"Really?"
He nodded. "Very charming man," he said, "unless he had reason to kill you."
13
"I'm hungry," he announced around six. He called up a Chinese restaurant. "Hi, this is Ray Gruliow," he said, and ordered several dishes, along with a couple of bottles of Tsing-tao, telling them not to forget the fortune cookies this time. "Because," he said, "my friend and I need to know what the future holds."
He hung up and said, "You're in the program, right?"
"The program?"
"Don't be coy, huh? You asked me in my own house if I was a fucking serial murderer. I ought to be able to ask you if you're a member of Alcoholics Anonymous."
"I wasn't being coy. People outside of AA don't generally call it 'the program.' "
"I went to a few meetings a couple of years ago."
"Oh?"
"Right here in the neighborhood. The basement of St. Luke's, on Hudson, and a little storefront on Perry Street. I don't know if they still have meetings there."
"They do."
"Nobody told me, 'Gruliow, get your ass out of here, you don't belong.' And I heard things I identified with."
"But you didn't stay."
He shook his head. "It was more than I wanted to give up. I looked at the First Step and it said something about life being out of control. I forget how they phrased it."
" 'We admitted we were powerless over alcohol- that it made our lives unmanageable.' "
"That's it. Well, I looked at my life, and it wasn't unmanageable. There were nights I drank too much and mornings when I regretted it, but it seemed to me that was a price I could afford to pay. So I made a conscious effort to cut back on my drinking."
"And it worked?"
He nodded. "I'm feeling the drinks I had just now. That's why I ordered food. I don't usually have this much to drink before dinner. I've had some stress lately. I think it's only natural to drink more at times of stress, don't you?"
I said that sounded reasonable.
"I wouldn't have brought it up," he said, "but I didn't want to order beer for you if you were the nondrinker I understood you to be, nor did I want to appear inhospitable." He slurred the last word just the least bit, and stopped himself from taking another stab at it. Shifting gears, he said, "The woman you live with. How old is she?"
"I'll have to ask her."
"She's not thirty years younger than you, is she?"
"No."
"Then I guess you're not as much of a damned fool as I am," he said. "When the club first met, Michelle was still in diapers. Jesus, she was the age Chatham is now."
"Chatham's your daughter?"
"Indeed she is. I'm even beginning to get used to her name. Her mother's idea, as you no doubt assumed. A man in his sixties does not name his daughter Chatham. I suggested to Michelle that if she wanted to name the kid after an English prime minister she should give some thought to Disraeli. It goes better with Gruliow than Chatham. Dizzy Gruliow. It has a nice ring, don't you think?"
"But she didn't like it?"
"She didn't get it. She's half my age, for God's sake, but God help me if I treat her like a child. I have to treat her like an equal. I told her, making a joke of it, that I don't treat anybody like an equal, young or old, male or female. 'Yes,' she said. 'I've noticed.' You know something? I don't think I'm going out to Sag Harbor tomorrow. I think the pressures of work are going to prove too great for me."
We ate in the front room, with the plates balanced on our laps. He found a Coke for me and drank his two bottles of Chinese beer.
He said, "It's funny. It was Homer's death that shocked me. He was a very old man by the time he died, older than anybody I'd ever known, but I must have expected him to live forever. He wasn't the first to go, you know. He was the third."
"I know."
"It was a shock when Phil died, but a car crash, that's the kind of lightning that's always there. It's going to strike somebody sooner or later. Did you grow up in New York?"
"Yes."
"So did I. In the rest of the country you don't get through high school without having a friend or two die in a wreck. Every prom night you know there's going to be at least one car that doesn't make it around Dead Man's Curve. But kids don't drive in the city, so it's a form of population control we're spared here."
"We've got others."
"God, yes. There's always some form of attrition that thins out the ranks of the young males. Historically, war's always played that role, and did a fine job before the dawn of the nuclear age. Still, limited wars and local skirmishes take up the slack. In the ghettos, dope's the medium. Either they overdose on it or they traffic in it and shoot each other." He snorted. "But I digress. If I ever write my memoirs that'll be the title. But I Digress."
"You were talking about Kalish's death."
"It didn't scare me. That's what we're talking about, isn't it? Fear, fear of dying. They say man's the only animal that knows he's going to die. He's also the only animal that drinks."
"You think there's a connection?"
"I'm not even sure I buy the first part. I've had cats, and I always had the feeling they were as aware of their mortality as I've ever been of mine. The difference is they're fearless. Maybe they don't give a shit."
"I can't even tell how people feel about things," I said. "Let alone cats."
"I know what you mean. You know why I felt no fear when Phil died? It couldn't be simpler. I didn't own a car."
"So you couldn't-"
"Die the way he did. Right. I had the same reaction years later when Steve Kostakos crashed his plane. Do I fly a plane? No. So do I have to worry about it? Certainly not."
"And when James Severance died in Vietnam?"
"You know," he said, "that wasn't even a shock. One year he didn't show up for the dinner and we learned he was in the service. The next year we learned he was dead. I think I expected it."
"Because he was in combat?"
"That must have been part of it. That fucking war. Whenever somebody went over there, you figured he wasn't coming back. It was easy to feel that way about Severance. I don't know how much of this is hindsight, but it seems to me that there was something about him. An aura, an energy, whatever you want to call it. I'm sure there's a New Age way of putting it, but my wife's not here to tell us what it is. Have you ever met anyone and somehow just sensed he was doomed?"
"Yes."
"You got that feeling with Severance. I don't want to imply I had premonitions of an early grave for him, just that he was… well, doomed. I can't think of another word for it." He tilted his head back, squinting at a memory. "You said you thought I was an odd choice for that group. I wasn't, not really. I was more like the rest of those guys than you'd imagine now. Most of the courtroom armor, a lot of the media image, it all came later. It may have grown naturally out of the person who attended that first dinner in '61, but it wasn't in place then. I was like the rest of the members, older than most but just as earnest, every bit as intent on playing the game of life and getting a decent score. I fit in just fine." He drained his glass. "If there was a good choice for odd man out, it was Severance."
"Why?"
He thought for a moment before speaking. "You know," he said, "I didn't really know the man. I try to picture him now and I can't bring the image into focus. But it seems to me that he was on a different level from the rest of us."
"How?"
"A lower link on the food chain. But that's just an impression, founded on three meetings three decades ago, and maybe it would have changed if he'd lived long enough to grow into himself and shed some of the emotional puppy fat. He didn't have the chance." He drew a breath. "But no, his death held no fear for me. I wasn't slogging through rice paddies getting shot at by little guys in black pajamas. I was busy helping other young men stay out of the army." He put his glass on the table. "Then Homer Champney died," he said, "and in a sense the party was over."