In the Drink Read Online Free PDF Page B

silent forbearance. I was bound to rocks, banished to the underworld, imprisoned in towers, mistaken for a frog, sent on impossible quests. Our days together took on a tunnel-visioned, hothouse compression I had heretofore associated with hostages and their captors; I typed and filed, scurried and fetched, bathed in a light that shone only in my own head.
    Later that evening when I walked into George’s, the place was empty except for the three lonely-guy regulars who’d grown their tailbones down into their bar stools and the weeknight bartender, a formidable giantess named Wanda. She didn’t talk much and rarely smiled, but she knew how to toss Macallan over ice cubes until it was silky and cool but minimally diluted, then slide it at just the right instant into a tumbler. Thiswas important because, as part of his fledgling power-elite persona, William was cultivating a taste for perfected single-malt Scotch.
    He came in right after me, looking harried and rumpled and carrying his briefcase, straight from work, still in his suit and tie. The sight of him momentarily daunted me. He looked like such a grownup. How had maladjusted little Billy Snow turned into this handsome lawyer, and what, exactly, was I to make of my own situation in light of his success? We were two seeds planted in the same soil, but he was useful and edible, and I was a weed.
    “The usual?” he asked, taking out his wallet, a streamlined calfskin affair stocked with platinum credit cards.
    “Okay,” I said, although I didn’t much care for perfected whiskey; all that chilling without diluting did something to its chemical makeup that made it more potent and mood-altering than whiskey drunk either at room temperature or on the rocks. But no matter: I would have what William had, in hopes that his mood and mine would align themselves, two compass arrows drawn to the same magnetic pole.
    We hunkered down at a little round wobbly table. As we got a few mouthfuls under our belts, he sighed and rubbed his head. “I brought so much paperwork I might as well have camped in my office,” he said.
    “You’re going to work here?”
    “No,” he said. “I brought it to fool my conscience. As long as it’s with me, I’m safe.” He had a crease in each cheek, not exactly dimples, but hollows that deepened when he smiled. I felt light-headed, as if I’d inhaled a balloonful of helium. I exhaled but it didn’t go away. “Those old-boy fucks,” he was saying now; I’d been watching his mouth with involuntary hunger instead of listening to what he was saying, and so had missed the topic change, but I suspected that he was referringto the senior partners at his firm. “They cornholed each other at Choate, married each other’s sisters, they probably borrow each other’s clothes. Every day I have to go to the men’s room and look in the mirror and say to myself, I’m as good as anyone from a Connecticut charm school. But even though I look and talk and dress just like them, and now I even take a leak just like them, they know I’m an outsider, they can smell it in my DNA.”
    “How do they take a leak?”
    “Like soldiers. Shoulders squared, weapon in hand, ready, aim, fire. I used to just slouch and dribble at the urinal like a wild animal until I noticed someone looking at me funny. Regulation pissing! Can you believe it?” He shook his head, half angry, half proud of himself.
    “I have to watch Jackie on the john, too. What’s up with that?”
    “Speaking of Jackie, I ran into Margot the other day.”
    I smiled uneasily. “Really? How was she?”
    “She was unfriendly. Well, not unfriendly exactly. Sort of polite and distracted. After about two minutes she said, ‘Well, nice seeing you again.’ Nice seeing you again. Like I was some asshole who had tried to pick her up at a party.” He studied his hands, which were cupping his glass and rolling it back and forth against the table. “Next time you talk to her, maybe you could ask her