“Wan’nother?” the bartender grumbled.
“Death in the Desert,” George said. “That’s a pretty hard-boiled name.”
“Iss’a poem. All the drinks got names of poems.” He tapped the company logo on the napkins: Dead Poets Society Functions.
“Cute,” George said. “So no living poets? Couldn’t get a Billy Collins in a tall glass?”
“The Wasteland is pretty good,” the bartender offered. “Got tea-infused bourbon in it.”
George was soon handed a cloudy gray drink that tasted like neither tea nor bourbon. In fact it tasted like nothing at all, which was fine by him, so long as it made the party a little blurrier. Then he got Sara a Faerie Queen, involving St. Germain and blueberries, and resumed scanning the room. Finally he put his finger on it. Last year more people had been dressed up. A lot more. In fact he couldn’t see anyone else wearing a suit, except for William. Had suits suddenly gone out of style? There were an awful lot of piratical mustaches going on around him. Two — no, three different guys with muttonchops. What was the point of looking different in exactly the same way as everybody else? No wonder all their dumb art was so dumb — edgy but harmless. Pairs of safety scissors in gilded frames.
He turned, and his eyes locked with Sara’s. She was chatting with William over by the doors to the balcony. She gave George just the quickest, tiniest smile, and it shattered him like a pane of glass. Could even one of these people paint that? The feeling you get when you’re having a crappy night and the woman you’re about to propose to smiles your way. With his right hand, George reached across his chest and patted his left jacket pocket. There was the impression of a small jewelry box, containing a diamond ring that had belonged to his father’s mother’s mother. He would give it to Sara tonight.
“Everyone says Gaussman’s going to be the next Rosenquist” came Irene’s soft, sweet voice behind him. She was speaking to a very tall woman and gesturing toward a longish painting of various bright-colored Web site logos. George liked it — at least it was colorful.
“I loathe Rosenquist,” the very tall woman said.
Irene made a face behind the woman’s back as she said, “Obviously. But that’s why—”
Just then they both heard familiar belly laughter. It was Jacob, at last, speaking to an elderly woman in a fox stole. “Did you skin that yourself? The workmanship’s incredible.”
“George!” Irene sang lightly as she passed him. “That’s the curator of the Morrison!”
He didn’t know what that was, but it didn’t matter. He was the designated extinguisher of Jacob’s fires. Still holding Sara’s drink in one hand, George pushed across the room.
As he arrived on the scene, Jacob was inspecting the woman’s fur: “You can hardly see where the hounds got him.”
“Where’ve you been, Jake?” George asked, looking apologetically at the elderly curator, who took her chance to break for the next room.
After taking a sniff of Sara’s drink, Jacob helped himself to a gulp. “Ah, Georgie Porgie pudding and pie. Long day up at the asylum.” Jake clucked his tongue. “Had to wrestle a kid to the ground who thought he was a goddamn ninja.”
Jacob Blaumann worked as an orderly at Anchorage House, a private rehabilitation institute up in Westchester. He kept a short, dark scholarly beard, which if he ever shaved would grow back during a commercial break. Of course Jacob didn’t watch television, or own one, and the real reason for the beard, George knew, was that a boy Jacob madly desired in their sophomore year had offhandedly commented that it made him look “less pudgy.” Likewise, Jacob had worn the same brown tweed jacket every day since he’d found it at Goodwill and Irene had said it made his shoulders look broad. These things went right to his head, it was true, but so what? It was his confidence, more than anything, that George had seen work its magic on all manner of men in bars, train stations, Whole Foods freezer aisles, and library carrels.
Once Jacob had written poetry, but now he was just a poet. He specialized in a certain type of epic that was a tough sell in an age of text messages. “At least my poems don’t fit on a square of toilet paper,” he was fond of saying. Now he tended a herd of mental patients who, upon occasion, needed to be held down and syringed and straitjacketed. A job he’d found on craigslist, believe it or not, which put his size and his psych minor to unexpected use.
“George,” he began, slinging an arm around his old friend, “I’d like to go to a fox hunt sometime. What do you say?”
“Oh, at least once before I die.” George sighed wistfully.
“Let’s set one up right along Madison Avenue. Get some hound dogs. Floppy ears. Keen sense of smell. You and I follow on horseback, naturally. One of us plays a bugle.”
“You know I used to bugle with the Columbus Philharmonic.”
Jacob lifted a cupped hand to his lips. “TOOO DOOO! TOOO DOOO!”
Most of the people in the room were looking at them now. George ceaselessly enjoyed his former roommate’s irreverence, since he couldn’t often bring himself to be rude. With Jacob it was just the opposite: if he ever had impulses toward politeness (and Sara firmly believed he didn’t), they were soon drowned out by whatever he was shouting. George liked to think they complemented each other in this way, each living through the other when it suited.
“Bunch of rubberneckers!” Jacob scoffed, no quieter.
George grinned. “Speaking of, I got stuck behind this six-car pileup today on the—”
“Hang on. Where’s the bar in this joint?”
“Over there. You’ll like it. All the drinks are named after poems.”
Jacob glowed like a thousand-watt bulb. “Who couldn’t love this town?”
Irene shot them an unappreciative look from across the room and then rubbed nonchalantly at her left eye with the back of her right hand as she schmoozed another donor. Feeling George staring at her, she stuck her tongue out at him and made bug eyes at the green-plastic-encased yam that perched at his end of the bar.
George rubbed his stomach and pretended to be hungry. She gestured silently at the moldy yam, and he scratched at his chin as if considering it. He pantomimed taking out a checkbook and writing many, many zeroes.
“Shut the fuck up!” Jacob bellowed. “They have a drink called The Wasteland! Though it ought to be two words: Waste, space, Land. That’s the actual title. Nobody gets that right. Even if it is highly overrated,” he went on, “it can’t touch ‘The Bridge.’ Hart Crane? Now there’s a poem you guys ought to make into a drink. With hints of the East River—”
He’d have gone on, but he got distracted. “Hey, why’s that Korean kid look so familiar?”
George ordered two more Wastelands, plus five flutes of William’s champagne. Now everyone was there. Now things could really get started.
• • •
William Cho never ceased to be amazed. Here he was in the penthouse of one of the most luxurious hotels in Manhattan, in the midst of a great spiral of artists and patrons. Strange accents buzzed past his ears. A Persian woman passed by with owl feathers braided into her hair. There was snow blowing around out on the balcony, and beyond it more snow was falling a hundred stories to the streets. A Somali man by the window gestured wildly, his platinum watchband glinting in a spotlight. Diamonds ringed the neck of a white girl on the bathroom line, who couldn’t be older than twenty. She and a Brazilian boy of about the same age studied a twisting glass sculpture that reminded William of a tidal wave, frozen solid. And here he was among them, feeling strangely rich by association, not least because he was standing there talking — being talked to, really — by Sara Sherman, of all people.