I glanced over to a table in the corner, where a man a few years younger than me was engrossed in conversation with a younger woman. They were both smiling, seemingly at ease in a fashion that admittedly filled me with a poison sting of jealousy. I looked back at Vincent, and took a long slug of my drink, then another.
“You think they’re married?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I told him.
“Believe me, they’re not.” Vincent smiled. “Not to each other, at least. You know what they’re doing?”
I polished off my drink. Vincent seemed to approve. “What are they doing?” I asked.
“They’re walking the line,” he said. “A drink after work, they get home a little late. ‘Honey, I got a call just as I was about to leave. Sorry about that.’ Dinner, put the kids to bed, watch some TV, everything is fine. They walked the line, and they got away with it.”
I was having a little trouble following what Vincent was saying. Another round of drinks had miraculously appeared. Though I usually stop at one, my mouth was dry, and soon I was nearly done with my second.
“…matter of degrees,” Vincent was saying. I felt hot, and a little nauseous. I undid my top button and loosened my tie.
“Go back,” I said, surprised by how much my voice was slurring.
“All I’m saying is that we all have our little transgressions,” Vincent added, nodding with self-satisfaction. “Big ones, little ones. Who cares? All that matters is getting away with it.”
“But what about—” I started, in a voice not quite my own.
“You all right?” he asked me.
“I’m fine.” But, in fact, that wasn’t true. When I moved my head, it felt as though the contents of a swimming pool were sloshing around inside. I blinked, and saw that the lights of the bar had begun to undulate, fragment, and generally indulge in an orgy of visual insubordination.
“You don’t look fine,” Vincent said. “Maybe we better get out of here.”
He helped me to my feet. I hadn’t realized that I needed to be helped, but there it was. I teetered, wiped the sweat from my forehead, and nearly fell over. Through the fish-eye vantage of double vision I could detect that I was beginning to make a scene.
“No worries,” Vincent said to out waitress, who had arrived with the bill and a look of concern that shifted to impatience when I nearly fell into her. “My friend here seems to have come down with something. I’m going to get him home.”
We were in a car, Vincent’s car. He was laughing and talking about one of his girlfriends. Rain seemed to be coming down on us, streaking and pooling on the window by my face, but I couldn’t be sure. The town passed by, completely unfamiliar to me. I could have been in Kansas City; I could have been in Rome. I could barely see.
“You enjoying that little pill I slipped you?” Vincent asked me when we were stopped at a red light. “Boy, you made quite an impression back there. Don’t think they’ll be serving you drinks anytime soon.”
For some reason this struck him as inordinately funny, and his laughter echoed in my ears as we drove on. I had the impression that we were someplace in the warehouse district when we stopped on a deserted side street. Sam came around, opened my car door, and helped me to my feet on the (wet?) pavement.
“You slipped me something at the bar,” I managed to grunt.
“Smart boy,” he said, one arm around me, half-carrying me to the doorway of a building.
“Don’t want to,” I slurred.
“Come on now,” Sam insisted. “Be a good boy.”
There were some stairs, fluorescent lights. No people. I could have done with some people.
I found myself on a sofa in a spare little office, with the lights of downtown sparkling like Christmas trees through the horizontal gaps in the blinds. I slouched back, my clothes soaked through with sweat, while Vincent was doing something at a near-empty desk.
The phone. He was talking on the phone. He pushed a pretentious pen set to one side as he opened the briefcase, still engaged in conversation, nodding, not smiling.
I entertained myself for a moment or two by trying to remember when last I had felt so out of control. I hadn’t been much of a drinker in college, or anytime after. Maybe during one of the lengthy arguments Barbara and I had before our split, those eternal jousting matches that I always lost simply because Barbara would declare me the loser. I sat up a little straighter, my adrenaline burst of irritation serving to focus my senses at least a little.
Vincent hung up the phone. “Hey, look,” he said.
He tilted the briefcase so I could see it. It was full of cash, neatly bundled.
“Forty grand,” he said, giving me a lizard smile. “Big payout on that shopping complex I was telling you about. I wonder how much of it the I.R.S. is going to take when I declare it.”
He froze, staring at me, waiting for my reaction. Then he burst out laughing.
“Problem is, I need to find a way to launder it squeaky clean. You know anything about that?”
I shook my head.
