Somebody Else's Music(40)

“I’m not worked up. I’m just—I don’t know. Maybe Jimmy was right. Maybe I should have sent the lawyers. And there was the dog.”

“Just kids thinking they’re cute,” Maris said. She had that deep, contemplative look in her eyes that said she’d been drinking, seriously, for hours. When Maris got drunk, she did not get sloppy, or slurred, or uncoordinated. She got serious, so serious she seemed to be looking into a crystal ball where she could see all the secrets of time—until it got to be too much, and she threw up. She shifted on the booth’s seat. “Chris is putting together a cocktail party for you, out by the golf course. Or maybe it’s a lunch. I don’t remember. She’s going to call you this afternoon.”

“I won’t be home this afternoon.”

“Be reasonable,” Maris said. “You know, you just might be wrong. People are impressed with what you’ve done with your life. They really are. They just want to get a chance to catch up with you again—”

“About what? Maris, for God’s sake, what’s the point? It would be one thing if we’d all been friends, but the last real memory I have of Belinda Hart is from when she backed me up against the sinks in the west wing girls’ room and told me that I was nothing but a worm who made everybody I talked to sick. Why don’t we all just let it be? They do what they do. I take care of my mother. You have a vacation and come in here to eat twice a day. Then you and I go back to New York and back to work and—”

“You can’t let Debra fire me,” Maris said.

“What?”

The waitress was back, with the food. Liz looked up as she put down the plates one by one, her face impassive and marred, her body stiff. Geoff looked impressed with the ice cream soda, which came in one of those tall old-fashioned glasses that looked like a champagne flute on steroids.

“Cool,” Geoff said.

The waitress disappeared. Maris put her purse on the table, opened it up, and took out a Chanel Number 5 bottle, a big one, the kind that people gave their mothers for Christmas presents. She took a long suck on the straw that was stuck into her Coke. Then she uncorked the Chanel bottle and dumped about a quarter of the liquid in it into her glass.

“I can’t believe you just did that,” Liz said.

“Don’t worry,” Maris said. “I’m not drinking perfume. I cleaned the bottle very thoroughly ages ago.”

“I know what’s in the bottle. I can’t believe you did that. What are you trying to do to yourself?”

Maris put the Chanel bottle back in her purse. “You can’t let Debra fire me,” she said again. She was very calm. Liz thought she might even be depressed—except that with Maris, it was hard to tell. “If Debra fires me, I’ll have absolutely no place to go, and you know it. I was fired from my last three jobs before this one. It’s like a curse. Image is everything.”

“Image?”

“After a while, you start getting fired for things nobody else would ever get fired for. It’s like getting a reputation when you’re in high school. It doesn’t matter if you’re a lily-white virgin. Once you’ve got the reputation, you’ll get blamed for everything. If you let Debra fire me, I’ll kill myself. I’m not bluffing. I’ve got two months of prescription tranquilizers saved and I always carry them with me. I’ll down them all with straight gin and do it right in your own living room, here or in Connecticut, or I’ll do it in the office in New York.”

Liz looked swiftly at Geoff, who did not seem to be paying attention. “Maris, for Christ’s sake,” she said.

“I’ll do it where the papers will be sure to connect it to you. I’ll send my suicide note to Matt Drudge. I’ll go out with a bang. Just watch me.”

“Maris,” Liz said again. “What do you think you’re doing?”

What Maris was doing was almost finishing her Coke, and getting the Chanel bottle out, and spiking it some more. By now, Liz thought, it had to be not much more than caramel-colored gin. She had never seen Maris drink with this much determination, or subterfuge. It was always at parties, or in real restaurants with wine lists, so that—until just this second—it had seemed to Liz that the stories of Maris’s drinking were mostly exaggerated. She drank at home. She drank when she went out to eat. People did that. It was only the getting sick that was really a problem.

Maris sucked up gin and Coke through her straw. She had begun to sweat. A thin line of beaded wet snaked across her forehead just above her eyebrows. Her fair hair glinted and darkened in the uncertain light coming through the window above the booth. The polish on her nails was much too red. For just a single, surreal moment, Liz didn’t recognize her. She was not the girl Liz had seen for the first time in kindergarten and watched, with envy and frustration, for sixteen years afterward. She was not the girl who had always been everything Liz had ever wanted to be, the girl who had achieved what Liz only fell short of, the girl who really was what Liz only fooled people into thinking she was. She was just a middle-aged woman with a drinking problem and a chip on her shoulder, too expensively dressed, too out of shape, and too drunk—at noon—to think straight about what she was doing.