by Ann Beattie
He took a deep breath, exhaled, and pushed open the unmarked door with three peepholes at varying heights—presided over by no one, that night—that opened into Forever. Max sat in the back booth—the one George Harrison favored, before he died—-longer-haired than when he’d last seen him, coughing in the fumes of his own cigarette smoke. His wrist was in a cast. A blonde was with him who immediately excused herself before any introduction.
“Max. Did I do something wrong?” he said.
“Give a girl one glass of white wine, she has to take a whiz immediately,” Max said. “She’ll come back all smiles, bladder empty, dying to know your name so she can begin to forget it.”
“You’re in a good mood.”
“I’m in pain, I hate pain pills, and I’ve always called a spade a spade, even if what I was talking about was a white woman pissing,” he said. “Never mind what happened to my wrist.”
“Max, our lives don’t matter,” he said solemnly. He was echoing Max, checking to see if he remembered. He did, and it got a smile.
“I’ll have an orange juice,” George said to the server.
“Vodka for me, another white wine for my lady friend in the loo,” Max said. “This man is the only alcoholic among us.”
The waitress went off, expressionless. Over her flat breasts she wore a white bustier, and black slacks tucked into black boots with a fringe of little bells. She had curly red hair and freckles. She was probably 34A, and nineteen years old. O’Malley would have eyed her seriously, then pronounced her not the equal of his wife. He had never once seen anyone he thought equaled his wife. That included a brief chat with Cindy Crawford, who had believed that both of them were writers for Variety.
“That’s the truth about white wine,” Max said. “If you order them a vodka—and believe me, that’s like asking them to drink their own blood, it’s so hard to persuade them—they drink it and sit for hours. But one white wine and they race for the loo.”
“Other than info on your girlfriend’s bladder, what have you got for me?”
The waitress put down the vodka, white wine, and glass of juice. “Cheers,” she said, walking away fast.
“I’d ask for nuts, but I’m tired of leaving big tips,” Max said. “Sometimes I think, If they don’t bring the nuts, the hell with them. I don’t want nuts anyway. Something better, but not nuts. I get tired of living in London. Rotten weather. Nobody bathes.”
“And you didn’t care for the monarchy, the last time I inquired.”
“Right. One of them dies, Elton John comes out of hiding and plays the piano.”
“She was the only one who would have gotten an Elton serenade,” George said.
“Sir Elton,” Max said, correcting himself. “And did you know he chose to live in Atlanta? That’ll tell you how pointless this place is.”
He thought briefly about defending Atlanta, but the truth was, it was something of a blur. Really, he missed Los Angeles. The blonde came back to the table and sat down, sniffing and smiling. “Never mind introductions. Let’s pretend we’re all old friends and we’re just picking up where we left off,” she said. “That would make me feel less lonely.”
“She always has nice ideas,” Max said. “Doesn’t that strike you as a nice idea?”
“It would be a fake name, anyway,” she said. “Like you’re Max. Right. I saw a driver’s license that said something else, and then a credit card that was different from that. Aren’t you supposed to have these things coordinated, like sweater sets? Anyway, I don’t want to pretend. I don’t want to feel weird and lonely just because I’m out on a date.”
“He’s the Dormouse,” Max said, pointing to George. “Jet-lagged Dormouse.”
“There’s stuff being developed for jet lag that’s supposed to be on the market soon,” she said. “Real stuff doctors would prescribe.”
“That would be good,” George said.
“ZZZZZZZZZZZZ. ‘That would be good,’ ” Max said.
“I look that tired?”
“He’s mean, isn’t he?” the blonde said. “My real name is Cary. I’m from Oklahoma.”
Mick Jagger was singing “Angie.” He lived around the corner from Max. They’d gone to the movies together a couple of times, and Mick had given him a tape of an Irma Franklin song Max had been trying to find for years.
“Your candle burned out long before…” Max sang, fingering the tabletop like a piano in perfect imitation of Sir Elton.
“I never know what you’re doing,” Cary said. “I’d really like it if you wouldn’t start singing, and tell me what you’re really thinking.”
“Princess Diana’s death,” Max said flatly.
“Oh,” she said, dropping her eyes. “Sometimes, for no reason, I start to think about her, and I get so sad.”
Everyone was silent.
“So, Max, before I fall asleep, as you’re going to accuse me of doing: What information have you got?”
“Everything. I don’t usually ask, but who is this Nicholas person?”
“As far as I know, he’s some druggie not worth finding, but his mother—a woman I hit in a minor fender bender—asked me to locate him. I agreed as a kind of dare to myself: to do something easy, just once.” He had also thought that it would be instructive to find someone who was sincerely missed by someone who wanted him back.
“You hit a woman?” Cary said.
“I was in a car accident with the guy’s mother,” he said. “I don’t hit women.”
“Don’t believe him,” Max said. “He’d say anything to get you in bed.”
Cary screwed up her face. She said, “Do you think you’re funny?”
“Let’s all have a drink,” Max said, drinking his down. “Now,” he said. “Here’s what I have, and it took a precious ten minutes out of my day, George Wissone.” Max let the name reverberate for a second. In Los Angeles, Max had known him as Arthur Hyde—though even then, Max had been Max. Max lit a cigarette and fanned the smoke into George’s face. He said, “I have his address, a key to his apartment—excuse me: flat—and the name and cell number of his dealer. I have his phone bill from the previous month, before service was cut off, and a picture of him with a girl outside the Piccadilly Circus stop whose name I didn’t get, I’m sorry to report.”
“Excellent,” he said. “It sounds like I’ve got about fifteen minutes of work left.”
“Explain what you said before,” Cary said. “Max never will. You’re bringing this guy back for somebody?”
“Cary. We never overhear anything, so we have no questions to ask,” Max said.
“What does it matter what I know? Who would I tell? This is about some druggie who’s being shipped home. Right?”
“Maybe you need to powder your nose,” Max said.
“Ha ha,” she said. “If I did have powder, you’d be surprised, wouldn’t you?”
“Powder for outside the nose,” Max said. He handed George an envelope. “Everything I know, you now have,” he said. “We’ll settle later.”
“You shouldn’t drink when you’re taking codeine,” she said.
“Next she’ll be offering me oxygen,” Max said. He had turned his chair toward George. He said, “Share with me some impression of Nick’s mother. I need some visuals on the lady who brought you all the way to London.”
Either Max’s drink had been very strong, or he was pretty far gone by the time he’d arrived. How obnoxious he must have been, those times he put people on the spot. He wondered how often he had acted that way with Paula, and whether that might not be something she resented. He wondered what kind of doctor she’d taken up with. How much her sister’s compulsive talk reflected anything she knew, beyond a love of telling stories.
“Whiskey per tutti!” Max called to the waitress, in a convincingly heavy Italian accent.
“More, luv?” the waitress said.
“Hon, I wouldn’t order more,” Cary said. “Those pain pills—”
Max looked at her. “A woman of
caution?” he said. “You?”
The waitress took the discussion to mean that she should come back. She turned toward another table and put down some beers. Max called, “One whiskey for me, nothing for my friends.”
George slipped the envelope Max had put on the table into his pocket. “Thanks,” he said. “I’ll let you know how things turn out.”
“It turns out that Cary is sulking,” Max said. “I observe this, though drunk out of my mind. Insensible. I want to go on record, though: I’m not stupid. Before I fell into this terrible state, I picked up on certain vibes between Cary and you, and you and Cary. If you two want to leave me here, I’ll drink my drink in peace.”
“Maaaaaax,” Cary said. “I hate it when people say crazy things like that.” She got up and walked stiffly toward the bathroom. George watched her go.
“You couldn’t seriously think that,” he said.
“Why not? I heard Paula broke up with you.”
“You always did have your sources,” he said. The waitress returned and put a drink in front of Max, said, “Okay, luv,” and left quickly. “But I’m not sure Paula’s staying gone, and I’m not interested in your girlfriend. Maybe you ought to be glad she’s looking out for you tonight, instead of trying to get rid of her.”
“There’s really nothing going on?”
He shook his head no.
“If I get paranoid, everything’s lost,” Max said.
“You’re not paranoid. You just had a bad couple of seconds.”
“No footsie under the table?”
He shook his head again. “Let me write you a check,” he said.
“Gratis,” Max said. “Though I would be interested in hearing how it turns out. I envy you being able to have a quick turnaround and go back to the States. I wish I could.”
“Passport still no good?”
“No good,” Max said. The waitress started to put a beer bottle on the table but realized her mistake and dipped toward the table on the left. Two young men with punk haircuts bobbed toward each other across the table like toy ducks with magnets in their bills.
“Scum,” Max said, following George’s glance. He turned back to George. He said, “Count backwards from sixty for me. Go as slow as you want, but count out loud so I’ll think we’re making progress with Cary coming back to the table. What’s that look for? If you’re so sure she didn’t go out the window, give me the count, so I don’t jump out of my skin.”
“Sixty,” he said. “Fifty-nine, fifty-eight, fifty-seven, et cetera. After that, fifty-six, going backwards to…number fifty-five, and before that comes fifty-four—we’re doing fine here—that was fifty-four, fifty-three, fifty-two. There she is.”
Max looked up. He had been concentrating, eyes closed, tapping his thumb on the table. Cary, hair neatly combed, approached the table, still walking stiffly. She had a tentative smile on her face.
“Love you, honey,” Max said. “For a minute, I just went a little out of focus.”
She waved her hand to indicate that it was nothing. Her lips were bright pink, which George didn’t think they’d been before. Rattled, though, she took a sip of orange juice before she realized it was his.
“That’s okay,” he said, encouraging her to keep it.
“I’m awfully sorry. I wasn’t thinking,” she said. Which had an odd echo. In fact, he had said those exact words to Nancy Gregerson after the accident. As for Max’s question earlier: he found Nancy Gregerson absolutely ordinary-looking. This was also true of her eyes—and people often had expressive eyes, even if they weren’t special in any other way—but her eyes were absolutely ordinary, like a drab, military-issue shirt. Well, he thought: there were ways out of having to wear those shirts, time had proven. But what could a woman do about her eyes? He’d spent enough time with Paula to know the answer: accentuate your best features, and play down the others. Yet she really had no “best” feature. He had come to London to see if he could still be a responsive human being who’d do a person a favor when he wasn’t motivated by money, or sex, or—in this case—danger. He was trying to do something he thought a more normal person, with a more normal life, would do. Something kind, and also a little unexpected: the way a person might decide to let someone with fewer packages step in front of them in line. It did feel strange to do a favor. It was nowhere near as thrilling as acting covertly, assessing all the variables, calling on his training, using his instincts when the training failed him. In fact, he felt almost as numb as he’d expected to feel, and self-conscious, too. When he was working, self-consciousness was not an emotion he’d ever experienced.
