Limitless

We went to a bar over on Sixth, a cheesy retro cocktail lounge called Maxie’s that used to be a Tex-Mex place called El Charro and before that had been a spit-and-sawdust joint called Conroy’s. It took us a few moments to adjust to the lighting and the décor of the interior, and, weirdly, to find a booth that Vernon was happy with. The place was virtually empty – it wouldn’t be getting busy for another while yet, not until five o’clock at least – but Vernon was behaving as though it were the small hours of a Saturday morning and we were staking our claim to the last available seats in the last open bar in town. It was only then, as I watched him case each booth for line of vision and proximity to toilets and exits, that I realized something was up. He was edgy and nervous, and this was unusual for him – or at any rate unusual for the Vernon I’d known, his one great virtue as a coke dealer having been his relative composure at all times. Other dealers I’d been acquainted with generally behaved like adverts for the product they were shifting in that they hopped around the place incessantly and talked a lot. Vernon, on the other hand, had always been quiet and businesslike, unassuming, a good listener – maybe even a little too passive sometimes, like a dedicated weed smoker adrift in a sea of coke-fiends. In fact, if I hadn’t known better, I might have thought that Vernon – or at least this person in front of me – had done his first few lines of coke that very afternoon and wasn’t handling it very well.

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.’