We All Sleep in the Same Room Read Online Free PDF Page A

up next to it on the windowsill. Times Square, the brightly lit circus, is churning on 7th Avenue. I lied to Raina and then to the partners, telling each of them I had plans with the other when really I’ll be getting drinks with Jessie. Deception hadn’t figured into any of this. The lies had simply come out, almost smoothly, with very little hesitation. Things are becoming shady, but I’m not yet guilty of anything. I raise my glass in the darkness and drink.
    The old burn. Vicious, toxic, cleansing. Pure gin—never my drink—striking, as if to pierce through the stomach’s lining, before firing back up through the throat, filling the sinuses with its hard-to-place, bitter vapors, and exiting the body behind reddened, watery eyes, leaving the brain adrift inside a liquid skull.
    Nervous moments ensue. I see my son’s small hand wrapped over my finger and the top of his head as he toddles below me, while Raina squats, at the other end of the living room, arms wide. Then Lily, inserting and reinserting her keycard, until a square light above the lock turns green and the door opens in.
    I down the rest of the glass. This time, when the gin settles, I feel calmer. I pour another, but don’t touch it right away. Then the door handle turns. I remain still as someone enters and the door shuts.
    â€œTom?”
    I clear my throat.
    â€œI finished my work and I’ve been looking all over for you,” Jessie says, coming closer. Her voice is sweet and cool.
    â€œWhat’re you doing in here?” She puts a blind hand out and finds my wrist. She holds it a moment and regains her balance. “You smell like alcohol.”
    â€œI cheated,” I say. “Started early. Want one?”
    She accepts the glass, sniffs the gin, and takes what amounts to a negligible sip.
    â€œCunningham’s stash,” I say.
    Earlier at Dunkin’ Donuts, I’d ended things by telling her about how it used to be with Cunningham and me: Friday afternoon gin-and-tonics at the Edison back in the old days. I retrieved for her a forgotten story about a time we’d tailed a suspicious looking man, Columbo-style, all the way to the East River where he passed off one of two identical briefcases before leading us back to our very building where he’d gotten off on the 17th floor, to be spotted at various times over the next year before disappearing. Jessie was all smiles. I’d succeeded in stamping the occurrence of drinks between a senior lawyer and an aspiring lawyer as a reputable and exclusive tradition, one which she might join.
    â€œSorry there’s no chaser.”
    She takes a longer sip, sputters, waits, and then, like me, gulps down the rest.
    â€œWhoa,” she says, bringing her wrist to her mouth. A rectangle of white teeth breaks from the shadows. “Can we go now?”
    * * *
    The Times Square Brewery, as it turns out, may be the most sanitized bar on the planet. The drinkers are hoarded together to one side around a long, black, S -shaped counter. A barkeep in black button-down and tie is handling orders. I’m trapped between two wide-backed business types and a swarthy goateed man smiling at a woman in a lime, stretchy miniskirt.
    â€œLet’s go upstairs.” Jessie says. I nod and follow. Blood rushes to my head. The gin.
    The second floor is more tables. It’s as sterile as a hospital cafeteria.
    The third floor, strangely enough, is carpeted in mauve, reminiscent of holidays spent in my grandparents’ living room on Long Island. At one end of the floor is a square bar with a female bartender dressed identically to the one downstairs. A sheer glass wall shows off the piping and stainless steel vats where the house drafts are brewed.
    I order the pilsner and Jessie gets a German beer called Dunkel. Pint in hand, I turn to Jessie who, unceremoniously, has already begun imbibing, so I peer once, straight through the suds to the bottom of my glass,