Read In the Drink for Free Online Page A

them she’s not technically a man any more, but that cut no ice with Dom and Vinnie, and I frankly didn’t want to end up feetfirst in a bucket of concrete at the bottom of the East River. So we’re homeless now.”
    “A lot of plays have naked men in them all of a sudden,” Isaid to no one in particular. “I don’t get it. Women can be nude and in total command of the situation, but men without their clothes on look like wet cats. I think Eve ate the apple to give Adam a little dignity.”
    “The Waste Land: A Musical Tragedy,” said Gus to William. “I wrote the music, for synthesizer and drum machine, very seventies, a sort of disco extravaganza. The text speaks so clearly to that whole era, you know what I mean?”
    “No,” said William, “I don’t have a clue. All I read is law crap. Come on, Gus, give us a few bars.”
    “Let’s see.” Gus made a show of resting his pointer finger against his cheek and rolling his eyes ceilingward while he mentally scanned the score. Then he took a deep breath and whined in a breathy Bee-Gees falsetto, wagging his head to indicate the drum-machine beat, “ ‘Here is no water but only rock, rock and no water and the sandy road. Here is no water but oh-honely rock, rock and no water and the sa-handy road.’ ”
    I laughed. William didn’t.
    “Eliot’s text is chillingly apropos,” said Gus piously. “ ‘I had not thought death had undone so many,’ for example, and the drowned sailor, the sterility, the aura of decay. ‘Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.’ ”
    “Apropos of what?” I asked. “Disco? I don’t get it.”
    Gus turned to me as if he’d forgotten I was there, which he probably had. “Of course, Claudia,” he said, “you have heard of metaphor.”
    Now William laughed. I looked away as if I’d just seen something mildly interesting at the bar, even though there was a hockey game on TV and Wanda was sitting on a stool in the back, smoking a cigarillo and reading the Post . Gus talked on and on, but I wasn’t listening; I wasn’t even pretending to.
    “Blah blah blah, me me me,” he said after a while, as if tosum up the essence of his personality in six words for anyone who hadn’t caught on yet, then rested his chin on his hand and gazed at William through intensely green, deeply interested eyes. “So what have you been up to, career boy?”
    “Not much,” said William. “Churning out the bullshit, billing the hours.”
    “Stalking the paralegals,” I blurted; I was in the grip of a merry recklessness and something else, a hard emptiness underneath the whiskey glow that made me finish what was left of my drink in one gulp and smile edgily at no one.
    “Watch out,” said William, nudging Gus, “she’s on the warpath tonight.”
    “I’m not that bad,” I said defensively. Then I saw by the startled look that flickered across his face that he’d only been teasing me back. “Oh,” I said with a brittle laugh. I closed my eyes for a second and felt the room begin a slow reel, then opened them again and squinted at Gus, who gave a wide-eyed start, as if he’d just remembered something of enormous interest and couldn’t wait to share it.
    “Have you heard the good news about Margot?”
    “What good news?” asked William.
    “Her memoir just won the Clark Foundation Award,” said Gus. “It was totally unexpected. A bolt from the blue. It couldn’t have happened to a better person.”
    Steep black cliffs closed in on me from the corners of the room. “That’s a lot of money, isn’t it?” I asked. My voice sounded hollow.
    “Not to mention the prestige,” said Gus. “She can pretty much write her own ticket from here on in.”
    “Can she,” I said. I felt him monitoring me for my reaction, and did my best to look unperturbedly back at him. There was a smudge of mascara on his lower left eyelid, but I didn’t tell him.
    “That’s amazing!” said William. “Good for her. She deserves