Absent Friends

That Phil and Marian couldn't resist some sniping had been glaringly apparent two days ago, when, drink unfinished, Marian had stood, scowled, and strode away, leaving Phil alone in the damn foodie bar in SoHo that had been her choice in the first place. They'd done something they'd spent decades avoiding: they'd met alone, Phil and Marian face-to-face. They had to talk, Marian had said when she called.

Harry Randall, then, was still alive, and who knew how many more pieces he was planning, what he might say? Randall's last story had convinced Marian (and how many others? and how many of them did he give a damn about, besides Sally?) that Phil had been cheating Sally from the beginning. The joke was this: everyone else was chasing the money—how deep was Phil Constantine in? what was it he was deep into?—but Marian had higher things on her mind.

“You lied to her,” she sniffed, denouncing him over their drinks (beer for him, and though he generally preferred his beer in a glass, with Marian he made a point of drinking from the bottle; a seabreeze, whatever the hell that was, for her).

He hadn't wanted to meet her, except that he'd had some mad thought that if he could explain to Marian, she could make Sally understand. But as soon as he saw Marian's straight-backed progress through the room (God, did this woman stride everywhere, did she never just walk?), her turquoise and coral earrings (likely picked up at some tony Free Tibet fund-raiser), and her unsmiling face (this he knew was hard for her, her natural inclination being to set others at ease: but not him, never him), he wondered what spell of insanity had made him think she might ever be on his side.

“I lied, Marian,” he agreed, and drank some beer.

“How could you do that? She loves you!”

“Marian, the whole thing is none of your fucking business.” He watched her flush as she took a sip of her pink drink.

“After all she's been through. How could you?”

“Is the point of this meeting to tell me what a shit I am?”

“No!” She sat up even straighter and glared at him. “I'm here so you can tell me the truth.” She made it sound like it was an opportunity for him, an offer he was lucky to get.

“Why?”

She blinked, and he almost laughed.

“Screw you, Marian. I don't owe you anything.”

“You owe Sally.”

“Sally and I—” But there was nothing about himself and Sally that he was interested in telling Marian, so he stopped.

“The truth might help you.” As though pointing out something he hadn't thought of.

“Help me what? Help me how? Fix things between me and Sally? Is that what you want? To help us patch things up?”

That was a lie she couldn't tell, and to her credit she said nothing.

He signaled for another beer, put his near-empty bottle down so that the ring it made added to the chain of rings he was forging left to right across the tabletop. “I got the money from Jimmy McCaffery,” he suddenly heard himself say. And this time he did laugh.

Her face darkened. “You think that's funny?”

Phil shook his head, still grinning, and lifted the beer again, finishing it in one long pull. He resisted the impulse to wipe his mouth on his sleeve. What was funny was this: even he, even now, if for half a second he glanced away, didn't keep an eye on himself, look what happened: he found he'd wandered halfway down the midway and was buying, from some quack whose booth was all tinkly music and colored lights, the patent medicine idea that the truth could set you free.

He grabbed himself by the shoulder and marched himself back through the sawdust and the horseshit. He'd already said it, so he might as well say it again. “From McCaffery,” he repeated. “But I never knew anything else about it.”

“How is that possible?”

“You want to know how it's possible? Or you want me to say it's not and I'm lying?” She didn't answer, so he just went on and told her the way it had been, how it was possible. “He said he felt like it was his fault.”

“His fault? His fault how?” she asked, and Phil had the feeling she was speaking without breathing.

“Keegan was his friend. He should've been able to do something. I told him that was nuts, the guy was inside, but he wouldn't give it up.”

“That's all he meant?”

“That's all he said.”

She did breathe now, her chest rising, falling. “And the lie? Why lie about the money?”

“McCaffery thought it was the only way—the State story—that Sally would take the money.”

“Where did the money come from?”

Phil grinned. “Well, Marian, that's the big question everyone's asking, isn't it?”

“Tell me!”

“Tell you.” Unbelievable. Hadn't she heard what he'd said? What he'd admitted to? That he'd closed his eyes and taken money, passed it on to a client who became his lover, told himself for eighteen years that it wasn't his business where it came from? Wasn't that bad enough for her? “Marian, I could say that's privileged information and there's no way in hell I'd tell you. But you want the truth? I didn't know then, and I don't know now.”