“You’re still mad at me,” she said.
“I don’t remember being mad at all.”
“Do you remember not returning my phone calls the last two times I was in town?”
“That was years ago.”
“I haven’t seen you since…when was it?”
“Nineteen forty?”
“November 1939,” she said. “That night I bribed my way into your apartment. That gangster… Little New York…he showed up and you pulled a gun on him. Do you remember that?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Do you remember how sweet that night was?”
I couldn’t look at her. Her blue eyes were just too goddamn blue for me to look at them. “It was a swell night, Sally.”
“I wish you’d call me Helen.”
“There’s no going back.”
“What do you mean?”
“It was too long ago. There’s no going back.”
“Nate, I know it was wrong of me to just leave you a note like that. I should’ve stuck around, or called you the next day, but it was a bad time for me-I was bankrupt, I was working my ass off getting my business life back together, and my personal life just got lost in the shuffle, and…”
“That’s not it.”
“What is it, then?”
“There’s no going back,” I said. “Excuse me.”
I opened the door; Eliot was standing out there, leaning against the far wall. “We better go,” I said.
“If you want,” he said.
“Sally, you look great,” I said, my back to her. “It was great seeing you again.”
I went back to the table. Eliot trailed after, in a few minutes.
“Where have you been?” I said, and it sounded nasty. I hadn’t meant it to, really, but it did.
“Talking to a fine lady,” he said, angry with me but holding himself back. “She thinks a lot of you, and you should’ve treated her better.”
“What did you talk about, anyway?”
Very tightly he said, “She’s concerned about you. Why, I don’t know. But she asked me a few questions, and I answered them. Why, is your civilian status a military secret?”
“Hell,” I said, getting up, “my life’s an open book.”
And I got up and walked outside. Stood on the corner and listened to the El roar by. I could smell the lake.
Eliot joined me, after paying the bill. He looked sad, not angry. I felt sheepish.
“Sorry,” I said.
“Forget it. You want to get another beer someplace?”
“No.”
“Want a lift someplace? I got a car, at the hotel garage. Better still, I got an E sticker.”
I laughed shortly. “You and every politician in town, I’ll wager.”
“For a guy just back from overseas,” he said, “you’re catching on fast.”
“This isn’t my first time in Chicago.”
“No? Then maybe you could recommend someplace else we could have a beer. What do you say?”
I said, finally, yes, and we walked to Barney’s Cocktail Lounge, where Barney’s brother Ben hugged me, even though we’d never been friends, really. I was the closest thing he could get to his brother, so I made do for a surrogate hugee. He’d talked to Barney long-distance in Hollywood just today. Barney indeed would be home soon, but Ben didn’t know when exactly.
The bar closed at one o’clock-another wartime sacrifice, but as a wise man once said, if you can’t get soused by one you ain’t trying-and Eliot and I stumbled out onto the street, and he set out toward his hotel, the LaSalle, and I walked home.
I wasn’t drunk, really. I’d had six or seven bottles of beer all told, spread well out over the evening. But you would think I’d drunk enough to make me tired. You would think I’d had long enough a day, shitty enough a day, to be sleepy.
But instead I sat at my desk in my skivvies with the glow of the neon night sunning me through the window. I sat there slumped on my folded arms like a kid sleeping on his desk at school, only I wasn’t sleeping. I sat there staring at the Murphy bed, folded down, fresh sheets and blankets waiting, that bed I’d slept in so many times, so many years before. Janey. Louise.
I reached under the desk and searched for and found the key I’d taped there, long ago. I removed it and worked it in the bottom drawer. There, waiting for me, was a bottle of rum, and my nine-millimeter automatic, both tangled up in my shoulder holster. I untangled them, left the gun in its holster out on the desk and drank from the rum like it was a bottle of pop.
But I still couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t even think of sleeping.
Who killed you, Estelle?
D’Angelo, are you back, too? Are you fighting the homefront war like I am? Was Estelle a casualty?
Monawk-who killed you, buddy? Bullets flying everywhere, Monawk screaming, Barney pitching grenades, D’Angelo, where are you?
Somebody screamed.
Me.
I sat up.