“Well, good luck with it,” Corrigan said.
Wilbur scooped a handful of peanuts from a dish on the bar and studied Corrigan while he brought them up to his mouth. “You’d be about what, Joe, fortyish? A little less, maybe?” he asked.
“I’m forty-four.” Corrigan transferred the cocktails to Sherri’s tray. She picked it up and carried it away.
“Ever have any experience with big outfits, out of curiosity?” Wilbur went on. “Where the real wheels are, know what I mean?”
Corrigan could have said that he had once been the main instigator and joint director of a project whose backers could probably have bought Oliver’s operation with the petty cash. Instead, he answered, “Oh, I’ll leave that kind of thing to those who have a taste for it. I’m from a part of the world where people tend to take things a bit easier, you understand.”
“Irish, right?”
“That’s it.”
“Yeah. Never got there.” Wilbur’s voice fell again. “But this thing I was telling you about with Oliver. He’s gonna fix me up real good there, in exchange for”—Wilbur grinned slyly—“don’t say anything to anyone, but you know how it is—a little harmless information about the place I’m at now. But anything’s fair in love, war, and business, eh?” It was all straight out of a score of popular movie series. Corrigan found it hard not to smile.
“I wouldn’t know about that,” he said.
Oliver arrived a few minutes later, dressed showily in a suit of silver-dusted cobalt blue with a white leather topcoat thrown loosely across his shoulders. He stopped in the doorway to look around, saw Wilbur at the bar, and moved ponderously across to join him. With Oliver was a tall woman, mid-thirties to forty, with straight hair worn high, heavy on the makeup. She was wearing a long, low-cut dress, and glittered from throat to fingers with jewelry. Corrigan had seen her with Oliver a couple of times before. Delia, he thought her name was.
Oliver was all hale-and-heartiness. “Hey, Wilbur, old buddy. You’re good on time, too, huh? That’s great. Just what we need. Joe, how’s it going? You remember Delia, right?”
“Hello again, Joe.” Delia smiled, revealing teeth that had to have been surgically rebuilt, and displaying her purple eye shadow. She was an accessory to Oliver’s image that went with the manner, the coat, and the suit.
“Let’s see,” Oliver said. “Gimme a screwdriver, gin with bitter lemon and a slice of lime here, and another of whatever that is for Wilbur.”
Corrigan took three fresh glasses down from the overhead rack. Delia rested an elbow on the bar and watched him while Oliver started telling Wilbur about the volume of transactions that the firm had handled that day. A couple that Corrigan had been keeping an eye on by the far wall, arguing since they sat down, were losing their cool, the man getting angrier, the woman’s voice rising, both gesticulating. Healthy expressiveness. The Merlyn Dree fans had started acting out some of his skits. The pink fedoras had latched on to the two girls who found Wilbur glamorous and exciting. Sherri came back with more empties and started loading the washer.
“I’m an associate with Oliver,” Delia told Corrigan. “I don’t know if he mentioned it. Foreign stocks and bonds department. That’s the high-risk end, where you have to know your way around.” She waited, inviting a response, then went on when Corrigan just nodded. “But the money you can make! I’m not even going to say what commission I grossed last quarter. But it bought me a Hampton Riviera with no payments. Getaway cabin in Vermont, Queensland beach scene in winter. . . .”
Corrigan looked at her with a neutral expression and said, “That’s nice.”
Delia’s voice dropped to a more confidential note. “You get to meet all the right contacts, too. I pay less tax than I did five years ago. I practically bank my paycheck and live off the expenses.”
“That’s nice.”
Oliver picked up his and Delia’s drinks and looked around. “Let’s move to a table. There’s one over there. Come on, Jon, I’ll give you some inside secrets about how to screw the most out of clients. If they’ve still got blood left, we’re not doing our job, right?” He winked at Corrigan. “Talk to you later, Joe, okay?”
“Behave yourself, now.”
“Why? Where’s the fun in that?”
Wilbur took up his own glass and his briefcase, and followed the other two away. Sherri, who had been half listening, came up beside Corrigan to ring some cash into the till. Corrigan eyed Oliver and his two companions contemplatively while they seated themselves around the table, then said to Sherri, “Suppose you moved to a small town. And you found there were only two hairdressers: one whose hair was neat, the other a mess. You’d go to the one who looked a mess, wouldn’t you? Because it would be she who did the hair of the other.”
Sherri frowned for a moment, then smiled. “Yeah—true. What brought that on all of a sudden?”
“Oh, those three who were here just now. That fella Wilbur thinks Oliver is going to do him a good turn out of the kindness of his heart. He’s expecting he’ll be treated with fairness and honesty.” Corrigan sighed and shook his head. “Why do people insist on looking for something where it clearly isn’t? And then they blame the world when their hopes don’t materialize.”
“I don’t know how you stand that woman the way you do,” Sherri said. “She’s so gross with her ‘I’ve got this’ and ‘I’ve got that’ all the time. But you can just stand there and say ‘that’s nice’ like you do. You’ll have to teach me how to do it.”
Corrigan smiled wryly. “Oh, that’s an old Irish story,” he said. “You’d have no problem if you knew it.”
“Well, tell me, then,” Sherri invited.
Corrigan glanced around. There were no customers looking for attention just at the moment. As a rule he didn’t bother telling jokes these days. People no longer understood them. Oh, what the hell, he told himself. Give it a try.
“It’s like this,” he said. “Two women are sharing a hospital room in Dublin, you see. One is from Foxrock. That’s south of the city, where all the money is—she’d be one of your Delias. The other’s the complete opposite: bottom end of the social spectrum—what we’d call a roight auld slag.”
“You mean like parts of the South Bronx?”
“Maybe. Anyway, Delia wants to make sure there’s no mistake about who she is, see. So she says to other . . .” Corrigan mimicked a prim tone: “‘Ah, I hope you don’t imagine that I am accustomed to sharing like this. Usually, I go to the private wing.’”
He changed to a shrill, coarser accent. “‘Oh, yiss?’ says the other, who we’ll say was Mary. ‘Dat’s noice.’
“‘I’ll have you know,’ says Delia, ‘that my husband is an extremely successful man and takes very good care of me. The last time I was a patient, he took me on a Caribbean cruise to recuperate.’
“‘Dat’s noice.’
“‘And on the occasion before that, he bought me a diamond pendant to compensate for the discomfort.’ . . .” Corrigan nodded an invitation at Sherri to supply the response.
“That’s nice,” she obliged.
“Ah, no,” he said. “You have to do it with the proper accent. Come on, now: ‘Dat’s noice.’”
“Dat’s noice.”
“Perfect. And then your Delia says, ‘Out of curiosity, does your husband show such consideration when you are confined?’”
“‘Oh, yiss, o’ course ’e does,’ says Mary. ‘When we ’ad our last one, ’e sent me fer elocution and etiquette lessons.’”
Sherri chuckled, and Corrigan continued, “Naturally, Delia’s astounded. ‘What!’ she exclaims. ‘Elocution? How would somebody like you even know what the word means?’
“‘ ’E did, too,’ Mary tells her. ‘See, at one time, whenever oi ’eard people tellin’ me a load o’ bullshit, oi used to tell ’em ter fuck orf. Now oi just smiles at ’em all proper, like, and oi say . . .’” Corrigan paused expectantly. Anyone should see it now. But Sherri’s eyes were still blank, waiting. He completed, “‘D
at’s noice.’”
There was a barely perceptible delay, and then she laughed. But the laugh wasn’t real. She had missed the point. Corrigan had seen the same thing too many times before. He turned to restocking the mixers shelf. What was it about the modern world that had changed people? he wondered. Sarah Bewley tried to tell him that nothing had changed, that it was his idea of humor that had been distorted. But the story he’d told Sherri was from his student days in Ireland, and everyone back then had found it funny. Or had nothing in those years happened the way he remembered it at all?
A knot of people appeared in the doorway, clustered about a squat, rotund figure whose name Corrigan couldn’t bring to mind instantly—some kind of city official, who worried all the time about his public visibility. The last time they were in, the talk had been about sending political messages through the communications chips that some people were having put in their heads. One of the aides couldn’t seem to comprehend why Corrigan was cool toward the idea. “Why would anyone choose to stay out of touch?” he had wanted to know.
Then a man with shoulders like a blockhouse came in and stopped, obviously checking the place. Moments later, a commotion of voices came from the hall outside the lounge. The Dree fans leaped to their feet with a clamor of squeals and shouts as the idol himself swept in ahead of an entourage of photographers and starlets, resplendent in a white glitter suit and red shirt, blond hair falling to his shoulders, arms held high to acknowledge the accolades.
The funny thing was that although Dree featured in commercials everywhere and appeared at all kinds of public events, he didn’t sing, dance, play, act, tell stories, or entertain in any way that was traditionally recognizable. As far as Corrigan was aware, he didn’t actually do anything. He was the ultimate celebrity: well known for no other reason than being well known.
Even Sherri was standing enraptured as the circus moved in and took over the bar. “You call this having a good time?” Dree yelled to the general delight: his standard catchphrase.
“You ain’t seen nothing yet!” they chorused back. All the way from Jolson. Sherri joined in; so did Delia, Wilbur, and the girls talking to the pink fedoras. The party dispersed to a corner, and an aide came across to the bar to give their order. Corrigan turned to set out the glasses, and as he did so he noticed a woman looking in through the doorway. She was tall, with long dark hair, wearing a suede coat over a satiny black dress. The noise and antics inside made her start to turn away; but then she caught sight of Corrigan, seemed to change her mind, and came in.
She had been in about a week before, he recalled. They had talked on and off about nothing in particular through much of the evening, and she had left alone. She was from California, liked Gershwin, the theater, old movies, and dogs, had been curious about Ireland, and seemed to know something about computers. Her name, he remembered moments before she sat down on a barstool with a quick smile of recognition, was Lilly.
CHAPTER SIX
Lilly made a living of sorts at a shoe-finishing shop—shoes were imported plain and unadorned from factories in Asia, then colored and trimmed locally to reflect the current buying patterns before tastes had time to change. That in itself seemed odd to Corrigan, for she displayed all the qualities that he would have thought equipped her for something more challenging and rewarding.
Her eyes, which were dark and depthless, studied the world with a reflective awareness that Corrigan hadn’t seen in a half-dozen people during as many years. She had the kind of intelligence that was intelligent enough not to flaunt itself; the quiet self-assurance that doesn’t mistake misapplied assertiveness for confidence. In short, she exuded style of a quality that was very rare; and that was also very puzzling, for it didn’t add up to the kind of woman who would show any interest in bartenders. Yet for some reason, Lilly seemed to be very curious about Corrigan indeed.
“Do you live in the city, Joe?” She asked when the workload eased and he sauntered back to the end of the bar where she was sitting.
“In a flat in Oakland, the East End.”
“Are you married, or what?”
“I was until this morning.”
“What happened?”
“She left last night for the weekend. But then the house computer told me that it’s for keeps and played a billet-doux.”
Lilly’s eyes searched his face for a moment. She had shifted her stool so that her back was to the body of the room, where everybody else seemed determined to prove that they were potential celebrity material too. “What’s called for, commiserations or congratulations?” she asked.
Most people would have spouted a set line from a soap—with no thought that it might or might not be appropriate, let alone the notion of trying to find out. But Lilly didn’t. She thought; she asked; she listened. That was how she had struck Corrigan the last time she was here.
“I’m not breaking my heart over it,” Corrigan replied. “Sometimes these things happen a long time before, and are just waiting to be acted out.” She understood, nodded. There was no pointless interrogation. No more needed to be said. “How about yourself?” Corrigan asked.
Sherri deposited another tray of empty glasses and bottles on the bar before Lilly could answer. She was looking worn. “Another round of everything for Dree’s people. Four beers for the tab on table three. One gin and tonic, one scotch on the rocks, two white coolers.”
“They’re working you hard tonight, Sherri,” Lilly said.
Sherri exhaled a sigh. “You can say that again.” She looked at Corrigan. “When the guy gave me the big order I told him, ‘That’s nice.’ Did I get it right?”
Corrigan stared down at the glasses as he poured, not knowing what to say. How did you explain inappropriateness to somebody who just didn’t have the wiring to feel it intuitively? This wanting to know why he thought something funny was another thing that he found all the time with people—and the main reason why he had stopped telling jokes. He was unable to understand why something that they obviously didn’t share should be so important to them. He could see why Sarah Bewley would be interested: trying to understand him was her job. But why would anyone else care about his peculiarities when he was the odd person out?
“Hey, bar,” the Merlyn Dree aide in charge of ordering called from across the room. “Back up on that order there. Make it another one for everybody!” He looked around. “When we drink, everyone drinks. Right, guys?” The room yelled its approval.
Then another group arrived, and things got hectic. Corrigan worked nonstop until they finally closed things down around 3:00 A.M., in all of which time Lilly never did get a chance to answer his question. In one brief lull, however, they did agree to going for a coffee somewhere, afterward.
“I pretty much keep myself to myself,” Lilly said. They had come out into the night air and were turning off Fourth into a passage that connected through to the late-night lights around Market Place. There was a moment’s hesitation, as if she were unsure about confiding something. “I guess I don’t really relate much to most of the people you meet these days. Things seem to change faster and faster. Not a lot of it makes sense anymore.”
Her words mirrored his own situation perfectly. Was that what she had somehow recognized, and why she was showing such interest in a bartender? “I know what you mean,” he said.
“Yes, I think you do. I don’t feel that with people very often.” She glanced sideways at him as they walked. There was more than idle curiosity at work. “You must meet all kinds in a job like yours.”
“You saw a few of them yourself tonight.”
“But you don’t just see them,” Lilly said. “You seem to see into them, as well. I was watching.”
“I know you were,” Corrigan answered. “So that makes you a bit of the same yourself, doesn’t it?” Lilly conceded with the quick smile of somebody being caught out, at the same time managing to convey that it was because she was not used to it. Compared to the empty stares and clumsy gropings to extract meanin
g that he saw every day, it felt like communication bordering on mind reading.
A promotional scouting robot spotted them as they came out into Market Place and rolled across to intercept them, flashing colored lights and logos of nearby places that were open late. “Hello, there! Enjoying the city late tonight?” it greeted jovially. “For your further entertainment we have Jermyn’s cabaret bar less than half a block from here, still open for drinks, dancing, and shows until dawn. Getting hungry? The Lilac Slipper offers the best in contemporary and traditional Cantonese cuisine, ten-percent discount for Pirates. Or, for more erotic tastes, ho-ho . . .”
Lilly sighed. “Maybe I could pass on having that coffee out. I’ll fix you one at home. How does that sound?”
“Sounds good,” Corrigan said. “How far is it?”
“Over the river, north. We’ll need a cab. Do you have a compad? I’m not carrying one.”
“I hardly ever use them.” Corrigan looked at the robot. “Can you call us a cab?”
“Sorry, I just make reservations. But why do you want to leave? It’s Saturday night. You want to be part of the scene, right?”
“Wrong.” Corrigan steered Lilly away to search for a pay booth. The robot pursued them, babbling tenaciously, until a mixed group of people appeared on the far side of the street, and one of them called it away.
“Aren’t you into being part of the scene?” Lilly said it in a light, mocking tone that combined several wavelengths—phrasing it as a question, but simultaneously telling him that she already knew and understood his answer because they both recognized and laughed at the same absurdities.
“Guilty,” Corrigan replied.
“You don’t need to find yourself?”
“I wasn’t aware that I ever lost myself.”
“But that’s terrible.”
“Now you know the worst.”
They both laughed. She slipped her arm loosely through his.
There was a gift store, with various curios and Pittsburgh mementos in the window. Suddenly Corrigan stopped and stared in at them. “What is it?” Lilly asked.
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