Out on the Cutting Edge

The speaker was a member of our group, celebrating a two-year anniversary. Most of the people in the room had heard her drinking story at one time or another, so she talked instead about what her life had been like during the past two years. It was an emotional qualification, and the applause when she finished was more than perfunctory.

I raised my hand after the break and talked about finding Eddie's body, and about spending the rest of the day with someone who was drinking. I didn't go into detail, just spoke about what I'd felt then, and what I was feeling now.

After the meeting several members came up to me with questions. Some of them weren't too clear on who Eddie was and wanted to determine if he was someone they knew. He wasn't a regular at St. Paul's, and he didn't speak up a lot, so not many people knew who I was talking about.

Several who did wanted to know the cause of death. I didn't know how to answer that. If I said he'd hanged himself they'd assume he'd committed suicide. If I explained further I'd have to get into a deeper discussion of the matter than I felt comfortable with. I was deliberately vague, saying that the cause of death hadn't been officially determined, that it looked like accidental death. That was the truth, if not the whole truth.

A fellow named Frank, long sober himself, had only one question. Had Eddie died sober?

"I think so," I told him. "There weren't any bottles around the room, nothing to suggest he was on a slip."

"Thank God for that," Frank said.

Thank God for what? Drunk or sober, wasn't he just as dead?

Jim Faber was waiting for me at the door. We walked out together and he asked me if I was going for coffee. I said I had to meet someone.

"The woman you spent the afternoon with? The one who was drinking?"

"I don't think I mentioned it was a woman."

"No, you didn't. 'This person was drinking, which was fairly natural under the circumstances. There's no reason to think they have a problem with it.' This person, they- you don't make that kind of grammatical error, not unless you're trying to avoid saying she."

I laughed. "You should have been a detective."

"No, it's the printer in me. It gives you a wonderful awareness of syntax. You know, it doesn't really matter how much she drinks, or whether she's got a problem with it. It's what the effect is on you."

"I know."

"You ever been with a woman who was drinking?"

"Not since I've been sober myself."

"I didn't think so."

"I haven't really been with anybody aside from Jan. And the few dates I've had have been with women in the program."

"How'd you feel this afternoon?"

"I enjoyed being with her."

"How'd you feel being around the booze?"

I thought over my answer. "I don't know where the woman stopped and the booze started. I was nervous and excited and edgy, but I might have felt a lot of that if there hadn't been a drink anywhere in the building."

"Did you have the urge to drink?"

"Sure. But I never considered acting on it."

"You like her?"

"So far."

"You on your way to see her now?"

"We're going out for a bite."

"Not the Flame."

"Maybe someplace a little nicer than that."

"Well, you've got my number."

"Yes, Mother. I've got your number."

He laughed. "You know what old Frank would say, Matt. 'Lad, there's a slip under every skirt.' "

"I'll bet he would. And I'll bet he hasn't looked under too many skirts lately. You know what he did say? He asked me if Eddie died sober, and when I said he did, he said, 'Well, thank God for that.' "

"So?"

"He's just as dead either way."

"That's true," he said, "but I've got to go along with Frank on this one. If he had to go, I'm glad he went out sober."

I hurried back to my hotel, grabbed a fast shower and shave, and put on a sport jacket and tie. It was twenty to eleven by the time I rang Willa's bell.

She had changed, too. She was wearing a light blue silk blouse over a pair of white Levi's. She had braided her hair, and the braid was coiled across the front of her head like a tiara. She looked cool and elegant, and I told her so.

"You look nice yourself," she said. "I'm glad you're here. I was getting paranoid."

"Was I very late? I'm sorry."

"You weren't more than ten minutes late, and I started getting paranoid forty-five minutes ago, so it had nothing to do with the time. I just decided you were too good to be true and I was never going to see you again. I'm glad I was wrong."

Outside, I asked if there was any place special she wanted to go. "Because there's a restaurant not far from here I've been wanting to try. It has a sort of French bistro atmosphere, but they have more ordinary pub fare on the menu, too, along with the French food."

"It sounds good. What's it called?"

"Paris Green."

"On Ninth Avenue. I've passed it but I've never been inside. I love the name."

"It gets the feel of the place across. The French atmosphere, and all the plants hanging from the ceiling."

"Don't you know what Paris green is?"

"Evidently not."

"It's a poison," she said. "It's an arsenic compound. Arsenic and copper, if I remember right, and that would account for the color."

"I never heard of it."

"You might have if you were a gardener. It used to get a lot of use as an insecticide. You would spray it on plants to kill chewing insects. They absorbed it through their stomachs and died. They don't use arsenicals in the garden these days, so I don't suppose it's been around for years."

"You learn something every day."

"Class isn't over yet. Paris green was also used as a coloring agent. To color things green, predictably enough. They used it primarily in wallpaper, and consequently a lot of people have died over the years, most of them children with a bent for oral experimentation. I want you to promise me that you won't put chips of green wallpaper in your mouth."

"You have my word."

"Good."

"I'll try to find other channels for my bent for oral experimentation."

"I'm sure you will."

"How do you know all this, anyway? About Paris green?"

"The party," she said. "The Progressive Commies. We learned everything we could about toxic substances. I mean, you never know when somebody's going to decide that it's tactically correct to poison the municipal water system of Duluth."

"Jesus."

"Oh, we never did anything like that," she said. "At least I didn't, and I never heard of anyone who did. But you had to be prepared."

The tall bearded bartender was behind the stick when we walked in. He gave me a wave and a smile. The hostess led us to a table. When we were seated Willa said. "You don't drink and you've never eaten here, and you walk in and the bartender greets you like a cousin."

"It's not really all that mysterious. I was in here asking some questions. I told you about that young woman I've been trying to find."

"The actress, and you told me her name. Paula?"

"He recognized her, and described the man she was with. So I came in a second time hoping he'd remember more. He's a nice fellow, he's got an interesting mind."

"Is that what you were doing earlier tonight? Working on your case? Do you call it a case?"

"I suppose you could."

"But you don't."

"I don't know what I call it. A job, I guess, and one I'm not doing particularly well with."

"Did you make any progress this evening?"

"No. I wasn't working."

"Oh."

"I was at a meeting."

"A meeting?"

"An AA meeting."

"Oh," she said, and she was going to say something else, but the waitress, with a great sense of timing, showed up to take our drink orders. I said I'd have a Perrier. Willa thought for a moment and ordered a Coke with a piece of lemon.

"You could have something stronger," I said.

"I know. I already had more to drink than I usually do, and I was a little headachey when I woke up. I don't think you mentioned earlier that you were in AA."

"I don't generally tell people."

"Why? You can't think it's something to be ashamed of."

"Hardly that. But the idea of anonymity is sort of bound up in the whole program. It's considered bad form to break somebody else's anonymity, to tell people that the person in question is in AA. As far as breaking your own anonymity is concerned, that's more of an individual matter. I suppose you could say that I keep it on a need-to-know basis."

"And I need to know?"

"Well, I wouldn't keep it a secret from someone I was involved with emotionally. That would be pretty silly."

"I guess it would. Are we?"

"Are we what?"

"Emotionally involved."

"I'd say we're on the verge."

"On the verge," she said. "I like that."

The food was pretty good considering that the place was named after a lethal substance. We had Jarlsberg cheeseburgers, cottage fries, and salad. The burgers were supposedly grilled over mesquite, but if there was a difference between that and ordinary charcoal, it was too subtle for me. The potatoes were hand-cut and fried crisp and brown. The salad contained sunflower seeds and radish sprouts and broccoli florets, along with two kinds of lettuce, neither of them iceberg.

We talked a lot during the meal. She liked football, and preferred the college game to the pros. Liked baseball but wasn't following it this year. Liked country music, especially the old-time twangy stuff. Used to be addicted to science fiction and read shelves of it, but now when she read at all it was mostly English murder mysteries, the country house with the body in the library and butlers who had or hadn't done it. "I don't really give a damn who did it," she said. "I just like to slip into a world where everybody's polite and well-spoken and even the violence is neat and almost gentle. And everything works out in the end."

"Like life itself."

"Especially on West Fifty-first Street."

I talked a little about the search for Paula Hoeldtke and about my work in general. I said it wasn't much like her genteel English mysteries. The people weren't that polite, and everything wasn't always resolved at the end. Sometimes it wasn't even clear where the end was.

"I like it because I get to use some of my skills, though I might be hard put to tell you exactly what they are. I like to dig and pick at things until you begin to see some sort of pattern in the clutter."

"You get to be a righter of wrongs. A slayer of dragons."

"Most of the wrongs never get righted. And it's hard to get close enough to the dragons to slay them."

"Because they breathe fire?"

"Because they're the ones in the castles," I said. "With moats around them, and the drawbridge raised."

Over coffee she asked me if I'd become friendly with Eddie Dunphy in AA. Then she put her hand to her mouth. "Never mind," she said. "You already told me it was against the rules to break another member's whatchamacallit."