I found the bourbon section and looked at the bottles. Jim Beam, J.
W. Dant, Old Taylor, Old Forester, Old Fitzgerald, Maker's Mark, Wild Turkey.
Each name rang a bell. I can walk past saloons all over town and remember what I drank there. I may be less clear on what brought me there or whom I drank with, but I'll recall what was in my glass, and what bottle it came from.
Antique Age. Old Grand Dad. Old Crow. Early Times.
I liked the names, and especially the last. Early Times. It sounded like a toast. 'Well, here's to crime.'
'Absent friends.' 'Early Times.'
Early Times indeed. They got better the more of a distance you looked back at them from. But what didn't?
'Help you?'
'Early Times,' I said.
'A fifth?'
'A pint'll be enough,' I said.
He slipped the bottle into a brown paper bag, twisted the top, handed it over the counter to me. I dropped it into a pocket of my topcoat and dug a bill out of my wallet. He rang the sale, counted out change.
One drink's too many, they say, and a thousand's not enough. But a pint would do. For starters, anyway.
There's a liquor store right across the street from my hotel, and I couldn't guess how many times I went
in and out of it during the drinking years. This store, though, was a few blocks away on Eighth Avenue, and the walk back to the Northwestern seemed endless. I felt as though people were staring at me on the street. Maybe they were. Maybe the expression on my face was the sort to draw stares.
I went straight up to my room and bolted the door once I was inside it. I took the pint of bourbon from my coat pocket and laid it down on the top of my dresser. I hung my coat in the closet, draped my suit jacket over the back of a chair. I went over to the dresser and picked up the bottle and felt its familiar shape through the brown paper wrapping, and weighed it in my hands. I put it back down, still unwrapped, and went over to look out the window. Downstairs, across Fifty-seventh Street, a man in a topcoat like mine was entering the liquor store. Maybe he'd come out with a pint of Early Times and take it back to his room, and look out his window.
I didn't have to unwrap the damn thing. I could open the window and pitch it out. Maybe I could take aim, and try to drop it on someone who looked as though he just got out of church.
Jesus.
I put the TV on, looked at it without seeing it, turned it off. I walked over to the dresser and took the bottle out of the paper bag. I put it back on the dresser but I stood it upright this time, then crumpled the paper bag and dropped it in the wastebasket. I returned to my chair and sat down again. From where I was sitting I couldn't see the bottle on top of the dresser.
Back when I was first getting sober I'd made Jan a promise.
'Promise me you won't take that first drink without calling me,' she said, and I'd promised.
Funny the things you think of.
Well, I couldn't call her now. She was out of town, and I'd ordered her not to tell anyone where she'd gone. Not even me.
Unless she hadn't left. I'd had a call from her the day before, but what did that prove? The connection, now that I thought about it, had been crystal clear. She might have been in the next room from the sound of it.
Failing that, she could have been on Lispenard Street.
Would she do that? Convinced that the danger was largely in my mind, would she have stayed in her loft and lied to me about it?
No, I decided, she wouldn't do that. Still, there was no reason I could think of not to call her.
I dialed, got her machine. Was there anyone left in the world who didn't have one of those damned things? I listened to the same message she'd had on there for years, and when it ended I said, 'Jan, it's Matt.
Pick up if you're there, will you?' I waited a moment while the machine went on taping the silence, and then I said, 'It's important.'
No answer, and I hung up. Well, of course she hadn't answered.
She was miles away. She wouldn't have played it dishonest. If she'd decided to stay in the city, she'd have told me so.
Anyway, I'd kept my promise. I'd made the call. Not my fault there was nobody home, was it?
Except that it was. My fault, that is. It was my warning that got her in a cab to the airport, and it was my actions years ago, long before I met her, that made the trip necessary. My fault. Jesus, was there one thing in the fucking world that wasn't my fault?
I turned, and the pint of Early Times was on the dresser, with light from the overhead fixture glinting off its shoulder. I went over and picked up the bottle and read its label. It was eighty proof. All of the popular-priced bourbons had been eighty-six proof for years, and then some marketing genius had come up with the idea of cutting the proof to eighty and leaving the price unchanged. Since the federal excise tax is based on alcohol content, and since alcohol costs the manufacturer more than plain water, the distiller increased his profit while slightly boosting the demand at the same time, since dedicated drinkers had to swill down more of the product in order to get the same effect.
Of course the bonded bourbons were still a hundred proof. And some of the brands came in at odd figures. Jack
