Alligators in the Trees

by Cynthia Hamilton

  “Can we?” Caitlin pestered, perturbed by her father’s lack of response.

  “Can we what?”

  “Can we go visit Priscilla in Florida? She’ll go to Disneyworld with us. She said so, didn’t you Priscilla?”

  “Sure. If you and your dad come down to Florida sometime, we can meet up there.”

  “Priscilla’s not going to be living near Disneyworld,” Philip said, bursting Caitlin idyllic vision.

  “You’re not?” she asked incredulously.

  “No, I’m moving further south, to the Florida Keys.”

  “Oh,” Caitlin said, before falling silent as she grappled with the idea of moving to Florida and not being close to the Magic Kingdom.

  Philip had the good fortune of finding a parking spot a few spaces down from The Essex. He maneuvered his vehicle with exaggerated care, drawing out his final moments with Priscilla. When he could stall no longer, he instructed his daughter to say goodbye.

  “’Bye,” she said a little sadly, as she leaned forward and put her small hand in Priscilla’s. “If I give you my address, will you write to me?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “I’ll give it to her, Pumpkin,” Philip said, getting out of the car. He opened the door for Priscilla, who emerged rather sheepishly. She had been dreading this moment all evening. As soon as she was on both feet, Philip took her hand, depositing a wad of bills in it.

  “What is this?” Priscilla asked, confused and a bit irritated by the sight of so much cash.

  “For your train fare.”

  “But…this is too much.”

  “Take it.”

  “No, Phil—I don’t like the idea of taking your money,” she said, shoving it back at him.

  “Look, I promised if you changed your plans and stayed to give me moral support, I’d buy you a first class airplane ticket. This is less than what that would’ve cost.”

  “But—”

  “You held up your end of the bargain. You should let me do the same,” he argued. Priscilla demurred.

  “Yeah, but this feels weird to me.”

  “Don’t be silly. Take it. You certainly don’t need to be out-of-pocket any more on my account.” Priscilla hung her head, uncomfortable with this accounting process. “You’re going to need all you can get if you’re going to make a go of it down there. Sure, rents are probably a lot cheaper, but think of all the money you’ll be spending on sunscreen.”

  Priscilla had to laugh. She had never known anyone who could take his dislike of a particular state to such a comic level. Her laughter made Philip smile, despite his misgivings.

  “You know you can call me if there’s anything you need,” he said. He restrained himself from making any more pledges. He had said them all before. Priscilla nodded, head down, confused by the feeling of regret that had suddenly come over her. Saying goodbye had never been difficult for her before. She was startled out of her conflicting emotions by a rapping on the glass.

  “Don’t forget to give her my address,” Caitlin shouted through the closed window.

  “Oh, right,” Philip said, patting his pockets. “Do you have anything to write on?” Priscilla reached into her bag and brought out her ever-present notebook. He wrote down his current and former addresses, as well as his cell phone and office numbers, just in case she lost his cards.

  “Well, you have a safe journey,” he said, handing the notebook back to her with all the dignity he could muster.

  “Thanks, I will.”

  “Okay, then. Goodbye.”

  “Goodbye, Phil,” Priscilla said, executing a quick but cordial embrace. “Thank you for everything.” Philip nodded, tightlipped, turning to go. “Phil, I just want to say that knowing you was the nicest thing that happened to me in this town.”

  The words sounded less sincere than they were meant to. Philip acknowledged them with a wistful smile before disappearing behind his Range Rover. Caitlin waved enthusiastically from the front seat.

  Priscilla waved back, a jolly smile covering the rush of foreboding that had besieged her like a conquering army. Why did it feel wrong to want what she wanted? She turned her back on Philip and his daughter, walking through the entrance of her hotel to put finality to this severed relationship.

  Once inside, Priscilla ducked out of view and waited until she was certain Philip had gone. She pushed back through the revolving door and turned to the left, walking briskly. She was amply glad her evening with Philip and his daughter had come to an end, but there was no way she could possibly sit in her hotel room, staring at the four walls all night, waiting for the sleep that would surely elude her.

  She slowed her pace as she came upon a place named The Curtain Call, a neighborhood bar with grandiose airs. She felt a magnetic pull as she drew near the door, propped open to take advantage of the mild spring evening.

  In the amber glow, she glimpsed further association to the Theater District in the framed eight-by-ten glossy photographs of famous actors that covered virtually every inch of wall space. The crowd, life-long patrons by the looks of them, glanced her way with tepid curiosity as she entered and walked the length of the bar, taking a stool that afforded a comfortable two-stool buffer between her and the others.

  Though she was not really one to hang out in bars with sad, lonely drunks, she had chosen this place as being perfectly agreeable to the task she had in mind. Once and for all, she would capture on paper the blissful sensation that takes hold after the first few sips of a cocktail.

  For years, she had struggled to dissect the elusive state that convinces brain and body the apex of cleverness and attractiveness had been reached, and the wittiness and clarity which one possesses in that particular moment is always accessible, if one could firmly grasp the essence of such an epiphany and hang on tightly. Priscilla was determined tonight would be the night she cracked the code; wasn’t she on the brink of a watershed event?

  Surely, with nothing to distract her, and with the emptiness of liberty to aid her, she would seize that fleeting frame of mind—somewhere between stone sober and wholly inebriated—and wrest it to the page, exposing the mystery of it forever. But first she had to make her mind a complete blank so no thoughts would interfere and cause her to stray from her course, as had always been the case in the past.

  “What can I get you?” asked the aging bartender, as he laid a napkin down in front of her.

  “A Manhattan,” she said without a moment’s hesitation, though she had never in her life had one. It was appropriate, if nothing else, to order the famous cocktail on her last night in the drink’s namesake. Besides, it was sophisticated, old fashioned and definitely potent enough to see her straight to her goal.

  “How do you want it?” the bartender asked as he reached for a bottle of bourbon, a low-end brand that almost guaranteed a headache.

  “Up, and make it Jack Daniels,” Priscilla said as she set her bag on the bar and rifled through it for her pen and notebook. She was not going to let the magic moment slip by unrecorded this time.

  She watched as the bartender shook her drink vigorously and poured the contents into a Martini glass. She slung the strap of her bag over one knee, making room for the lovely, dark honey-colored cocktail with the appealing red cherry at the bottom. Anything this pretty had to be good. With one glance, she was convinced it had the right chemical make up to induce crystalline revelations.

  Priscilla took the glass by its dainty stem and lifted it slowly to her lips to prevent the contents from sloshing over. The first sip of the deceptively inviting substance shocked her tongue with its potency.

  The whiskey, with its garnish of sweet vermouth, ravaged tongue and throat before landing with a burning thud in her stomach. She set the glass back down on the bar top while she catalogued the after-effects of her first Manhattan.

  The burning sensation wore off quickly, replaced by a curious urge to sample the formidable cocktail again. She brought the glass to her lips, more steadily this time, and took an ev
en braver sip. This time the effects registered in her legs, making them decidedly more relaxed, though in a rather alarming way.

  She placed the glass back on the napkin, carefully setting it dead center. She ran her finger down the cool glass and stem. It was remarkable; one more sip would possibly do the trick. She opened the notebook to an unused page, took the cap off her ballpoint pen, and set it on top. She was ready. She lifted the glass to her lips a third time and took a long, languid sip, like a goodbye kiss to a lover she was leaving behind.

  At first, she felt disappointed. But slowly a change began to take place. The corners of her mouth edged upward, forming a smile that owed its origins to an unshakable self-knowledge. She grasped the pen and sat poised, waiting for further enlightenment. But the only instruction she received from her brain was to take another sip.

  It was a moderate sip, one calculated not to disturb her perfectly honed mental state. She let the whiskey linger on her tongue, enjoying the taste she had first found harsh. She set the glass down and gazed at it affectionately. She had it, by God, right there in her mind’s eye. She saw the truth of what she sought as a whole piece of information, multi-faceted and Technicolor, as if seen through a kaleidoscope.

  The definitive answer was this: four sips of a well-mixed cocktail allowed one to view life in an unbiased state of mind. It had temporarily suspended the beliefs and sentiments of Priscilla Louise Vanderpool and allowed her to appreciate life’s intricacies with a Zen-like openness.

  For instance, she now saw her fellow patrons not as sad, lonely drunks, but as individuals who had known for longer than she the calming and meditative effects of a good drink. She glanced around the room and saw the vulnerability and bravery of these individuals, where before she had suspected weakness. How could she know what trials and tribulations they had each endured, only to end up relying on shallow barroom camaraderie to fill their nights?

  The bartender, whom she had initially written off as somewhat pathetically marking the last years of his life, listening to the sordid and trivial tales of his clientele, now seemed to her magically patient and non-judgmental.

  There was something to be learned from these people, her fellow human beings, something she had grossly overlooked in the past. The lesson was this: don’t be so quick to judge. And what applied to these folks surely applied to others in her life for whom she had not bothered to look beyond the surface.

  Naturally, Phil came to mind. But that was too easy; it didn’t take threading the cocktail needle to understand she had previously discounted his value. But she didn’t want to think about Phil just then. No, she wanted to put this new focusing device to a harder test. Frank: now there was a challenge.

  She sat back, arms folded across her chest as she imagined Frank standing right in front of her, filthy apron and crooked paper cook’s hat. Okay, she had to give him credit for the language barrier. It had to be hard, being in his shoes.

  If the tables had been turned, she doubted she could learn a foreign tongue half as well as he had. Still, no matter how difficult it was to blend into unfamiliar surroundings, she could never imagine herself being such a tyrant. But then again, it could just be a cultural thing.

  Having debated Frank’s shortcomings and finding him to be merely human, Priscilla rewarded herself with another sip. She was enjoying this little game of hers, an internal spin the bottle. She closed her eyes and took another stab at it. Instantly, the face of Tobias Jordan popped into her head and she relished the chance of getting an unbiased take on him.

  Well for starters, she might have been expecting too much from him. Just because he sat in her station a few times didn’t mean they had any kind of bond. So he happened to be the only famous person she had allowed herself to fantasize about; he had no way of knowing that. He had not taken part in the imaginary conversations she’d had with him about music, life, love. He could not be expected to behave the way he had in her fantasy.

  Priscilla reached for her cocktail and drank immoderately, leaving just a large swallow in the pointed bottom of the glass. She exhaled deeply, as though she were trying to expel her humiliation. It was embarrassing to admit she resented Tobias Jordan, and only because he hadn’t looked at her that first day in Frank’s and recognized her as his soul mate. She was no better than the average groupie, building him up in her head that way.

  No wonder the guy acted so strange and antsy; he never knew which female was going to lay claim to him. She couldn’t blame him for being so cold to her. But if that were the case, if he had erected a barrier to protect himself against delusional women like her, what could have possibly motivated him to come looking for her? She drained her drink and signaled for another.

  Priscilla watched with anticipation as the bartender placed her second Manhattan in front of her. By this time, she was so intent on examining Tobias Jordan’s bizarre behavior toward her, she had lost sight of her scientific experiment.

  She took a dainty sip of the liquid amber cocktail. She smiled to herself, believing erroneously that she was still in the rarified realm where she could unravel life’s riddles with piercing clarity.

  The truth was she had merely shifted downward to the level of intoxication that skews one’s perception, buoys one’s self-esteem without proof of worthiness and fosters unrealistic expectations. Nevertheless, she continued her in-depth evaluation of the events that had haunted her for the last several days.

  If Tobias Jordan had been looking for her, she reasoned unsteadily, what had been his purpose? He had no clue she wrote lyrics, so he couldn’t have come looking for what he had ultimately taken away.

  And what could’ve possibly provoked him to buy all her lyrics, lavishly offering her fifteen thousand dollars for the dubious privilege of hauling her millstone across town? It was a mystery she wouldn’t be able to fathom if she lived a hundred years. She shook her head and took another sip.

  Could there be, after all, a connection between Tobias Jordan and her that the rocker could not deny? Could he have been fighting the pull of their chemistry out of habit and the need for anonymity?

  Priscilla gazed down into her glass. She plucked the cherry out by the stem and plopped it whole into her mouth. Sweet, sickeningly sweet, but oddly satisfying as well, like dragging one’s finger along the side of a wedding cake, snatching a taste of the forbidden frosting that never tasted quite as good as it looked. This fantasy of what Tobias Jordan’s actions meant was of the exact same nature; enticing, but impossible for a hard-boiled realist like her to take seriously.

  As she was on the subject of men and their puzzling conduct—and they complain that women are hard to figure out!—she couldn’t help but take another critical look at Phil. If she was supposed to take him at his word, then he was plain out of his mind in love with her. More likely just infatuated, and only because he had been propelled toward his wife’s polar opposite by her cold-hearted rejection.

  Priscilla didn’t doubt for a moment Phil would drop to his knees in elation and gratitude if his wife told him she had changed her mind and wanted him to come back to her. And now that The Phoenix and Phil’s career were poised for a reprieve, what could be more natural than reconciliation?

  The woman in all those society page photos was no dummy; she certainly realized whatever she hoped to get out of a bankrupt Phil was far less than she could get by staying with him through more good times. Unless, of course, she had taken up with another lover already. Priscilla smiled to herself, a catty, malevolent smile, a devious grin that only jealousy could inspire.

  All right, she was big enough to admit that she was intimidated by Phil’s wife. It was one of the reasons she had never been willing to take Phil’s overtures seriously. The woman was gorgeous and sophisticated, and obviously made for a guy like Philip Glessner, architect extraordinaire.

  It was almost insulting that Phil would parody her by claiming to be interested in her. Maybe she resembled a high school classmate from the wrong side of the tracks who
he had a secret crush on for years.

  Maybe she represented not only a break from the world that had betrayed him, but perhaps he also felt as though he were performing a charitable act. Wasn’t that how those straight-laced, good-to-the-bone people thought? When one was feeling down, nothing warmed the cockles of their solid gold hearts like showing kindness to the downtrodden. The notion of being Phil’s charity case sickened her. She almost wished she had never met him.

  Priscilla reached for her glass and was shocked to find she had killed nearly two Manhattans in less than an hour. With horror she realized her pen and notebook were laying untouched, no new words of wisdom inscribed on the ruled page. She wracked her brain trying to recapture those fleeting insights, the pearls of truth that had seemed so compelling just minutes earlier.

  Uh…a small amount of alcohol allows a person to see with unbiased clarity… She stared at the blank page, willing her hand to record some earth-shaking revelations. But the hand lay stubbornly unresponsive.

  Damn, she thought, as she grappled with her failure to catch the tiger by the tail. She had felt so certain she was on to something concrete and irrefutable this time. How could she have let it slip by again? Why couldn’t she have held her concentration long enough to nail this quest, once and for all?

  With growing self-loathing, Priscilla watched in confusion as the bartender slid another Manhattan toward her. Was she so out of it that she couldn’t remember ordering a third drink? She needed another drink like she needed another man to think about.

  “From the gentleman at the end of the bar,” the bartender said in answer to Priscilla’s puzzled expression. They both turned in unison toward a curly-headed man in his late thirties, smug in his loden-green corduroy jacket and his high-school teacher sensibilities. He gave her an ingratiating smirk, one that caused the Kung Pao Shrimp to dance upwards in a threatening manner. The bartender left her to deal with her quandary as he freshened a scotch and soda at the other end of the bar.