“You feel pretty good, too,” Julia went on, not really arguing with Nicole so much as reminding herself. “Oh, you may not feel so good the next morning, but who cares about the next morning? That’s then. This is now.” She looked longingly toward the long stone bar, as if to say she wouldn’t mind at all if she got drunk.
“No,” Nicole said once more, but she heard something in her voice she’d never expected to find there: hesitation. She’d smoked marijuana a few times, at Indiana and afterwards. She would have enjoyed it more, she thought, if it hadn’t felt as if she were lighting smudge pots in her lungs. What could be so different about alcohol? She’d been drinking wine – watered wine, but wine – with meals, and she hadn’t turned into a lush.
But your father did, said the stern voice in her mind. For the first time it sounded less authoritative than merely prim. Miss Priss, Frank had called her sometimes. At first it was affectionate, but later it gained an edge. Then he started adding, “You know, Nicole, people who preach like that usually do it because they’re afraid they’ll be tempted – and they’ll like it.” Not long after that, he was gone. Lady number two hadn’t ever been prim in her life, or sensible either.
Nicole couldn’t help it if she was congenitally sensible. Maybe that good sense was what she needed now, instead of blind abhorrence. Dad drank boilermakers, for heaven’s sake. A few cups of wine don’t even come close.
Do they?
“Can’t do it all the time,” Julia said, “but everybody needs to get drunk once in a while.”
Moderation in everything, including moderation. Nicole couldn’t remember where she’d heard that. She’d always thought it made good sense, but she’d never applied it to alcohol before. She’d been too busy running in the opposite direction – running away from the father figure, a therapist would say. So did it make sense now? God – gods – knew this wasn’t Los Angeles. Life here in Carnuntum was profoundly, sometimes unbearably, different.
Gods, yes. Liber and Libera had, somehow, granted her wish, her whine, her prayer. They’d brought her to Carnuntum. They were, as she had discovered to her dismay, god and goddess of wine. What would they think, what would they do, if they realized how she felt about their very own and most protected substance? Or had they known all along, and set her up for just this dilemma?
Hadn’t Christianity turned a lot of the old gods into devils? Right now, Nicole could see why. But she hadn’t felt anything bad in Liber or Libera, not in their faces on the plaque and not in the way they’d granted her prayer. So maybe it was a creeping evil – or maybe it was simple godlike benevolence. Be careful what you wish for, she’d heard said: you might get it.
She was, she knew, talking herself into something she would have rejected in horror a few days – or, heavens, was it weeks? – before. She had rejected wine, and what had that got her? A case of the runs that almost turned her inside out, and derision from everybody who heard about her drinking water.
“Well, maybe,” she heard herself say. “Maybe it’ll get the taste of that cursed clerk out of my mouth.” An excuse, an alibi – she knew as much. She also knew life was a bore, and an unpleasant bore at that.
Julia must have had a much more solid understanding of that than she did. The slave went over to the bar and filled two cups with wine, brought them back, and plunked one on the table in front of Nicole. Nicole stared at it. It was one of the cups she filled and washed and filled again all day long, brimful of the middle-grade wine. That was boldness on Julia’s part, mixed with prudence: not the cheap stuff if they were going to drink it neat, but not the expensive stuff either, since they were going to drink a lot.
Nicole reached out a hand that was gratifyingly steady and lifted the cup. With the same deep breath she’d have drawn just before she jumped into a lake of cold water, she touched it to her lips and sipped.
The wine wasn’t watered; they wanted it full strength, to get drunk the faster. It was almost as thick as syrup, and almost as sweet, too. But under that sweetness lay the half-medicinal, half-terrifying taste of alcohol.
Julia sighed and set down her own, emptied cup. “That’s so good,” she said. Her voice was low, throaty, sensuous. She might have been talking about something quite other than wine.
“Yes,” Nicole said, although she didn’t think it was particularly grand. Warmth filled her belly and spread slowly outward.
Julia tilted back her cup to catch the last of the wine, then rose to refill it. Politely, she picked up Nicole’s, too, only to set it down and give Nicole a look the dim lamplight only made more reproachful. “You haven’t finished yet, Mistress?” Beneath the words lay others: what are you waiting for?
What was Nicole waiting for? If she was going to do this, she wasn’t going to do it halfway. She gulped down the wine – dizzied, half staggered, nearly ready to gag on the fumes and the sweetness, but by damn she did it. She thrust the cup at Julia. Julia nodded approval, filled it up again, brought it back.
That one Nicole drained as fast as she could. “You haven’t finished yet, Julia?” she said, and laughed. It sounded too loud, as if she’d turned up the volume by mistake.
Julia laughed, too. Was she laughing because she thought it was funny, or because her owner had made a joke? Damn, Nicole thought. Her thoughts were turned up high, too. Idon’t care. Tomorrow I’ll care. Not tonight. No. Not tonight.
A swallow or two later, or maybe it was three, Nicole touched the tip of her nose. It seemed to have gone numb. That was funny – not big-laugh funny, not giggle funny. Funny funny. Iam getting drunk, she thought. It was wonderful. Marvelous. Fascinating.
And it was her turn to fill the cups. Getting up wasn’t bad, though the floor tilted underfoot. Walking straight was harder. Yes. Officer, she thought, I’m walking under the influence. She giggled.
So did Julia. If she found anything out of the ordinary in sitting down with her mistress and getting plastered, she didn’t let on. Nicole wondered how often she’d done it with Umma. As Nicole carried the wine back to the table, walking with great care so as not to spill it, she almost came right out and asked. She caught herself in the nick of time. Alcohol, she thought clearly and – all right, primly – makes you want to talk before you think. Such a clear thought, and so wise. She was proud of it.
If she hadn’t learned about talking jags from experience – if she hadn’t already had a good notion of them from memories of her father and from what she’d seen in the tavern – Julia would have taught her. The slave’s mouth ran and ran and ran.
Nicole had learned a long time ago that nodding every once in a while was enough to keep a drunk – in this case, Julia – going. Some of what the slave said was interesting in a lurid sort of way; Nicole found out more than she wanted to know about the intimate preferences of several of her regular customers. The one who liked his boys sweet and young, for example – the younger the better; and the one who’d buried or divorced three wives, not one of whom had ever given him an heir, because he couldn’t bring himself to enter them through the proper orifice; and…