Beware the Solitary Drinker

by Cornelius Lehane

  One of the reasons Sam came into Oscar’s was because he liked Carl van Sagan. Carl was a writer, a poet who worked midnights as a doorman to support his muse. Sam told stories to Carl that I got to hear because I was the bartender. He wanted Carl to tell him how to write a book.

  “A book about characters,” Sam told Carl. “I know some real characters.”

  Carl raised an eyebrow.

  “You’re a writer, right?”

  Carl nodded.

  “Can you make any money at that?”

  “I’m hoping to sell one of my poems to the movies,” Carl said.

  Nodding his head, pursing his lips, Sam looked Carl over. “I suppose not…”

  Carl hitched up his glasses, wrinkled his forehead, which he did when he was interested in what was being said, and which gave him that owl-like look, and bought Sam a drink. The only time Sam drank was under such auspices.

  “I just want to know how you write it down,” Sam said after sipping his beer, the foam decorating his mustache as he turned to look at Carl with some earnestness. “I mean, do you got to start when the guy’s born?”

  His first character was Nick. “I told him they’re going to build a statue of him in Greece. When those guys get off the plane there, he’ll be right in front of them.” Nick, it turned out, was a handicapper who went to the track with Sam, but who only gave tips to Greeks. “They love him,” Sam said.

  Carl wrinkled up his forehead, cleaned his glasses, and ordered another scotch. Sam wanted coffee.

  When I got back with the drinks, they were talking about capital punishment.

  Sam was in favor of it. “If I go back again, it’ll be the third time,” Sam said over his coffee cup. “That means for keeps. I’d rather be dead.”

  Listening to Sam talk to Carl, I found out how he’d gotten to jail in the first place. It was back in the Fifties when he thought he was a hot shot and went to work running numbers for Boss.

  “Three guys jumped me in an alley behind the Terminal Bar down on 10th Avenue. They were going to kill me. They threw me against a loading dock. I looked down and there was a hammer. God must have put that hammer there. I picked it up and clobbered the guy closest to me.

  “The cops came in the Terminal an hour later. They said, ‘Hey, you with the hat on.’ I did nine years for manslaughter.”

  Now he sat beside Oscar, who tried to ignore him. Sam was one of the many customers, like Reuben and all the Eritrean and Namibian refugees, Oscar didn’t like. But he left them alone when they came in to see me. Oscar wouldn’t fire me, even though he didn’t like me either. He believed in the pre-eminence of the bartender, having been one himself, so he was afraid he’d lose all of the customers if I left.

  This night, as I refilled Sam’s coffee cup, he reached into the pocket of his Yankee jacket and handed me a napkin with “Briar Patch 2nd” written on it.

  Oscar, looking over my shoulder, said he lost his shirt on the last tip Sam gave him. His dark eyes filled with sadness. He was in a mood to lament. “Someone being killed is the worst thing that can happen to a bar,” he told us all.

  Sam said there were shirts for sale at 96th Street, and crying towels too.

  All of this was on the surface. No one said how sad it was that Angelina was dead. We didn’t try to comfort one another. These were hard guys; they’d already suffered through the holes in their hearts. But, every few minutes, talk would stop. The men would stare into their glasses or at the bottles lining the back wall. Oscar would rattle the pages of The Racing Form. These moments, I knew, were for Angelina. We did miss her after all.

  Later, after I’d done last call, I poured a final coffee for Sam and some for me and took a chance. “What do you think happened to Angelina?” I asked. It wasn’t a question to ask Sam, and, up to this point, I’d been working pretty hard on pretending to myself I didn’t care who killed her, so I was a little bit surprised at myself.

  “She was crazy,” Sam said. “You can’t do those kinds of things.”

  “What things?”

  “The weirdos.”

  I walked away from him to the other end of the bar. I felt that pang you get when you discover something terribly embarrassing about someone close to you. Sam seemed to think I knew what he meant, and I was too embarrassed for Angelina to ask.

  At the end of the bar near the door, Nigel and Carl talked quietly. I heard Carl say she must have a family.

  They’re sending her body back to Springfield,” Nigel said.

  “That’s gruesome,” said Reuben across the semi-darkness from a couple of bar stools away. “It’s just a fucking body now. What difference does it make what you do with it?” He was drunk and ugly, trying to provoke Nigel.

  “Cut it out, Reuben,” I said.

  “That’s what we all are. Nothing special—rot in a couple of days. In a week no one will remember her. You,” he said to Nigel. “When you die, no one will remember the next day.”

  I sent Reuben home.

  “Maybe we should send flowers,” someone said from the darkness. Whoever it was, his words were slurred, so it took us a while to get his meaning. But, despite this heroic effort at community, it wouldn’t work. The winos came anonymously to the bar precisely because there were no obligations. They wouldn’t send flowers; they wouldn’t go to her funeral if it was down the street. They wouldn’t go to my funeral.

  Carl van Sagan was thoughtful. He’d liked Angelina, too. Sometimes, after the bar closed, she and I stopped off to visit him in his little booth off the lobby in the big West End Avenue building where he worked.

  “I think we should go to her funeral,” Carl said.

  “What did you say?” I asked, my first response to words that take me by surprise, even when I’ve heard them perfectly.

  It took quite a while, until well after closing, till everyone was gone except Carl, for me to give in. I thought, at first, Angelina would go away from my life now that she was dead. Nothing connected me to her. But I couldn’t get rid of the feeling that I owed her. I thought maybe I was supposed to have loved her after all and taken care of her—that my hard heart had helped kill her.

  The next afternoon, Carl and I, both wearing borrowed suits, went to Springfield on a Peter Pan bus. We took a cab from the bus depot to a funeral home just outside the city in a town called Chicopee that looked like a set from a 1950s movie. I recognized a bank and a gas station, a liquor store and a bar. I saw a used furniture store, then a street of storefronts with drab displays behind foggy plate glass windows. In a men’s apparel store, the mannequins wore fedora hats and loose fitting double breasted worsteds, as if they had been dressed shortly after World War II and hadn’t changed since. This was what Chicopee felt like—frozen since World War II.

  The cab entered a traffic circle of the every man for himself variety. Beyond it, a bridge crossed a quiet river; next to the bridge, a red brick mill, a vestige of the New England textile era, stretched out along the riverbank. We turned right and passed the Hotel and Restaurant Workers Union office. It, too, was in a storefront, next to a store that sold surgical equipment. The funeral home was a large, old house a short way up a hill. When the cabbie dropped us off, he promised to pick us up again in an hour and take us to a restaurant in walking distance of the bus depot.

  A directory with a black background and gold borders listed Angelina’s name. When I read it, I wished I hadn’t come. I had to just stand there thinking about her being dead. I couldn’t make the idea of it go away anymore. Carl walked ahead of me into the viewing room and up to the casket. He stood with his head down. I stood beside him, holding myself still to keep from running away. I didn’t want to pray, and I didn’t want to look at Angelina’s dead body.

  On our way in, we’d passed two women, one young, one older, sitting in the front row of chairs. All of the other chairs were empty. I didn’t know how long we should stand in front of the casket. I didn’t know what to do when I stopped standing there either.

&n
bsp; Carl shifted on his feet beside me; finally, I turned and walked over to the older woman and asked if she was Angelina’s mother.

  “I knew Angelina in the city,” I told her. “She was a good person. I’m sorry she’s dead.”

  “Thank you,” the woman said. Her eyes were expressionless; they seemed almost cold. I wondered if she felt responsible for her daughter’s death.

  “My other daughter, Janet,” she said turning to the young woman next to her.

  “Brian McNulty,” I said, shaking her hand. This sister wasn’t anything like Angelina. Very businesslike in her tailored suit that seemed very obviously not borrowed, she shook hands like a salesman. But her eyes were red-rimmed and puffy, her face pale and drawn.

  “Did you know Angelina well?” she asked.

  “Not very well,” I said, while Carl mumbled his name to Mrs. Carter.

  “Nice of you to come all the way from the city,” the mother said.

  Carl nodded, smiling, then thought better of it and wiped the smile off his face.

  “She used to come into my bar,” I said.

  “Oh,” said her sister in a tone that made me feel unwholesome.

  “She sang there with a band sometimes,” I mumbled.

  “And you, Mr. —”

  “Carl.”

  “Mr. Carl.”

  “Not Mr. Carl,” Carl said. He was more flustered than I was.

  “How did you know my sister, Carl?”

  “From the bar…We were friends…She was really talented.” Carl spoke earnestly and meant what he said, but it was lost on her.

  Distaste dripped from sister Janet’s words; brooding anger smoldered in her eyes. Yet I couldn’t help noticing that, though this sister wasn’t at all like Angelina, she was attractive in her own right. Nicely built, shapely, nice legs. But she didn’t do anything with it—at least not for us. She carried herself with a mixture of elegance and aloofness, as if she’d been bred for respectability, her tone and manner suggesting she knew we were part of the seamier side of her sister’s life. Her politeness was vague. I felt like a delivery man.

  The mother, short and stocky, her hair tied in an efficient looking bun, her dark blue suit serviceable and nondescript, kept the empty expression on her face. I knew from Angelina that she was an office clerk, and she looked like one—the kind who goes by the book and can’t bend the rules and takes it personally if you haven’t paid your electric bill on time.

  Some other, mostly younger people began arriving then, probably high school friends of Angelina’s. Later, as Carl and I sat in the back row on cushioned folding chairs staring straight in front of us, guys in suits came in and with them women who looked accustomed to wearing high heels. These were friends of the sister. Janet hugged each of them in a way that suggested she was glad they came but felt funny about the hugging. None of them seemed the hugging sort either.

  We shook hands with mother and daughter once more before we left. The mother smiled tightly. But something had changed in the daughter. She seemed more interested in me. Her eyes, still red and puffy, were almost friendly. “I’d like to talk a minute,” she said. “I’ll walk out with you.”

  She walked with Carl and me out onto the porch of the funeral parlor. A black car with a taxi light on the roof idled at the curb. Carl and I glanced at each other, then looked longingly at the cab.

  “I’m coming to New York in a few days to pick up whatever might remain of Angelina’s things,” Janet Carter said. “Might I call you?”

  “Me? Sure…I guess,” I said.

  A beseeching look, an entreaty, tears starting up in the corners of her eyes. I didn’t like this. Carl was eyeing the cab like he might make a run for it. Janet Carter looked at me with those pain-filled eyes. “Poor, little Angel—” she began, then turned away, sobbing, her shoulders shuddering.

  I patted her awkwardly on the back. “I’m sorry,” I said. I didn’t know what she wanted. I suppose at that moment she didn’t either. But I couldn’t turn her down, whatever it was. I gave her my phone number and the phone number and address for Oscar’s and left her standing, sniffling, on the porch. There was something about her, too, even in her sniffling. Strength, maybe. Determination not to give in to her sorrow? Anger? I couldn’t tell. I wasn’t sure I wanted to see this Miss Carter again. But I wasn’t sure I didn’t want to see her.

  ***

  At dinner in a surprisingly good German restaurant near the bus depot, Carl and I drank Wurtzburger drafts, direct from Germany, and ate weiner schnitzel.

  When we were finished, Carl’s expression turned owlish, so I expected something serious. “It would be better if Angelina’s sister didn’t come to New York,” he said.

  “Oh?”

  He fidgeted a bit with what was left on his plate, then sloshed the beer around in his stein. “There’s something you should know about Angelina,” he said in a determined voice. “She acted in some movies for Boss and Rocky—” His eyes softened with sympathy. Maybe the shock I felt registered on my face. It was the shock of finding out what I couldn’t believe but knew immediately must be true as soon as I heard the words.

  Cheap sixteen-millimeter flicks made in the cellar of 811 West End Avenue. I knew about Rocky’s flicks. I’d even, in my innocence, thought I was the one who first told Angelina about them. We’d sat in that cellar on a sagging filthy couch in the shadows of the giant boilers watching them once. A girl slapped around by two guys, until her tits hung out of her dress and the guys became frenzied like starving dogs and devoured her while she writhed, tied to the bed, panting, bleeding from her mouth.

  When we walked home afterward, I told Angelina I didn’t know why there were movies like that.

  “Men get off on them,” she said.

  “I don’t.”

  “It’s better for men to watch that than to do it,” she said. “Men are into really sick things.”

  I hadn’t gone back. But I guessed now that Angelina had …or maybe she’d already been there, just protected me from knowing she was more depraved than I thought.

  Rocky, when not a movie mogul, was the super of the building Carl worked in. He came into Oscar’s every night, except the one night a week he went to visit his girlfriend in Staten Island, and drank anywhere from eight to a dozen Dewars. He’d been doing it for twenty years, Oscar told me. I marveled each night that his rotted liver didn’t explode right in front of me. Reuben told me once that the day after Rocky got married he came home and found his wife in bed with someone else. “Right in his own bed,” Oscar said, as if he’d been there. Reuben repeated it, “Right in his own bed.” All of Reuben’s unfaithful wives, it seemed, had enough savoir faire to use someone else’s bed. Rocky had gone to sea after that, worked in the engine rooms of the big ships, studied during his sober times, eventually landed up in New York a stationary engineer peddling sadomasochistic bondage flicks on the side. Other women had acted for him, I knew, none as pretty as Angelina though. I couldn’t guess why any woman would go near him. He was grimy, leering, missing half his teeth, mumbling and drooling and slurring words when he was drunk. He wore the same clothes all week and the cellar smelled of urine from the bottles he pissed in when he was too drunk to get off the couch. Yet other women had gone to him—and now Angelina.

  ***

  On the way back to the city in the dim and shadowy light of the Peter Pan bus, Carl seemed much wiser than I was as he talked about Angelina. I discovered she visited him on many nights and spoke to him for hours at a time, sometimes all night long, in his booth off the lobby of 811. I was surprised by how much he knew about her.

  “She wanted to do things,” Carl said. “She wanted to be a singer. I told her to take lessons, and she did. She was really serious.” Carl was serious also. He wrote for hours every night, had been to writing workshops, had published poems in small magazines. I admired him because he was his own barometer of success. I was even impressed that he liked me; it made me feel that I might not be altogether
full of shit.

  “Why did she have such a fucked up thing for men?” I asked, even though the answer no longer made any difference.

  “She said she felt closer to you than anyone she’d ever known.”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “It’s what she said. It means she hadn’t given up. She said you and I were the only men friends she had and that we’d changed her way of looking at men.”

  “Great,” I said. “Do you think that’s what got her killed?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you know who killed her?”

  “No. She couldn’t stay away from fucked-up men. The part of her she could control, she worked hard on to become something. She really was quite remarkable. But the other part she couldn’t do anything about.”

  Chapter Three

  I was off Monday, the day after we got back from the wake in Springfield. On Tuesday night, about half an hour after I got to work, Janet Carter appeared. I saw her through the window walking down Broadway to the bar. She held herself straight when she walked, her arms swinging by her side, taking long strides, her shoulders back. She wore gray slacks and a black jacket that on a man would be called a sports jacket.

  My mind dreaded the sight of her. She meant trouble, no question about it. Yet my heart quickened. I kept my eye on her from the moment I spotted her, lest by some chance she not come in after all. When she opened the door, conversation stopped and heads turned.

  “Good evening,” she said, holding out her hand like a businessman again. “Do you remember me?”

  Sitting herself down on a corner barstool, she took stock of the place with what I sensed was mild disapproval, then looked at me questioningly. “Do you always work behind the bar?”