Right, I’d thought, but do you really not get that he was recounting his problems with his bitch ex-wife, dwelling on how much he loves his kids, in expectation not of useful legal advice but rather in the vague hope of getting into your pants? The more I drank, you see, the wiser I was becoming. It is often that way with me.
That guy’s spot had been taken by a young semi-couple. The girl had dressed nicely and applied makeup with enthusiasm and yet remained irrevocably homely. Her stubbled companion had good cheekbones and olive skin and was dressed in denim and a battered red leather jacket, with sideburns that came to a sharp point. He was wearing a red bandanna, too. I’d hated him on sight, naturally.
“I could never be angry with you,” the girl was saying. He nodded with the randomness that comes from possessing a significantly lower comprehension of the language than you’ve led everyone to believe.
The conversation meandered on, the girl doing all the talking, the guy occasionally speaking with a clumsy deliberation that conferred half-assed profundity to gnomic gems along the lines of “Yes, I think that is so.” The fact that he was harmless and possibly even almost charming simply made him all the more punchable. The girl leaned toward him often and covertly moved her stool a couple of inches his way. He endured this stoically, and suddenly I understood their situation as if I were perched outside their reality and watching it critically, some drunken god assigned to monitor their progress. In the end I was leaning so far in their direction that she noticed and turned to look at me.
And then suddenly I was talking.
“Honey,” I said, “I’m going to save you time and unhappiness here. What young Carlos is trying to say—without actually saying it—is that he’s enjoyed screwing you the last several weeks but is now going back to Europe, where he will return to screwing somebody else, probably the hometown girl whose letters he’s been stashing under the bed all the while he’s been here.”
The girl blinked.
I shrugged. “How can this surprise you? Check out the fucking sideburns. Bottom line is, Pedro here is not a poet or bullfighter. He’ll spend his glory years driving a delivery truck for his uncle’s restaurant, sleeping around while he’s still got it, and then getting exponentially fatter and more baggy-eyed. Accept that this guy’s memory is who you’re going to be unfaithful with for the rest of your life, and go back to Plan A and find yourself some nice local M.B.A. with a commitment to shaving and regular gym attendance.”
Both were looking at me by now, him with utter incomprehension, smiling a little, thinking how friendly these Americans were—they just strike up conversations in bars, it’s so great. The girl blinked twice more, however, and I realized I still hadn’t nailed it.
“Though, actually…” I said as it dawned on me, “he hasn’t been screwing you, right? But he’s going home tomorrow, and so you hope tonight’s going to be the night. Sorry, honey. Not going to happen. You’ve really just been friends all this time—except that he has, in some amphibian way, always known that you wanted it.”
The girl was staring at me now, her mouth wide. I shook my head slowly, sharing her pain, compassionate for her essence and being in a moment of bonding with her flawed and yet honest human soul.
And then she hit me in the face with an ashtray.
I left Tillie’s under something of a cloud. I tried explaining myself to the waitress but was hampered by the nosebleed, and she got a huge black guy from the kitchen to motivate me the hell out of their bar. He was good. I felt very motivated.
I made it out onto the sidewalk largely unassisted, to be confronted with traffic and steady drizzle. I wandered up and down Fourth for a while, smoking heroically and snarling at trees. I had already called the house three more times and received no answer. I knew I had gotten drunk to avoid thinking clearly about what these things implied, but this knowledge didn’t help. I still didn’t want to think about it. I couldn’t find anywhere else apart from the Malo and another hotel’s lounge bar, and I sensed I wouldn’t be welcome there either. So I took a right down a street called Madison, thinking I’d head toward the waterfront. I discovered that Madison is not a street but a mountainside. I was okay for a couple of blocks, but when I got to Second Avenue and looked down the next stretch, I seriously considered just staying where I was and waiting until someone opened a bar nearby. I decided that this would somehow be a sign of weakness, however—being a man is riddled with that kind of bullshit—and persisted on my way. They’d replaced the concrete paving alongside the Federal Building with serrated bricks, which helped a little, but after a few steps I simply lost my footing. I crashed onto my elbow and ass and slid ten feet down the street, clanging resoundingly into a garbage can.
As I hauled myself back up, I was passed by a middle-aged couple methodically trekking in the other direction, bundled up in identical fleeces.
“Slippery, huh,” one of them said. They looked like a double-headed grub.
“Fuck off,” I replied. At the junction with First, I found a minimart and lurched in to buy more cigarettes. The Chinese woman behind the counter looked like she didn’t want to get involved, but I gave her The Look and she did what I wanted. I bought a bottle of water, too, and used my reflection in the beverage cooler to make sure my face was clean of blood. Afterward I stood outside on the corner and spotted the glow of a bar on the other side. I limped over. It was a nice place, loosely attached to yet another hotel but dark enough inside that the welt on my cheek wouldn’t be immediately obvious.
I ordered a glass of weaker light beer and sat in the corner, out of danger’s way. That was the idea, at any rate. If I’d still been in active charge of the evening, I’d have realized that any beer was a bad idea now, or any bar. The problem is that the guy who means me the most harm seems to live inside my own head.
The first thing I did was check Amy’s phone to make sure it hadn’t been smashed to pieces. Luckily, it seemed fine. The shock of my collision with the ground seemed to have sobered me up a little, too, unless I’d merely entered that Indian summer of clarity you get when your nervous system is warning it’s about to wash its hands of you and is giving you one last chance to get the hell home before it pulls the plug and drops you bonelessly to the floor.
Since I had made no progress with a positive explanation for Amy’s collection of text messages, I went back to one of them. I’d realized earlier in the afternoon that there was a direct approach to finding out whom they were from. I hadn’t wanted to go that far then, and I hadn’t been drunk. Now I was.
I hit the green button and called the number.
After a few seconds of silence, I got an out-of-ser vice recording. I cut the connection, feeling relieved and disturbed. Where the hell was Amy? Was she okay? If so, why didn’t she call? How much longer should I leave it before going to the cops? I knew their likely response to a man with as little evidence as I had, but I was worried about her. The only other avenue I could think of was trying to find our car. I could try to check all the downtown parking lots, which would be a long-shot endeavor, but I suddenly found the idea compelling. At least I’d be doing something, the kind of legwork that had to lead somewhere. At the moment it was pouring rain outside. But maybe when it slacked off…
In the meantime I called home yet again. Still no reply, and it was now well after nine. I did the math and worked out that it had been about forty-six hours since we’d last spoken, a record in seven years. This forced me to believe that something was wrong and simultaneously made me want to believe it wasn’t—like seeing the doctor wince on reading your blood tests, even though you’ve spent the last six months wanting to know why you feel like shit.