“Why? You finally figured out the seven players with eleven letters in their last names?”
“I’m still working on that one,” I said, not exactly sure how to proceed.
“So why didn’t you just ask me? If you wanted to have a beer so badly?”
“I saw you walking a block ahead. I was just trying to catch up.”
“Okay,” Winston said. “So let’s have a beer.”
And he smiled.
We went to a place called O’Malley’s, which looked very much like what you would expect a place called O’Malley’s to look like. It had a pool table in the back, a dartboard in the corner, and a TV tuned to an Australian football match. It had two resident drunks, at least I assumed they were more or less regulars, since one of them had his head laid flat on the bar and the bartender wasn’t bothering to wake him. The other one Winston knew, because he said, “Hey, man,” and briefly clapped him on the back when we walked by.
“What’ll you have?” Winston asked after we took our seats at the bar.
“I’m buying,” I said.
“Hey, you did me a favor, remember?” Winston retorted.
Yes, I remembered. Enough to think Winston might do me a favor in return.
“A light beer,” I said.
Winston asked the bartender for two. Then he turned back to me.
“So, everything okay?” he asked. “You looked a little depressed the other day. Is it your kid? Isn’t she sick or something?”
I’d never told Winston about Anna, but word gets around, I suppose.
“No, it’s not that,” I said.
He nodded and watched as the bartender put two beers in front of us.
“I have this problem,” I said, finding a certain comfort in that word. Problems, after all, were manageable things. You had problems and then you figured out a way to solve them.
“Look, if it’s a pang of conscience about that night, forget it. Have you heard about any more computers being stolen? I told you I wouldn’t, and I haven’t.”
“Yes, I know,” I said.
“So what is it?”
Winston took a long sip of beer. I hadn’t touched mine yet — there was an ever-widening pool of water under the glass, making the bar beneath it look dark as blood.
“I did a stupid thing,” I said. “I went a little crazy. With a woman.”
Winston looked just a little confused. I understood—he was probably wondering why someone who wasn’t a friend in the strictest definition of the term was talking to him about other women, about things you talked only to best friends about.
“You had an affair or something?”
“Or something.”
“Okay. So, it’s over, or what?”
“It’s over, yes.”
“So what is it? You’re guilty about it. You wanted to unburden yourself? Fine. Don’t worry about it. Everybody in the office is having an affair. Even with each other. What do you think we talk about down in the mailroom? Who’s screwing who.”
I sighed. “It’s not that.”
“Okay,” Winston repeated. “So what is it?”
“Something happened.”
“What? She’s pregnant?”
“No. We were caught by someone,” I said.
“Huh?”
“In the hotel room.”
“Oh,” Winston said. The wife, he was thinking.
“A man came in and attacked us,” I said.
“What?”
“He jumped us as we were leaving the room. He robbed us and . . . raped her.”
I had Winston’s full attention now. Maybe he was still asking himself exactly why I was telling him all this, but at least he was interested in what I was saying.
“He raped her. In a hotel?”
“Yes.”
“What hotel?”
“Just a hotel. Downtown.”
“Fuck,Charles. What happened? Did he get away? They didn’t catch him?”
No, they didn’t catch him. In order to have to have caught him, they would have had to be told that he’d done something that necessitated his having to be caught.
“We didn’t report it,” I said.
“You didn’t report it.” Winston had fallen into the unfortunate habit of repeating every other thing I said. Probably because every other thing I was saying was a little hard to believe.
“Wecouldn’t report it,” I said, “understand?”
“Oh,” Winston said, finally comprehending the situation. “Yeah. Okay, sure. So he took your money and disappeared?”
“No. He didn't disappear.” I finally took a sip of beer — it tasted flat and warm. “That’s the problem.”
Winston looked confused again.
“He’s blackmailing us,” I said. “I guess that’s what you call it. Asking us for money so he won’t tell Deanna. My wife. And her husband.”
Winston sighed and shook his head. That's some situation you’ve got yourself into, this sigh said. I feel for you.
I wanted Winston to do more than feel for me. I wanted him to act for me. And that would take more than sympathy. It would take a kind of quid pro quo; it would take another kind of blackmail.
“So — did you pay him what he wanted?” Winston asked.
“Yes and no.”
“Well, did you or didn’t you?”
“I did. He wants more now.”
“Uh-huh,” Winston said, taking another sip of beer. “I guess that’s kind of par for the course, isn’t it. Don’t they always want more?”
“I don’t know. It’s the first time I’ve ever been blackmailed.”
Winston almost laughed. Then he caught himself and said: “Sorry, Charles. Really, it’s not funny, I know. It’s just that it’s kind of hard to imagine—I mean, you. In this kind of shit?”
He lifted his glass again and sucked down foam. “So . . . what are you going to do?”
Winston had finally reached the million-dollar question.
“I don’t know,” I said. “There isn’t much I can do. I can’t pay him. I don’t have the money.”
“Uh-huh. So you’re going to let him tell your wife,” he said, adding up all the variables but coming up with the wrong answer. “Sure — fuck him. She loves you, doesn’t she? So you fucked around — who hasn’t? She’ll forgive you.”
“I don’t think so, Winston. I don’t think she will forgive me. I don’t think she could. Not with our daughter and all. . . .”
I explained the rest. How Lucinda refused to let her husband know, either. How I felt I owed her that.
“Shit,” Winston said. Then, after a long moment of silence: “Been a great couple of months for you, Charles, hasn’t it?”
He was referring to losing the credit card account, I guessed — even the mail department must’ve weighed in on that one.
“So,” Winston said softly, “what do you do now?” as if asking himself that question, putting himself in that situation, maybe, and wondering what he'd do. And it’s possible that it was then, that very moment, that he finally understood why I’d asked him here, why I’d followed him four blocks in the freezing cold to get him to have a beer with me. Maybe because he said to himself, If it was me, I’d kick that blackmailer’s ass. I’d kill him. I would. Dismissing that as a reasonable alternative for me, of course, since I wasn’t exactly the violent type. No, you had to have a little muscle to do something like that, you had to have a little experience in these matters, gotten your hands dirty now and then, or at least your fists bloody. Didn’t you?
Winston put his glass down — midswallow he put it down and looked at me.
“What the fuck are you asking me?” he said. He’d finally put two and two together; he’d finally figured it out.