In spite of my recent un-Kipster-like behavior, I didn’t fool myself that my default settings weren’t still firmly locked on self-destruct. It would take more than a few months of writing, monogamy, and noble impulses to declare the Kipster fully exorcised. I liked drama. I mean, what else were the chapel, Cutthroat, and Fox Hunt all about if not drama? I liked to complicate things and I was less than confident that the new me wasn’t more a function of lack of opportunity than a reflection of profound change.
No, as much as I liked the idea of having Renee with me, I knew leaving her in Brixton was the right thing to do. The right thing for me. For once, I needed things to be simple. I told Renee that I’d be going back to New York soon enough and that we’d make a vacation of it, over Christmas maybe. It wasn’t so much a lie as a fantasy, one she seemed willing to go along with so we might both get through the week until I left.
Now, with the first dim rays of the sun filtering through the gaps in the skyline, it occurred to me that this was when I’d normally be wrapping up my first writing session of the day and climbing back into bed with Renee for a few minutes before getting dressed to run with Jim. Okay, so I knew I would miss them, miss my routine, but I didn’t expect it to happen even before I got across the Hudson River. Hell, a few more minutes of this, I thought, and I’d be getting weepy for Stan Petrovic.
As I opened the door to the Liars Pub, a gaggle of chattering, Southern blue-hairs poured out past me and asked for directions to Radio City. Their tour bus to Branson must have missed a turn at St. Louis. But who was I to laugh at them, even a little bit? You teach at Brixton County Community College, you lose the privilege of looking down your nose at anyone but yourself.
“One for lunch?” the hostess asked, thumbing a stack of menus.
“I’m meeting someone. The reservation’s under Donovan.”
When the hostess looked down at her reservation sheet, I looked at her. Curvy, petite, and in her mid-twenties, she was dressed in a vintage clothing store cocktail dress-black, of course-over black heels that reeked of credit card debt. Her hair was jet black, her skin a shade of light mocha, her eyes almond-shaped but hazel. Her lips red and thick, her nose upturned, her breasts full, she was the most exotic-looking woman I’d seen in seven years.
“Yes, we have it, but I’m afraid Miss Donovan hasn’t yet arrived. Would you care to be seated or to wait at the bar?”
“Actress, dancer, painter, or writer?” I asked. This might have been the only time I posed the question without a motive more nefarious than curiosity. After all, no one who looked like her came to New York City for a career in hostessing. Nobody.
“Writer.”
I said, “You have my condolences.”
If she was offended, she didn’t show it. “Tell me about it.”
“This place used to really be something once.”
She sighed. “So I’ve heard.”
“You would have liked it,” I said.
“Not now.”
“Of course not, it’s a job.”
“It’s a corpse. No one likes working in a place that once was.”
“Almost as unpleasant as somebody who once was. I’ll be at the bar.”
I’d been so exhausted when I drove across the GWB and down to the hotel on 44th Street that nothing had penetrated. Nor did I get teary-eyed and gawky on the cab ride over here. Only when I made my way to the bar did it begin to sink in. Standing there, taking it all in gave me a sense of just how long I’d been away, of how isolated and insulated I’d been, and what this weekend might mean to me.
The Liars-no one who knew better called it by its full name-was a stone’s throw from the Flatiron Building and had been around for about a century. Back in the day, it used to be the kind of place where writers swapped stories about bigger-than-life characters like Runyon, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Hemingway. But now as I looked around I saw that the place was as artificial as Disneyland. It had become a theme park eatery that sold T-shirts and hot sauce. The banquettes bore the names of legendary writers on commemorative brass plaques. The Liars was a venue where gods and giants had been supplanted by tourists and the talentless. Even before I left New York, the Liars had become a bit of an insiders’ joke. Now it was just a joke. Not so different from me, really.
Given that Meg had booked me into the Algonquin, it came as no shock that she’d chosen the Liars for lunch. She seemed not to know what to do with me, fearing, I suppose, that I’d somehow melt down at the thought of eating or sleeping somewhere not haunted by literary ghosts. And why not? “Literary ghost” was a pretty apt description of me. I might have considered telling her that I would have preferred to stay in a boutique hotel and to lunch at a restaurant that didn’t sell souvenirs. The very notion of a chic hotel and three-star restaurant had broad appeal to someone from Brixton County. And while the Algonquin, a lovely old hotel, was more than several steps up in class from Hendrick’s Motor Court or the Red Roof Inn in New Prague, it wasn’t exactly hopping. The most exciting thing about the Algonquin was the cat that lived in the lobby. Maybe that was the point. Until I signed those contracts, Meg meant to keep me as far away as possible from hot new places and dangerous old haunts like the Chelsea Hotel. I didn’t like it, but I guess I understood her reasoning.
I took note of many things as I stood there nursing a pint of ale. Meg was always late for our meetings. She liked drama too, but only of her own making. I noticed too that several additions had been made to the caricature sketches of writers, editors, and publishers lining the walls. I saw the sketch of Moira Blanco that hadn’t been there seven years ago and the one of the recently deceased Haskell Brown. I wondered if the cops had made any headway on his murder, but didn’t dwell on the subject. I wasn’t a hypocrite and it was Brown’s homicide that had cleared my path. I noticed sketches of Bart Meyers and Nutly and Marty Castronieves. Mostly I noticed the one of me that wasn’t there and winced at how much that hurt.
Nor did it escape me that the hostess wasn’t close to being the hottest woman in the place. At the bar alone there were five women, most of them in their early twenties, who, even on a no-makeup-bad-hair day, would have been Miss Brixton County. And no two of them were attractive in the same way. I’d forgotten that New York City was a city of St. Pauli Girls. That at any one time in any bar, on a subway car, or in a movie theater line, there were women, young and old, whose varied charms and looks were even more alluring than Renee’s. Renee had a kind of regional perfection, if that makes any sense. Yet, at that moment, I found myself missing her. Then Meg walked in.
When we first met, Meg’s look was sex neutraclass="underline" not androgynous, neutral. She was plain faced, brown eyed, thin lipped, and built like a pencil, so she depended on her black-on-black wardrobe and take-no-prisoners attitude to lend her an air of authority. We hit it off almost immediately, though, to this day, I’m unsure why. I liked that she was immune to my charms and me to hers. It was just healthier that way. Funny thing is, our taste in women was very similar: we liked them, a lot of them, and often. It was one of the few things we shared, actually. Meg was unknowable. I knew about her. I knew she was loyal and dogged, but not why. True, I’d earned her a lot of money once, but that was yesterday’s news and in New York publishing, yesterday was ancient history. I never knew much about her upbringing, her family, or what was going on inside her head and she never volunteered information. Still, we’d somehow managed to love each other.