Read In the Drink for Free Online Page B

it.” I heard in his voice equal parts respect, wistfulness and affection.
    I burst out in a harsh voice, “She probably knows someone on the committee.”
    They looked at me.
    “That’s how it works. Of course she’s a good writer, but it’s amazing the way she seems to have connections to everyone who can help her. She schmoozes like the rest of us breathe. She’s known all the right people since she was born.” With an enormous effort, I made myself shut up.
    “Is that so,” said Gus. He studied me for a moment with a canny appraisal that made me cast about for a way to modify what I had said. I didn’t look at William; I hadn’t been able to look at him since he’d laughed at me.
    “She’s lucky,” is what I came up with. “We need all the help we can get.”
    Gus raised his eyebrows at me over the top of his glass. “We certainly do,” he said. He drained the last drops of his drink; the ice cubes rattled against his teeth. A peculiar look crossed his face then, a flicker of queasy self-doubt. “Excuse me just a moment,” he said. He set his glass, empty now except for a sticky adherence, on the table, and stood up. The bar had become very crowded in the last few minutes. He leaned into the press of bodies behind him until they parted enough for him to insert himself and disappear among them.
    “FYI, Claudia,” said William, “there’s no such drink as a Vanderbilt. He loves to make people feel like barn animals for not having heard of something he’s just invented.”
    “How hilarious that must be for him,” I said. FYI? Did he think he was writing me a memo? “Why are you friends with him?”
    “Why is anyone friends with anyone?” he said mildly, and went off to buy another round. Behind the bar, a string of flashing colored lights pulsed like tiny hearts right where real hearts would have been if the bottles of alcohol had been human figures. High overhead, propellers mixed air with smoke and sent it downward; faces bloomed in the dim light, talking and sending smoke ceilingward. A country song ambled out of the jukebox. The metallic plaint of the slide guitar stirred up a squall in my chest; the whiskey spread a thick, fuck-it-all paralysis through me that made me go limp in my chair. I was so envious of Margot my arms ached, but it was the pure, hopeless envy of a paraplegic watching an Olympic runner win another gold.
    Oh, buck the hell up, I told myself. What would it matter in a hundred years? It would all be over by then; maybe no one would even be around to know or care. We were all just shoring fragments against our ruins.
    The jukebox went silent. Where was William? God, I loved him. The same hopeless paraplegic feeling doused me again. The process by which men and women fell in love and coupled off had always been about as clear to me as quadratic equations or Masonic rites. I’d grown up without being exposed to many actual men besides teachers, who didn’t really count. I had cobbled together a composite picture for myself out of the limited source material at hand. My mother had naturally weighed in heavily with the opinion that the male sex was a lower order without common sense or the capacity to behave responsibly, but Gothic novels and fairy tales had inculcated in me the equally strong but contrary expectation that either a prince of some kind would carry me off to his castle or Mr. Rochester would eventually marry me if I waited for him to go blind. By the time I was eight years old, I’d absorbed the idea that courtshipand marriage happened when the perfect man came along and chose you from the lineup. All you could do, as the girl, was stand there and wait.
    After living for so many years with such precise and deeply ingrained expectations, being confronted with an actual flesh-and-blood man was like trying to understand a spoken foreign language whose dictionary I had read. Every now and then I caught a glimpse of a familiar word, but these brief flashes of