Out on the Cutting Edge

She tasted of booze when I kissed her, and she had a small scotch while we decided where to go. We both wanted meat, so I suggested the Slate, a steak house on Tenth Avenue that always drew a lot of cops from Midtown North and John Jay College.

We walked over there and got a table in front near the bar. I didn't see anyone I recognized, but several faces were vaguely familiar and almost every man in the room looked to be on the job. If anyone had been fool enough to hold the place up, he'd have been surrounded by men with drawn revolvers, a fair percentage of them half in the bag.

I mentioned this to Willa, and she tried to calculate our chances of being gunned down in crossfire. "A few years ago," she said, "I wouldn't have been able to sit still in a place like this."

"For fear of being caught in a crossfire?"

"For fear they'd be shooting at me on purpose. It's still hard for me to believe I'm dating a guy who used to be a cop."

"Did you have a lot of trouble with cops?"

"Well, I lost two teeth," she said, and fingered the two upper incisors that replaced the ones knocked out in Chicago. "And we were always getting hassled. We were presumably undercover, but we always figured the FBI had somebody in the organization reporting to them, and I can't tell you the number of times the Feebies showed up to question me. Or to have long sessions with the neighbors."

"That must have been a hell of a way to live."

"It was crazy. But it almost killed me to leave."

"They wouldn't let you go?"

"No, it wasn't like that. But the PCP gave my life all the meaning it had for a whole lot of years, and when I left it was like admitting all those years were a waste. And on top of that I would find myself doubting my actions. I would think that the PCP was right, and that I was just copping out, and missing my chance to make a difference in the world. That was what kept you sucked in, you know. The chance it gave you to see yourself as being one of the ones who mattered, out there on the cutting edge of history."

We took our time over dinner. She had a sirloin and a baked potato. I ordered the mixed grill, and we split a Caesar salad. She started off with a scotch, then drank red wine with her dinner. I got a cup of coffee right away and let them keep filling it up for me. She wanted a pony of Armagnac with her coffee. The waitress came back and said the bartender didn't have any, so she settled for a cognac. It couldn't have been too bad, because she drank it and ordered a second one.

The check came to a fairly impressive sum. She wanted to split it and I didn't work too hard trying to talk her out of it. "Actually," she said, checking the waitress's arithmetic, "I should be paying about two-thirds of this. More than that. I had a million drinks and you had a cup of coffee."

"Cut it out."

"And my entrйe was more than yours."

I told her to stop it, and we halved the check and the tip. Outside, she wanted to walk a little to clear her head. It was a little late for panhandlers, but some of them were still hard at it. I passed out a few dollars. The wild-eyed woman in the shawl got one of them. She had her baby in her arms, but I didn't see her other child, and I tried not to wonder where it had gone to.

We walked downtown a few blocks and I asked Willa if she'd mind stopping at Paris Green. She looked at me, amused. "For a guy who doesn't drink," she said, "you sure do a lot of barhopping."

"Somebody I want to talk to."

We cut across to Ninth, walked down to Paris Green and took seats at the bar. My friend with the bird's-nest beard wasn't working, and the fellow on duty was no one I'd seen before. He was very young, with a lot of curly hair and a sort of vague and unfocused look about him. He didn't know how I could get hold of the other bartender. I went over and talked to the manager, describing the bartender I was looking for.

"That's Gary," he said. "He's not working tonight. Come around tomorrow, I think he's working tomorrow."

I asked if he had a number for him. He said he couldn't give that out. I asked if he'd call Gary for me and see if he'd be willing to take the call.

"I really don't have time for that," he said. "I'm trying to run a restaurant here."

If I still carried a badge he'd have given me the number with no argument. If I'd been Mickey Ballou I'd have come back with a couple of friends and let him watch while we threw all his chairs and tables out into the street. There was another way, I could give him five or ten dollars for his time, but somehow that went against the grain.

I said, "Make the phone call."

"I just told you-"

"I know what you told me. Either make the phone call for me or give me the fucking number."

I don't know what the hell I could have done if he'd refused, but something in my voice or face must have gotten through to him. He said, "Just a moment," and disappeared into the back. I went and stood next to Willa, who was working on a brandy. She wanted to know if everything was all right. I told her everything was fine.

When the manager reappeared I walked over to meet him. "There's no answer," he said. "Here's the number, if you don't believe me you can try it yourself."

I took the slip of paper he handed me. I said, "Why shouldn't I believe you? Of course I believe you."

He looked at me, his eyes wary.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I was out of line there, and I apologize. It's been a rough couple of days."

He wavered, then went with the flow. "Hey, that's cool," he said. "Don't worry about it."

"This city," I said, as if that explained everything, and he nodded, as if indeed it did.

He wound up buying us a drink. We had survived a tense moment together, and that seemed to carry more weight than the fact that we had created the tension ourselves. I didn't really want another Perrier, but Willa managed to find room for another brandy.

When we stepped outside, the fresh air sucker-punched her and almost knocked her down. She grabbed my arm, caught her balance. "I can feel that last brandy," she announced.

"No kidding."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Nothing."

She drew away from me, her nostrils flaring, her face dark. "I'm quite all right," she said. "I can get home under my own power."

"Take it easy, Willa."

"Don't tell me to take it easy. Mr. Holier-than-thou. Mr. Soberer-than-thou."

She stalked off down the street. I walked alongside her and didn't say anything.

"I'm sorry," she said.

"Forget it."

"You're not mad?"

"No, of course not."

She didn't say much the rest of the way home. When we got into her apartment she swept up the faded flowers from the kitchen table and started dancing around the floor with them. She was humming something but I couldn't recognize the tune. After a few turns she stopped and began to cry. I took the flowers from her and put them on the table. I held her and she sobbed. When the tears stopped I let go of her and she stepped back. She began undressing, dropping her clothes on the floor as she removed them. She took off everything and walked straight back to the bedroom and got into the bed.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry."

"It's all right."

"Stay with me."

I stayed until I was sure she was sleeping soundly. Then I let myself out and went home.

I tried Gary's number in the morning. I let it ring and no one answered, neither man nor machine. I tried him again after breakfast with the same result. I took a long walk and tried the number a third time when I got back to the hotel. I put the television on, but all I could find were economists talking about the deficit and evangelists talking about the Day of Judgment. I turned them all off and the phone rang.

It was Willa. "I would have called you a little earlier," she said, "but I wanted to make sure I was going to live."

"Rough morning?"

"God. Was I impossible last night?"

"You weren't so bad."

"You could say anything and I couldn't prove you wrong. I don't remember the end of the evening."

"Well, you were a little fuzzy there toward the end."

"I remember having a second brandy at Paris Green. I remember telling myself that I didn't have to drink it just because it was free. He bought us a round, didn't he?"

"He did indeed."

"Maybe he put arsenic in it. I almost wish he had. I don't remember anything after that. How did I get home?"

"We walked."

"Did I turn nasty?"

"Don't worry about it," I said. "You were drunk and you were in a blackout. You didn't throw up, turn violent, or say anything indiscreet."

"You're sure of that?"

"Positive."

"I hate not remembering. I hate losing control."

"I know."

There's a Sunday afternoon meeting in SoHo that I've always liked. I hadn't been there in months. I usually would spend Saturdays with Jan. We'd make the rounds of the galleries and go out for dinner, and I'd stay over, and in the morning she'd fix a big brunch. We'd walk around and look in shops and, when the time came, go to the meeting.

When we stopped seeing each other, I stopped going.

I took a subway downtown and walked in and out of a lot of shops on Spring Street and West Broadway. Most of the SoHo art galleries close on Sunday, but a few stay open, and there was one show I liked, realistic landscapes, all of them of Central Park. Most of them showed only grass and trees and benches, with no buildings looming in the background, but it was nonetheless clear that you were looking at a distinctly urban environment no matter how peaceful and green it appeared. Somehow the artist had managed to instill the city's hard-edged energy in the canvases, and I couldn't figure out how he'd done it.

I went to the meeting, and Jan was there. I managed to focus on the qualification, and then during the break I went over and sat next to her.

"It's funny," she said. "I was thinking of you just this morning."

"I almost called you yesterday."

"Oh?"

"To see if you wanted to go out to Shea."

"That's really funny. I watched that game."

"You were out there?"

"On television. You really almost called?"

"I did call."

"When? I was home all day."

"I let it ring twice and hung up."

"I remember the call. I wondered who that was. As a matter of fact-"

"You wondered if it was me?"

"Uh-huh. The thought crossed my mind." She had her hands in her lap and she was looking at them. "I don't think I'd have gone."

"To the game?"

She nodded. "But it's hard to say, isn't it? How I might have reacted. What you'd have said, what I'd have said."

"Do you want to have coffee after the meeting?"

She looked at me, then looked away. "Oh, I don't know, Matthew," she said. "I don't know."

I started to say something, but the chairperson was rapping on the table with a glass ashtray to indicate that it was time to resume the meeting. I went back to where I'd been sitting. Toward the end I started raising my hand, and when I got called on I said, "My name is Matt and I'm an alcoholic. Over the past couple of weeks I've been spending a lot of time around people who are drinking. Some of it's professional and some is social, and it's not always easy to tell which is which. I spent an hour or two in a ginmill the other night having one of those rambling conversations, and it was just like old times except I was drinking Coke."