A Drop of the Hard Stuff

“Of course not.”

“Did you want to?”

“No,” I said, and thought about it. “Not consciously. But I probably wanted to, on some level.”

“But you didn’t drink.”

“No.”

“Then you’re okay,” he said. “Go to sleep.”

Not counting our Bronx boyhood, that was the third time I saw Jack Ellery—once through one-way glass, and twice at meetings.

The next time I saw him he was dead.

IV

I WENT OUT for breakfast at the Morning Star Friday morning, and went straight from there to the Donnell Library on West Fifty-third. In the restaurant the night before we’d talked some about the General Slocum disaster, but I’d been uncertain exactly when it had occurred and how many lives had been lost. I found a book that would answer all my questions, including some that hadn’t come to mind until I started reading about it. Just about everyone involved had been grossly negligent, from the owners and line management on down, but the only one who went to jail was the captain, and his sentence struck me as awfully light for the enormity of his actions.

As far as I could tell, nobody bothered to bring a civil suit, and I thought how the world had changed in three- quarters of a century. Nowadays people filed a lawsuit at the drop of a hat, even if it was somebody else’s hat and it hadn’t been dropped within half a block of them. I tried to decide whether the country was better or worse for all that relentless litigation, and I chose to postpone my decision, because something I’d read was leading me to another book on another subject.

That took care of the morning, and I went straight from the Donnell reading room to the Sixty-third Street Y, getting there just in time for the 12:30 meeting. It broke at 1:30, and I stopped at a pizza stand for a slice and a Coke, which would do me fine for lunch, although I didn’t suppose it would bring a smile of delight to the face of a board-certified nutritionist. It was around 2:15 when I got home, and there were two slips in my message box. The first call had come at 10:45, and I’d missed the second one by less than ten minutes. They were both from Jack, and both times he’d said he would try again later.

I went upstairs and called his number on the off chance that he was home now, or that he’d acquired an answering machine. He wasn’t and he hadn’t.

I stayed in the room until it was time to go out to dinner. I had no reason to go anywhere and I had a book to read, so I wasn’t there specifically to wait for his call, but that was probably a factor. The only time the phone rang it was Jan, confirming that we were still on for Saturday night. Then she asked if I’d walked all the way home the previous night, and I took a breath before I answered. “I walked two blocks,” I said, “and then I said the hell with it and flagged a cab.”

We established when and where we’d meet, and I hung up and wondered at my first impulse, which had been to say yes, that I’d walked all the way home from Yorkville. And what else? That my feet were sore and my calves ached? That I’d been mugged and pistol-whipped en route and it was all her fault?

But instead I’d paused for breath and told her the unremarkable truth, and she’d passed up the chance to remind me I could have saved a couple of bucks by sharing her cab. I suppose you could say we were both making progress.

Friday night I went to St. Paul’s. I saw Jim there but he complained of a headache and went home at the break. I joined a few others for coffee afterward, where the chief topic of conversation was a member who’d just come out as a lesbian. “I knew Pegeen was gay,” a man named Marty said. “I figured it out about ten minutes after I met her. I was just hoping I could get lucky before she figured it out.”

“While visions of threesomes danced in your head,” somebody said.

“No, I’m an uncomplicated guy. I just wanted to nail her a couple of times before she turned into a pumpkin.”

“But your Higher Power had other ideas.”

“My Higher Power,” Marty said, “was clueless. My Higher Power was asleep at the fucking switch.”

There was a message waiting for me at the hotel desk, the same message: Jack had called and would call again later. It didn’t say to call him, and I decided not to because it was late. Then I changed my mind and called him after all, and there was no answer.

Saturday started out cold and rainy. I skipped breakfast and wound up ordering an early lunch from the deli down the block. The kid who delivered it bore an unsettling resemblance to a drowned rat, and it earned him a bigger tip than usual.

I spent the afternoon in front of the TV, switching back and forth between a couple of college football games. I didn’t pay much attention to what I was looking at, but it was better than being out in the rain, and I figured I’d be in one place long enough for Jack to get hold of me.

But the phone never rang. I picked it up myself a couple of times and tried his number. No answer. It was frustrating in a curious way, because I didn’t really have a burning desire to talk to him, but neither did I want to be haunted by an endless stream of message slips.

So I sat there in my room, and when I wasn’t looking at the TV I was looking out the window at the rain.

Jan and I had arranged to meet at a restaurant at Mulberry and Hester, in Little Italy. We’d been there a couple of times together and liked the food and the atmosphere. I was a few minutes early, and they couldn’t find our reservation but had a table for us, and Jan showed up ten minutes late. The food was fine, the service was fine, and I could have flavored the conversation by pointing out a stocky gentleman at the bar whom I’d arrested ten or a dozen years earlier.

We might have walked around after dinner, but it was still drizzling and there was a chill in the air, so we went straight to Lispenard Street and she made a pot of coffee and put some records on—Sarah Vaughan, Ella, Eydie Gorme. It should have been just the ticket for a rainy October night, domestic and romantic at the same time, but there’d been a stiffness at dinner, a distance between us, and it didn’t go away.

I thought, Is this it? Is this how I’ll spend every Saturday night for the rest of my life?

We went to bed sometime after midnight, with an all-night jazz station on the radio, and lying together in the dark, we did each other some good. And afterward I felt something lurking in the shadows out there on the edge of thought. I turned away from it, and sleep descended like a fast curtain.

Some months ago I had taken to keeping some clothes at Jan’s place. She’d turned over one of the dresser drawers to me, along with a