Whiskey & Charlie

by Annabel Smith

  Charlie had no desire to socialize with Whiskey and his friends. He wouldn’t even have considered taking up his invitation if it hadn’t been for the fact that it was New Year’s Eve, and out of his own pigheaded stupidity, Charlie had found himself with nowhere to go and nothing to do.

  By September that year, Charlie had already had enough of all the hype about Y2K. He had always found New Year’s Eve overrated, but never more so than this year. He wanted to slap people who used the phrase the dawn of a new millennium; 2001 was the new millennium, anyway. He had turned down invitations to rent a beach house in Byron Bay, to cruise the Murray River on a houseboat, to go to an outdoor concert at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl, a dance party, a masked ball, a twelve-course degustation dinner. When people asked Charlie how he planned to celebrate, he said he would be staying at home to watch the Star Wars trilogy. Those who believed that the so-called Millennium Bug was going to bring the entire planet grinding to a halt the minute the clock struck twelve told him his VCR wouldn’t be working. Charlie said he would take his chances. He had been called, by various friends and acquaintances, a party pooper, a killjoy, a misery guts, a stick-in-the-mud, a freak. He had felt strangely smug about the choice he had made until he woke up on the morning of December thirty-first and felt inexplicably excited. It was the dawn of a new millennium! He wanted to celebrate. He made frantic phone calls. He couldn’t get a flight to Byron or Adelaide. The ball, the dinner, the dance party, and the concert were all sold out. Every single one of Charlie’s friends had tickets, costumes, limousines on order, magnums of champagne on ice. Charlie had his Star Wars box set and a packet of corn chips. It was not enough.

  He rang Marco. “Can I come out with you tonight?”

  “I thought you weren’t going out. I thought you were boycotting the whole thing.”

  “I changed my mind,” Charlie said. “Don’t make me eat humble pie. Just tell me, can I or can’t I?”

  “Course you can.”

  “Won’t it be sold out though? Everything’s sold out.”

  “I can get you in—Robbie’s one of the organizers.”

  “Tell me what you’re doing again,” Charlie said.

  “You know what I’m doing. I’m going to a dance party at the Docklands. Alice Down the Rabbit Hole.”

  “That’s such a gay name,” Charlie said.

  “It’s a gay dance party. What do you expect?”

  “Will there be men in pseudo cowboy outfits with their asses hanging out?”

  “Hopefully,” Marco said.

  “I’ll hate it, won’t I?”

  “Probably. There are heaps of things on though. Who else have you called?”

  “Everyone I’ve ever met,” Charlie said miserably.

  “What about Whiskey? I bet he’ll be doing something good.”

  “You must be joking.” Since their return from Mumbai almost two years earlier, Charlie had barely seen Whiskey at all.

  “Well, you’ve got Darth Vader or Whiskey. It’s your choice.”

  x x x

  Whiskey did not sound overly excited to hear from Charlie, but he said he would pull a few strings to have Charlie’s name added to the guest list of the party he was attending. Charlie suspected Whiskey had agreed to let him tag along only because it gave him the opportunity to show off his latest girlfriend. Juliet was a model, Whiskey told Charlie. He had met her on the set of an advertisement he was making for the Crown casino. This did not impress Charlie as it might have impressed someone else. All Whiskey’s girlfriends were models. Or actresses. Or models who wanted to be actresses. Charlie had met some of them over the years. They all looked different but were essentially the same. One thing they all had in common was that they adored Whiskey, hung on his every word, which made Charlie feel ill.

  Whiskey picked Charlie up in his convertible.

  “Can we put the top up?” Charlie asked immediately. Whiskey always drove with the top down, even in the middle of winter. He wanted everyone to see him in the car, talking on his mobile phone, ignoring the beautiful girl who was sitting in the passenger seat beside him.

  “Why do you want the top up?” Whiskey asked.

  It was the kind of car everyone looked at—sleek and shiny, it reeked of money. As if that wasn’t enough, the car was orange. Burnt orange, Whiskey called it. Charlie thought the color was hideous. Whiskey liked it because it was the only model of that color in Australia. He thought of it as his signature color, his trademark, a symbol of his originality. Charlie thought of it as the worst kind of ostentatiousness, the height of mindless consumerism. He did not say this to Whiskey.

  There was a time when he used to say those things, in the beginning, when he thought it might make a difference, that it might give Whiskey some kind of reality check. After India, he had realized it was too late. Whiskey had such a warped sense of his own importance that if Charlie told him how much he hated the car, he knew Whiskey would think he was jealous. So he saved his breath.

  “It’s too cold to have the top down,” he said mildly.

  “It’s summer,” Whiskey said.

  “It’s Melbourne,” Charlie said.

  “You’re such a lightweight, Charlie,” Whiskey said, getting out to unclip the roof.

  Charlie ignored this. He felt much better when the roof was up. So what if people stared at the car? The windows were tinted; no one could see him and make the mistake of thinking he was part of the show.

  “Where’s Juliet?” he asked.

  “She’s meeting us there,” Whiskey said. “She’s the ‘independent’ type.” When he said the word independent, he took his hands off the wheel to draw quotation marks in the air and accompanied this gesture with a smirk, which failed to conceal his annoyance.

  Seeing this chink in his armor made Charlie feel warmer toward his brother. Whiskey had become more like a cardboard cutout than a real person, so Charlie found it increasingly difficult to think of him as someone who could be hurt or unhappy, who had the same ups and downs as everyone else. He had changed so much that Charlie found it hard now to believe that not so very long ago they had been friends, stranger still to think that once upon a time, when Whiskey was still William, Charlie had wished to be exactly like him. But in that brief moment when the mask slipped, Charlie remembered these things, felt a rush of affection for his brother.

  “What’s she like then?” Charlie asked.

  “She’s beautiful,” Whiskey said. “She’s the most beautiful girl you’ll ever see.”

  The way he said it, Whiskey sounded almost angry, as though for the first time in his life he had found something he wanted that was beyond his reach. Charlie said nothing. All his brother’s girls were beautiful: beautiful, shallow, and inane, the kind of girls who seemed less and less beautiful the longer you talked to them.

  x x x

  Juliet, however, was not like Whiskey’s other girls. She was a beauty; that part was true. But everything else about her was a surprise to Charlie, and also, it seemed, to Whiskey. To begin with, she didn’t rush over as soon as they arrived, only smiled and waved and carried on talking to a pale, striking girl with dark hair and heavy eye makeup. Whiskey seemed uncertain for a moment how to proceed.

  “Vodka?” he asked, recovering himself. At the bar, they drank in silence, Whiskey looking across at Juliet while trying to pretend he wasn’t. When at last she did come over, he seemed awkward, short of words in a way Charlie had never seen him.

  “Did you get here okay?” he asked finally, when the introductions had been made.

  “Monique picked me up,” she said.

  This comment seemed to enrage Whiskey. “I thought you were going to walk,” he said.

  She shrugged.

  “If you needed picking up, I could have picked you up myself.”

  “It’s no big deal, Whiskey,” she said.

&nb
sp; He exhaled heavily.

  It had been years since Charlie had seen Whiskey lose his temper. As he got older, he’d become more easygoing, and in his adult life he had cultivated this quality, made much of it with others so that it became something he was known for, along with his orange car. Now he glanced around the room, as if he was looking for something to hold on to, something to steady himself. Seeing someone he knew, he called out, waved his hand in a way that seemed desperate to Charlie.

  “Marty! How are you?” he exclaimed, breaking away from Juliet, shedding his exasperation like a jacket, leaving her alone at the bar with Charlie.

  “I hate riding in his car too,” Charlie said. He didn’t know what made him say it. It was an entirely inappropriate thing to say to his brother’s girlfriend, whom he had only just met. To his surprise, she laughed, leaned closer to him, and said conspiratorially, “I never said a word, Charlie.”

  Charlie was struck by her extraordinarily low voice, the woody scent of her perfume, which was the kind of smell he did not usually like on women but seemed right for her. He tried to think of something else he could say that would make her laugh.

  “Do you want another drink?” he asked instead. And then he asked her anything he could think of, anything to keep her talking, just to hear her voice and watch her lips move. And so he found out she hated modeling, that what she really wanted to do was write screenplays, that she had already written one in fact—the story of a young man who wanted to be a writer but thought he had to read everything everyone else had ever written before he could begin. She told him this story shyly, as though she was giving him a gift she was not sure he would like, and as she told it, Charlie found himself feeling glad Whiskey was so out of his depth with this girl, not because Charlie liked her himself, though of course that was part of it, but because she was much too good for his brother, too real and lovely for someone as empty as Whiskey had become.

  “What about you, Charlie?” she asked suddenly, as if embarrassed by the story she had told. Usually Charlie didn’t bother trying to explain his job to Whiskey’s friends. He knew they would find it incomprehensible that someone would give up an opportunity in television to work at a local primary school. But his brief stint in TV had given Charlie none of the rewards his job at the school did. He had made five times as much money as a runner, but those enormous paychecks did not bring him the same happiness as seeing a student who had struggled for months learn to spell the word because. He told Juliet this as a kind of test.

  “You’re probably the only person in this room who does something meaningful for a living,” she said.

  She passed the test. Charlie thought about kissing her, pulled himself up. He had used his brother to get a party invitation, and now he was sitting at the bar, making eyes at his girlfriend. Whiskey did not deserve her, that was true, but she was still his girlfriend.

  “Well, I shouldn’t monopolize you all night,” he said, standing up. Juliet smiled. Charlie had come across books containing phrases like “when she smiled she lit up the room.” He had always thought of these lines as the worst kind of clichés, had said that their authors should be taken out and shot. But when Juliet smiled at him, he saw what those awful writers had meant, found there was no other way to describe it.

  He made a halfhearted attempt to look for Whiskey then, but when he found him, Whiskey seemed even less interested in playing at brothers than Charlie was. So Charlie moved randomly about the party, trying not to notice where Juliet was, hoping she would come over and talk to him, promising himself that if she did, he would extricate himself as quickly as politeness allowed. Though he returned again and again to the bar, it seemed that his glass was always empty before the ice had even begun to melt. Alone in the bathroom, he thought again about kissing Juliet, said to himself, “She’s your brother’s girlfriend, for god’s sake,” realized he had spoken aloud, decided he must be drunk.

  Midnight came and went. Charlie clinked glasses, shook the hands of men, and kissed the cheeks of women whose names he had forgotten the minute he was introduced. He snorted two lines of cocaine because he was offered it, and it seemed a possibility that in the circles he moved he might never be offered it again. He did not know what he should expect to feel, but it turned out to be nothing much of anything, except that his gums became numb and he felt the need to keep pressing his thumb against his teeth to make sure they were still there. He did become more talkative—found himself taking part in conversations he would ordinarily have avoided, held forth on the true nature of Tom Cruise’s relationship with Nicole Kidman, expressed several other opinions he had not been aware he had.

  When the cocaine wore off, Charlie remembered that he was drunk. He knew he should go home, but it was a long time since he had seen either his brother or Juliet, and the thought of working his way through the party to search for them was exhausting. He wanted to lie down, wandered down a corridor, sticking his head through doors until he found an empty room. The room he found was not a bedroom but a study, and there was nowhere for him to lie down, only an imposing leather desk chair, which looked uninviting, but on closer inspection turned out to be a deluxe model, fitted with a series of knobs and levers that raised and lowered the seat while altering the angle of the backrest. Charlie played around with the chair until he achieved a position in which he thought he might be able to sleep if only the light in the room was not so bright. Unfortunately, he couldn’t find the light switch, though he had explored the room in a manner thorough enough to make Sherlock Holmes proud. He thought briefly that there should be a law against the fitting of light switches in positions that were not immediately obvious to the uninitiated.

  Giving up on sleep, Charlie rolled his way along a bookcase that ran the length of one wall. He pulled out a copy of J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, which he’d been meaning to read. But when he opened the book, he found that the letters were not behaving as they ought to: familiar yet strange, they danced and jigged and spun before his eyes like the chorus line from Riverdance.

  Charlie was holding the book in his lap when Juliet came into the room. He did not want to attempt standing up out of the chair, but he swiveled to face her.

  “Whiskey’s looking for you.”

  “Here I am,” Charlie said.

  She smiled. Truthfully, this time, he could not have said that it lit up the room, because the room was already far too bright. But it moved him just as it had when they were sitting at the bar.

  “What are you reading?” she asked.

  Charlie held up the book. He had forgotten which book he’d chosen.

  “I couldn’t stand that book,” she said. “What do you think of it?”

  Charlie tried to think of a sensible answer to such a perfectly reasonable question, but nothing came to him, so he told her the truth. “I can’t read at the moment,” he said.

  She laughed in the dry, restrained way she had. Charlie thought she was ridiculously beautiful, and he had no idea what to do about it. Juliet went over to the desk, picked up a pen and a notepad.

  “Do you want to give me your number?” she asked.

  “My phone number?”

  She laughed again. “What other number would I want?”

  Charlie felt confused. He wondered if he had missed some essential component of this conversation. He was afraid for a moment that he would not be able to remember the number, but it came to him when he tried, all the digits in a sequence that seemed suddenly more meaningful because it was Juliet who was writing them down.

  “Mobile?” she asked.

  “I haven’t quite caught up yet.”

  She smiled, putting the paper in her pocket, and then she leaned down and kissed him, not on his cheek or on his forehead, but his mouth, pressed her warm and perfectly shaped lips to his and held them there for a moment.

  “I’ll tell Whiskey you’re here,” she said, and then she walked awa
y from him, stopping at the door to dim the light on the switch that was by the door in plain view.

  x x x

  Charlie slept late the next day, was woken at two in the afternoon by Whiskey’s phone call.

  “I broke up with Juliet,” he said.

  Charlie felt groggy. He tried to think back over the events of the night before, wondered if his brother knew about the kiss, found he couldn’t remember getting home.

  “What happened?” he asked cautiously.

  “Who knows?” Whiskey said. “It was her idea to end it. She said we had no connection or some crap like that. You know how it is with models. She’s probably after someone with more money.”

  Charlie did not really know how it was with models, but from the little dealings he had had with them, he thought it entirely possible that the state of someone’s bank balance could make or break a relationship. If Whiskey had been talking about any one of his other girlfriends, Charlie would have believed him. But not Juliet.

  Though he had only just met her, though he barely knew her, Charlie felt certain Whiskey’s financial status had had no impact on Juliet’s feelings. But what Charlie thought didn’t matter to Whiskey anyway. Whiskey was not waiting for Charlie’s confirmation of his theory—he did not need agreement to continue; he was not that kind of conversationalist.

  “She probably thinks she can do better. But she’s not as perfect as she thinks she is. She seems pretty at first, but when you really look at her face, it’s actually quite out of proportion.”

  Charlie thought of Juliet’s face. Despite the state he had been in the night before, he had no trouble recalling it, and it did not seem to him to be the slightest bit out of proportion. In fact, he thought that if he had to make a template for a human face, hers would be the face he would choose. He did not remind his brother that less than twenty-four hours earlier he had described Juliet as the most beautiful girl you would ever meet. He tried to think of Whiskey as a person he liked and wished the best for, rather than as the brother he tolerated but could not respect.