Chum

by Jeff Somers

  There was always Bickerman Beta, who was, as I’ve said, a cupcake. Getting into those French-cut panties wouldn’t be a problem. Extricating myself from them might be. As evidence, I give you Bickerman Alpha, who still had a dumb look of mourning on his face. Best to leave her be until a magical combination of memory-erasing liquor and the absence of Bickerman Alpha fell into my lap.

  Which brought me to Denise, Henry’s prickly peach. I had good reason to think that Denise was my best bet, back to New Year’s Eve, when I think only the problematic presence of Henry kept the Tom Wallace Magic from operating at full strength, corroding metal and melting women. Denise had been simmering at a low boil about Bickerman Beta’s kid sister, and it was common knowledge among the Wallace men that the easiest woman to seduce was a woman pissed off at her mate for suspected mental infidelity, because her mind was already constantly on sex, because she was already looking to feel attractive both to make her guy jealous and to make herself feel young and perky again, and, finally, because they tended to be brooding and drunken. This had been passed down from father to son for generations, all part of the survival instinct, because we Wallaces all knew we were despicable and unlovable and so we had to breed wherever we could.

  While everyone gathered around the cake the girls had created through some means, obviously, other than baking—the misshapen thing was making everyone nervous, as it did not seem to have the normal properties of “cake” and we all wondered if someone shouldn’t have the hospital’s phone number partially dialed while we ate it—and sang in honor of Luis’s continued existence, I studied Denise. She was clearly out of Henry’s league. While not quite the cupcake that Bickerman Beta was, she had an air of confident attractiveness: This was a lady who knew that men surreptitiously turned to watch her ass when she walked by. As opposed to Flo’s breezy casualness and Kelly’s ballsy disdain for the social niceties, or Bickerman Beta’s wide-eyed cheerleaderism, Denise was the girl who always looked like she’d spent two hours picking out her clothes and an additional hour doing her hair. Nothing was ever out of place.

  Of course, nothing was ever by accident with this girl, so when generous portions of cleavage were doled out for us to gawk at, it was on purpose. Ditto the skin-tight jeans, the subtle perfume. Some men would shrug and say she was gussying up for her man, but I eschewed that in favor of a more Tom-favorable scenario: Denise’s underbrain had already decided it was time to test the genetic waters for better material than Henry. She didn’t know it consciously yet, but Denise was looking to get laid.

  As we sang in the dim kitchen, illuminated by candlelight, I looked her over. A green sweater, tight and fuzzy against the chill. Low V-cut, drawing the eye. Old faded jeans, tight and whisper-thin. A little bit of belly showing when she stood straight, and Denise had good posture. Chunky heels, not quite in Flo’s league but still an important lust indicator. Her hair was up in messy curls, and she had big hoop earrings in. She smelled like leaves in fall.

  “Speech!” Bickerman Alpha shouted when the singing was done. “Speech!”

  Luis smiled as the room quieted. “I would like to thank you all for coming,” he said in his precise way. “It makes me feel very special. I was very homesick today, remembering my birthdays at home, and this has made me very happy. You are all great, great friends to me.”

  It was a surprisingly touching speech from our usually bizarre Spanish friend, and everyone clapped. Denise hugged him and pecked him on the cheek. I burned with jealousy.

  The cake was sliced and eyed nervously, but everyone elected to start drinking rather than take chances with the Frankencake. The plan was to have a bit of cake and a cocktail or two and then head out to one of our favored watering holes, Rue’s Morgue, where it was crowded and loud and none of us would be able to hear a thing the other said, but where the drinks were affordable and strong and the juke had lots of midtempo rock-and-roll to sing along with. Not a very complicated plan, but we weren’t complicated people.

  I slipped an arm companionably around Luis. “Happy birthday, amigo.”

  “Thank you. I am relieved to discover you were not here to rob me.”

  “I was contemplating a quick ransack of your place, but you were inexplicably here.”

  “Inexplicably?” he asked. “I live here.”

  Talking with Luis was often an existential nightmare. I moved on. “How old are you now? With that George Hamilton tan, you could be anywhere between twenty and seventy.”

  “I am thirty-one.”

  “Huh. I’m thirty-three.”

  He nodded gravely, and drank some beer, staring at me.

  I suddenly wondered if I’d turned into a roach overnight and failed to notice in the morning. It would explain plenty, including this conversation, I thought. I decided to brighten my day with alcohol. “We ought to get you a drink, Luis. It’s your birthday, and you should be drunk throughout your birthday.”

  “Is this an American tradition?”

  “I always thought it was worldwide, actually.” I opened the fridge. “You have a choice of three beers, none of which appear distinctive.”

  “I know what is in my own refrigerator,” he said seriously.

  I pulled out a pair of bottles. “Gotcha, buddy, I’m right there with you. Here, take this and go in peace.”

  Luis wandered off with a beer, somewhat gratefully, I thought. I know I exhausted him. I exhausted most people. Just as I was getting interested, they were getting bored. I leaned against the fridge and ran my yellowed eye over the girls again, resting finally on Denise, whom I caught staring at me. She looked away hastily, flushing, and then looked back. I smiled for her benefit. She was too far away from drunk for me to safely brace her, but a little jollying along never hurt. Besides, in a room of fifteen people there’s no privacy, so flirting with her would quickly become a diplomatic disaster. But a little jollying along, what the hell.

  We continued to stare at each other. I went back to New Year’s, the smell of her, backed against the wall, pale and eyes half-closed, and Christ, if Henry’d been somewhere else or if there’d been less light in that room, I swear I’d have had an ankle on one shoulder and a hand over her mouth, humping away happily. Since then, she’d been avoiding me. Wallace wisdom told us that women did not avoid you when they were unattracted to you. They avoided you when they wanted you badly. The logic went like this: If she experienced nothing but a brief pang of revulsion when you walked in the room, you generally got nothing more than a sneer in your general direction. If she was dripping about you all the time and hating herself for it, she’d stay as far away from you as possible because your mere presence would be causing her skin irritations.

  Finally, I winked at her, and she looked away. I waited to see if she would look back at me, but she didn’t. I glanced at Henry and jumped a little, because he was staring at me. I did the only thing I could do: I winked at him, too, which made him laugh. I liked Henry and wanted to fuck his girlfriend without him knowing about it, if I could. I flicked my eyes back to Denise and she was looking at me again. Denise tried to act hard-assed, but I knew better.

  Reading my mind, she flushed again and looked away, saying something sweet to Bickerman Beta, for whom she had little use, to distract her. I leaned against the fridge and imagined them together.

  Then a brisk, healthful walk to the restaurant, a rundown dump called Casual Spain, in honor of Luis, who seemed underwhelmed, as if he wouldn’t be caught dead in a place named Casual Spain but was too polite to say so. Fifteen of us, looking like a clothing commercial—I could hear the classic rock chestnut in the background as we cavorted—walking in small, careful groups. Except me, who was alone. The scent of danger, I assumed, all the minnows making way for the big fish. Or perhaps I wasn’t as popular as I’d always assumed, which was unthinkable.

  Sangria all around and I am sitting, magically, between Kelly and Denise, and across from the Bickermans and Luis, with all the Others, the vague friends of the Others, on the
other end of the table. I leered at Denise again, but she ignored me and Henry caught it, and the simple soul thought I was funning with him again. Someday soon I was going to sell Henry the Brooklyn fucking Bridge and that would be the end of me and Henry, wouldn’t it. I had lots of Henrys behind me, though, and Henry had hung on a lot longer than I would have imagined. He leaned across Denise, one hand around his glass of wine, which you could tell you were going to have to pry out of his death grip.

  “You making eyes at me?”

  “Your girlfriend, actually.”

  “Buck a throw, big boy.”

  Denise smacked him on the back of his head. Must have been pretty hard, too, because Henry threw her a resentful glare. Trouble in paradise. I mentally encouraged Denise to drink more, and faster.

  Across the table, Bickerman Alpha was struggling heroically with our waitress to acquire shots of tequila for everyone. Surly and pissed about having fifteen people to deal with on what was usually an easy shift, she wanted nothing to do with us and scowled as Bickerman Alpha laid out his requirements. Next to him, Bickerman Beta was already getting that puffy, defiant look that precipitated her liquored rages, lighting a small flame of hope in my breast, and next to her, Luis was looking completely buggered as to what was going on, which I suspected had to do with a difficulty in keeping up with our slurred English in crowded situations. I’d witnessed Luis’s bar catatonia before. At first I thought it was due to a simpleness on his part, then I realized even I could only understand half of the inane mutterings of my friends, and it was my native tongue. Lord knew what Luis was hearing. I upgraded him to wise and left it at that.

  I didn’t like sitting at tables. You were trapped. I liked being able to get up and walk away. I sucked weak sangria sullenly, wishing it were over, or at least my birthday.

  Then came out the appetizers and the parade of gifts and cards that people had smuggled to the restaurant. Luis seemed genuinely touched at this display of affection, gasping at every package thrust into his hands, and reading every card out loud in his precise diction. Henry, being a nicely warped guy when he put his mind to it, had written out “Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll just to confuse the poor foreign national.

  “Mim-sy were the … the Borogoves?” Luis read, squinting at the card carefully. He looked up. “That is correct?”

  “Luis,” Henry said seriously, “I don’t understand a thing you just said.”

  It was a little mean, but with everyone laughing and putting their hands on him, Luis couldn’t be angry. I’d never seen him be bothered by small-minded jabs at his lack of English mastery, although it was pretty shitty for supposed friends to do to you. Getting the joke, he smiled and read the rest of the poem in a Speedy Gonzalez accent thick enough to float.

  I hadn’t brought anything for him. I didn’t buy people gifts, I bought them drinks. As the rest of them beached themselves on the shores of sobriety in the quest for eternal life, I said, screw them. If you didn’t want a cocktail, I didn’t want to buy you one.

  More sangria all around, and several conversations I wanted nothing to do with erupted around me like tepid pools of lukewarm water. I kept a pitcher of wine for myself and began drinking recklessly out of boredom while Henry and Bickerman Alpha chatted about football scores and Luis gave Denise a fascinating travelogue about his native Spain. I let my eyes wander, looking for an attractive waitress to molest, but found nothing. I settled back in my chair and balanced my glass on my belly, which was growing large and powerful as I stumbled into my dotage. I resigned myself to boredom and set about falling asleep with my eyes open, uninterested.

  So when a stockinged foot wormed its way into my crotch, I stiffened to an instant mode of readiness and assessed the situation.

  I looked at Luis, who appeared to be engrossed in his conversation with Denise, or perhaps in his inspection of her chest. Anyway, his body was at the wrong angle.

  I glanced up at Bickerman Alpha, but he was literally jumping up and down in his chair, hooting like an ape, much to the amusement of Henry.

  I looked at Bickerman Beta, and the tart winked at me salaciously. I leaned forward, grinning, back in the game.

  Dinner arrived and huge plates of food obscured Bickerman Beta from me, so I amused myself with a quick reminisce concerning my often-troubled relationship with the Beta, while multitasking a complex fantasy involving Denise, a bottle of vodka, and some unconsciousness—her leg kept rubbing up against mine and she smelled maddeningly good, and I hadn’t given up on her yet—just put her aside for a more obvious possibility.

  There had been, in the beginning, a paradise of bachelor men. Henry, saintly and soiled; Bickerman, the asshole who was useful in that he did and said things you wanted to do and say, and thus took the heat for doing and saying them; and then me, adroitly using both of them to maneuver myself within putting distance of all the great pieces of ass in this world. When chicks were hard to come by, as they occasionally were during droughts, they also served as good conversation. All trios are politically explosive, of course, and you end up pairing up into various combinations for sanity. Bick and I went in for worse shit than Henry, so I left him behind sometimes—he understood that and let it be. Henry and I amused each other better, and we often didn’t mind each other’s company. Bick didn’t like anyone, at least not back then, unless he was loaded, so he never hung out with Henry alone if he could help it.

  The three of us drank and smoked and picked up chicks. It was great.

  Then, of course, came the fateful evening we descended on the old college town and the old college bars, ostensibly on a tour of teary memory, but really to see if a crop of freshmen chicks might be about, untrained in liquor consumption and ready to be impressed with our paycheck-inflated wallets. We didn’t find any freshmen chicks, but we did find the Cupcake, the future Bickerman Beta, along with Kelly and a few other maidens-in-waiting. Bick and Henry were content to sit and drink in the back, while I made an assault on Mary, an obvious former sorority chick. Vague memories told me that back in the day I’d been catnip to sororities. I figured ten years, give or take, couldn’t have faded me that much. I put my all into it—every Elvis crotch thrust, every mysterious I-know-more-than-I’m-letting-on laugh, every subtle hint that great and serious pain hid barely beneath my cheerful exterior. At first I suspected success because the Cupcake touched me a lot and laughed a lot and let me buy her several drinks. Now I know that Mary lets anyone buy her drinks.

  The Cupcake remained unmoved. Eventually I retreated, confused, to the comfort of men, where they slapped my back and fed me booze, and soon we had such a cloud of manly testosterone about us, the women, despite apparently (and inexplicably) disliking me, had drifted over to be nearer the scent and soon joined us. The Cupcake, in a sign of things to come, was quickly bombed and had taken an obvious shine to Bickerman. From that moment on, paradise was lost, and we were forever changed.

  It had been three years, and in essence, my relationship with Mary hadn’t changed much. She disliked me, intensely, and yet seemed to enjoy flirting with me. Then again, it had once been suggested to me that I thought everyone was flirting with me due to an innate arrogance. I’d never believed it, of course. And it might have been the sangria, but she was eyeing me appreciatively enough over her glass, and I began to plot. Why not? Bickerman Alpha spent a lot of his extra energy going after Beta’s sister. I figured he had no moral high ground to nail me on. And it took two to tango. And I was bored.

  My choices of conversation were terrifyingly banal. On my right, Luis, Henry, and Denise were discussing something that sounded suspiciously like politics, with serious, pie-eyed sincerity, and the Bickermans were reliving wedding moments with Kelly, who seemed to be calculating how much energy would be required to slit her wrists with butter knives as opposed to the energy required to continue listening. She nodded in all the right places, but then, she’d been there, she’d seen it all—how hard was it to predict where the pauses were?


  I started eyeing the butter knives myself and took comfort in the familiar action of getting stinking drunk. After a few moments, though, I caught Bickerman Beta looking bored and caught her eye. I winked.

  “Not much of a birthday, is it?”

  She smiled. “Poor Luis!”

  Luis heard his name and glanced at us. “I am quite wealthy, actually,” he said in his precise way.

  I waved at the waitress. “I say Luis should start drinking more seriously.”

  There were groans from everyone, but they were just playing innocent, I knew. Kelly alone could drink me under the table. Everyone had been sitting there wondering when in hell the drinking was going to start in earnest, and, as usual, a Wallace Man had to step up and take the sneers of society just to get the debauchery started.

  “Slow down, Tommy, we’re not even at the bar yet,” Denise said.

  “I want eight shots of tequila,” I ordered the waitress. The Others could fucking fend for themselves, I thought, especially since none of the booze already ordered had made its way to my end of the table.

  Groans again.

  “Thomas,” Luis murmured, “I must pace myself. It would not be right for me to not survive the evening.”

  “Why not?”

  “I am the man of honor, tonight.”

  “He’s upgrading himself.” I winked at Beta, who seemed perked up at the prospect of hard drinking, as I suspected she would be. I kept waiting for her foot to reappear at my crotch.

  “All right, then, a toast,” Henry suggested, as usual finding some graceful way for me to get my way. Thank God for Henry! He was my enabler, my social lubricant. Denise, of course, gave him a look that said, You ass, stop encouraging him, he’s a deviant. Denise knew the truth, but thankfully no one could hear her at such high frequencies, like dog levels of sound.