A Drop of the Hard Stuff Read Online Free PDF Page B

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 oftimes 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 Gormé. 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 couple of hangers in the closet. So I had clean socks andunderwear to put on after my morning shower, and a clean shirt, and I left what I’d been wearing for her to wash.
    “You’re coming up on a year,” she said at breakfast. “What is it, a month away?”
    “Five, six weeks. Somewhere in there.”
    I thought she’d have more to say about that, but if she did she decided to leave it unsaid.
    That night I met Jim Faber at a Chinese restaurant on Ninth Avenue. Neither of us had been there before, and we decided