JILL’S BOOK CLUB HAD BEEN meeting on the usually inconvenient Friday night once a month for more than five years, and the meeting night wasn’t going to change now. Tonight, because Peter had had such a hard time yesterday—couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, obviously working too hard—she offered to stay home if he felt he needed the company. She would make him a strong martini, cook him dinner, open a good bottle of wine.
“No. Get out of here. Have fun. I’ve just got some low-grade thing. I’ll probably be in bed by eight.”
After she left, he ate take-out Chinese with the desultory twins. Tyler and Eric, until recently his golden boys, were the enemy camp. He was seeing them now with unblinkered realism. Both of them were entitled slackers—although Eric was worse than Tyler—who with their incessant needs had robbed him of so much of his emotional, not to say sexual, life with his wife. The pathetic truth, which he’d somehow come to accept as his lot in life, was that Jill only had time for him when everything was peachy with the boys.
Which was almost never.
To say nothing of the unending financial drain—about to get much worse since they were starting college in a few months—that would eat up eighty grand after-tax dollars a year minimum for the next four years.
Shit. It was unbelievable. When he was eighteen—their age—he moved out of his parents’ house and never looked back. Paid for his own college, did ROTC, went to war, got his law degree, all on his own dime.
Every part of that was a foreign concept to these spoiled rotten kids.
But if he called them on their bullshit, it would only lead to conflict, to an argument. And he just didn’t have the energy. Or, he suddenly felt, the will. He didn’t really care, didn’t want to get into anything unpleasant, so he kept his tone civil. “So where are you guys off to tonight?”
Both of them doing the eye roll thing with each other. As if he wasn’t even there, as if he couldn’t see it. But he pushed on. “I’ve got a dead night since Mom’s got her book club. I thought maybe we could all go out and catch a flick.”
“A flick?” Eric said, setting a new record for derision in two words.
“Uh, it’s Friday, Dad,” Tyler said, trying to undo some of the damage. “We were just going to hang.”
“ ‘Hang’ doesn’t really tell me much,” he said.
“You know,” Tyler said, “just with the guys.”
Peter didn’t know. He didn’t have a clue. But he kept up the front, mild and understanding. They’d go do what they did, which would probably be stupid and perhaps dangerous, but nothing he could do would stop them. “Sure,” he said. “I just thought. No big deal.”
Ten minutes later they were gone.
In another life that suddenly felt like very long ago he’d been reading and as far as he remembered very much enjoying a book called Stuff Matters. It was right where he’d left it on the table next to his reading chair in the living room, but now when he picked it up and leafed through it, he had no idea how much he’d read, where he’d stopped, anything. He looked at the front cover for a minute, read over the flap copy on the back. Had he actually started it? It seemed impossible.
His next stop was in front of the television, where he might be able to kill a couple of hours, and perhaps deaden his mind, watching a ball game. The Giants were playing the Cardinals at AT&T Park and he normally loved listening to the banter between Kruk and Kuip, but after half an inning, he shut off the damn thing, went up to his bedroom, stood there flat-footed and empty-brained for some immeasurable time, then turned around, went down the stairs, grabbed a jacket from the hall closet, and walked out the front door and into the night.
McCarthy’s in West Portal wasn’t more than half a mile from Peter’s house in Saint Francis Wood. He had passed by it a hundred times but hadn’t been inside in years, ironic because as soon as he opened the door, he remembered it as his kind of place, or at least the kind of place he’d frequented, often with Jill, when they were younger.
Prime time on Friday night, people packed all the tables and crammed the bar. Peter stood just inside the door, wondering if he should just turn around and try another watering hole. Before he’d moved, though, a burly, bearded guy right in front of him pushed back from his place at the corner of the bar and stood up. Turning, he saw Peter standing there and made an extravagant gesture, offering up his seat. “Kept it warm for ya.”
“Thanks.”
Taking the stool, Peter shrugged out of his jacket, draped it behind him, and suddenly the bartender was in front of him. The ball game he’d turned off at home was playing on three of the television sets to the accompaniment of Dire Straits, loud but not ear-splitting.
He ordered Hendrick’s gin on the rocks.
Next to him, a husky female voice insinuated itself just above the music. “I don’t know Hendrick’s. I can’t believe it’s better than Sapphire.”
He turned his head, noticing her for the first time. “Maybe not better,” he said, “but different for sure. Roses and cucumbers.”
“Sorry?”
“The botanicals they use,” he said. “Hendrick’s is all rose petals and cucumbers. The Sapphire is all about the juniper. You taste them together, it’s pretty obvious.”
“Rose petals? Really?”
“Really.”
“I’ve got to try myself some of that while the night’s young and I can still taste it.”
The bartender was coming back toward them. He placed Peter’s drink in front of him.
“Stan,” she said, pointing at his glass. “You want to mix one of those up for me, too? Hendrick’s.” She met Peter’s eyes. “Rocks, or up?”
“Good either way.”
She nodded to the bartender. “Stan, you decide.” Placing her Sapphire drink in the bar’s gutter, she said, “but let’s hold onto that if the Hendrick’s doesn’t work out.” She came back to Peter. “I can’t let myself forget the basic problem with gin.”
“What’s that?”
“Same as with breasts,” she said. “One is not enough and three is too many.”
Peter chuckled. “I’ve noticed that.”
“You’ve known women with three breasts?”
Now he laughed. “No. I didn’t mean that. I meant three is too many gins. Although, I suppose, that goes for breasts, too, of course, now that you mention it.”
She made a small show of looking down at herself, one side then the other. There was plenty to see on both sides. “Whew,” she said, and they both laughed.
She put out her hand. “Diane.”