* * *
For a week, I went back there every afternoon, and wasn’t once asked to leave or to stay. The experience was friendly and easygoing and really very…good. We’d be naked and it was all I would think of; no transcript, no dread of what I might do to or with Blank, no discomfort at all—just where and how to touch next with what part. Once, a condom spoke up to thank me for using it despite its being newly expired, and then, insecure about my not having answered it, asked me how its fit was, and whether the sensitivity it permitted was as high as promised, but even that proved quick and painless to contend with; I removed it, telling Denise it had broken, and slipped on another that didn’t try to talk to me.
Each afternoon, we’d go to bed first thing, and remain there, making out, having sex, taking catnaps, and laughing (Denise knew a lot of great old-timey jokes; her father’s father, “Simple” Simcha Simon, had been a minor comedian on the Borscht Belt circuit) til we wanted to smoke, or eat, or drink, or (twice) Denise wanted to dropper some spidge oil (she gave me no trouble when I declined to join her), and after that we’d return to the bed til seven or so, then she’d walk me to the door, hug me goodbye, we’d agree on a time to meet the next day, and then I’d go home, take Blank from its nest, put it in its sleeve, eat dinner with my father, read, go to bed, wake up, and transcribe.
The ease of that week, and much of the pleasure, was, I believe, enabled by our knowledge that Denise would soon be moving back to Chicago, which, even though Chicago wasn’t very far away, was far away enough that our never discussing it after that first conversation on her patio seemed to mean that there was nothing to discuss, i.e. that for her to move would be for her to move on. I wasn’t someone who she wanted to know in any depth—wasn’t someone who she thought, for example, to visit at his house—nor was she someone who I cared to be known by in any depth, or, for that matter, invite to my house. We didn’t even have one another’s numbers. When I came back to see her the second day, she—despite our having agreed to meet there and then—seemed a little surprised to see me. I gave her a copy of No Please Don’t, and she admired the cover, and my picture on the back, but never again said a word about it. I don’t believe she read it. Given the red flags I’d think it would have raised at least high enough to demand I dismiss them, I doubt she read even the author’s bio. And that was just fine.
I don’t think we could have lasted much beyond that week, but the last of our rendezvous—the seventh, a Sunday—was not supposed to be the last. Denise wasn’t moving out for another few days, and we agreed I’d come back on Tuesday at three. She wished she could see me on Monday, she explained, but she had other plans: Tuesday was “Independence Day,” and, early Monday morning, she’d be going downtown, to the flagship Graham&Swords PerFormulae Paradise, to camp out all day for the midnight release with some friends from the Dollheart-Betty Group ad firm, some of whom had worked on the “Independence Day’s Arriving Late This Year” campaign, and because she had designs on getting hired full-time at Dollheart-Betty, she couldn’t back out, and hoped I understood. I assured her I did, I bid her happy camping, said that I would see her on Tuesday, and meant it.
* * *
But then, Monday morning, I got a call from Herb. He’d found Stevie Strumm. He said he had pictures.
I met him at the tavern a few hours later. The place was mostly empty, but he was there when I arrived, a manila folder on the bar in front of him, Jill’s hand on top of it, beneath his own. Jill saw me first and blushed and winked. I gave Herb the Glenfibbly I’d bought in Indiana.
“Twenty-one?” he said. “What a good guy you are. You shouldn’t have, really, but, fuck, I’m glad you did.” He unfolded a pocketknife, carefully slit the seal on the case, and slid out the wooden frame in which the bottle was secured, gingerly removed the bottle from the frame, slit the seal on the cork, pulled the cork, and then, with his eyes closed, held the bottle under his chin and inhaled the fumes rising out of its neck. The whole operation took a couple of minutes, was performed in total silence, and seemed to me to be either a little too demonstrative, or a little too intimate to publicly engage in—I couldn’t decide—and when Herb opened his eyes, I swear, they were misty. He said, “Thank you, Bill. This gift is too generous.”
He asked Jill to pour for us and, once she had, he offered up a toast to “Blossoming love, gifts between pals, and better luck next time.”
We clinked glasses and sipped. This was the fourth time I’d ever drunk whiskey—the fif- or sixteenth I’d ever drunk alcohol—but I understood instantly why the Scotch was so expensive. Rather than tasting like the necessary suffering you had to endure on your way to a buzz, it tasted like something primarily intended to be sensed with the tongue. The tiniest nip of it filled your mouth with flavor after flavor, flavors that you’d never guess would complement each other, and the flavors seemed to take whole minutes to fade, which made you want to talk about them. It made you want to name them, to pin them down, as much toward the goal of knowing which ones to more actively seek when you took your next sip as to see if others would name the same ones as you, or point out the ones you’d failed to notice.
Burned steak and marzipan.
Mushrooms and grapefruit.
Band-Aids and lemon zest.
Rubberbands and chocolate.
I named some of those myself, discovered the others after Herb and Jill had named them. The Scotch was a boon on a couple of levels. Whereas I’d initially accepted my dram out of mere politeness (and with some irritation), by the time I’d swallowed back that first thimbleful, I was no longer impatient for Herb’s report on Stevie; we’d get to it, I knew. And beyond that, the Scotch was something new for me to like, something new that I could, in the future—in exchange for money I now had—have.
I’d enjoyed half my Scotch—the other two were on their second—before Herb opened the manila folder and started to speak in apologetic tones, at which point I understood that the “Better luck next time” clause in his toast (which I’d originally assumed to be some kind of traditional Boston thing) had been aimed at me.
The four pictures of Stevie, and the accompanying intelligence, came from the files of the Department of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Prostitution, where Herb had a contact—an old classmate from Exeter. Two of the photos were full-page snapshots from the society pages of Lone Star Social—one taken at a governor’s ball in 2006, the other in 2011 at a benefit concert for Safehouse, a nationwide charity organization that Stevie had founded in 2008 to provide apartments for battered women and runaway teens. In both of these photos, Stevie, her hair blond and up-done, her dresses long and sequined, her heels high and nails painted, stood in what appeared to be gleeful proximity to a slouching, big-toothed, husky fellow in an overtight tux and architect glasses, his gaze so intensely aimed at her swanny neck (she’d grown long and tall) that if Herb hadn’t told me the man was her “notoriously adoring—or what’s known back in Boston as completely fucking pussy-whipped” husband, I’d have thought he was a stalker with a strangling fetish. In fact, he was a writer, and a rich one, too: one of the major voices among that growing group of increasingly bestselling American and Canadian novelists referred to as either (depending on the critic) the “Dystopian Utopians” or “Feelgood Dsytopians” or “Pseudo-Anti-Fascist Crypto-Randian Fantasians,” whose work is either set in the very near future or the uchronic present, in the wake of a global environmental disaster of unnamed origin that has, for all its horrors, evened the playing field such that race, religion, and socioeconomic background have ceased to be either enablers or prohibitors of virtue or power, and everyone—hero, villain, and reader alike—gets to deserve exactly what they have, whatever it may be. I didn’t like his work much.