? Who besides me would know or care?

Anyway, I knew John, knew the limits of what could happen between us. Our affair had followed the same trajectory as most of my relationships: bantering dive-bar pickup, drunken sex, a rushed exchange of phone numbers afterwards on a subway platform, then other nights with more dive-bar bantering and drunken sex. Until John, these affairs had generally continued until the guy went back to his old girlfriend or stopped cheating on his current one. These endings caused me no undue distress; downtown bars were stocked with such men, and when one went down, another popped up in his place. But John was married, and this imbued our encounters with poignancy and depth. He told me that he’d never leave Rima, and because I had no reason to doubt this, the anticipation of heartache lent an air of melancholy self-abnegation to our couplings in stairwells and elevators.

One fine spring morning I awoke in my own bed alone, with an ache in every orifice and a memory of bending over on the Christopher Street Pier at four in the morning with my drawers around my ankles while John stood behind me, holding my hips. As I gripped a piling to keep from tumbling into the Hudson, I gazed down into the filthy water and thought gaily to myself, Well, here I am, and this is me. An open, half-drunk quart of cheap beer sat by my foot, our ubiquitous shared bottle, the cost of which was always without discussion split to the nearest penny. When John banged into me with extra vigor and the bottle flew into the river, I told it silently, Better you than me, and watched it sink.

The next morning I decided, lying there awash in every
detail, that this thing between us had gone about as far as it was likely to go. I called John to tell him so, and Rima answered.

John always talked about Rima with a romantic schoolboy wistfulness I found incongruous but touching, because their marriage was at heart a business deal gone terribly awry. She’d married him with the understanding that she would live with him, sleep with him and support him for the three years of marriage required to establish her American citizenship, at the end of which he would give her a divorce. They each had a different reason for this deal: she made three or four hundred dollars a night as a stripper at Goldfingers and didn’t want to go back to Rumania; he was in love with her and too young to know any better. Ten years ago, when they’d married, she had been as hauntingly beautiful as Dietrich or Garbo, at least according to John, whose poetic license was understandable, given the fact that by the time I met her, genetics, gravity and a chain-smoking, hard-drinking youth had put an end to that haunting beauty, and with it the lucrative part of her stripping career. She had been reduced to picking up shifts in sleazy strip joints in the Navy Yard or the nether regions of Queens, places where men catcalled and shoved folded dollar bills in her ass cheeks. After work she cast her sorrows and money into the winds of after-hours clubs, then staggered home at dawn to collapse until it was time to get up and do the whole thing over again.

I had run into her a few times before, at parties. I was a little afraid of her. Her drunken rages were legendary and left their mark; during one late-night attack on John, she caught him just above his eye with the edge of her ring and gashed his eyebrow open; in another, she knocked him down, gave him a good hard kick or two and broke three ribs. John told me that calls came for her at odd hours, raspy, stoned voices asking for
Della or Vera; for a while she’d taken up with one rapper/deejay crackhead after another, then switched to middle-aged junkie jazz musicians, and all of them borrowed money she couldn’t afford to lend them, then disappeared. She and John still shared a bed, but they hadn’t had sex of any kind in several years and weren’t likely to again, John told me, and I had no real reason to doubt him. But there was no longer any question of a divorce. She was his broken muse, his shattered Grecian urn. Unlike everyone else, she needed him. For her part, she couldn’t afford a place of her own and no one in his or her right mind would have taken her in except maybe her family, but they were all in Bucharest, and she would rather shoot herself than live there again.

“Is John there?” I asked.

“Who is calling?” she asked in her high, slurred, bizarrely accented voice.

“It’s Claudia. I’m a friend of his.”

“Listen to me, Clow-dya,” she said. “I don’t want him to see you any more.”

“Okay,” I said. “That’s fine with me.”

“Good-bye,” she said, and hung up.

This had been last May. I’d only seen John once or twice since then, and each time I’d run into him, he’d begged me to reconsider; we had such good times together and we both knew exactly where we stood, so what harm was there in continuing? These pleas sometimes ended in tears—John’s, that is; he could weep with as much compassion for his own plight as anyone else’s. But I stood firm. The end of my affair with John had marked the beginning of my yearning for William, which was of a completely different nature, although equally hopeless. I was through with married men, at least for now. Not only that, I seemed to be through for now with any kind of one-night
arrangement, any romance spawned after midnight in a bar.

However, a filament of that old era came sliding back now to snake itself around my ankle.

When John handed me my glass, he said nothing about the fact that I’d stiffed him a dollar or two, not even a dry little wisecrack, which I took to mean that he would do anything to get me into bed, or wherever. As if to prove this, he breathed right in my ear so his breath steamed up all the little hairs in my ear canal and my knees threatened to buckle with involuntary mating-instinct acquiescence, “Where have you been?”

“Around,” I said. “We’ve been through this, John. I’m not hiding from you.”

He gazed at me with soft admiration, put his hand on my face, turned my head and, without my permission, kissed me. I pulled back to look him in the eye. He had a lovely mouth, wide and full, the upper lip dented in the middle, a deep dimple in his cheek.

“How’s the wife?” I asked.

“At least come for a walk,” he said. “I’ve missed your mind. You always inspire me so much, you spark my ideas. And I like to think I do the same for you. I would love so much just to talk to you again.”

Probably because you can’t understand a single word your wife says, I thought, but I was feeling down and lonely and I’d had a terrible day, so I said aloud, “It would seem churlish not to, when you put it like that.”

Frieda was sitting at a back table with Cecil, who had come offstage for a couple of songs. When they were sitting down it was harder to tell how much difference there was in their sizes, but they still made quite a pair. Gus hovered obsequiously over them, his hands pressed together as if he were praying, waiting
for an in. He leaned over and offered his hand to Cecil, who dragged his eyes reluctantly away from Frieda and shook it.