Chum

by Jeff Somers

  Just like that, I was turned on.

  She pushed away. Gently. Looked at the floor.

  “Uh, all right. I’ll try him at work again later. Let’s go.”

  Kelly’s ass encased in black leggings led me back through the dusty living room. Everything preserved like a museum exhibit. Noble Henry’s Habitat. Note the dust on the bookshelves; the man hadn’t read a thing in years. Note the single flattened couch cushion where Noble Henry sat alone most nights, fondling a remote control. Note the slight smell of desperation in the air.

  I knew my Henrys.

  In the kitchen, the liquor cabinet had been shut up again, and Bick was still standing. I made a mental note about the liquor. It was dangerous sitting there, like an unexploded bomb.

  I paused in the doorway, letting my eyes adjust to the sudden gloom of the hallway. Everyone else already on the stairs, heading down, escaping. Bick confused as to his location and purpose, no doubt. Flo relieved to be getting back to her busy schedule of Internet shopping and prickteasing at work. Kelly chewing her pink lip in that adorable way she had, upset.

  I glanced back at the still-life kitchen. I was going to have to get myself a new Henry. Fortunately, I was good at that.

  VII.

  NEW YEAR’S EVE

  The door opened and Tommy’s face, freshly barbered, peeked through the small opening. He looked us up and down.

  “Leave the woman and the bottle,” he croaked in a bad Spanish accent. “You go.”

  “You can have the woman,” I replied, pushing the door open, “but the bottle stays with me.”

  Denise elbowed me in the ribs.

  “As you wish, gringo,” Tommy said, bowing us into the apartment. “We’ll get it off you anyway. My dear! You’re looking absolutely edible!”

  “Can’t you be normal tonight?” Denise suggested. “Try it as a resolution.”

  “Tomorrow, for you, I will. But resolutions are for the New Year. This is merely the Eve. So you’ll have to put up with me.”

  I took Denise’s coat and bundled it along with mine into Tommy’s small bedroom, which was big enough for a bed and nothing else. You could squeeze your way around the bed, but only if you bent double to avoid the shelves he’d put up on the walls. It was best, I knew, not to enter Tommy’s bedroom at all, since—

  “Whatcha doin’?”

  I turned to find Tommy, hands in pockets, smiling as if he were not making sure that I wasn’t searching his room.

  I tossed our coats onto the bed. “We the first?”

  He nodded cheerily. “You’re the least fashionable people around. Come to the bar area, I’ll get you started. Got some nice bourbon, just for you.” He winked at me obscenely. “I made Denise a wonderful gin and tonic. She’ll be wasted in an hour.”

  I tried to match his wink for obscenity, but that was no easy task. “So I can use your bed later?”

  He blanched. “Uh …”

  I put an arm around him. “Don’t worry, Tom my boy, we all know your weird little phobia concerning your bedroom. Fetch me a bourbon and all is forgiven.”

  The bell rang and Tom slipped from my embrace with feminine grace. “Duty calls. Make yourself at home!”

  Unspoken, of course, was the caveat that at home did not now, or indeed ever, include his bedroom.

  I found Denise by the bar, which was an overlarge thing that dominated Tommy’s largest room, which wasn’t all that big to begin with. I slipped behind her and wrapped my arms around her middle, lacing my fingers around her belly.

  “Barkeep, I’ll have a bourbon and soda.”

  She giggled warmly as I bit her ear. “Tommy told you he was getting me drunk for you?” she said playfully.

  I paused and extricated myself. “Jesus, he said that to you?”

  She turned her head to wink at me. “The exact phraseology he used was ‘lubricating you for my pal Hank.’ It’s okay. I’ve known Tommy long enough now not to take him too seriously.”

  “Thank God for that,” I said, slipping to the other side of the bar, where a wonderful bottle of Jack Daniels waited. I busied myself with making a drink as Tommy came back, leading Bick and Mary.

  Fresh from the cold air and dressed up in passably classy clothes, Bick and Mary looked like the model Young White Couple: gawky, gorgeous, sure of themselves, and terrible in their ease.

  “Ho, it’s the Young Couple,” I called out. “I thought the White House, Bickerman and Harrows?”

  Bick threw his arms out, and Tom smilingly removed his overcoat like it was a royal robe. “Mary failed the security check. Something about sex with communists, whatever that means.”

  Mary slapped him lightly with her gloves and handed her own coat to Tom. I let my eyes roam her for a split, guilty second, then a quick look at Denise to make sure she hadn’t noticed. All seemed well.

  “I thought as much. Drinks? I know how to make anything with one ingredient.”

  Bickerman was, as always, disturbingly manic. I’d never seen him without a red-cheeked kind of excitement about him, as if he were always running up stairs. Or was always internally burning something off, a big meal, too many drinks. Mare was pale, next to him, and small, trapped in his immense gravitational pull.

  “I’ll take a Scotch, bub,” Bick said, turning to kiss Neesie on the cheek.

  “White wine for me,” Mare said sweetly. “How are you, Hank?”

  “Swell,” I said, trying to be flashy as I poured alcohol for everyone. “Another year done. Looking to drown my sorrows.”

  “Sorrows?” she said archly, her eyes flicking to Denise. It had been two months for us. I had forgotten to make a big deal out of what seemed to be, to me, an arbitrary sort of anniversary.

  I kept my eyes on the booze. “Now, now, let’s play nice, Mare.”

  She laughed. I handed her her wine and Bick his Scotch, and the doorbell was ringing.

  “Okay, everybody!” Tom shouted, sprinting for the door. “Act normal, for God’s sake!”

  I took his advice and drank fast.

  • • •

  For a misanthropic ass who pissed off everyone he knew on a weekly basis, Tommy had a lot of friends, and his tiny, oddly white apartment was filled to bursting with strange people. Denise had gone off with Kelly and Flo to the bathroom, and I leaned against a wall and watched the party flow. I hadn’t spent a lot of time at Tom’s place; we usually hung out at mine. Tommy liked to amuse himself by “disappearing” things into the jungle-like yard my bedroom window opened onto. Objects my friend Tom Wallace had disappeared into my dense, overgrown backyard included, but were not limited to: a bowling ball, several watermelons, a box of files from his job, two unopened bottles of middling Scotch, and, once, inexplicably, every pair of shoes I owned.

  Tommy’s place was fascinating.

  First off, the whiteness of Tommy’s apartment. I’d known Tommy for years, had done a lot of questionable socializing with him, but I’d been completely unprepared for his taste in interior decoration. The walls were white. The furniture was upholstered white. Everything was white, or close to it. Bick and I always referred to Tom’s apartment as the White Castle, or Casa de Blanc. It was weird, but it had become entrenched weirdness, and thus almost ordinary and normal. Tommy’s apartment was white, and always had been, and therefore was no longer remarkable, really.

  I didn’t know too many people at the party, aside from the Bickermans, Mikey, and Luis. The rest of the people might have been work friends or old school chums or random strangers plucked from the street—who knew? Not me. And I wasn’t asking the right questions. I leaned against one of the white walls and sipped my drink and watched the party flow by. After a few moments I acquired a fellow wall-watcher, a guy about my age in a beat-up sports jacket. Noticing me eyeing him, he smiled and held out his hand.

  “Phil Dublen.”

  I’d heard the name, and it must have showed in my face as I dug through dusty memories trying to place him. He nodded, as if reading my min
d.

  “I used to date Flo.”

  “Denise’s Flo?”

  He nodded again. “Long ago. Uh,” he looked suddenly grim, “she isn’t here, is she?”

  “Yes,” I said. “So step lightly. Do you know Tom?”

  “Not really.”

  We stood there for a moment, surrounded by white noise, forgotten by the rest of the revelers. I struggled to think of anything at all to say to this guy, who appeared to be a mildly normal human being.

  “You’re the guy,” I said with a note of triumph, “who quit his job, right?” Small bright portions of something Flo had said once when recounting her many failed relationships coalesced into coherency. “You came into some money and quit your job.”

  “I didn’t quit my job. I wanted to quit my job. I did come into some money. But I blew it all. So here I am.”

  “You’re here looking for money?”

  “No—why, is there some here?”

  I didn’t know what else to say to this guy, and he seemed at a loss too, so after another second or two of staring we nodded and went back to leaning against the wall.

  Tommy was across the room playing DJ with his tiny player plugged into his huge stereo. The stereo was gigantic, the speakers half as tall as I was, from a previous era. He was leaning toward crappy dance music in deference to the bad taste of his guests, who were a rowdy bunch. I was getting jostled on a regular basis and almost didn’t notice when Mary began tugging on my arm. I turned, startled, and she grinned and leaned in to me.

  “Henry! Are you having fun?”

  My God, I thought, she’s so drunk.

  Mary was not much of a drinker. Which was to say, she drank like a surly longshoreman but had a stomach made of glass, resulting in several Black Ops missions to bring her home through torrents of vomit and verbal abuse. Number of times she had acknowledged this and vowed to be a better person: Hundreds. Number of times the evening had ended with Mary screaming and punching and puking on someone’s shoes: Thousands. Number of times the shoes puked on had been mine: Four.

  “Yes, Mary, and you?”

  She was hanging on the lapels of my jacket, beaming up at me in red-faced excitement. “A great time! You know, Henry,” she continued, pulling herself erect by my jacket and leaning against the wall next to me, “we never talk.”

  This was true, but I’d never thought of it as a problem: You didn’t have to become best friends with your friends’ significant others. Sometimes it happened, sometimes it didn’t, and either way it was usually for the best.

  Mary, after a consultation with what appeared by her breath to be a bottle of tequila, had decided otherwise.

  What I said was: “Ask me anything.” Then I struck a dramatic pose.

  She giggled, and I noted with alarm that she still had her hands on my jacket. I had no illusions that Mare had suddenly developed an attraction for me; rather, it was an alarming indication of how drunk she was. I became frightened, and scanned the immediate area for Bick.

  “Okay,” she slurred, then wrinkled her brow in concentration. “Okay! Do you prefer Henry or Hank?”

  “I prefer Ishmael.”

  This brought her leaning into me, shaking with laughter, hanging off my jacket. I scanned the room again, smiling helplessly.

  “You’re funny!” she gasped. “You’re Dave’s funniest friend.”

  I shook my head seriously. “That would be Tommy.”

  “No, no—he’s funny but not funny like in humor,” she said. “You’re cute funny. I think Denise is lucky.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said, a little floored by an unsolicited compliment. I decided to deflect before she started asking me all sorts of things about Denise that I had no answers for. “Where’s Bick?”

  She frowned a little. “I’m mad at him, the little bastard.” She stumbled, and I had to grab her to keep her from doing a header into one of Tommy’s icy glass end tables. She steadied herself and went on, unconcerned. “This always happens. He always pays so much attention to his friends, and I end up standing there alone.”

  I nodded wisely. “Denise says the same thing to me,” I confessed and immediately regretted it.

  She slapped me playfully on the chest. “Why do you men do that?”

  Before I could answer, Mare was jostled from behind by a beefy guy in a golf shirt, wearing, inexplicably, shorts despite the inch of snow on the ground outside. Whatever he muttered with his head half-turned toward Mary might have been an apology. It might also have been a quotation from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, for all I could make of it. I opened my mouth to reply, but she whirled around, stumbled against me, then stumbled against our new friend as she tapped him on the shoulder.

  “Excuse me, asshole, watch where you’re fucking going, okay?”

  I blinked dimly.

  Beefy Boy turned halfway toward her, one of Tommy’s known-to-be-deadly mint martinis in one hand. He murmured something that was not, I assumed, an apology of sufficient class.

  Mary leaned forward and slapped him on the back of his neck. I flinched in sympathy.

  “Hey, asshole,” Mary snapped. I reached forward and tugged at her, looking around at all the people who were taking time out of their busy drinking/socializing schedules to stare in our direction. She ignored me and now had Beefy Boy’s attention.

  “What the fuck is your problem?” he asked, reasonably enough.

  Mary, a foot his junior but obviously a few pints ahead of him otherwise, swayed and began screeching. I wanted to have a better word for that, a calmer word. But she was screeching.

  “Who the fuck do you think you are, and why can’t you watch where the fuck you’re going?!” She pushed him hard on the chest. “Shithead!”

  She turned away from him. He stared at her with a dumbly shocked look. I sympathized. I wouldn’t know what to do in his situation, either.

  Mare grabbed my drink out of my hand as Bick materialized out of the crowd.

  “Fuckheads,” the new Mary muttered, slamming back my drink and making a face.

  “Honey?” Bick said with a wink at me. “You okay?”

  “Your honey’s a goddamn psycho, bud,” Beefy Boy said, turning away.

  Mary whirled. “Shut the fuck up!” She screeched before Bick got his hand over her mouth. He smiled at Beefy Boy.

  “Sorry, man,” he offered. “She’s a monster when she gets fucked up.”

  “Whatever.”

  Bick turned his game show smile on me, holding his struggling wife-to-be as she grunted and kicked at him, red-faced.

  “Sorry, man. Did she say anything crazy? Mare shouldn’t drink. She becomes a monster.”

  I looked them over. Bick’s smile appeared to be long-suffering. “Nothing to me, man,” I said. “Don’t worry. You gonna be all right with her?”

  He nodded, the smile still bolted in place. “Sure. She can’t stay this way forever.”

  Mary wriggled free, slipped under his arm, and stumbled into a group of people standing nearby.

  “Get your hands off me, goddammit!” she snarled, righting herself at the expense of several other people. “I will not be brutalized in public, you fuck.”

  “Quack, quack, quack,” Bick answered mildly, leaning next to me, all casualness. “Go pass out somewhere.”

  “Asshole,” she slurred, stumbling off.

  “Quack!”

  Aside from the booming music, there was an odd silence in the room until Tom suddenly appeared, standing on one of his own end tables. “That concludes tonight’s presentation of The Troubles of Being Bick, performed by our own Days of Wine and Roses players! A big hand everyone!”

  Everyone laughed, and Bick even took a little bow. Then the buzzing of conversation welled up, and I found myself embarrassed, not sure what to say.

  “Everything okay?” I asked lamely.

  “Sure, perfect,” Bick grimaced. “She just should never ever drink, but always does. That about covers it. I’ll find her asleep somewhere later, and
she’ll be super nice to me for a few days, and then it’s all forgotten,” he smiled. “It’s all right. Drunk chicks turn me on.”

  “Speaking of drunk, she took my drink.”

  He put his arm around me. “Let me make it up to you.”

  • • •

  “There are many people here that I have never met before,” Luis said, shrugging. “I am not sure I like them all. I wonder where Tommy met them? He is always with us.”

  “Not always. The man has a job. A past. Who knows what’s he’s doing in his spare time?”

  In Tom’s tiny white kitchen, there is room, perhaps, for a dwarf to relax comfortably. Somehow I was wedged in with Luis, a tipsy Denise, and three or four complete strangers. It was hot and loud. We were closer to the bottled beer, however. Small consolation, but lemonade was being made industriously.

  “I had expected it to be just our usual group,” Luis complained.

  I had, too, and Tom’s sudden wealth of friends and well-wishers puzzled me. He wasn’t a cuddly guy who made friends and influenced people. His penchant for inappropriate cursing and mean-spirited insult comedy usually made him somewhat unlikable.

  “Cheer up, Luis. We’re here!” Denise offered.

  In true Luis fashion, he did cheer up suddenly, grinning. “That is true! Have a drink with me, Denise.”

  I watched in some alarm as he unsteadily poured a shot of tequila into two shot glasses and passed one to Denise. She was already into her warm-and-moist drunk stage, marked by an attractive flush to her cheeks and a grabability she usually didn’t exhibit. I had as yet never proceeded beyond this stage and wondered if there was a monster in Denise as well. It was frightening.