The tall bearded bartender was behind the stick when we walked in. He gave me a wave and a smile. The hostess led us to a table. When we were seated Willa said. “You don’t drink and you’ve never eaten here, and you walk in and the bartender greets you like a cousin.”
“It’s not really all that mysterious. I was in here asking some questions. I told you about that young woman I’ve been trying to find.”
“The actress, and you told me her name. Paula?”
“He recognized her, and described the man she was with. So I came in a second time hoping he’d remember more. He’s a nice fellow, he’s got an interesting mind.”
“Is that what you were doing earlier tonight? Working on your case? Do you call it a case?”
“I suppose you could.”
“But you don’t.”
“I don’t know what I call it. A job, I guess, and one I’m not doing particularly well with.”
“Did you make any progress this evening?”
“No. I wasn’t working.”
“Oh.”
“I was at a meeting.”
“A meeting?”
“An AA meeting.”
“Oh,” she said, and she was going to say something else, but the waitress, with a great sense of timing, showed up to take our drink orders. I said I’d have a Perrier. Willa thought for a moment and ordered a Coke with a piece of lemon.
“You could have something stronger,” I said.
“I know. I already had more to drink than I usually do, and I was a little headachey when I woke up. I don’t think you mentioned earlier that you were in AA.”
“I don’t generally tell people.”
“Why? You can’t think it’s something to be ashamed of.”
“Hardly that. But the idea of anonymity is sort of bound up in the whole program. It’s considered bad form to break somebody else’s anonymity, to tell people that the person in question is in AA. As far as breaking your own anonymity is concerned, that’s more of an individual matter. I suppose you could say that I keep it on a need-to-know basis.”
“And I need to know?”
“Well, I wouldn’t keep it a secret from someone I was involved with emotionally. That would be pretty silly.”
“I guess it would. Are we?”
“Are we what?”
“Emotionally involved.”
“I’d say we’re on the verge.”
“On the verge,” she said. “I like that.”
The food was pretty good considering that the place was named after a lethal substance. We had Jarlsberg cheeseburgers, cottage fries, and salad. The burgers were supposedly grilled over mesquite, but if there was a difference between that and ordinary charcoal, it was too subtle for me. The potatoes were hand-cut and fried crisp and brown. The salad contained sunflower seeds and radish sprouts and broccoli florets, along with two kinds of lettuce, neither of them iceberg.
We talked a lot during the meal. She liked football, and preferred the college game to the pros. Liked baseball but wasn’t following it this year. Liked country music, especially the old-time twangy stuff. Used to be addicted to science fiction and read shelves of it, but now when she read at all it was mostly English murder mysteries, the country house with the body in the library and butlers who had or hadn’t done it. “I don’t really give a damn who did it,” she said. “I just like to slip into a world where everybody’s polite and well-spoken and even the violence is neat and almost gentle. And everything works out in the end.”
“Like life itself.”
“Especially on West Fifty-first Street.”
I talked a little about the search for Paula Hoeldtke and about my work in general. I said it wasn’t much like her genteel English mysteries. The people weren’t that polite, and everything wasn’t always resolved at the end. Sometimes it wasn’t even clear where the end was.
“I like it because I get to use some of my skills, though I might be hard put to tell you exactly what they are. I like to dig and pick at things until you begin to see some sort of pattern in the clutter.”
“You get to be a righter of wrongs. A slayer of dragons.”
“Most of the wrongs never get righted. And it’s hard to get close enough to the dragons to slay them.”
“Because they breathe fire?”
“Because they’re the ones in the castles,” I said. “With moats around them, and the drawbridge raised.”
Over coffee she asked me if I’d become friendly with Eddie Dunphy in AA. Then she put her hand to her mouth. “Never mind,” she said. “You already told me it was against the rules to break another member’s whatchamacallit.”
“Anonymity, but it doesn’t matter now. Being dead means never having to remain anonymous. Eddie started coming to meetings about a year ago. He’d stayed completely sober for the past seven months.”
“How about you?”
“Three years, two months, and eleven days.”
“You keep track to the day?”
“No, of course not. But I know my anniversary date, and it’s not hard to figure the rest out.”
“And people celebrate anniversaries?”
“Most people make it a point to speak at a meeting on their anniversary, or within a few days of it. At some groups they give you a cake.”
“A cake?”
“Like a birthday cake. They present it to you, and everybody has some after the meeting. Except for the ones on diets.”
“It sounds—”
“Mickey Mouse.”
“I wasn’t going to say that.”
“Well, you could. It does. In some groups they give you a little bronze medallion with the number of years in roman numerals on one side and the serenity prayer on the other.”
“The serenity prayer?”
“ ‘God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.’ “
“Oh, I’ve heard that. I didn’t know it was an AA prayer.”
“Well, I don’t think we have exclusive title to it.”
“What did you get? A cake or a medallion?”
“Neither. Just a round of applause and a lot of people telling me to remember it’s still a day at a time. I guess that’s why I belong to that group. No-frills sobriety.”
“ ’Cause you’re just a no-frills kind of guy.”
“You bet.”
When the check came she offered to split it. I said I’d get it, and she didn’t put up a fight. Outside, it had turned a little colder. She took my hand when we crossed the street, and went on holding it after we reached the curb.
When we got to her building she asked me if I wanted to come in for a few minutes. I said I thought I’d go straight home, that I wanted to get an early start the next morning.
In the vestibule she fitted her key in the lock, then turned to me. We kissed. There was no alcohol on her breath this time.
Walking home, I kept catching myself whistling. It’s not something I’m much given to.
I gave out dollar bills to everyone who asked.
8
I woke up the next morning with a sour taste in my mouth. I brushed my teeth and went out for breakfast. I had to force myself to eat, and the coffee had a metallic taste to it.
Maybe it was arsenic poisoning, I thought. Maybe there had been shreds of green wallpaper in last night’s salad.
My second cup of coffee didn’t taste any better than the first, but I drank it anyhow and read the News along with it. The Mets had won, with a new kid just up from Tidewater going four-for-four. The Yankees won, too, on a home run by Claudell Washington in the ninth inning. In football, the Giants had just lost the best linebacker in the game for the next thirty days; something illicit had turned up in his urine, and he was suspended.