Fletcher Flora
The Gimlet Affair
It was late in the afternoon of a day that was in June and I was in my office, developing a feeling of sadness that was already pretty bad and would keep on getting worse, because that was the kind of evening it was going to be.
You know the kind of evening I mean? It goes on and on in the softest kind of light, and there’s a breeze that barely stirs the leaves of the trees, and in among the leaves are about a million cicadas sawing away with their legs, or vibrating their wings, or doing whatever cicadas do to make the sad-sounding and lovely racket they make. It is the kind into which you withdraw alone to weep without tears, remembering every pretty girl you ever kissed or didn’t kiss, and thinking with sorrow of things you haven’t done that you will almost certainly never do. It is an adolescent kind of emotionalism, immune to reason. A man in its spell is in danger.
I was in its spell, or beginning to be, and in danger, although I didn’t know it. I leaned back and made a little tent of fingers over which I sighted through Venetian blinds at the neon sign of the Rex-all drug store on the corner across from the Merchant’s Bank Building, in which I had, second floor front, my office. At that moment, I was distracted by the red head of Millie Morgan, which appeared in the doorway and came into the room. Millie is my secretary, and her head was followed, naturally, by the rest of her. The rest of Millie happens to be even more distracting than her head, and the fact that my wife tolerates her amiably is less of a commentary on my stability than on my wife’s serene confidence in her own assets, which are, in fact, considerable.
“If you have no serious objections,” Millie said, “I’ll leave now.”
“No objections,” I said. “Go on home.”
“I’m not going home. I’ve got a date for cocktails and dinner with an engineer. We may try sex.”
“You’ll like it,” I said. “It’s fun.”
I watched her go through the doorway, and then sat down and submitted again to the abortive sorrows of the incipient evening, the elegiac contemplation of going and gone. I sat there alone for about twenty or thirty minutes, I think, before looking at my watch and seeing that it was almost five thirty and time for me to be starting home.
I got up and went through the outer office into the hall, and there on the frosted glass of the door in neat little gold letters was a name, W. Gideon Jones, which was mine, and a designation, attorney-at-law, which was what I had become and what I was.
It seemed to me that an attorney-at-law was something a man might be if he didn’t have the imagination or daring to be something else, and I stood there looking at the neat little gold letters and thinking of all the fine and exciting things I had never done and would never do because I was a picayune fellow who had lived all his life, time out for the university and a service hitch, in one small city of thirty thousand souls and a million cicadas.
Although it was a trim and unsatisfactory state of affairs, it was something that had to be accepted and lived with, and it occurred to me that acceptance might be a hell of a lot easier if I were to go over to the Kiowa Room, which was the cocktail lounge in the Hotel Carson, and have a couple of Gimlets before going home. So I went there and did that, and I would have been better off, as it turned out, if I hadn’t.
The Gimlet was good, the bartender was taciturn, and I was grateful for both of these conditions. The bartender’s name was Chauncy, and he had skin the color of Swiss chocolate surrounding large, limpid eyes that expressed mutely a legend of sorrow. I sat on a stool at the bar with my back to the room, and there were shadows in the glass behind the bar, the dim reflections of remote patrons. I drank the Gimlet unmolested and was well on with a second, supplied by Chauncy in response to a gesture, before someone spoke from behind my left shoulder into my left ear.
The voice came clearly from the distaff side of sex, and it contained a remarkable husky quality that I had heard before and remembered well. You do not quickly forget this kind of voice under any circumstances whatever, and you do not forget it at all, even after seven years of silence, if you have heard it with all the nuances of tenderness and passion and, sometimes, anger.
“One of the nicest things about coming back to a place,” it said, “is meeting old friends in general and some old friends in particular. Hello, old friend.”
I looked into the mirror and saw the face that went with the voice, and it was practically the same face that had gone with it when I had last encountered them together. Part of gone. Part, although I didn’t know it, of the natural conspiracy of a particular day.
I spun slowly, half a turn of the stool, and faced the face directly. Beth Webb was its name. I had loved it once, and it had loved me. It had said so, at least, although in the end it hadn’t acted so.
“Well, for God’s sake,” I said. “Hello.”
“You look about the same,” Beth said. “Has it actually been seven years?”
“Seven lean years. The period of famine. Wasn’t there something like that in the Bible or somewhere?”
“Darling, I’m sorry. Has it been difficult for you?”
“Not at all. Everything has been fine.”
“Well, you mustn’t sound too cheerful about it. I’ll feel better if you suffered just a little. What’s that you’re drinking? It looks good.”
“It’s called a Gimlet, and it’s made of gin and lime juice.”
“It doesn’t sound quite as good as it looks. I’ll have one with you, however, if you’ll ask me.”
“Excuse me. Will you have a Gimlet with me?”
“Yes, I will, thank you.”
I ordered one for her with a gesture to Chauncy, and another for myself with the same gesture, which made one more than I’d planned to have, and I carried both of them over to a little table where she had gone to sit. It was a very small table, and we accidentally touched knees for an instant under it, and I thought sadly that it had been a long time, seven lean years of famine, since I had touched her knee, either accidentally or on purpose, under a table or elsewhere. She was wearing a black dress with a narrow skirt, a sheath, and a tiny black hat on her pale blonde head. I had a drink of my third Gimlet while she was having a drink of her first.
“How do you like the Gimlet?” I said.
“Much better than I expected. I think I would like getting drunk on them. Would you care to get drunk on Gimlets with me?”
“Time was I’d have accepted with pleasure. Now I must beg to be excused. Sorry.”
“It’s just as well, I guess. Tell me about yourself. What have you been doing all this time?”
“Routine stuff. Practicing law. Getting married.”
“I heard about that. It made me want to cry. What is your wife like?”
“Small but potent. Brown hair and nice legs and a warm heart. Her name is Sydnie, but I call her Sid. We were married three years ago.”
“She’s lucky. You tell her I said she’s lucky.”
“Cut it out, Beth. She’s not lucky, but she’s satisfied. So am I, and it’s a nice arrangement.”
“I can’t seem to remember her. Did I know her?”
“No. She came here after you went away.”
“How convenient for you. You see how things work out, darling? It’s a law of compensation or something.”
“Is that what it is?”
Was it? Going was still going, but gone had come back, and I thought it might be the law of diminishing returns. I could hear the cicadas as plain as plain, all up and down the streets of town in a thousand tremulous trees.
“Darling,” she said, “my Gimlet is all gone.”
“They’re very small and go quickly,” I said.
“Have another with me. Please do.”