Alcohol has always been a friend I could count on, unlike most of my other friends. Life in the business world is no picnic, and just when you need someone is the time they generally pick to disappear. They transfer, and you have to work with someone new, who has his own friends. They get promoted or demoted. They become unavailable. But alcohol is always available, and adjustable to your needs. What could be better than a cold beer after a set of tennis? than a good cognac by the fireplace? It’s raining outside and you look at your lady and she smiles that special smile and comes to sit next to you, leaning in your arms, sipping from your glass. Or an ice-cold martini while the smell of steak is coming from the kitchen, no, from your outside grill, and the martini and the liver paté and stuffed mushrooms and shrimp cocktail all go to the back of your neck and untie that knot that seemed permanent until this very moment and you smile thankfully and look at your guests and realize what wonderful people they really are, and you tell them so. Or a Bloody Mary on hung-over Sunday mornings, followed by Eggs Benedict and a dry Chablis. I mean, isn’t that what life’s all about?
When I was in business I was famous for my lunches and dinner parties. The purchasing agents fell over themselves trying to get invitations. They would give orders for things they didn’t want, or wouldn’t need for a year, just to visit the club or get a shot at my wife’s onion soup and the good Bordeaux that went with it. My two kids, bless them, were just growing up then, and they would hang around, looking like angels, emptying ashtrays and bringing out the hors d’oeuvres. I remember particularly one night old Bill McShane, the head buyer for McClintock’s, and a hard man, a real hard man to please, just sat back around midnight and said, “Charlie, you win. I already told Gustafson I’d buy his stuff instead of yours, but I’ll cancel the order tomorrow. This has been something else.” He had downed about seven manhattans, a bottle of burgundy with dinner, and was now tapering off with brandy. Lots of people reacted that way; my wife and I would glance at each other then, surreptiously, and practically wink. It made it all worthwhile. I don’t think McShane ever changed that order, though. He was one of the toughest men in the business.
I worked for Prince and Co., mainly in adhesives. It’s a good field, still expanding, and Prince is the best in the field, if I do say so myself. They make compounds that will hold anything together, any combination: rubber-to-wood, paper-to-metal, plastic-to-rubber, even metal-to-metal. You wouldn’t believe it would hold, but it does. Think of everything that needs some sort of adhesive compound. From one point of view, without them our entire modern world would fall apart: houses, furniture, cars, airplanes, telephones, not to mention your ordinary boxes of food and other goods. My wife has literary pretensions, she reads a lot, Book-of-the-Month and all that—she used to sneak some of the professors from our hick local college into our dinner parties, for social uplift, she said, but the poor buggers would gulp down the free drinks and puff on my cigars and pass out before dinner, so she stopped doing it. Anyway, sometimes we’d be having a little spat and I’d be sitting there, swirling a snifter of Armignac, and she’d shout, “Charlie, stop that! You’re just a goddamn glue salesman!” And I would say, “Patricia”—never call her Pat if you value your life—“Patricia, without glue all your goddamn books would fall apart tomorrow, what do you think of that?”
But then we’d make up, and that was always fun. Patricia is a remarkable person. Like most men, I married out of a sheer lack of confidence, but I was lucky. When it was time for me to marry, I married the one who was in love with me at that time, and that was Patricia. The thought that someone else would ever fall in love with me never entered my mind. She was a lit major from Goucher College, but she still looked like the curvy blonde cheerleader she had been in high school. Her skin was so pale and smooth it was a pleasure just to run my finger over her cheekbone or down the curve of her calf just above the ankle. I was nothing but a glorified stock boy in those days. I knew I wanted to sell, and knew also I needed experience and not college to do it; but we had no idea in those good-bad old days of hamburger and cheap beer in returnable bottles that I would rise so fast in the company. In six years I had the largest territory in Connecticut and a lovely old home in Hartford; in ten years we had an elegant sloop named Asharah that we kept at Watch Point where we’d entertain during long sunburned weekends. Those were the days! The sloop was named after some Phoenician sea goddess that Patricia had read about, but when I painted it on I misspelled it—it should have been Asherah—and for a few weeks she was mad, and after me to repaint it. But after a while we got to like it: it seemed more original somehow. That’s what it was like in those days: even our mistakes turned out right.
Right now the snow is coming down hard outside my window, almost like hail, and I feel a long way from Watch Point. In general, snow has a softening effect on this city, covering the dirty sidewalks, rounding the harsh corners of the apartment buildings. It brings out the kids on their sleds in a nearby vacant lot, and I like to go out and watch them, but my legs aren’t what they used to be so I don’t go out as much anymore. I can watch the people hurrying into Mac’s grocery store or ducking into the Cloverleaf Bar for a quick beer or a game on the bowling machine. I like to lie here and smoke and think. It’s comfortable. Did you ever notice how smoke rises in the air but sinks in a bottle? That’s right. If you hold a cigarette in your hand the smoke rises and disperses in the upper regions (except maybe at the Cloverleaf, where the air is thicker than chowder), but if you hold a cigarette down in a bottle the smoke sinks and curls to the bottom like a net in water. Strange.
But what I wanted to tell you about was this conversation I had with a Polish engineer. It was an important conversation for me; in fact, it led to everything else that happened. Not only can I remember every word of it, I can remember, word for word, various variations that might have occurred and led to completely different conclusions. Over the past five years I have put together a series of possible conversations and followed the implications out to places far far away from Mac’s grocery and the Cloverleaf Bar. One even took me to Warsaw, where I lived in the Old Town in the shadow of the castle Gorski told me about, and gave advice to the Party leaders on what adhesives to use: Gorski said they need men like me in Poland. But unfortunately the conversation didn’t go that way, and I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about why. That’s one of the pleasures of retirement: Time to think. I wish to God I had studied philosophy somewhere along the line. I often feel I’m on the verge of something really important, something about the way our lives go one way and our thoughts go another and we’re caught barefoot in a no-man’s-land where the ground is covered by broken stained-glass windows from old bombed-out cathedrals. That was an actual dream I had once. What it means I wish I knew.
His name was Zbigniew Gorski—I still have his card. Despite the fact that our former National Security Advisor has the same first name, Zbigniew is tough to pronounce so everyone called him Bishek, which was funny enough. He was something less than medium height, neat, almost dapper, and curiously young-looking. I had been told he had fought with a troop of Boy Scouts in the Warsaw Uprising so I figured the youngest he could be was forty-five, a year younger than me. But I’ve always looked mature for my age. I was 6′2″ when I was fourteen, my hair was gray by thirty-five. I think it helped me make sales, and even when I was fifteen the older boys would send me in to buy their six-packs: I had a better chance of getting served. Now I was sitting at the Blue Horse Inn with a foreigner who was my age but looked like my son.
Also, I was nervous. I usually take out directors or purchasing agents to dinner, not engineers, but this was a special case and a big order crucial to the company hinged on the outcome. Frankly, things had not been going too well for me for a year or so, and I’d been called into the office a few times to explain my decreasing sales. But the adhesive business is simply getting more competitive each year, as I explained to Roland Prince, Jr., a short stocky man with half the brains of his father despite having graduated from Wharton Business School. The father and I had been very close, and when he kicked over out on the golf course—not a bad way to go, except he fell in the water hole: for old time’s sake, everyone said—I knew Prince & Co. would never be the same for me again. At any rate, at this time I wasn’t the only one having trouble, sales were down all across the country, so when Bill Bishop made a huge sale to ATX Electronics involving the aircraft business and a government contract, everyone was happy because it eased the pressure across the board. But something went wrong. Their engineers told their purchasing department that our product wasn’t the best one for the job. I knew it was—I had made a sale, on a much smaller scale, and it worked perfectly. That was why Prince told me to take out the engineer.
“You’ve done it before, Charlie,” he told me. “Take him to the best place in town. Snow him. Take it easy on the booze, but snow him. This is important, Charlie. You know how to do it.”
I won’t say that Prince exactly threatened me, but, as I said, I was nervous. The Blue Horse is the poshest restaurant in Hartford, you practically have to wade through the carpet, and I got there a half hour early to make sure of a good table. I told them to put a couple of bottles of vodka on ice, and was on my third martini by the time Gorski came in. We hit it off right away, though he was a serious type, and I was feeling pretty good. “You’re not the engineer who invented the Polish parachute?” I asked him.
“The one that opens on impact? No.” He smiled slightly. I guess he had heard all the Polish jokes.
We were drinking vodka straight because that’s what he had ordered: I had guessed right. Anyway, toss an olive in an ice-cold glass of vodka and what do you have? A Polish martini, and not bad either. The Blue Horse featured a Czecho-slovakian beer called Pilsner Urquell, and when I suggested that as a chaser, Gorski said that was a good idea. I liked him, a man after my own heart. We got to talking about drinking habits. He always drank vodka straight, but usually here in the States the vodka wasn’t served cold enough. In Poland the vodka was better, too; he drank a brand called Zytnia. I had him write it on his card because I’m interested in that sort of thing.
“You Poles are supposed to be real drinkers,” I told him. “Everyone says, never try to drink with a Pole.”
“We drink too much,” he agreed, “but not like you Americans. We usually drink only when we eat. What did your Hemingway say? It’s a way of ending the day?”
“Yes. Well, my wife would know about that,” I said. “She’s a great reader. I think it’s a pretty good way of starting the day, too.” I raised my glass and smiled at Gorski, and he smiled back. Maybe he had a sense of humor after all. But he really was stuffing in the food, skinny as he was. I wasn’t too hungry myself. I was feeling light-headed, with that wonderful sense of clarity that drink can sometimes give you. Even my vision seemed sharper, and the face of the waiter as he brought us the bottles was like some old portrait where every line, every shadow, had a life and story of its own. His cheekbones alone told me he had spent a miserable childhood.
“Seriously,” Gorski said, “you Americans must drink every day. You wait all day for the cocktail hour. When it comes close to that time, your face lights up and you make your martini and you sit down and say Aah! Doesn’t that mean you’re alcoholics?”
“We don’t have to drink every day. We like to drink. It’s practically a health food. We relax. It’s fun.”
“But you do drink every day!” He was beginning to get a little irritating, and I was glad to detect a slight slur in his voice. “What’s the difference between having to and wanting to, as long as you do it? When was the last day you didn’t have a drink?” he asked, and sat back like some goddamn prosecuting attorney.
I tried to think, but who keeps track of things that they don’t do? He smiled broadly, exposing a set of very bad teeth. “If you drank more,” I said, “your teeth wouldn’t be so bad.”
He covered them up. “You still haven’t answered my question.”
“I could stop anytime I wanted to,” I said firmly. “In fact, I probably won’t have a thing tomorrow.” As I said this, I remembered we were supposed to go to the Martins’ for cocktails, and for some reason this infuriated me. Suddenly it seemed hard to breathe, and Gorski’s complacent face appeared to float across the table like some obscene Halloween balloon.
“You still haven’t answered my question,” he repeated. “When was the last day that you didn’t have any drink at all?”
I suppose at that time I had been hanging by a thin emotional thread. I was tired—I hadn’t slept well in weeks—and nervous, and the combination of these things with this infuriating cross-examination as if I were back in Townsend High School with its collection of vicious and sadistic teachers, all of this simply caused that thread to snap. Even so, I reacted with reasonable calm. I reached out, slowly—in actual slow motion, it seemed to me—and grabbed his tie. I pulled his head toward me, dragging his tie through that unspeakable goulash he had chosen to eat.
“Listen, you stupid Polack,” I said in a low voice, “get off my back and stay off.” I meant to say, “I’ll drink when I want and not drink when I want,” but I never got it out. Gorski jerked back and somehow, as I released his tie, my chair fell over backwards and I was lying on my back in the deep-piled carpet of the Blue Horse.
It was a disaster, of course. The waiter helped me up, everyone staring, and mumbled something I couldn’t understand. I brushed him away, walked directly to the cloakroom, got my coat, and left the restaurant. Only when I got out in the fresh air I remembered I hadn’t paid the bill, which I knew would be a whopper: the Blue Horse had fancy prices, especially on its liquor. Well, that was Gorski’s problem; my problem was, we hadn’t even begun to talk about adhesives.
Patricia didn’t seem surprised to see me home early. She was working in the yard, which she loved to do. I poured me a whiskey, then changed my mind and dumped it in the sink. I sat by the window, looking out at our beautiful azaleas, and as usual I was disappointed. Their bloom lasts so short a time, we wait for it so long, we build up in our minds such an image of impossible beauty and fragrance that the actual imperfect presence of these fragile flowers is always anticlimactic. It is similar to what we do with our children: such energy, effort, and emotion are invested in them that we take it as a personal affront when they don’t measure up to our totally imaginary and ridiculous expectations.
I was already replaying the conversation with the Pole, and worrying how I would explain it to Prince. But mainly I was thinking, Maybe Gorski was right, I shouldn’t drink so much, I should get some exercise, golf or something. I really wasn’t in good shape. In fact, my doctor—old Benbow, who never said you actually had to do anything; he was of the permissive school—had recently suggested that I cut down on drinking and smoking.
“On both of them?” I asked, winking at him. “What will you want me to cut out next?”
He didn’t wink back. “I’ll let you know,” he said. “That’ll be twenty dollars.”
And I still might do it, but every time I think of starting (of stopping, rather) I think of my grandfather, old Grandpa who grew up on beer and cigars in Schweinfurt, Germany, and sustained himself on American whiskey until he was eighty-eight, working right to the end (illegally, I’m sure) as a night watchman in Bridgeport. Of course, he didn’t like cigarettes. “Put out them stinkaroos,” he’d tell me, passing a cigar. “Have a real smoke.” He even said that to Patricia, who had innocently lit up her mentholated filtertip—the kind Grandpa hated the most—at the dinner table.
She stared at him. He stared back. Then she took the cigar, jabbed her fork through it, and proceeded to light it up in a positively Olympian cloud of smoke. There was silence around the table (except for the sucking puffing sounds Patricia was making): everyone was afraid of Grandpa. After what seemed like an hour but must have been just a minute or so, Grandpa turned to me and said, “She’s all right,” and everybody laughed and dinner started again and Patricia and I got married.
Gorski had got to me, all right. I went upstairs to bed without another drink (without supper, either). In the morning I told Patricia I was going to the club to play golf.
“You don’t know how to play golf,” she said.
“No problem,” I said. “Gene Martin has played for twenty years and has never broken 100. And that reminds me, I don’t feel like going to their cocktail party tonight.”
She looked at me. It occurred to me that she didn’t look at me very much these days. “Suit yourself,” she said.
But the club was packed and I only had a vague idea of where to rent or borrow golf clubs. I soon found myself at the nineteenth hole with Archie Miller and Hank Leone. I said no to the beers, but they came anyway. I felt sad, positively sinful, as I took my first sips, but as the day wore on I gradually became angry again, just like at the Blue Horse. I could see the Pole’s face leaning toward me. It was only poor overweight Archie Miller, asking what I wanted for lunch, but I felt like strangling him.
“Your trouble, Archie, is that you only think about food. That’s why you look like a goddamn beach ball.”
I stayed angry while I drove with Hank Leone, who had been divorced the month before and was in no happy frame of mind either, to the Martins’ cocktail party. I was still in good control of myself, but when I get angry I drink faster. I was worried about the lost contract and I was worried about Patricia, back at the house. Sometimes I think I have a positive genius for suffering. I’ve noticed some people never seem to suffer at all, no matter what they do. Some people, even very tenderhearted ones, are entirely without conscience. I’ve known men and women who help strangers, love animals, cry at tragedies on TV, who think nothing of ripping off a supermarket, cheating on their income taxes or spouses, exceeding speed limits. They seem to possess no sense of guilt: these are the lucky ones. But we can’t have too many of these people or our society, which is constructed almost entirely on guilt, would collapse. When the deep inner voice stops crying Thou shalt not, the stones will crack and grass and weeds will reclaim the streets.
In the middle of the party Roland Prince, Jr., arrived with his long-nosed wife. I saw right away that he had heard about my lunch with Bishek Gorski. He avoided me for a while, but when I went up to him he said he would like to see me in his office on Monday.
“You can talk to me now,” I said, “if you’re not afraid to speak (I nodded at his wife) in front of Cyrano here.”
“You’re fired, Charlie,” he said.
“Listen, shrimpboat,” I said, “let’s step outside and see who can fire whom.” I knew as I said this it didn’t make much sense, but I was past caring by now. Hank Leone somehow steered us apart, and later on in the evening Patricia came to pick me up. I was lying on a big pile of coats in the guest room. The next morning I got up, hitchhiked to the club, picked up my car, and started driving west.
That was five years ago. I had the vague idea of going away, drying up, starting over. I kept going till I came to this sleepy Midwestern city with its pink motels and cheap flophouses and free lunches. Small checks follow me, and I’m reasonably contented. Now that I’m over fifty, I don’t have the energy I used to have. I could write the kids, but somehow even that seems too hard to do. Once in a while, when a check comes, I splurge on a bottle of Martell’s Cordon Bleu and share it with the gang here. They don’t even know what it is. We sit around on our bunks drinking it out of paper cups, hiding them when Mrs. Matthews comes in to check on us. I get a kick out of that. And sometimes I exercise my old skills, just to show off. The Cloverleaf is going to raffle off a station wagon and the one who sells the most tickets gets a free Christmas turkey. I’ve already sold so many we’re planning on a great feast.
But mainly I pick up bottles of this cheap and perfectly palatable wine. I lie here in the twilight and think. I blow smoke in a bottle and watch it sink. Hey. That rhymes. Patricia would be proud of me.