Nightlife (11 page)

“How do you know him?” she asked. “I know you’re not, but you almost look like you could be brothers.”

“People have said that. And I’m the fairer-skinned, darker-haired twin.” He pushed his plate away across the wrought iron. Feeling, for the first time in a long while, that people just might be looking at him with envy. This was nirvana— fed and sober and happy to be in the company of a lovely female who wasn’t dragging him through ugly litigation. “We used to say we were supposed to be brothers, but biology and genetics conspired against us. And that fate won out in the end.”

April smiled. “That’s kind of sweet.”

“We met in college, at the University of Illinois. Almost eleven years ago, first week there as freshmen. We both started off trying the fraternity route—different houses—and we both hated it. With me, it was like, four days in and I
knew
I wasn’t cut from that cloth. We both walked out of our houses the same morning with our bags packed and threw ourselves on the mercy of the university housing system. We ended up assigned to the same temporary housing room.”

“Neither one of you strikes me as the Greek type.”

“Thank you.” He drained his water glass, and someone was there to refill in moments. “Temp housing was bizarre. It was this double-size room that was supposed to be used as a lounge. They crammed five of us in there. Makeshift bunk beds, freestanding clothes racks, desks everywhere there wasn’t a bed. Sardines go to college. The rest of the guys on the floor called it the Refugee Camp.”

She laughed. “Grandma would sympathize.”

“I guess it gave Erik and me a pretty strong common bond. Because our backgrounds were pretty different. I came from St. Louis, and he was from some tiny little place in Ohio. We ended up rooming together until we graduated. Apartments after that first year.”

April was leaning in, chin atop laced fingers. “I love happy endings.”

He whipped out his almighty MasterCard Gold to take care of dinner. Had to smile at the imagined horror of the First National Bank of Wilmington should he apply for one under his present circumstances. After dinner they grabbed a bottle of cheap sangria. She drove back to Davis Island but bypassed Erik’s building, kept going to the south rim. Left a winding two-lane drive and veered onto a broad expanse of lawn overlooking Hillsborough Bay. She stopped a few yards from the abrupt shoreline, where a layer of chunky rock was land’s last bastion before sea.

They got out, strolled to the edge, sangria in hand. The day had cooled down to the low seventies, and salt breezes skimmed off the water. Behind them was the small Peter Knight Airport. Angled across the bay was some sort of shipyard, a huge freighter docked. Farther out on the horizon, there came another one, its guttural basso horn rolling across the water. Sailboats and catamarans milked what they could from the dying sunlight and waning winds, wedges of brilliant color flashing to and fro.

Justin and April sat on the grass. It was as close to paradise as he’d found recently.

Justin unscrewed the top of the sangria bottle. “Want to sniff the bottlecap?”

“I’ll trust your selection.”

He took a pull from the bottle. Chilled, fruity; the original wine cooler. He passed it to her. “We should’ve thought to get cups.”

She drank, smiled. “I don’t mind your germs if you don’t mind mine.”

“Deal.”

The bottle was on its third go-around when she drew her knees up beneath her chin and gazed out over the water. A pair of miniature speedboats were playing cat and mouse.

“You don’t talk much about yourself, do you,” she said.

“Not much lately.” He felt them heading out over thin ice. “Did Erik say much about me? Why I was moving down here and all?”

“Not a lot, no.” She laughed. “He said
he
wasn’t going to defame your character, he was going to leave that up to you.”

“Always thoughtful, that Erik. I love him a lot, you know.”

April was silent. Waiting, he supposed, for him to fill in some blanks regarding his life. At no point this evening had she seemed judgmental about anything, so maybe the revelations wouldn’t be as disastrous as he had feared. Maybe the ice would bear up under the weight of his guilt after all.

So he spilled it, without resorting to sugar coating, without whining that it wasn’t really his fault. Facts only. Here sits a stupid guy who made a very stupid mistake and paid dearly for it and
still
realized he’d gotten off exceedingly lucky.

“So that’s it,” he said in conclusion. “If you feel like driving off and leaving me sitting here, I’ll understand.”

April leaned in to knock shoulders with him. A very tender, subtle way of telling him he was still accepted. It went far deeper than words. You don’t touch someone whom you revile, not like that.

“I admire you, in a way,” she finally said.

This was a real shocker.
“Why?”

April looked his way, head slightly atilt. Such depth in the almond eyes. “It must have taken a lot of courage to pull together what you had left, instead of just sinking lower and lower. Picking up and moving somewhere to make a fresh start. That takes guts.”

“It was a necessity.”

“It still took guts. Sometimes I wish I had the guts to do the same thing, just pack up and find somewhere else. Someplace where I don’t know anyone and nobody knows me. That would make us even.”

Justin wondered why, what emotional dirty laundry she could be toting around. Maybe the rift with her former fiancé. Brad. So what if people called him Dickless; the ties may have been strong indeed. From the outside, no one else can truly know how deep your rivers run.

So he wondered, but got no answers. He would not press, not dig. If it was important, meant to be shared, she would offer it freely. As he had.

After he got the sangria back, he held it up to the west, let the sinking sun play through the reddish-purple. Half gone. Not half full, he realized. Pessimism still reigns.

“You may have noticed last night, I’m not exactly without faults. I do too much of this sort of thing, for one.”

She nodded. “I wondered about that.”

“After everything started falling apart, my ex-wife told me I could drink all I wanted but I was never going to be able to forget.”

“Maybe she had you all wrong. Maybe you don’t drink to forget at all.”

“To numb it, then. Same thing.”

“Maybe. Or maybe you do it to remember.”

He smiled, relishing the ease of the conversation. No accusations, no reproachments. Almost as if they were discussing someone else. He looked curiously at her.

“What would I be trying to remember?”

“Your true self,” she said softly.

He played it over in his mind. “I don’t even know what my true self is anymore.”

“There you go, then.” April resumed her vigil over the water. “I hardly know you, but it seems like you’ve spent a lot of time trying to shoehorn yourself into places that don’t really fit you, deep inside. Like the fraternity. And whether you realize it or not, you sound pretty relieved to be out of the agency game. And that whole upwardly mobile track that burns people out and eats ulcers into them before they’re thirty.” A long pause. “I’m sorry. I don’t have any right to try and figure you out like that.”

Justin told her not to apologize, that she was probably more on target about him than he’d managed to be about himself in quite some time. Maybe that was it. And maybe it was just the easy way she laid it out. As a friend, instead of someone doing some coldly analytical dissection.

“So maybe you drink to breach those walls inside and get back to yourself,” she went on. Confidence renewed. “Kind of the same principle I was talking about last night at the club. Substance abuse as a way of returning to the forgotten. The things buried so deep in your unconscious that they might never see daylight again.”

He grinned into the sangria as he drank. “I get the feeling that the Betty Ford Clinic will never call to hire your services.”

“And if they did, I’d turn them down.”

Justin mulled her theorizing over, testing its merits, probing its weaknesses. He had no reason to believe the latter outweighed the former. Not at all; it held water surprisingly well.
I drink, therefore I am. Can you see the real me?
Couched in April’s terminology, it sounded almost romantic. Reality was likely far more mundane. Firewater simply anesthetized sensibilities offended by his backstabbing belief that happiness was a component of more than material acquisitions, status, and employer perks. He’d known who he was all along—had just tried to live some other yuppie’s life-style.

The sangria was gone by the time the sun gave up and sank into the bay. Taking with it more of the day’s warmth, stealing the rest of their light. Scrubbing clean the unflinching stare of day in favor of the guarded cloak of night.

For better or for worse, he felt different now. Unburdened. Justified. Even if things went no further between them, he would always thank her for that.

A bit later, April told him she had to make an early night of it. Had to be up early in the morning, meetings with a couple of clients were scheduled. That was okay. He didn’t mind.

The evening had already given him far more than he had expected.

The Lincoln was smoky gray, always washed, always waxed, and as it glided through the night, Tony thought the Town Car felt like a shark. The streets were their seas, the other, lesser cars fleeing before this king of predators. The tinted windows, opaque from the outside, hinted of no mercy. Traffic lights were merely suggestions. Cruising, cool and confident. Waiting for the proper trigger to snap hunger and need beyond containment.

Not just anyone would do, however. There had been a couple of promising possibilities earlier in the eve, but these had gone belly-up. Friends had been in the vicinity, witnesses who might remember.

Shortly after they had turned onto East Seventh, Lady Luck did an abrupt U-turn. There, up ahead, outside Masquerade—

“Pull over here,” he told Lupo, and the car slowed and veered, smooth as butter. “Looky what we got here.”

“Sasha, as I live and breathe,” said Lupo, a la W. C. Fields, “heavily.”

“And all alone too.
Pobrecita,
” Tony murmured, pursing his lips. Poor little thing.

Masquerade was a dance rock club, part metal, part punk, all gloom. The predominant philosophy was nihilism, the predominant sartorial color black. Music at nuclear-holocaust sound levels. He should have thought to check here first. All these gothics and gloom rockers, sounded just like Sasha’s kind of magnet. Little blond chippy, she had few reservations about professing to anybody who’d listen that death was just about the most romantically sensual thing she could conceive of.

Sasha was leaning up against an ebony Jag outside the club, wearing a short leather skirt, black fishnets, and lace glovelets. Hair teased into a mane. Red, red lips.

Tony, riding shotgun, hit the electric window, and it whirred down just as Lupo eased the Town Car to a halt beside her. She broke into a broad smile when she saw who it was.

“Waiting for me, baby?” he said.

Sasha puckered up and blew him a kiss across the four feet separating them. “Just waiting.”

“Hot lady like you, all alone? Crying shame. You tied to this place tonight? Or can you come out and play?”

She looked back toward the club’s entrance. Rockers, both headslammers and morbids, hither, thither, and yon. “I had plans.” Sasha adjusted the tiny purse riding one hip, hung from a shoulder by a long, thin strap. She looked him straight on with a wet red grin. “But, like, maybe they’ve changed.”

Mendoza stepped from the car as Lupo punched another button to unlock the back doors. Tony opened the door for her, ever the gentleman. She told him he looked sharp himself, and wasn’t it the absolute truth. He was dressed to the nines tonight. White silk suit and tie, pale blue shirt. Definite inspiration for respect. He got in after her and had one hand exploring the upper limits of her fishnets by the time Lupo was back in traffic.

“Where are we going?” She teased a red fingernail along the zipper of his slacks.