One Thousand Chestnut Trees. Mira Stout

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СКАЧАТЬ a drink with us?’

      ‘Suave,’ Laura said, smirking, ‘I guess I wouldn’t mind another.’

      I shot her a questioning look. One worried almost equally about Laura’s man-judgement as about her drinking-judgement. She tended neither to eat enough to avoid instant drunkenness, nor to get enough decent male attention to repulse dodgy advances. However a diversion from the adultery question was welcome. Noting his friend’s success, the boy in the fisherman’s sweater rose from his corner, and sauntered over to our table.

      ‘Hi there. Wen Stanley. Tommy introduced himself? Tom Morgan. Morgan-Stanley, I know, I know … Mind if we sit down?’ he asked.

      ‘What kind of a name is “Wen”?’ said Laura.

      ‘Short for Wendell,’ said Wen, visibly warming to his subject. He and Tommy smiled conspiratorially. ‘Waiter! Another round please. Put these on my tab, will you?’ said Wen, untying his sweater sleeves.

      I don’t remember a great deal of the ensuing conversation, nor was any of it surprising. Condensed version: them; Groton, Middlebury, Manufacturer’s Hanover training program, Fisher’s Island. Laura knew Tommy Morgan’s sister from St Pauls. Wen knew a few people from Brown, including my old boyfriend, Fred, and a slew of friends of my friends’ cousins. Wen lived on the upper East Side in his maiden aunt’s apartment. Would we like to go up there for a nightcap?

      Laura said she’d like to, and excused herself to go to the Ladies’ Room. I sat there between the boys, smashed. We had eaten some nuts and pretzels. I counted having drunk five martinis. (A first.)

      Just then Harry entered the hotel and looked around inquisitively. He spotted me sandwiched between two strange men, and his face hardened a fraction. I had forgotten that Harry was coming.

      ‘How was Philadelphia?’

      ‘Fine,’ he said, scrutinizing me. ‘Harry Palmer. Pleased to meet you,’ he said, shaking hands insincerely with Morgan-Stanley. He fired me another look and settled heavily into Laura’s seat. The boys exchanged men-of-the-world glances.

      ‘Not Palmer, of Palmer’s Peanut Butter, I trust?’ said Tommy, in an inspired gambit.

      ‘’Fraid so,’ said Harry, looking about distractedly.

      ‘Weh-hey! Palmer’s Peanut Butter! The King of Peanut Butters. That makes you … what, King Peanut?’ said Wen.

      Harry flinched. ‘My father’s the boss.’

      ‘So what do you do, crack the shells?’ Tommy drained his martini glass languidly.

      Harry ignored him.

      ‘So you must be an incredibly rich guy. Plus all the peanut butter you could ever desire.’

      ‘I’m flattered at your interest in the family business. Why, what does your father do?’

      ‘Here are the drinks. Cheers, Mr Peanut!’ Wen raised his glass. Harry’s jaw tightened again, and he looked at me with distaste.

      ‘I’d better go see what’s happened to Laura,’ I excused myself. As I walked to the Ladies’ Room the force of the martinis asserted itself in a blaze of dizziness and acidic hunger. Legs, which felt like they belonged to someone else, carried me to the little wood-panelled bar with the grouchy bartender. Ignoring his eyeballing intimidation tactics, I crammed a handful of mini-pretzels from the napkinned bowl into my mouth and walked away, crunching, pleased to be able to negotiate the crowded reception area without mishap. I found Laura behind a locked cubicle in the Ladies’ Room.

      ‘Are you all right, Laur?’ I got down on all fours onto the spotless black-and-white checkerboard floor and looked under the door.

      ‘Absolutely not,’ came a weak voice above her familiar feet, ‘I’ve been sick.’

      Worried that I might get sick as well, I started to do some light jumping-jacks and toe-touching calisthenics, hoping that violent blood circulation might speed the alcohol-processing and chatted with some difficulty to Laura as I performed them.

      The sound of Laura retching ripped through the echoey sanctum. It was so hushed in the Algonquin that one could imagine being ejected for making audible bodily function noises. A middle-aged woman in a fur coat entered and looked horrified, catching me mid-jumping-jack, and experiencing Laura’s vomiting noises as they peaked acoustically. She left in an outraged huff, trailing the scent of ancient Blue Grass.

      ‘I don’t want to rush you, but are you OK yet?’ I asked under the door.

      ‘Getting there.’

      ‘You can’t really want to go uptown with these clowns. I mean, it’s not as if we know them or anything. And Harry certainly won’t want to go.’

      ‘What is there to know, for Christ’s sake. Where’s your spirit of adventure? It’s my birthday after all … Won’t you at least go along with me on my birthday?’ she wheedled from under the door.

      ‘Excuse me for pointing this out, but look where “spirit of adventure” has gotten you so far, Laur – the tiles.’

      ‘Oh come on. Forget Harry. You don’t like him anyway.’

      ‘Thanks Laur. I’ll see you back out there. And hurry up will you? Do you need anything?’

      ‘Nah. Be out in a minute.’

      

      Twenty minutes later, the five of us were in a taxi headed uptown. Tommy tried to charge the bill to his father’s reciprocal Harvard Club account, but the waiter refused. Harry, looking blacker and blacker, ended up paying the tab. The air was somewhat tense.

      Although Morgan-Stanley were a bit of a joke, Harry’s martyred patience and plodding reliability were not especially endearing that evening. There in the taxi I was chilled by the thought that I didn’t actually care much what he thought or felt. Though we had only been seeing each other for a month, he was becoming quite proprietorial. Our watery liaison boiled down to a flirty evening shouting over the Palladium’s sound system, a couple of unrelaxed beers at Fanelli’s, a harrowing weekend at his parents’, and an intensely interrogatory dinner at Mortimer’s.

      There had been a curious lack of urgency about our attraction. Harry’s advances, like his opinions, were politic, and had remained delayed on the ground for a disarmingly long time, like the take-off of a well-maintenanced jumbo aircraft. Although he was kind and well-meaning, I had been attracted to a friend’s racy description of what he had been like during college. As time went on, I wondered if perhaps the friend had been thinking of someone else.

      Squashed up against Harry as the taxi gunned up Park Avenue, mildly sickened, I wondered about romantic Love. The rare, invisible currency running through people’s lives, whose presence tripled your blood count in the night. People pretended it didn’t matter if you had it or not, but it did. Maverick and precious, it was a wild thread stitching together unlikely people, strengthening them, suturing their wounds, weaving surprising designs in the chaos. Whatever it was, Harry and I had not been selected for its grace.

      I recalled that weekend, being brought home speculatively, and prematurely, to his family’s grey-shingled mansion in Sands Point, to see how I went with СКАЧАТЬ