'No,' I said. 'I think she'll follow through.'
'Well, I hope to God you won't let your conscience get in the way.'
'It's a lot of money,' I said.
'You earned it, for Christ's sake. Not just in terms of the results you produced but the time you put in.
Look at the months you've been working on this, and what did you get in return? A two-thousand-dollar retainer from Adrian?'
'So?'
'You probably spent that and more on expenses.'
'Not quite.'
'Don't quibble,' he said. 'Just take the money.'
'I intend to.'
'Well, that's a relief.'
'I usually take money when it's offered,' I said. 'It's how I was brought up. And this is money I can take with a reasonably clear conscience. And I can use it. Christmas is coming.'
'So they tell me,' he said, 'but you must have done your Christmas shopping by now.'
'Not quite all of it,' I said.
* * *
The week before Christmas was about as social as it gets for us.
We were out just about every night.
We had dinner one evening with Jim and Beverly Faber, and another night with Elaine's friend Monica and her married boyfriend.
(Monica, according to Elaine, figures if a guy's not married there must be something wrong with him.)
One afternoon we stopped in at a reception at Chance Coulter's art gallery on upper Madison Avenue, then had dinner with Ray Gruliow and his wife. We ended the night at Danny Boy Bell's table at a new cellar jazz club in the west nineties, listening to a young man who'd listened a lot to Coltrane when he wasn't listening to Sonny Rollins. The following afternoon Mick called to say someone had given him a good pair of seats for the Knicks game, and could Elaine and I use them?
Elaine, who feels about basketball the way Mick feels about ballet, insisted that I go with Mick. We watched them lose to the Hornets in overtime, and she met the two of us afterward for dinner at Paris Green.
The night before Christmas we had dinner at home. She made pasta and a salad and we thought about having a fire in the fireplace and decided it was more trouble than it's worth. Besides, she said, Santa might sue. During the evening the phone rang a few times, with the usual round of holiday greetings. One of the callers was Tom Havlicek, telling me I'd once again managed to miss the opening day of deer season. 'Damn,' I said. 'I'd marked it on my calendar, too.' He asked for an update on Havemeyer, and I filled him in and told him his fellow Ohioan had a good lawyer and would probably wind up with a relatively light sentence.
Jason would be interested, he said. The boy had been buying the New York papers and clipping the stories. And he'd spent a long afternoon with Tom in Massillon, getting a little career advice. He was talking about taking a couple of undergraduate courses in police science, then getting his law degree and
passing the bar exam, and then going into some form of police work.
'My guess is he'll land in the DA's office,' he said, 'but the way he's talking now he wants to wear blue and carry a badge. You ever hear of a working cop with a law school diploma on his wall?' I said he'd probably wind up being Massillon's next chief of police, and Tom made a rude noise. 'For that,' he said,
'you need two things I hope he'll never have, a fat ass and a foul disposition. And you never heard me say that.'
Shortly before midnight the two of us walked up to St. Paul's. It was a clear night, and not too cold, and it looked as though they were having a decent turnout for midnight mass. Our destination, however, was not the sanctuary but the basement, where my AA group was having our annual midnight meeting. It's an open meeting, not limited to self-declared alcoholics, so Elaine was welcome. For the occasion, candles provided the illumination, and there was a better-than-usual selection of cookies laid out by the coffee urns, but in every other respect it was a typical meeting, with the speaker's drinking story taking up the first twenty minutes or so and round-robin sharing filling out the hour.
At one o'clock we said the serenity prayer and put the chairs away and walked home, and by the time we got there we decided not to wait until morning to open our presents. I got a cardigan sweater from Barney's and a silk shirt from Bergdorf's, along with firm instructions to take them back and exchange them if I didn't think I was likely to wear them. I also got a hat from Worth & Worth—'because you got the hat trick,' she said, 'so I figured you earned it.'
'It's a different style for me.'
'It's a homburg. Does it fit? It should, it's the same size as your fedora. Try it on. What do you think?'
'Well, it fits. I think I like it. It's dressier than the fedora, isn't it?'
'A little bit. Let's see. Oh, I really like it.'
'It's me, huh?'
'Not every man could wear a hat like that.'
'But I can?'
'They should use you in their ads,' she said. 'You old bear.'
