Robert Parker - Love and Glory

“Friend of the bride?” the bartender said.

“What makes you think so?”

“I work a lot of weddings. Most people drink champagne. A shot and a beer ain’t happy drinking.”

I didn’t answer him, I just held out the empty shot glass. He shrugged and put some blended whiskey in it. The bottle had one of those little chrome spouts in it, and he turned it nicely when the glass was full so none dripped.

There were flowers banked around most of the room — huge arrangements spilling out of big vases, roses, and a bunch of others that I didn’t know the names of. The bridesmaids in their yellow and the ushers in their white splashed among the crowd. The bride and groom danced. The son of a bitch danced so well that he was able to make Jennifer look good. I knew she couldn’t dance a step. Or she didn’t used to be able to. Things change. I leaned my back against the bar. Without looking, I stuck my shot glass back at the bartender. No one else was at the bar. They were all drinking champagne and nibbling canapés from trays that circulated.

“ ’Nother beer too,” I said.

The hot booze was insulating the small feeling part, layering in more protection. I felt full of novocaine. Here comes the fucking bride, I murmured to myself. All dressed in white. Christ, I never even fucked her. As they danced, Jennifer looked up at her husband. She looked at him just as she had looked at me, and I knew he felt just like I had, that he was all that Jennifer was interested in. She must have looked at Nick Taylor that way. Poor bastard, no wonder he’d been walking around with a ring in his pocket. Like me. He believed her. Even drunk I knew it wasn’t quite fair to Jennifer. We were talking about different things when we talked about love, my definition didn’t have to prevail.

There were tall windows around the open dance floor. Outside, trees moved in the summer wind and beyond them people played golf on a green rolling course that seemed eternal. The room was air-conditioned and cool, and high-ceilinged. The rich are different than we are. Yeah, they’re cooler. The colored dresses and the flowers were beginning to blur and the room was starting to look like an impressionist painting. I better stick to beer. No more shots. The beer had lost most of its taste. I sipped it from the bottle.

“Boonie, how nice of you to come,” Jennifer said. She was in front of me with the groom. He hadn’t loosened his tie. His jacket was buttoned. Neat, I thought. The fucking asshole.

“Thanks for inviting me,” I said. I drank some beer.

“Boonie, this is John Merchent. Boone Adams.”

He stuck out his clean, strong, tan hand. “Glad to meet you, Boone, I heard a lot about you up at school.”

I shook his hand briefly. “Yeah,” I said.

“Understand you were in Korea,” he said.

“World safe for democracy,” I said.

“My roommate at the deke house was in Korea.”

“You a deke?”

“Absolutely. I was a deke at Cornell and when I transferred I moved right in. Great house.”

“Cornell,” I said, “a deke, and a perfect asshole.”

“Boonie,” Jennifer said.

“Line from The Naked and the Dead,” I mumbled.

“You’re drunk, fella,” Merchent said. “Better get yourself under control.”

“Whyn’t you get me under control, twinkletoes?”

Merchent’s brother walked over and two of the ushers. They all looked like Merchent. Everybody at the wedding looked like Merchent. Except me.

“A whole collection,” I said. “A quartet of perfect assholes.”

Merchent jerked his head at me and his brother said, “Come on, fella, I think you should leave.” He put his hand on my arm. I yanked my arm away.

“Whyn’t he throw me out,” I said, and lunged at Merchent. He slid me past him almost negligently and his brother and the ushers rushed me out through the hall and into the parking lot. I sprawled on the pavement and scraped my hands.

“Don’t come back,” Brother said. “We’ll have you arrested.”

“How ’bout one at a fucking time,” I said. I was on my feet, but the parking lot seemed insubstantial. I was having a little trouble standing steady. Brother and the two ushers laughed a little, shook their heads, and walked back into the reception.

I stood alone in the parking lot. The sun was setting. The knee of my pants was ripped. I had gotten blood from my scraped palms on my white jacket. There was nothing to do and nowhere to go. I started walking. Behind me, I heard Jennifer say, “Boonie.” I stopped and looked back. She was standing in the door of the club in her wedding dress. “Boonie,” she said. “I’m sorry.” I nodded and turned back toward the street and kept walking.

She called after me. “Boonie, I know it’s corny, but we could be friends.” I shook my head and didn’t look back.

I arrived in New York wearing jeans, loafers, a blue oxford-weave shirt with a button-down collar, and an army field jacket with the twenty-fourth division taro leaf patch on the shoulder. I had no luggage except a gym bag with the collection of unmailed letters in it that I had come to call my journal and a couple of new notebooks. In my wallet was seventeen hundred dollars in mustering-out pay. I was twenty-two.

The one-room apartment I rented on Thompson Street had been freshly painted. But whoever had done the painting hadn’t scraped the old paint, so the walls were lumpy. Around the old four-footed tub and pull-chain toilet, paint had slopped and dried into thick white scabs. The porcelain surfaces were ineradicably stained, like the soul of man, and no absolution would ever clean them. I didn’t care.

Except for the daily journal entries to Jennifer my writing didn’t happen. I sat every day for a couple of hours at my kitchen table and looked at the cheap white paper in the typewriter. But I didn’t type anything. I was spending a lot of money on beer and by December I was up to 180 pounds, all of it fat, and I was almost out of money.

I went down to Robert Hall and spent forty-five dollars for a blue blazer and some gray flannel pants. I bought a tie in Times Square for a buck, then I got the Times and started reading help wanted ads. Some kind of writing job, advertising maybe.

It was my twenty-third interview. I’d been doing about five a day, every day. I didn’t have a job, but I was getting good at interviewing. No sir, I didn’t finish college. I felt my military responsibility came first. Yes sir, I know that advertising’s a tough business. The war left me needing action. I couldn’t go back to school like a child. Oh absolutely sir, I’ve given it a lot of thought. I assessed what I could do that would help me and help my employer. What did I have to market, I asked myself. Writing skills, I decided, and a desire to be where there was action.

I had the patter down quite well now, when I got a chance to use it. Most of the time the interviewer told me about the company and himself and his philosophy of advertising and employment and things.

“Mr. Adams?”

“Yes?”

“Mr. Locke will see you now.”

I walked behind the secretary’s wiggling buttocks across the big reception area and down the corridor with head-high cubicles on both sides and men in shirt sleeves working at typewriters and into a big private office with a big window that looked out over Madison Avenue and another big window into another big office across the street. There was probably a guy over there having an exit interview. Matter and anti-matter. The secretary smiled and closed the door behind me.

Mr. Locke was sitting with his feet on the window ledge facing out the window, his head tilted back, his eyes closed. He was tall and thin and blond and probably went to Cornell with John Merchent and his ushers. His gray flannel suit jacket hung on a hanger by the door. His blue oxford button-down was open at the neck and his blue and red rep tie was loosened. He wore horn-rimmed glasses and wing-tipped cordovan shoes. The Prince of Madison Avenue. Full uniform.

I stood by his desk. He still sat with his eyes closed. Maybe I was supposed to launch into my spiel unprovoked. No sir, I didn’t finish college. I felt my military... shit. Locke kept staring at the insides of his eyelids. Then he sat up abruptly, swung his feet down, spun his chair around, and wrote for maybe a minute in longhand on a legal-size pad of blue-lined yellow paper. When he finished he read over what he’d written, made a spelling change, and sat back.

“Hi,” he said. “Whitney Locke. I was just writing some poetry.”

I nodded.

“You’re Boone Adams. Personnel sent you up.”

“Yes.”

He waved toward a chair. “Sit down, please.”

I did. My chair wasn’t as nice as his. But I wasn’t the copy chief. He sifted through some folders on his desk until he came up with my application and résumé.