Mary's supposed to meet Eddy and me at the bar by seven o'clock, so when I see her come through the door I know it's her even though she's changed her hair again. She's with her friend Jeanne from the West Side who wears ankle-length dresses and thinks she's some kind of Earth Mother type. Jeanne's always talking about women and their rights and the Wicca cult she belongs to somewhere north of Westchester, and I figure Jeanne must have heavy legs because I've seen a lot of women go "Earth Mother" because of their legs. Mary's told me that Jeanne is a rare and special person, a "diamond in the rough," a font of wisdom and arcane information, untainted by anything as pedestrian as attending school or gaining professional certification. Mary doesn't come right out and say it, but she's taken up Jeanne because a small part of Mary reserves room for the exotic, and a large part of Mary patrols the outer borders of herself through the lives of those who appear to live there.
"We did it," Mary says, making her way through the happy-hour crowd, snapping her fingers over her head with a move that is vaguely Continental and somewhat out of place. I'm not sure what she means when she says, "We did it," though after she starts in on Eddy about the tax question on Tuesday (which I didn't even know was a tax question), it's clear she's talking about law school and graduation and how we, meaning Mary, Eddy, and I, had somehow gotten through the bar exam.
"You can't deduct those items on a state return," Eddy says, his voice loud with intent but thin with uncertainty, the two of them facing off on something ridiculous about credits and estates, while Jeanne just stands there trying to look enigmatic and poised and peaceful all at the same time. "And that's got nothing to do with the 'Rule Against Perpetuities,' " Mary says, and I wonder what it is about law students that compels them to test one another in their relentless quest for the simple certitude of being right.
Behind Jeanne, a few stools down the bar, there's a kid with a Mao hat with a red star above the bill. He's been on a jag for hours, saying he's one of the chosen few because he goes to Harvard, preaching to no one in particular about the proletariat and the working man and Labor's failure to give Management what it really deserves. He looks around for somebody to bother and I give him a don't-even-try-it look, but before I can ask Jeanne about the summer solstice and what really happens on the shortest night of the year, the Mao-kid's got his face over her shoulder and he's complaining about lawyers and how they're completely fucked, with their money and the way they screw society. I figure I might have to do something about this, nothing chivalrous, just the normal mind-your-own-business stuff, but Jeanne just stands there and listens to him as if she's not put off by it, all the time smiling her hippie-bliss smile as if the Mao-kid were some kind of noble and savage entertainment.
Later, after Eddy has the good sense to get us to the back room where we can sit in overstuffed leather booths and order from walk-about waitresses, Jeanne says people like the Mao-kid are just "young souls" who haven't been reincarnated more than a few times and that "old souls," meaning herself, of course, have a responsibility to lead them gently through experience. It's all such a crock that I look at Eddy with my eyes doing the 180-roll-around-the-ceiling thing, but Eddy likes this stuff about old souls and young souls, and he and Mary ask Jeanne what they are, and I wonder what's the big deal about having been around the block a couple of thousand times.
Mary orders another drink and doesn't hesitate or debate the big "yes" or "no," or whether she's going to have some sugar-laden, syrupy, doesn't-taste-like-liquor drink. Mary just orders gin straight up and straight out, because Mary always knows what she wants, whether it's a drink or something big, as in the "big picture," which for Mary is a very big picture, and which, at present, has little to do with men, since she's slotted a man for herself somewhere down the road, having carefully plotted exactly how she intends to proceed successfully along the treacherous path of life among adults.
Mary's going to work downtown in a big firm. That's what she's wanted to do forever because that's what her father does, and there's something in those muscular, hard-featured WASP girls that makes them want to be like their fathers. Mary says she'll gladly endure the forced camaraderie of late nights with bleary-eyed associates, driven by caffeine and ambition, for the prestige of being a young lion on the street-not to mention the perks of young boys who'll pick up and deliver her photocopies and bring around fresh coffee and sweets in the late afternoon. "Those are just some of the accoutrements," Mary says, and Mary wants all kinds of accoutrements, and being brilliant and having been raised the way she was raised, she'll probably get all of it and not give a damn about what the less than brilliant students used to say about her. They were the ones who called her hard and shallow because she made no excuses for her ambition, but just went her own way, distinguishing herself from the others, who, despite themselves, didn't know what they wanted, but out of fear, or insecurity, or some blind passion for growing up on time, acted cocksure and arrogant so as not to acknowledge their own insecurities concerning the prospects for their own driven futures. There were a lot of students like that in school. I'd say there was a floating constant of idiots, myself included, who were intermittently struck dumb by the chronic arrogance of apparent control-the constant itself comprising different people from time to time, particularly at semester's end when the number grades had the deleterious effect of knocking the underpinnings out from under many, who then, humbled and chastened, rationalized away the importance of professional success in favor of the "more important" things in life-things like an appreciation for art or nature or loved ones-pretending to be deep, even eccentric, because they'd been marginalized, driven to the outer rim of credibility, to the arena of quiet reflection, having slipped so badly along the fault line of uncertainty where existentialism and bad grades meet.
We order more drinks and listen to the Bobby Short look-alike try to sound like Nat King Cole, while Jeanne tells us about the power of the gems she carries in a small velvet pouch. Mary listens with the same unaffected interest she shows everybody, and I imagine Mary at work on her first day and how she'll know what to say when she greets lawyers and bosses in corridors filled with semi-important people.
Mary and I both made the Law Review. Everyone expected her to make it, and nobody expected me to make it. In fact, the gang I ran with the first year acted like I'd somehow betrayed them when I made it and they didn't. At first I was embarrassed by it, but then one day in the beginning of second year Professor Kohler, this nondescript little guy with huge glasses, called on me to brief some case I'd never seen before, and I fumbled over words that made no sense until I admitted that I was unprepared. Then Bob Bradley, who sat behind me, and who'd been a Green Beret, leaned over his desk and said something about "the kid on Law Review" not knowing his cases, clicking his tongue with that "tut-tut-tut" thing kids do when they're being real assholes. I just turned around and told him to fuck off. I said, "Fuck off, Bob Bradley," and Kohler heard me and looked at me, and I didn't even feel bad about it because I'd had enough of Bob Bradley's envy. It was about that time that Mary and I became friends. She said: "Don't let the bastards get you down," which is one of those WASP things WASPS say when they're calling on that stiff-upper-lip stuff.
Jeanne continues to tell us what her gems can do. She says that thousands of people are using them to change the world for the better. Eddy fingers a stone, and when the waitress comes by I ask her if she's heard about how people are going to change the world by using stones. The waitress looks at me like I'm crazy. She thinks I'm just another jerk customer who's drinking and saying stupid things. I want to tell her I wasn't kidding, that the girl with the round face and the Oriental dress is the one who's really crazy. But it's over so quickly with the waitress putting the glasses down and fingering the money that I can't explain myself, and I watch her walk away with her muscular legs and small body and Dutch-boy haircut. Then Eddy asks, "How do these gems do all this good stuff?" and Jeanne starts in on magnetic poles and higher consciousness and the secrets of the pyramids, and Mary just looks at me and whispers, "Isn't she a kick?"
Outside, in a foyer with a spiral staircase, kids no older than ourselves, dressed in tuxedos and gowns, climb the staircase to a ballroom from where I can hear the first sounds of music in the bass that rumbles over the ceiling and down the walls.
"Where are they going?" I ask, and Eddy tells me about the private club the owners run upstairs for people with money and old names.
"Money," I say.
"New money," he says. "Only the names have to be old," and he places the gem he's holding in the small velvet pouch that's open on the table.
Eddy's a strange guy, but he's a good-looking guy, too. People say he looks like Fred Astaire, all pressed and clean, distinguished, a little older than his years, everything about him having been compacted, smoothed, and polished, if not by the passage of time, then by that kind of experience usually reserved for the wealthy which makes them shine and cut figures as they age toward some imperishable beauty of self-justification. But there's a lot more to Eddy than the mechanics of manners or style. He's a kind person, and he's not even rich. He's just a middle-class kid from New Jersey who wants to be a priest, and in two weeks he leaves for a seminary somewhere in Upstate New York where he'll live in an old Jesuit mansion with about thirty other men and do whatever priests do when they live together. When I first met him, I asked him what he planned to do after graduation. I figured he'd work in some small family firm and handle the minor problems of wealthy widows with blue hair and black topcoats. But then he told me what he was going to do, and I coughed a few times and said, "Oh, yeah. Jesuits. I've heard of them." I didn't let on that I thought it was an unusual career move. Later he told me that I was the only person he'd told outside of his parents and his single old aunt who gave him money to enjoy himself. I asked him why he'd confided in me, and he said he'd done it because he wanted to get to know me. I said, "Well, then, let's get drunk," which we did that very day and most days since, he drinking his Manhattans and I drinking my Scotch; he never getting looped and I always getting looped.
Eddy's a loner, although he used to hang around with a group who looked like the guys with precise diction and soft bodies who sang in their college glee club. He says he liked them, but not really, because they got together more for self-protection than for reasons of friendship, and that underneath their talk about opera and bridge there was a cynicism and a deep unhappiness. Eddy figured I was a loner, too, which is true as far as it goes, though not altogether true, since I've always wanted to belong to a group of friends in the same way that kids in high school want to belong to a clique. "Clicks and circles," I'd say, and it was the phonetic shorthand I used for the mitochondrial activity of social cells about which I and a few others floated freely, though not wholly free, our movements and sometimes our perceptions being necessarily affected in the shadows of envy of what others did without us.
The waitress comes again and, except for Jeanne, we order without any thought for the amount we're drinking. Jeanne has switched to tonic water, and she just sits there trying very hard not to look like some kind of personified indictment.
"I can't believe she didn't invite you," Mary says, and she's talking about Nicole Caravaggio's party, to which she and Eddy and just about everybody else had been invited, and which I crashed with a flourish of bad judgment.
"She was pissed," I say. "I figured it had to be some kind of oversight," and I say all of this knowing that popularity meant less to me than getting drunk.
"It was a terrible party," Mary says.
"Eddy ran me drinks out to the car on the half-hour," I say, because I left the party very soon after Nicole asked me to leave, a request to which I responded with some Scripture about the stone the builders rejected becoming the cornerstone. Bob Bradley, the former Green Beret, who'd never forgiven himself for not making the Law Review, helped Nicole get me out of her house, which wasn't a difficult thing to do since I didn't want a scene in which I'd end up looking worse than everybody else.
"We used to say he'd be the next senator from Missouri," Mary says about Bob Bradley, because Bob Bradley was older and from St. Louis and had that take-charge look of competence one imagines in Green Berets and senators.
"Well, there was no reason for Nicole to snub you," Mary says, though I knew there were reasons, because I'd said some things, and they were unkind things, and having said them I was an easy person for Nicole to hate.Copyright© 2003 by Michael Hogan