Drinking With Men : A Memoir (9781101603123) (14 page)

So of course by then, I got why all these guys had such deep affection for him. Ed clearly didn't like everybody. But if he liked you, well, he
really
liked you. And if he didn't, well, good luck to you. I can't say exactly that he held many people in contempt, I don't think that's what it was, but often, he sure looked like he did. If he took to you, he made it clear. It wasn't hard to tell that he was happy to see you. In the way he called out your name. Or extended a barstool or chair to you. Or threw his arms around you and embraced you with his usual disarming tenderness.

After our inauspicious start, we had become fast friends. And after finding him so unappealing at first, I now found him singularly beautiful. I wasn't sure that it was romantic love, exactly; I wasn't sure
what
it was. I think many of us—Ed's drinking friends—were a little bit in some kind of love with him. But I suspect that because I was a woman in this company of men, I felt I had to think harder about this. I didn't especially want to have a crush on a drinking buddy. Particularly a married drinking buddy. I told myself it was fine; my crush on Ed was probably no different from the man-crushes so many of the guys seemed to have on him.

But one night something happened. It was a charmed night: Everyone was happy, the little room thick with smoke and full of laughter. I was sitting at a table with Ed and Jimmy and a couple of other guys. Ed and I got into some kind of loud argument. I have no memory of what we were fighting about, but suddenly we were standing up, palms planted on the little table, screaming at each other. And then, just as suddenly, we kissed, right across the table. It was quick. Just as quickly, we backed away from each other. It was nothing, and it was something. The room's din died down, everything went into a spin for a moment, then stopped. I knew that it would never happen again, and it shouldn't. Jimmy sat there gaping. I was pretty sure he'd give me shit about it some day, even if he never said a thing about it to Ed.

I didn't return to the bar the next night. It wasn't that I was avoiding Ed—I never wanted to avoid him—but I was afraid that maybe he would now think less of me. Two nights later I was ready to return. I had to. Liquor Store was where I lived in the off-hours and, besides, regardless of what had happened—a small thing that had now become overblown, amplified, outsized in my conscience—I still had to see Ed.

I ran into him before I even got to the bar. He was walking across North Moore Street, too, and when I saw him from half a block away, I picked up my pace and caught up with him. “Hey Ed.” I nodded.

“Rosie.” He nodded.

We said nothing more. We proceeded to Liquor Store, where he ordered a beer and I ordered a Jameson. And it felt like everything was completely back to normal—like it had never
not
been normal. There would never be another kiss, and that was a good thing. Instead, there would be more talking, more listening, more drinking, and a greater deepening of our friendship. If anything, things were easier now, like some air had been let out.

Summer was nearly shifting into fall, and my time in the sublet was running out. I couch-surfed in the neighborhood for a while. I started looking at apartments in Manhattan, but there was nothing I could afford. A friend told me that there was an apartment available in the building next door to her in Brooklyn. I didn't want to move to Brooklyn. Really, I didn't want to leave a ten-block radius of Liquor Store. But I went and checked the place out. It was a real apartment, with space and light and closets and high ceilings, and the price was right, and friends lived next door. In October I moved in, knowing that I wouldn't be able to spend as much time at Liquor Store, knowing that I wouldn't be able to see Ed nearly as often. But I felt that now, with a place of my own and some distance from TriBeCa and its bars, my life would start to stabilize. And it did. For a while I was happy to set up house and refinish the floors and paint the walls and scavenge for furniture and cook real dinners. I missed the almost-nightly sessions at Liquor Store, but I felt ready to start acting like an adult, or something. And maybe adulthood was finally ready for me.

That fall, in dizzyingly rapid succession, I got an apartment, I got a cat, and I got involved with a really good, really smart guy. Someone my own age. Someone I didn't know from a bar. Frank and I had met during graduate school orientation the previous year and slowly became friends. We wound up in a few classes together—Spenser; Yeats and Linguistics; Revolutionary Poetics. We taught at the same community college, where we, as brand-new professors, were in the same small group of teachers who had to meet weekly with a supervisor who helped us figure out how to do our job. In these meetings and in our classes together, Frank impressed me. Whenever he spoke in our seminars, he did so judiciously: the points he made were always insightful and nuanced, never gratuitous, never uttered just to show off. He was an excellent reader with a broad and interesting mind, and a fine writer. And in our little teaching group, I also discovered that he was a stand-up guy with a strong sense of justice. Once, when one of the other male students in the group launched a vicious verbal attack on one of the women in the group—disagreements about pedagogy could get heated, but I'd never heard anything like this—Frank cleared his throat and calmly said, “I doubt you'd talk this way to me. Or to any other man.” The perpetrator was silenced. No one in the room would ever forget that. We all knew that Frank was right. Much as I wished I'd said it, I was glad he had. My respect for him multiplied, and I'm pretty sure that's exactly when I started to fall in love. Not long after that, we tried to make a plan to see a movie together, but couldn't figure it out. In December, he mentioned that he was having a small birthday dinner at one of my favorite restaurants in Chinatown. I promptly invited myself. And that's when and where our romance really began—over platters of duck with flowering chives, Singapore mai fun, clams with black beans, and roast pork with ginger-scallion sauce.

Normal things were happening in my life, which surprised me, and I think it also surprised many of my bar friends. Not long after Frank and I had started dating, I took him to meet my Puffy's and Liquor Store friends, and I soon felt pretty terrible about subjecting him to their scrutiny. But it was necessary, because these people had become like another family to me. Frank was low-key and often shy, a generally mild-mannered, even-tempered academic. Some members of my bar family were friendly and open and welcoming. Some just tried to take a reading of him, like they were checking out a horse at auction. And others, just a few, were downright hostile. One especially tart-tongued friend grabbed him by the shoulders and looked him right in the eyes: “If you fuck with this girl,” she said, “I will superglue your hand to your dick.” I tried to laugh it off, but I could tell that he hadn't found it funny.

Part of me was moved by how protective some of my friends were. And part of me felt uncomfortable, even resentful, and it made me wonder if maybe some among them didn't want me to get on with my life, to behave like a normal person in her twenties probably should, as if I should just stay put in this little world of bars, drinking every night, occasionally fucking men whom I did not love, with whom it was understood there would be no future. I knew something serious was happening in my life, and I knew that such seriousness fits uneasily into bar culture. Ultimately I didn't really care what most of the crowd thought of my boyfriend, as long as they were courteous and not too scary. But I
did
care what Ed thought. I trusted him. I trusted his judgment. I knew he didn't like everybody. His approval mattered.

So when Frank and I went to Liquor Store together one evening, I did a quick check through the window to see if Ed was there. He was. I took a deep breath and collected myself, like we were about to have an audience with the Godfather, and we walked inside. I'd told Frank about Ed. I'd gushed about him. He knew that it was important to me that they meet.

I introduced them. They shook hands. We sat down. Not much was said. A few questions. A few answers. They were both quiet men. I felt tense and a little awkward. I made some small talk, mostly about how great they both were, as though it were a public relations event or a diplomatic summit. I talked up Ed's art and Frank's scholarship, both of which I ardently admired. But the point was to get them talking to each other, and that wasn't happening. What would get them going? There had to be something. Finally, it hit me: It had been Missouri folklore that had brought Ed and me together, the night we became friends. The Show-Me State would come to the rescue once again.

“Frank, Ed's a big Twain fan,” I said casually. Frank was, too, even though Mark Twain was well out of the realm of his academic specialization in English Romanticism. But that was all it took. For fun, Frank had recently reread
Pudd'nhead Wilson
for the first time in years, and he and Ed had found their subject. Now I could sit back for a spell and just listen. Perfect.

Frank and I had a couple of drinks and left. Everything seemed to have gone fine, but I wasn't sure what Ed thought.

“He's cool, right?” I asked Frank.

“Yeah,” Frank agreed. “He's cool. And really smart.”

Not long after their first meeting, Frank arrived at Liquor Store before me one night. He later told me that Ed had grilled him. “He wanted to make sure my intentions were honorable,” Frank told me. He said that they were. Frank was touched by Ed's concern, and relieved that no threats to his person had been made.

The next time I returned to Liquor Store by myself I found Ed alone at a table. I got a whiskey and joined him. He nodded and said quietly, “He's a nice young man.” I already knew that, but I needed to hear it from Ed.

I'd still stop by the bar now and then after work, but my visits became rarer. I was starting a new life, one that relied less on the bar. But on a bright sunny spring day in 1998, Frank and I found ourselves in TriBeCa and headed to Liquor Store. We ran into Ed a block south of the bar, on West Broadway. He was unusually worked up, uncharacteristically loquacious. He delivered a rapid-fire monologue. He and his wife had been in New Mexico. “It was weird, man. Even went to Roswell. Looked at some property. Checked some shit out.”
He'd finally gotten around to seeing a dentist. And he'd been to the doctor, for the first time in years. Something was wrong. There would be some kind of operation. But he'd be okay, he assured us. I told him that Frank and I were planning our first trip together, to Europe. His parents were living in Bayreuth for a year. “Well, if you're going to Munich, let me know,” Ed said. “I have people there.”

Later, I called Ed. Sure, we'd go to Munich, an easy train ride from Bayreuth. We'd need to get away from the parents for a few days. We talked for nearly an hour. “Go to my gallery, on Maximilianstrasse. And go to my friend's restaurant, near the market. And drink at Schumann's. Use my name,” he said. “And yeah, the museums. You should go to those, too.” I jotted all the names and numbers down in a notebook. Thanks to Ed, Frank and I spent three wonderful days in Munich, meeting Ed's friends, eating and drinking in places where he was as beloved as he was at Liquor Store. But the best and most revealing part of our visit to Munich was seeing his art there. At his gallery, an assistant patiently pulled drawings from the flat files and reverently showed us fine, funny drawings, funny and tough and tender, mostly in black with occasional shots of other colors, spare but not at all stingy—beautiful in an off-center way, a way that makes you stop and think about what beauty is, anyway, not unlike their maker.
This is where Ed really abides,
I remember thinking,
in his work. This is who he is. This is where all of that listening, all of that reception, all of that quietness and patience, all of that toughness and discernment go.

But by that November, something else was wrong. I'd heard through the grapevine that Ed had been diagnosed with cancer. Really bad, advanced cancer that had started in one organ and metastasized elsewhere. Soon after I heard the news, I caught up with him at Liquor Store. He wasn't smoking anymore. I wasn't sure what to say to him, and neither, it seemed, were most of the guys. They were clearly distraught, but trying to act like everything was okay, or was going to be okay. It was unusually quiet around the bar. After that, he was in and out of the hospital.

I called him at the hospital a few times, and his voice was weaker with every conversation. “Don't visit,” he said emphatically. He'd told others the same thing. He didn't want visitors; he didn't want people to see him like that—other than his wife and the doctors. I talked to people about it. I couldn't stand thinking that I might never see him again. I wanted to respect his wishes. But I was also scared. What would I say? I couldn't imagine treading lightly around Ed. I knew that would piss him off. And in the face of death, I was suddenly, weirdly, shamefully timid. I stayed away. And when he died, less than five months after he'd been diagnosed, I regretted it. But even Jimmy—the best of all those who made the claim of being Ed's best friend—had obeyed his wishes.

There was a round of phone calls one day in late March 1999. Ed had died. And as much as I expected a call, as much as I knew it was coming, the news punched me in the gut. I hated that I hadn't gone to see him. I hated even more that he was gone. Ed had only been part of my life for a short time. Should that have made his loss harder or easier to bear? I couldn't tell. I knew how crushed Jimmy, who'd known Ed for thirty years, since they were boys—“we're still boys,” Jimmy once said—must have been. They had traveled the world together, working for a famous artist. They had spent mornings drawing together on a hotel balcony in Hawaii. They had been poor, grubby young artists together in Manhattan in the seventies. During the course of their friendship, they had seen each other through odd jobs and successes and failures, through girlfriends, through their courtships and marriages, through everything. I tried to imagine how he must have felt, the enormity of the loss. At the same time, I was jealous. He'd had decades of Ed; I'd only had a few years.