THREE BEERS IN, JOHN TRIED TO KEEP PACE WITH NICKI, WHO gulped them down faster than anyone he’d ever seen.
“I hate warm beer,” she said. “It has to be cold. Drink at your own pace if you’re a wimp.”
They were at the end of the bar, where it met the wall. The last time he’d been to Grange Hall, he and Jess sat in the middle of the bar. John avoided looking in that direction. Other than the wall, the only thing to look at was Nicki. She appeared no worse for wear despite slamming three beers in an hour. She changed out of her black shirt into a white blouse before they left Frontier. When he first met her, John thought her somewhat plain. But during the shift, she impressed him with her hustle and the charm she summoned for each table. As they drank, Nicki told John that she had been waiting tables at Frontier for two years.
“Before that?”
“I hopped around a lot. Sometimes places went under. Sometimes I got tired of the people or the money wasn’t good enough.”
“College?”
She rolled her eyes.
“Sorry,” he said. If the beer hadn’t already turned his cheeks and ears red, he knew they were flushed now.
“Why are you sorry? I would have gone if I wanted. Why do I need to pay all that money for someone to tell me to read some stupid books by guys I don’t want to read? A waste of time. I saved tuition money. I got no debt.”
“So you wanted to be a waitress?”
“I like restaurants. I like the cash. You can usually find someone to drink with after your shift, so you don’t feel like an alcoholic. And when I walk out the door, I leave everything there, right? When I’m done, I’m done. I don’t have to spend my time with my friends or at home stressing about work.”
John must have looked skeptical, because Nicki said, “I feel like you’re judging me.”
“I’m not.”
“Admit it. You’re judging me a little bit. You think I’m some kind of party girl. Or stupid. Or unreliable.”
“No!”
“Then what’s with the face?”
“It’s just,” he thought for a moment, “different from people I know. Now, at least. I worked in a restaurant while I was in school. It was a means to an end. I never imagined it as…It wasn’t something I wanted to do. And now I’m back.”
“Why does it bother you? To be a waiter? Did you look down on us when you were a lawyer?”
“I’m still a lawyer,” John said with a certitude as empty as the bottle in his hand. “And no. I didn’t.”
“So what’s the big deal?”
“They’d look down on me.”
“Who?”
“My former colleagues. My former clients. My friends. All of them.”
“Didn’t they always look down on you anyway?”
John was glad that the bartender showed up with two new beers. He took a long pull from his bottle and looked back to find Nicki offering him a cigarette.
“I didn’t know you smoked,” he said, pulling one from the pack.
“I do after three beers.”
“What do you do after four?”
She laughed and smacked his shoulder lightly, then rubbed it as if she had hurt him, and said, “You’ll have to stick around to find out.”
Nicki put the cigarette in the corner of her mouth while she rooted in her purse for a lighter. Instead of remembering his last cigarette in the bar, John focused on Nicki’s lips. When her hand emerged from the purse with a pink plastic lighter, John intercepted it and relieved her of the Bic. He lit her cigarette for her, and then his own.
“So are you really planning to work at the restaurant, or you just doing this until you can go back to being a lawyer?”
“You tired of working with me already?”
“Just curious.”
“I don’t know. We’ll see how it goes. I need to pay the bills. And keep the boss happy.”
“You know why Ed hired you, right?”
“He thought I was handsome?”
Nicki giggled again. “He’s an ex-con. He’s always looking to give someone a break or a second chance.”
“I’m not a convict.”
“I know,” she said, raising her hands like he’d pointed a gun at her. Smoke rose from the back of one, the cigarette hidden like a plane crash behind a ridge. When she saw he wasn’t leaving, she lowered them.
“Can I tell you something?”
“Yeah.” John took a long drag on his cigarette. He readied himself for her to ask about Jess.
“I was surprised by how handsome you are.”
He smiled before he could stop himself. “What?”
Nicki blushed. In her rush to confess, she exhausted her stockpile of courage and had nothing left. But she didn’t avert her eyes. She took a quick sip from her beer.
“This is going to sound funny,” she started, “but I saw your picture in the paper. And you’re better looking than the pictures they used. I’m just saying.”
John didn’t respond. Which photo had she seen? The police walking him out of his building? His mug shot? One of him on the courthouse steps?
“I’m not hitting on you,” she said. “I’m just saying that when I read about the case, I wondered why she was into you. You know?”
Yes, he knew.
“She was so pretty. And I thought—I mean, maybe I’m just not into Chinese guys—but I thought your photo was ehhhh. You looked like any other guy. I didn’t see myself cheating on my husband with you.”
“You have a husband?”
“No.”
“So now you’re here with three or four beers in you, and you’re reconsidering your initial impression?”
“When you put it that way, you make me sound like a tramp.”
“Nope. Just trying to figure out whether this is just the beer talking or whether I’m actually handsome.”
“You’re not as funny as you think.”
John couldn’t tell whether she was flirting with him or wanted him to think she might be interested. Did it matter? Hadn’t he learned his lesson? Finish his beer, have another cigarette, head home, work again tomorrow. The last time he was here, shouldn’t he have done the same?
#
Neither John nor Jess spoke until they got into the cab, and then only for Jess to give the cab driver Cathy’s address.
“She went away for the weekend,” Jess said before turning to look out the window. “Some conference for work.”
John nodded. The cabbie chose a route—north on Hudson Street, kick over to Tenth Avenue, then crosstown at Ninety-Sixth Street and up Madison—that brought John within a few blocks of his home. He thought about telling the driver to stop so that he could get out. The next stoplight, he told himself, it would be close enough to walk home. They hit two before Ninety-Sixth Street crossed into Central Park. At the second, he brought his fingers to the door handle.
Jess slid across the black vinyl seat until she pressed against him. Her arm burrowed underneath his right arm so she could take his hand. John let go of the door handle. Jess dropped her head to his shoulder. Green light. The cab accelerated down Ninety-Sixth Street and beat the next light. Stone walls rose on either side of them as the street descended below the night-covered park.
#
“You’re not going to return the compliment?” Nicki asked, turning in her stool to put her back to the wall and giving John full view of her shirt, unbuttoned down far enough that it required his concentration not to glance down at her chest.
“Compliment? You just said I wasn’t funny.”
“I said you were handsome.”
“Fine,” he said with a half smile. “You’re very funny.”
She laughed—nearly a bray. “You’re an asshole.”
John would have hated that bray if he heard it from a stranger. She was a stranger, but nobody laughed around him anymore, much less with him. Making her laugh was like slamming four more drinks. His stool felt wobbly. He reached out and grabbed the edge of the bar.
“You okay?” Nicki asked.
“Yeah. You got another smoke?”
She passed him a cigarette and took one for herself. This time, she lit his.
“Want to tell me about it?” she asked.
“Tell you about what?”
“Whatever’s on your mind.”
“You don’t want to know what’s on my mind.”
“Sure I do.”
“For one thing, your shirt.”
“Don’t be crude,” Nicki said, sitting back and pulling the gap in her blouse closed. Then she smirked and leaned forward, the neckline of the shirt parted again. “Seriously, you can talk to me.”
“I don’t know you.”
“You can know me.”
The cigarette smoke coiled in the air between them. John tried to discern what Nicki was hoping to get out of him. John was drunk, not an idiot. She wanted something from him. Maybe a story about how she slept with him. Maybe his side of the story about what happened to Jess. Or perhaps she didn’t care about what came before and simply thought he was good-looking.
“I don’t want to talk here,” he said.
“I live in Gramercy. We can talk there.” Nicki crushed her cigarette
out.
John took a final sip of his beer. Nothing felt right about the eve-
ning, but he hadn’t had sex since before his arrest. The twenty months felt like twenty years, but each of those days was a day Jess hadn’t seen. For a few minutes, John wanted to forget that.
“Let’s get a cab.”
#
They had walked to the door of Cathy’s building through an empty street. Over the quiet, he could hear the hum of the cab’s engine and the gritty peel of its tires on the asphalt as it drove off. John recalled a time when, like a vampire, he would have stood on the sidewalk until he received an express invitation to follow so he wouldn’t appear presumptuous. Years before, the first time Jane invited him up to her apartment, they’d stood on the street for ten minutes after John walked her home from a date, chatting, then kissing, a stanza and refrain repeated. In the end, she’d simply taken his hand and led him to the door. Later, before they finally drifted off to sleep, Jane took his cock in her hand and said, “You need to take a hint. Don’t ever make me work so hard for this again.”
Jess held the door of the building open for him as he climbed the short stoop. He pushed the inner door open—the lock had been broken the whole time they’d been using Cathy’s apartment. He followed her up the stairs, appreciating the fit of her skirt and the flex of her calves as she took each step on the toes of her high heels. Except for the percussion of their feet on the stairs and the jangle of her key ring as she searched for the apartment keys, the stairwell was silent.
He waited for her to undo the deadbolt on Cathy’s door and considered leaving her there. Whatever pain the last month had brought, it simplified things for him. No more lies to his family, and no more stress someone in the office might discern a meaningful glance or discover an errant note. So why stay? Did he want a better coda for them than the catastrophe in the hotel room? Was he trying to throw them back on the runaway train so that they could finally derail properly? Or did he only want to fuck some of his sadness, anger, and regret back into her? And what was Jess looking for as she stepped into the apartment?
John closed and locked the apartment door. When he turned, Jess stood in the middle of the unlit room facing him, framed in a corona of ambient light from the windows. She began to unbutton her blouse. John crossed half the distance between them and stopped so that he could watch her undress. Nothing in the way she unhooked her bra, unzipped her skirt, or slid her underwear down her thighs revealed her reasons for doing so. It was like trying to divine the intention of a thunderstorm.
When she finished, he undressed. It was nothing as elegant as Jess, but she watched him without laughing.
She stepped into his arms, rested her head on his shoulder, and brought her arms around his back. John wrapped his around her waist above her hips. But for the fact that they were nude, it looked like they were dancing.
#
Nicki’s apartment was a miniature version of Cathy’s, except for the mottled black-and-white cat that padded off behind the couch when John walked in with Nicki.
“Ignore him,” she said. “He’s shy.”
John hung his coat on the back of one of the two chairs at a small table near the door. Nicki tossed hers across an arm of the couch, about three feet away, then turned to the fridge. Everything in the apartment was two steps from all the other objects. The walls loomed close. A thick pipe ran up one corner of the apartment, throwing off so much heat that the paint on it bubbled in places. John wanted to open the single window for some air but guessed it would be stuck in its frame.
She handed him a bottle of New Amsterdam and presented the neck of her bottle to him. He tapped it with his. Nicki sat on the couch and patted the cushion next to her until he joined her. She stretched a leg out across his lap. The couch faced a small TV, rabbit ears rising from the back.
“New York is funny,” Nicki said. “A few months ago, I’d see you on the news, and now you’re in my apartment.”
John placed his hand on her calf.
“Can you tell me about it?” she asked.
“The trial?”
“No. I read the papers. I want to know about you and her.” “There’s not enough time.”
“You in a rush?” She pushed her leg farther up his lap. “We can take our time.”
John stared at the blank television screen.
“You had an affair with her,” Nicki prodded.
“Yes.” It felt like a lie, to reduce it to that.
“How did it start?”
“In the office. After our Christmas party.”
“Why?”
John shrugged. “Why are we here right now?”
Nicki threw him a crooked smile. “I live here.”
One corner of John’s mouth rose in a half smile, then froze as Nicki raised one knee, bringing the heel of her foot to the inside of his thigh, and pressed. John flinched, but Nicki extended her leg slightly, pinning him into the corner of the small couch. The pressure was uncomfortable, but not unbearable, and when he stopped moving, she pivoted her foot so it brushed against his cock without releasing the discomfit caused by her heel.
“I can make this hurt,” she said. “Or not. Depends on how you answer my questions.”
“You tell me first,” he said. “Why did you invite me over?”
Nicki shrugged. “Life’s boring. I want to have a story. A secret. You can be both.”
“Aren’t you scared of me?”
“Ten people saw me leave that bar with you. You’re not an idiot. You’re not going to hurt me, right?”
“No,” he said.
“Okay,” she said. “I told you. Now you tell me.”
“What do you want to know?”
“The stuff I didn’t see in the papers. Like why.”
“We were unhappy.”
“Did she make you happy?”
“We did our best to make each other less unhappy. For a while at least. But I don’t think either of us was capable of making the other happy.”
“Did it end like they said?”
John shook his head.
“How did it end?”
#
“Is this the end?”
The question was a breath across his chest. Jess’s head lay just above his heart. Her left arm, hip, and leg were draped over him in Cathy’s bed. John didn’t answer. He tried to remember how they had made love,
the sound of her, the smell of the crook of her neck. But he couldn’t distinguish the presence of her from the memory he was saving for a time she might not be there.
“It feels like it, right?” she asked. Her chest pressed against his as she inhaled deeply.
John concentrated on the feel of her skin, the bare flesh of her stomach, the rough patch of her pubic hair against his hip, the pull of her leg. If he didn’t confirm it for her, maybe she would think of a reason that this wasn’t the bottom, that there were still depths to which they could fall.
“Why don’t you say something?” Jess asked.
“I’m not going to lie to you. But I don’t want to say it’s over.”
“I hate you,” she said. “I hate you for not leaving her.”
“What if I left her?” he asked, knowing he couldn’t.
“I would hate you more.”
She tilted her head up to his and pulled his face to hers. She kissed him, then rolled away to sit at the edge of the bed.
#
John remembered the curve of Jess’s back, cast in blue from the dim light of the digital clock next to Cathy’s bed, and her hair falling slightly past her shoulders.
“We broke up,” he said. “I wouldn’t leave my wife.”
“Was that the night…”
“No.”
Nicki drained the rest of her beer. She released the pressure in her foot, so that it simply rested in his lap. John imagined that it finally occurred to her that she was alone in her apartment with an accused murderer and approaching the point where if she kept asking questions, she would get to the one that she wanted the answer to but couldn’t ask. Nicki broke the silence.
“You ever told anyone what happened that night?”
“No.”
Nicki brought her feet off his lap, curling her legs underneath her, allowing her to lean toward John, but also making it easier for her to get to her feet faster than he could. It was a first step toward her straddling him or running. His relief at her removing her leg surprised him. He’d gone to Nicki’s apartment to forget about everything that came before, not relive it with her.
“Do you want to tell me?” she asked.
John hesitated. It wasn’t just the risk that the truth presented, but the shame, anger, and regret that were chained to the memory. But he was so weary, carrying the truth alone.
Nicki touched his shoulder. The warmth of her hand passed through his shirt. She said, “You can tell me. I promise I won’t tell anyone.”
“Promise me that you’ll tell me you understand. Even if you don’t.” She did, so he told her, and when he finished, she told him that she understood. He hoped he would leave the memory of that night with her, but it followed him home anyway.