Andy Liptak shook his hand, both smiling and solicitous. "I heard about the arm. I couldn't believe it, after all you went through in 'Nam. Some raw deal. You want a drink?"
His eyes now focused, Willy looked into the face of his old friend, wondering about the depth-or the truth- of his ignorance. "I'm on the wagon," he answered, reflecting also on the use of his old nickname-the Sniper. Serving as such had been just one of his official functions in Vietnam. But his machinelike technique, his remote demeanor, and the way others treated him had all earned him the title. Snipers were outsiders, despised by the enemy and usually shunned as cold killers by their own. At the time, he'd enjoyed the distinction. Now it embarrassed him.
Andy didn't falter, giving Willy's good arm a squeeze. "That's really great. I wish I had the discipline. Come on back. I got a nice table reserved."
He led the way through the back of the bar and around a corner to a large, open dining room sprinkled with a haphazard collection of tables and chairs. He took Willy to a corner near the windows where the noise seemed less and the mood more intimate.
"Here we are," he said, the affable host. "Have a seat."
Willy slid into his chair, thinking back to when the two of them, dressed in sweat-stained tropical khakis, their faces sheening in the heat, would share beer after beer in noisy, hot dives with names they couldn't pronounce or remember, hoping to find in each other's company some touchstone of a home far away in time and place.
That necessity now having been removed, Willy wondered what he'd ever seen in this man.
Andy seemed to pick up on his thoughts, cupping his cheek in his hand and staring at Willy with a faint smile on his face. "Asking yourself how we got here?"
Willy hesitated before answering. Since the moment he'd returned to this city, he'd been tiptoeing through a minefield of other people's good graces. He'd kept his true nature from Mary's apartment superintendent, Ward Ogden, Rosalie Coven, Louisa Obregon, even his brother, Bob, presenting to them all a measured, even muted front.
Doing so had bordered on agony. Ever since he'd begun his recovery from alcoholism, he'd gotten used to using honesty with surgical precision, regardless of how it was received. Total candor had been the Stateside equivalent of his Vietnam-born contempt of adversity-a showy conviction that he had nothing left to lose. He'd known even then it was merely a mask, of course. His chilling aloofness in combat was mostly self-loathing and despair, and his plain speaking nowadays was largely to stave people off, but there was no denying the advantages the mask had over the reality. There were times, in fact, when his self-deception was running strong or his confidence hitting bottom, when even he believed that his crippled arm and verbal bluntness were somehow things to be proud of.
Which was why right now, with his entire past overtaking him, he so urgently wanted to speak honestly- truly-and tell Andy Liptak of all the anger, contempt, nostalgia, even love and confusion that he felt welling up inside him as he watched his friend smiling from across the table.
But once more, he kept his guard.
"It's been a long time," he said blandly instead. Andy gestured to the waiter, an older man with an apron tied around his waist. "Give me a Brooklyn Lager, and a…"
"Coke," Willy finished for him.
The waiter disappeared as Andy shook his head. "Yeah, long time. Who would've thought way back that we'd end up where we are? The Sniper and me, after all these years. Jesus. How's life in Vermont? Didn't I hear through the grapevine you got a new job?"
Now that the conversation had begun, especially along such superficial lines, Willy felt more comfortable biding his time about his true purpose for being here. The brief emotional flurry of a moment ago was snuffed out by the hard, cool veneer he called on so often.
"Yup. Kind of a crazy deal. It's like a statewide detective unit, except nobody knows about us and no local cop wants us around stealing his cases. Typical bureaucratic bullshit."
"Sounds fancy, though."
"Till they pull the plug on it," Willy admitted. "We're so new, no one would notice. Things going okay with you?"
Andy made an expansive gesture, like a lord displaying his acreage. "Pretty good. Got a lot of irons in the fire. Never could resist a deal, and this town's full of 'em. Real estate around here is like trading pork bellies: it's fun and a little scary and when it pays off, it's like knocking off a bank. So, I do some of that, and I own a few businesses I don't even know what they do, and a bunch of other stuff. When we were in 'Nam and I was wrestling palletloads of condoms and shit like that, I never figured I'd be swimming these waters. But I've gotten into it, and I can't complain. It's almost like a sport, like rock climbing or white-water canoeing or something-full of unpredictables. No day's like the last."
Their drinks came, and after that the traditional Peter Luger meal of porterhouse steak, onion and tomato salad, and creamed spinach. Willy didn't have to do much to keep Andy going, especially as the beers kept pace. Like most self-made social scramblers, Andy Liptak loved talking about himself, and the more he did, the more Willy learned, and the less he had to worry that the tables might be turned.
But the substance, and eventually the point of it all, finally became elusive. The more Andy rambled on, the less Willy paid attention, until he finally realized he'd been subliminally avoiding the very reason he'd contacted this man. The purpose here was Mary, as it had been when he'd arranged this reunion. But seeing Andy again, and being hit by a wall of meaningless chatter, Willy felt hunkered down as in a trench. He became loath to break cover by asking questions that would only speed up his revisiting the past. He had expended such effort in closing off those years, and had lost so much in his blind, enraged fumbling, it felt like leaping off a cliff merely to ask a simple leading question.
But ask it he finally did.
It wasn't out of context. Andy by now was expounding on family values and the benefits of settling down. He apparently had a wife who preferred their Long Island beach house to the city place he favored and used as an office. He was bragging about yet a third home in Portsmouth, New Hampshire-a huge, blue-blooded estate, reminiscent of the Astors summering by the sea- that he'd picked up in a roundabout way, and implying he might have a girlfriend or two on the side, when Willy casually asked, "Did you ever keep up with Mary after you two split up?"
That brought on a pause, and an expression touched with both sorrow and guilt. Finally, Andy chewed his lower lip briefly and leaned forward, his elbows on either side of his after-dinner coffee.
"Did Bob or anybody give you the scoop on Mary and me?" he asked.
Willy wasn't about to suggest they had, and he was surprised that Bob's name had cropped up. He didn't realize they knew one another, although he now remembered Bob saying Andy "sounded" like a decent guy.
"Just that you'd gone separate ways," Willy said.
"You didn't keep up with her?"
He shook his head. "Too many ghosts."
Andy nodded sympathetically. "I know the feeling. She told me you two had it pretty rough toward the end."
Willy couldn't stop himself. "What'd she say?"
"That you fought a lot, that you had a drinking problem and a lot of anger. That you kept obsessing about 'Nam. I hope this doesn't sound wrong, but she really loved you. She brought that up so much, I kinda got sick of it. That might've had something to do with why her and me didn't work out. She was still stuck on what happened between you."
Willy regretted having broached the subject, and tried to get back on track. "Why did you break up, though? You said that was only part of it."
Andy put on a philosophical look. "Part of it, all of it. Hard to tell, when you think back. I mean, I'm no shrink, and she had a lot of issues, probably before you ever met her, so who knows where all that crap comes from? And I wasn't in such a great place, either-a super bad choice for her, looking back. But you know how she was: all that energy… hard to resist. And I don't resist too well anyhow."