The Jezebel Remedy

by Martin Clark

  “Speaking of music,” Brett said. “I’ll…I’ll track down our waitress and give you some privacy,” he offered, standing as he spoke. He bumped the edge of their table, causing a water glass to spill. He quickly set it upright. A pile of ice remained, cubes dumped beside a dirty plate.

  “No, it’s okay. Don’t worry about it. I’m not goin’ to answer it.” She sat back, slumped a little. “What would I say?” She dropped the phone into her purse.

  She scooted only to the middle of the cab’s seat, didn’t completely cross the carpeted ridge above the transmission, and Brett eased in beside her, closing the door as he came. The car accelerated onto a wide avenue. It was dark now, the city candled by streetlights, traffic signals, bar signs with burning neon script and the plodding glow of various window displays, their bulbs illuminating travel posters, antiques, pawned saxophones and guitars, and mannequins wrapped by layers of trendy woolen clothes.

  “You know,” Brett said, “if you don’t want to go to a bar, I have a little pied-à-terre not far from here.”

  Lisa laughed, snorted and gulped air and leaned into him and dipped her head and kept laughing and wiped at her eyes. “How was it you pronounced it? It’s one of those words you see a lot but never really learn how to say. At least, I’ve never heard it said out loud. It’s crossword fodder. Brett Brooks has a crossword lair. A fancy-pants den. A French apartment. Suave.” She laughed some more, but there was no barb in it, nothing mean-spirited.

  Brett repeated it. “Pied-à-terre.” The alcohol caused him to slow down the syllables.

  “Once more.” She elbowed him.

  “Now you’re just making fun of me,” he said, but he was grinning, playing along.

  “Yep. I am. Damn right.” She dabbed at the corners of her eyes. “Oh, gosh. I can’t remember the last time I laughed so much.” She glanced at him and then went on another jag. “Tell you what,” she said when she’d composed herself, “you’ve got some serious bullshit in your bag. You’re a pro. I get the feelin’ maybe you’ve done this before.”

  “Nah. No kidding, Lisa, I haven’t had a date in months.” He leaned away so he could see her complete face. “And what would you prefer? What would be a better term? Crib? Bachelor pad? Love nest? One-bedroom apartment with a tiny balcony?”

  “A date, huh? We’re datin’? At any rate, at least you didn’t say you keep a little pied-à-terre. That would be about candy-ass and prissy.” She frowned, thought for a moment. “Wow, I sure am cursin’ a lot. So, uh, no, I won’t be visiting your apartment tonight, but you didn’t blow it for eternity.”

  “Glad to hear it.”

  “I wanna go see the Chairmen of the Board. I’ve changed my mind. The hell with the jazz; that’ll be too slow and earnest. Where were the Chairmen playin’? They make me think of college and summer. I love ‘Give Me Just a Little More Time.’ Is General Johnson still with ’em? We’ll kick winter to the curb. Banish all this blah. Yeah, let’s do that.”

  “No problem.”

  At the show, Lisa continued to drink—a beer, a daiquiri in honor of beaches and warm weather, another beer—and she and Brett made a path through the crowd to the front of the stage, where they sang—yelled, actually—the parts of the songs they knew and danced in place and brushed and bumped against other people and held their bottles high over their heads when the lyrics mentioned “ice cold beer.” There were a few people their age at the show, but not many. They stayed until the band finished and the houselights came on harsh and jarring and a bouncer circled the room telling everyone it was closing time, to kill the alcohol or throw it in the trash. Glass banged and clanked in garbage bags behind the bar, a young man in a knit cap pushed a wide janitor’s broom over the floor.

  Brett took Lisa’s hand, and they walked outside into the frigid air. Shivering, she pulled her coat tight around her neck. The same cab was there, the engine running, cozy for them.

  “What now?” Brett asked as they were climbing in. He was holding the door for her. He shut the tail of his topcoat in the door and had to open it, pull the fabric free and then shut it again.

  “Well, for once in my life, I really didn’t plan ahead, so, hell, hmmm, that’s a brilliant question. It was nice just to go somewhere off the clock and not worry about missing a court deadline or whether or not I had enough friggin’ eggs for a recipe. But I’d say I’ve got a travel dilemma.”

  “Yeah, there’s no chance I’m letting you drive. And I’m way too tanked to take you anywhere myself. We’d probably blow a fifty or so combined.”

  “I’m call…I’ll just find a room back at the hotel. I’ll call Joe from there. Me. I’m gonna rent a room for me. By myself. Alone. A-lone.”

  “Sad news about staying alone, but understandable.” Brett told the cabbie to take them to the Hotel Roanoke. It was after two in the morning.

  During the trip there, he pushed up the hem of her skirt and touched the inside of her thigh, but he wasn’t sloppy, wasn’t rushed, wasn’t clumsy, didn’t paw or grope, just rubbed his hand a few inches in different directions, his flat palm up and down and sideways against her hose, a thin, stretched nylon separation between her skin and his. “I figure we should go ahead and kiss good night now—take all the awkwardness out of it,” he said. “I don’t want to be standing there freezing in a damn parking lot, floundering and stuttering. Wondering and so forth.” He kissed her, and when they finished, he kissed her some more, and she relaxed into the seat, and the side of his hand hit higher on her leg and didn’t quit, brushed against her crotch, and she bent her leg, but not entirely, hinted it toward him and shut her eyes, felt him underneath her skirt, the alcohol framing and concentrating it all.

  She opened her eyes and glanced in the mirror because the driver would have to be aware of what was happening. He was watching the road, discreet. Anyway, it was dark in the car, and there were coats and shadows concealing them. When the car slowed and the driver flipped the blinker for the turn into the hotel, they stopped kissing and Brett slid his hand to her knee, let it rest.

  “Whew,” she said. She adjusted her skirt but didn’t bother with anything else. “No denying that.” She sat up straighter.

  “You want me to have him take us back to the bar and we can do the same trip again?”

  “No,” she laughed.

  The cab pulled up next to Lisa’s Mercedes, and Brett gave the driver a handful of bills, a hundred obvious on top.

  “A pleasure doin’ business with you, Mr. Brooks,” the man said. “Appreciate the tip. You got my number. Ya’ll be careful. Ain’t no problem for me to carry the lady direct to the front entrance.”

  “Thanks. We’re okay.”

  The cab circled the lot and headed away, the only vehicle in sight on the road, and Brett wrapped both his arms around her at her waist, facing her. “Do you need anything out of your car?”

  “No.”

  He walked with her to the lobby, where he sat in a leather chair near the entrance while she paid for a night’s stay. She dropped her wallet and several charge cards spilled onto the floor, and the clerk had to tell her twice where to initial the paperwork. She squinted at the room rate and informed the lady behind the desk she’d been drinking and couldn’t drive home. The clerk, a wiry woman with short gray hair, told her avoiding the highway was a smart decision, though she sounded sour and strict when she spoke.

  The clerk peered at Brett. “Will your husband be staying?”

  “Oh, no. No. He’s not my husband. I had too much drinks…to drink…at a business celebration, and he was kind enough to bring me here. My husband’s home.” Lisa leaned across the counter and whispered, “Now, well, uh, he probably would like to. We all know how that goes.” The words were thick, the pace of her speech off-kilter.

  “I hope you sleep well,” the clerk said. “I imagine you will.” She wrote a room number on a small cardboard folder and underlined the four digits, the felt-tip line drawn with a quick, prim swipe. “Would you care for
one of our signature warm cookies?”

  Lisa cocked her head, collected her purse. “Yeah. Hell, yeah. Sure. Why not?” So what, she thought while she waited for her chocolate chip. Screw her and her bitchy attitude.

  “You set?” Brett asked from his chair in the main lobby.

  She swung toward him and blew him kisses with both hands, her purse sliding down to her wrist, her cookie and room card jammed between her fingers, very nearly slipping free. “Thank you, Brett Brooks. Sweet dreams. You were nice to take care of me. See you around.” He stood, but she was walking and didn’t wait or linger or offer him any possibilities, went zipping into an open elevator. She pressed her floor number, watched the doors seal, slumped against the wall and stared at the glowing button as she rose through the building to her level. By the time the elevator tinged to a stop and the doors rolled away, she was sitting on the parquet floor and looking out at colorful carpet, fresh flowers on a hallway table and a framed black-and-white print of the city from bygone days: horses, wagons, wooden buildings and muddy streets.

  Joe was alarmed and still awake when she reached him. “Where have you been? Are you okay?” There was no separation between the questions. The sentences piled into each other.

  “I’m drunk,” she said. She giggled. “Oh, Joe.”

  “Why didn’t you call me?”

  “I did. I did call,” she said. She was sitting on her hotel bed. She bit into the cookie and considered the minibar. “Sure did.”

  “You called at, like, five o’clock. It’s almost three in the morning now. I’ve been worried to death. I called Gentry, Locke and couldn’t catch anyone after hours. Checked with the cops in both Roanoke and Salem. Wore your cell out. Jeez.”

  “No. I called around ten. Ten at night.”

  “No, you didn’t,” Joe said. He sounded more befuddled than angry.

  “Yep I did. From a bar. To tell you I couldn’t make it home. Not to be worried.”

  “Well, I didn’t—”

  “I’ve got the proof here. I do, Attorney Joe Stone. On my phone. On Recent Calls.” She waited a beat. “Uh-oh. Joe, I’m so sorry. I called the office. Damn.” She had, in fact, called from the bar around ten-thirty and intentionally left a message at their office.

  “The office? Our office?”

  “I’ve been drinkin’. I made a mistake.” She sighed. “Do you forgive me? I wonder if this little fridgey thing has champagne? Or Baileys? Baileys would be a treasure.” She crossed the room to the minibar.

  Joe chuckled. “So you somehow wound up drunk and now you’re in a hotel? Safe and sound? How could you confuse the messages here and at work?”

  “It was loud, okay? I just hit, uh, the preset on my phone and waited for the beep. Punched the wrong one. My bad. My error. I apologize.”

  “What hotel?”

  “The Hotel Roanoke,” she said. “And Conference Center,” she added nonsensically.

  “And you’re okay? Drunk but okay?”

  “Yep.” She opened the minibar and looked inside.

  “Who did you go to a bar with? How’d that happen?” His voice changed, not much, but enough for her to notice the edge. “Last I heard you were headed to the food court. Helluva detour.”

  “Well, sorry, but I just fell in with bad companions, Joe. It was fun. Spur of the moment.” She located a small bottle of Baileys and cracked it open. She took a draw from the miniature opening. “Believe it or not, Brett Brooks was our guide. He and his girlfriend, in case you might worry—”

  “Brett Brooks? Brett Brooks is a hound of the very first rank and—”

  She interrupted. “His freakin’ girlfriend was there, Joe. And a wonderful lawyer who was visitin’ here by the name of Sarah. She went too. Sarah.”

  “Well, I doubt that would slow him down. Just more birds in the covey for him.”

  “He is quite the operator,” she said. “Handsome too.”

  “Handsome like a copperhead. Did he—”

  “He was a gentlemen…gentleman, I mean. Nice as you’d ever want. And his girlfriend’s a sweetheart.”

  “I’m sure she is, Lisa. It was probably like attending a world-hunger summit with Marc Anthony and Jennifer Lopez. Nothing but goodwill and beneficence.”

  “Marc Anthony? Huh?”

  “How did you wind up at the Hotel Roanoke? Surely you didn’t drive, drunk as you are.”

  “Sarah and I took a cab. She went home after here. It’s so cute you’re jealous.” She opened her mouth and let the bottle drain in until she had a full swallow. Some of the Baileys hit her lips and trickled onto her neck and blouse. “Damn, I just poured brown on my new top.”

  “What?”

  “I’m having problems with my nightcap.” She giggled again. “So, anyway, I’m safe and here where I am, and I love you and I’m goin’ to bed, okay? Okay? Oh…oh. You need to cancel my appointments tomorrow or cover for me. Please?”

  “Yeah. Do I need to come and get you or anything?”

  “Why? No. I’m fine, Joe. I allowed myself one night to let my hair down and be silly, and it’s been years since I was irresponsible and it’s not like…like I’m callin’ you from Paris high with…on heroin from some soccer star’s pied-à-terre. I’m an hour away, in a classy hotel.”

  “I’m just glad you’re okay. I was worried sick.” He sighed. “I can’t believe you fouled up the message. Imagine if I’d done this—you’d kill me. But it’s good you had such a big time. You’ve been kind of subdued lately, so I suppose you’re owed some fun.”

  “Good night, Joe.”

  She’d dozed off wearing her clothes and with her makeup still in place, propped against the dresser next to the minibar, its door not closed, rich candies and stunted rows of booze lining its racks, and there was knocking from out in the hall and a hotel security officer announced loudly that Mr. Joe Stone had sent him to check on her and make sure she was safe. Could she give him a “visual confirmation”? She told him to leave, but evidently he didn’t hear her, and when he peeked past the safety chain and saw her sprawled there on the floor, he offered to help, and she told him, from behind a pointed finger with a brightly painted nail, to leave her the hell alone and shut her damn door and that she was a lawyer, understand, and she’d sue him and his polyester-blend blazer and walkie-talkie into infinity.

  She awoke on the floor to a window blasting winter daylight, sick, her fingers and blouse stained by the cookie and the Baileys, the carpet weave unpleasant and rough against her cheek, unsure for several seconds where she was. She made it to the bed and lay down and pulled a pillow from underneath the fold in the counterpane and didn’t leave until noon, ignoring the maid and the ringing phone, twice rolling toward the mattress’s edge to gag and spit and puke into a leather wastebasket.

  Joe was kind enough when she returned home, though he made her detail her lies and embellishments a second time, and he frowned at each mention of Brett Brooks, girlfriend or not, and because she was still sickly and disabled on the couch at dinner, he grilled a cheese sandwich in the frying pan and brought it to her, along with a bowl of canned vegetable soup, and he sat next to her while she ate and said, with a sincere half smile, that he was tickled to see she had the instincts of a party girl left in her. Maybe they should give some thought to a trip to Hawaii or Mexico, where it was warm and they both could cut loose. Maybe they’d cancel the house at Emerald Isle they’d rented since 1993 and try a new vacation, though it sure would be tough to break their streak of beach Scrabble and a shrimpburger lunch at the Big Oak Drive-In. Might jinx them, too.

  The residue of the alcohol’s pernicious claim crept into Friday as well, but Lisa, frazzled and woozy, nevertheless left the office early and drove to Mt. Olivet Elementary School for her volunteer tutor’s gig, same as she’d been doing for the past eleven years, and she met this year’s student, a bony girl-child—eyeglasses crooked, a tooth chipped—at the door to a classroom. The child, a fifth-grader named Montana Triplett, snatched Lis
a’s hand and right away commenced prattling, gushed run-on fragments about her teacher and a report card and the several free throws she’d scored during her basketball game and a prankster who’d toted a live guinea pig to school in his backpack.

  They spent almost an hour at the city library sorting through school assignments and selecting a new book for Montana to read, then finished off the evening at McDonald’s, the girl wasting most of her burger, scarcely interested in food. Before they married, Lisa and Joe had decided they weren’t suited for raising children, and they’d never seriously regretted their choice, no more than an occasional speculation at Christmas or a generous envy when moms and dads e-mailed photos of a darling newborn. Still, Lisa had filled a lot of gaps caused by shiftless parents. She’d bought her fair share of tennis shoes and fashionable mall jeans and always shuffled appointments and trials if she could help chaperone a field trip. She enjoyed her commitment, appreciated the chance to ride shotgun on exuberance and shining possibility, to witness it firsthand and tap into it around the margins, never once put off by the realization that many of the kids’ deficits were so unruly that they wouldn’t be tamed by a few hours a month with a pretty lawyer-lady volunteer.

  “You look tired, Mrs. Stone,” Montana informed her as they were stacking their wrappers and tall cups onto a tray, ready for the garbage.

  “Really? You think so?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Well, sweetie,” Lisa told her, “I can promise you this: You’ll leave me better than you found me. Seeing you pepped me up. Made my day. Thanks. It’s nice to have you as a friend, you know?”

  —

  Soon afterward, around seven-thirty on a Sunday morning, she found Joe in the kitchen with Brownie, and as she came past the pantry Joe told her to stop where she was. To emphasize the request, he straightened a traffic-cop arm in her direction. He was wearing striped flannel house pants and a ratty T-shirt, standing near the stove, the dog sitting on his black haunches. “Check this, Lisa. Old dog, very new trick.”

  He slowly lowered a piece of bacon toward Brownie, and the dog’s tail quivered and he Gatling-gun sniffed and he keened his head, but he stayed rooted to the floor, didn’t lunge or snap at the food. Joe kept closing the distance and placed the bacon squarely on the animal’s nose, and remarkably, Brownie—amped, drooling, excited—didn’t budge, didn’t gulp it down until Joe said “Eat,” and then the dog ducked his snout and grabbed the meat straight out of the air, snatching it so rapidly it was as if he’d never moved.