Cheating at Solitaire(4)

Marcey waved into the middle of the room. “I’ve got my jacket. You know. My blue jacket.”

“Your blue jacket is made of glitter and silk thread. Do you mean to say you came all the way out to New England in the middle of the winter without a decent winter jacket?”

“I hate coats,” Marcey said. “They make me look fat.”

Somebody came up with the jacket. Marcey didn’t see who it was. She really wasn’t seeing much of anything. Stewart Gordon handed it to her.

“Put it on,” he said. “At least it will cover your breasts, one of which, at the moment, is waving in the breeze, to the enormous satisfaction of half the people in this room. And only most of them are men.”

“It’s not just the breast,” Marcey said. “Don’t you know? Kendra and Arrow and I made a pact. We’re all going commando for the whole year. This year. Until midnight. We’re all going commando to show that we’re, that we’re—”

“Ass,” Stewart Gordon said. “Kendra Rhode got a one-hundred-million-dollar trust fund the day she was born. She doesn’t need a career. You do. And you’re not going to have one by the time she’s through with you.”

“Kendra Rhode is my friend,” Marcey said. “She’s my best friend. We’d do anything for each other.”

“Kendra Rhode is a psychopath who likes to play with people’s heads. Button that jacket and I’ll take you home.”

“I don’t want to go home. There’s nothing to do at home. And besides, I’m supposed to be out at the Point for a party. You weren’t invited to the party, were you? Kendra invites only the best people to her parties.”

“Come into my parlor, said the spider to the fly.”

“What?”

“Never mind. Let’s go.”

Marcey looked around the bar. There were a lot of people there, and most of them were looking at her. That was reassuring. That really was. Sometimes, when she got drunk enough, she began to feel as if she were trying to walk on water. It was all right as long as she didn’t notice that that was what she was doing, but when she did she suddenly realized that she couldn’t, and she was way out over the ocean and about to drown. She hated that feeling, that about-to-drown feeling. It made all her nerves go crazy and it made her want to cry. She wanted to cry right now. Crying seemed to be the best thing she could possibly do. Crying had substance, and she had no substance. Everybody said so. There was something coming up her throat. It might be vomit, but it might be something else. If she didn’t get Stewart Gordon away from her, he would start giving her a lecture about how she should have gone to school.

“School isn’t important,” she said, leaning very close to him. Leaning was not good. Leaning was like falling. “What does school get for people? Jobs in offices. That’s it. Jobs in offices. Or mechanics. Or things. School—”

There always came a point when the air looked slick and solid, when it could ripple. It was rippling now. It made her think of mayonnaise, and of the first time she had ever been in a movie, when she was seven years old. Her mother was always sitting in one of those folding chairs at the edge of the set, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees, tense. Everything was always tense. That was the year she had been interviewed by Katie Couric. She had been given a big solid chair to sit on, and her legs had dangled from the seat without reaching the floor.

“I can’t walk on water,” she said, as loud as she could, past Stewart Gordon to the room at large.

Everybody was watching her. They really were. Everybody was always watching her. They would always watch her. This was what life was like and it would never end. Never never never.

Somewhere at the back of her mind, though, there was that ocean of water she was walking on, and the thought that it was ending for Arrow. It was ending right now.

Stewart Gordon was holding her up with one hand. She was standing up. She had no idea how she had got that way. She gripped the bar with both hands and wrenched herself away from him. Kendra got paid to go to parties. That was not fair. Arrow was starting to look like a fat slob. That was not fair either. Nothing was fair, and she deserved better than this, although she was not sure for what. The most unfair thing was Stewart Gordon, who was like the voice of doom, or something, all the time. Somebody ought to do something about Stewart Gordon. Somebody ought to put a stop to him.

Even so, when she finally decided to throw up, Marcey was careful to do it directly onto the bartender’s pink-and geen, tiny-fishhook-patterned bow tie, and not on Stewart Gordon’s chambray shirt.