78: cherry
"I thought you'd be home tomorrow," Bertie says.
"I thought you'd be... British," I stammer, as though it's some vindicating accusation, and he throws back his head and laughs. It sounds like a crow picking his way across the ice.
"Rocky," he says, dripping weariness and tact, as though that's an explanation. And perhaps it is; there's something vaguely, threateningly European about his manner. He's still standing at readiness like I'm about to attack, and I wonder if I should.
"Well. Welcome. Or I guess welcome home," I say darkly, and he grins appreciatively.
"Where's the man of the house?" Bertie asks, and fills my glass. I can't tell him that I don't know, so I shrug in a manner I hope is both brusque and nonchalant, taking it from him greedily. We clink and drink, and I've downed mine before I see him savoring it, holding it in his mouth. I feel young and brutish and dumb. I like it.
"I like your hair." There's a picture of him over the mantle that I never thought to ask about: His hair in that one is long, hanging in loose curls from a sloppy strap at his neck.
"I had no idea it would be so curly when I cut it. I mean," he says with the gesture of a bow, "Thank you." He looks me up and down, churlish and remote. "I have to say I'm surprised. You're not what I pictured."
"You're exactly how I've pictured you," I say, and my voice is hollow enough that I wonder if he'll know how far back that goes, but he just laughs again, and nods.
"He's usually so predictable."
"I haven't seen any... I don't know what his usual type is." But I do: He's standing in front of me, all grown up.
"Well, I'm sure you're delightful."
"How long are you staying?"
He shakes his head warningly at this breakdown in tact. "Until the wind changes, Jimmy."
"It's a busy season. The new paperback is coming out, you know."
He does.
I put my glass down, unsure of where to go from here, and he surprises me, taking my hands in his as though we're going to squaredance.
"Let's smoke, outside, before he catches us. I won't tell if you won't." I shake my head, unsure, but he clucks at me and smiles without winking, and before I know it he's drawn me out, onto the back patio, and he's lighting my cigarette.
"The problem with El Niño is that he doesn't really believe we exist. We're just fodder. Cardboard figures for us to move around."
That's what you are, I think savagely. Old and tired as you are. "You didn't always think that, did you?"
He takes a long draw on his cigarette and shakes his head, ruminating. "No, I don't guess I did. I'm not sure I really think it now."
"What do you do, Bertie?"
"I play my music and I take pictures. I went to Burning Man, it was a drag. I've been in Venice. It smells like a wet dog."
"How long were you there?"
"Long enough to love it. Do you travel?"
Just for readings and conventions. Before that, nothing. I know nothing about the world, not really. "I don't really like to travel," I say instead. "I like comfort. I like home." This last with a gesture around the place, up toward the house on a rolling curve around to the yard, the pool.
"It's a lovely old place, isn't it? Horrifying when we bought it, but he does love a fixer-upper."
I think about dashing the champagne in his face, but there's something in it that I can't stop looking at. The cleft in his chin is less pronounced than mine or Xaime's, but he puts it to better use. He hefts the bottle again, finishing it off.
"I wasn't planning on looking for him, to say goodnight. Strange that he's disappeared, though."
"We can all have breakfast, in the morning," I say, and look up toward the bedroom.
"You're not really tired, are you? I was sort of looking forward to breaking open one of his bottles of billion-year-old tequila."
"He'll kill us."
"I assure you that he won't," says Bertie. For the first time I feel like I'm not being interviewed by a future stepmother, and simultaneously realize that this is A) A pretty fucked-up way to feel about him and B) Exactly what he intended. But his tone now is, while still complicit, not unctuous. For a moment I feel like we're at play in a castle, all alone, afraid to speak for echoes.
"Fine," I say. "But you're taking the heat."
Bertie sets them up in a straight line, using every shot glass in the kitchen. I stand at one end, staring down them like an Electric Company video about industrial production. The line goes on forever. At the end of the line he's standing there happily, he's blurry but I can still see him; the tuxedo tie over his bare chest like black diamonds, and the open shirt.
"We'll work our way toward each other. Down, or up considering on where you're standing. Five points for every shot, ten if you down it, and the first man to waver has to shoot from the bottle."
"Do we have to have points?"
"You have to have some way to measure your success, Jamie."
"Jim. Jimmy. It's Jimmy."
"Have it your way."
"Maybe I will, Bertie." I feel brave, and my breath quickens. I hear the onrushing clash of calamity in my ears but I still can't see what direction it's coming in.
With every shot, he looks less like a cartoon fox villain threatening peaceful forest creatures, and more like I imagine the villains from James Bond movies would be, if I'd ever seen one. Bertie sheds the tuxedo jacket and pulls his shirttails out, flipping back the cuffs. It makes me feel like a supermodel, just to be here in this stainless-steel kitchen, drinking shots without flipping the cups like my young collegiate neighbors in the studio flat taught me to do. Every shot comes with some bogus quotation.
"It's very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present," he says in some weird Hamptons accent, and we drink.
"History puts a saint in every dream," he says, and we drink.
"Never had a Cherry Valance of my own," he says, winding down. Getting slower. But I don't want him to fade, so I don't call for the extra drink.
"What does that even mean?" I ask, and he grabs me by the hands, pulling me out of the kitchen and away from the limes and the salt and the infinite line of infinite glass, toward the CD player, toward new things and new music I've been missing.