She said she’d meet me at the bar at Chumley’s. I was doubtful. “I thought you’d quit that.”
“It’s all right,” she said. “That was a temporary aberration. I’m over it.”
I wasn’t sure it was a good idea, but I hadn’t seen her for a while, so I said, “Okay.”
She was sitting at the bar when I arrived. There was a scotch and water in front of her. She looked all right. “How are you doing?”
“I’m all right,” she said. “I’m fine.”
“Glad to hear it,” I said. “Charlie, a vodka tonic. A lot of ice.”
She looked at me. “So, how have you been? I haven’t seen you for a while.”
I shrugged. “It isn’t great, but we’re still publishing.”
“You always land on your feet.”
“Not always,” I said. I watched her face.
“Still at the same place?”
She gave me a quick look. “No,” she said. “I decided I needed a change.”
“I thought you liked that place.”
She gave me a wary look. “I did. I had some trouble with Swenson.”
“Swenson?”
“The top guy. He was always trying to get into my pants.”
“I wouldn’t have blamed him,” I said. It was gallantry: she didn’t look as good as she used to. She had never been exactly what you’d call pretty, but there had always been something about her – bright eyes and a friendly smile. Guys had liked her; she was fun to be around. There’d always been somebody, sometimes a couple of somebodies.
They came and they went. However, I hadn’t heard of anyone recently. It wasn’t any of my business, but I was curious.
“What ever happened to that guy you were seeing – the one from the agency who always had a big Mercedes?”
She shrugged. “He was okay. We had some fun. But somehow we didn’t mesh. In the end he said he wasn’t ready for a long relationship.”
I studied her. “Were you ready for a long relationship?”
She shrugged again. “Who knows. Let’s talk about something else.” She raised her hand like a school girl asking permission to leave the room. “Charlie, can I have another?”
She sounded as if she were worried he’d say no. She looked at me. “What about you?”
My glass wasn’t even half empty. “I’m not ready,” I said. “You go ahead.”
“You’re no fun,” she said mildly. Charlie brought her scotch.
By the time I was 15, I had learned that playing the Good Samaritan was a sure way to get into trouble, but we’d been friends for a long time. There had even been a moment when it might have come to more than that. “So what are you going to do?”
She watched my face. “What do you suggest? Got any ideas?”
We were looking at each other. “What really happened with Swenson?”
“He said I was taking too much time for lunch. I was getting back to the office at three in the afternoon half the time. He said I needed to be in the office.”
“Were you?”
“Jesus, don’t you start. I was always having to deal with some widget maker from Indianapolis who had a wife who played bridge all afternoon and a kid with two heads. He gets to New York once a year and he expects to have fun. Take that away from him and he’s going to dump his wife and the two headed kid and run off with a stripper from
Romania who can barely speak English and doesn’t know how stupid he is. I saved a lot of marriages with those lunches. Swenson never understood that if we were going to do business with these people I had to show them a good time.”
I nodded. “Yeah, I can see that. I don’t have to deal with people like that often, but sometimes we have to make nice on an advertiser, and they look to me. I know the good jazz bars. Or I can bring them here to Chumley’s so they can go home and say they’d been to a place with no sign out front that nobody knows about aside from the ten thousand other people who think that nobody knows about it.”
She was still looking at me. “What about your outfit?”
She had caught me off guard. “My outfit?”
“Yeah. You must have openings sometimes.”
I turned my head down to look into my drink. “I can ask,” I said. “O’Neill usually has a nephew who needs a job. He seems to have a lot of nephews. I don’t know who they really are. But I’ll ask.”
“I’d appreciate it.” She picked up her glass and drank it back. “I want another.”
“Let’s go slow. Maybe we should think about getting something to eat.”
She looked at her watch. “It’s only seven, for God’s sake. Nobody eats dinner at seven. It isn’t civilized.”
“All right,” I said. “But just one. Then we’ll eat.”
She nodded seriously. “All right. Definitely. Dinner at eight. Like gentry.”
“I didn’t say eight o’clock. I said one more drink.”
“Okay,” she said. She slid off the bar stool. “I have to take a leak.”
I waited until she disappeared around the bar. “Charlie, how long has she been in here?”
“She comes in at six. I usually shut her off after a while. She doesn’t argue with me like some people do. Sometimes they feel insulted and start arguing.”
“How do you deal with that?”
“If it gets bad I got a baseball bat back here. I lay it on the bar. They usually stomp out. I don’t need people like that
in here. But she never gives me an argument. She just goes. I don’t know where she goes to.”
She came back and hoisted herself onto the bar stool. “Where were we?” she asked.
“We were talking about getting something to eat.”
“Not yet. I thought we were going to have one more. I’m not hungry yet.”
“All right,” I said. “Just one. Then we eat. Agreed?”
“Okay, ponder,” she said. “Agreed.”
