Read In the Drink for Free Online

what I’ve done to offend her.”
    “William, we aren’t friends. If it weren’t for Jackie, we would have nothing to talk about. Anyway, speaking of Jackie, she gave me another lecture today about American girls. So what if I didn’t grow up knowing a bunch of dukes and earls and viscounts? In what way are viscounts useful?”
    “They’re like peacocks. They can’t sing, and you can’t eat them, but they look great in the yard.” He took a mouthful of whiskey and held it on his tongue with a sensual grimace thatshould have made me tell him to cut out the yuppie affectation but instead ignited the little pilot light in my loins. “Ian Macklowe’s secretary just quit, in case you’re interested.”
    “Ian Macklowe,” I said. A wave of depression crested and broke over my head. “That senior partner who gets three-hundred-dollar haircuts? Who buys his girlfriend hundred-dollar pairs of white cotton underwear? I can’t work for that scumbag. My God!”
    “You’d make fifty grand a year,” said William. “I’d recommend you even though you keep telling me what a shitty secretary you are. You can type, can’t you?”
    “I’d be totally miserable.”
    “You’re miserable now.”
    “What do you mean? I’m writing a book. I can’t just leave.”
    He looked at his glass, which was almost empty, and then at mine. “Well, there’s always the next round. You in?”
    “Why not.”
    We smiled at each other. To keep myself from leaping at him and devouring him alive, I looked over at Wanda, who was upending a case of Rolling Rock into a bin of ice. Her features were crumpled with the effort into a dented button at the center of the vast white pillow formed by her brow, cheeks and chin. If I had expected the sight of her to steady me, I was disappointed; I floated on a heady, expanding current that almost lifted me from my chair.
    “Well hello, you two,” said a voice above us, a sharp clear needle piercing the roar. Gus Fleury. His hair was slicked artfully back from his brow in one cohesive wave. A veneer of sweat gleamed on his sharp face. His hair gleamed; his sharkskin jacket gleamed. He was drinking a thick concoction in a tall glass, a swirl of chalky pastel-colored liquids.
    “What’s in that drink?” I asked. “It looks like barium.”
    “Crème de this, crème de that,” he said, seating himself atour table. He had emerald-green, almond-shaped eyes, which he widened or narrowed as necessary for maximum theatrical effect. “Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of a Vanderbilt, Claudia.”
    The moment, or whatever it had been just now with William, had evaporated. “I bet you haven’t,” said William. “How’s it going, Augustine?”
    “If you call me that again, I swear I’ll put a contract out on you, and I have connections, as you’ll hear. I’m in a complete panic, thank you. I’m trolling desperately for a new site for my play. It was supposed to go up next week.”
    In the mid-eighties, during his final semester at NYU film school, Gus had shot a low-budget movie about East Village drag queens, Apocalipstick , which became an art-house hit, won a prize at Sundance and was snapped up by a major distributor; he’d made an additional small fortune from foreign, video and cable TV rights. Because he had invested all this money wisely, he now had the luxury of producing one “original” play after another without having to worry about overhead or profit or the opinions of downtown-weekly theater critics, one of whom had described his work as “precious, icky tripe” and another of whom had written, “The show began with a snot-nosed, self-important whimper, and I have no idea how it ended, because I ran away.”
    “We had a factory building in Dumbo,” he was saying, “but last week the owners, two Jersey wiseguys who wouldn’t know artistic integrity if it kneecapped them, heard there was nudity involved. They told me, and I quote, ‘No naked fags or no deal.’ I told