We settled into a booth, finally, and a waitress came over.
Vernon drummed his fingers on the table and said, ‘Let me see – I’ll have a… Vodka Collins.’
‘For you, sir?’
‘A whiskey sour, please.’
The waitress left and Vernon took out a pack of ultra-lite, low-tar, menthol cigarettes and a half-used book of matches. As he was lighting up a cigarette, I said, ‘So, how’s Melissa?’
Melissa was Vernon’s sister; I’d been married to her for just under five months back in 1988.
‘Yeah, Melissa’s all right,’ he said and took a drag from the cigarette. This involved drawing on all the muscle power in his lungs, shoulders and upper back. ‘I don’t see her that often, though. She lives upstate now, Mahopac, and has a couple of kids.’
‘What’s her husband like?’
‘Her husband? What are you, jealous?’ Vernon laughed and looked around the bar as if he wanted to share the joke with someone. I said nothing. The laughter died down eventually and he tapped his cigarette on the edge of the ashtray. ‘The guy’s a jerk. He walked out on her about two years ago, left her in the shithouse.’
I was certainly sorry to hear this, but at the same time I was having a bit of a problem working up a plausible picture of Melissa living in Mahopac with two kids. As a consequence, I couldn’t really make a personal connection to the news, not yet at any rate, but what I could picture now – and vividly, intrusively – was Melissa, tall and slender in a creamy silk sheath dress on our wedding day, sipping a Martini in Vernon’s apartment on the Upper West Side, her pupils dilating… and smiling across the room at me. I could picture her perfect skin, her shiny straight black hair that went half-way down her back. I could picture her wide, elegant mouth not letting anyone get a word in edgeways…
The waitress approached with our drinks.
Melissa had been smarter than anyone around her, smarter than me, and certainly smarter than her older brother. She’d worked as the production co-ordinator of a small cable TV guide, but I’d always pictured her moving on to bigger and better things, editing a daily newspaper, directing movies, running for the Senate.
After the waitress had gone, I lifted my drink and said, ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
‘Yeah. It’s a shame.’
But he said it like he was referring to a minor earthquake in some unpronounceable Asian republic, like he’d heard it on the news and was just trying to make conversation.
‘Is she working?’ I persisted.
‘Yeah, she’s doing something, I think. I’m not sure what. I don’t really talk to her that much.’
I was puzzled at this. On the walk to the bar, and during Vernon’s search for the right booth, and as we ordered drinks and waited for them to arrive, I’d been having photo-album flashes of me and Melissa, and of our little slice of time together – like that one of our wedding day in Vernon’s apartment. It was psychotronic, skullbound stuff… Eddie and Melissa, for example, standing between two pillars outside City Hall… Melissa doing up lines as she gazes down into the mirror resting on her knees, gazes down through the crumbling white bars at her own beautiful face… Eddie in the bathroom, in various bathrooms, and in various stages of being unwell… Melissa and Eddie fighting over money and over who’s a bigger pig with a rolled-up twenty. Ours wasn’t a cocaine wedding so much as a cocaine marriage – what Melissa had once dismissively referred to as ‘a coke thing’ – so, regardless of whatever real feelings I may have had for Melissa, or she for me, it wasn’t at all surprising that we’d only lasted five months, and maybe it was surprising that we’d even lasted that long, I don’t know.
But anyway. The point here and now was – what had happened with them? What had happened with Vernon and Melissa? They had always been very close, and had always played major roles in each other’s lives. They had looked out for each other in the big bad city, and been each other’s final court of appeal in relationships, jobs, apartments, décor. It had been one of those brother-sister things where if Vernon hadn’t liked me, Melissa probably would have had no hesitation in just dumping me – though personally, and if I’d had any say in the matter, as the boyfriend, I would have dumped the older brother. But there you go. That hadn’t been an option.
Anyway, this was ten years later. This was now. Things had obviously changed.
I looked over at Vernon as he took another Olympic-sized drag on his ultra-lite, low-tar, menthol cigarette. I tried to think of something to say on the subject of ultra-lite, low-tar, menthol cigarettes, but I just couldn’t get Melissa out of my head now. I wanted to ask him questions about her, I wanted a detailed up-date on her situation, and yet I wasn’t sure what right I might have – if any – to information here. I wasn’t sure to what extent the circumstances of Melissa’s life were any of my business any more.
‘Why do you smoke those things?’ I said finally, fishing out my own pack of unfiltered Camels. ‘Isn’t it just a lot of effort for almost no return?’
‘Sure, but it’s about the only aerobic exercise I get these days. If I smoked those things,’ he said, nodding at my Camels, ‘I’d be on a life-support machine by now – but what do you want, I’m not going to give up.’
I decided I would try and get back to talking about Melissa later on.
‘So, what have you been doing, Vernon?’
‘Keeping busy, you know.’
That could only mean one thing – he was still dealing. A normal person would have said I work for Microsoft now or I’m a short-order cook at Moe’s Diner. But no – Vernon was keeping busy. Just then it struck me that maybe Vernon’s idea of helping me out was going to be an offer of some cut-price blow.
Shit, I should have known.
But then, had I really not known? Wasn’t it nostalgia for the old days that had prompted me to come here with him in the first place?
I was about to make some wisecrack about his obvious aversion to respectable employment, when he said, ‘Actually, I’ve been doing some consultancy work.’
‘What?’
‘For a pharmaceutical corporation.’
My eyebrows furrowed and I repeated his words with a question mark at the end.
‘Yeah, there’s an exclusive product range coming on-stream at the end of the year and we’re trying to generate a client base.’
‘What is this, some sort of new street language, Vernon? I’ve been out of the scene for a long time, I know, but…’
‘No, no. Straight up. In fact’ – he looked around the bar for a moment, and then went on in a slightly lower tone – ‘that’s what I wanted to talk to you about, this… creative problem you’re having.’
‘I-’
‘The people I work for have come up with an amazing new substance.’ He reached into his jacket pocket and took out his wallet. ‘It’s in pill form.’ From the wallet he produced a tiny plastic sachet with an air-lock seal across the top. He opened it, held the sachet with his right hand and tapped something out into the palm of his left hand. He held this hand up for me to see. In the centre of it was a tiny white unmarked tablet.
‘Here,’ he said. ‘Take it.’
‘What is it?’
‘Just take it.’
I opened my right hand and held it out. He turned his left hand over and the little white pill fell into my palm.
‘What is it?’ I said again.
‘It doesn’t have a name yet – I mean it’s got a laboratory tag, but that’s just letters and a code. They haven’t come up with a proper name for it yet. They’ve done all the clinical trials, though, and it’s FDA-approved.’