DRINK ORDERS are placed, and Gwen makes a point of not ordering alcohol. “Nothing with alcohol for me,” she says. “Bring me anything, as long as it doesn’t have alcohol.”
“Perrier, Ramlösa, Evian, Pellegrino, Poland Spring, Saratoga, Lethe?” asks the waiter. Belinda catches it, and only Belinda. She looks at the waiter and shows a surprised smile. He grins.
“Oh, it doesn’t matter to me,” says Gwen. “Just as long as there’s no alcohol. Perrier, I guess.”
When the waiter has gone, Gwen says, in answer to a question no one has asked, “I haven’t had a drink for a month or more. I think I was becoming an alcoholic.”
“Oh,” says Matthew. Belinda looks at him; it’s a look that says, with no possibility for misinterpretation whatsoever, “Get me out of here.”
“She took a quiz in a magazine,” says Harold.
“I haven’t missed it, really,” says Gwen. “It’s been fine. Just fine. I don’t fall asleep so early, for one thing. I’m getting a lot more done.”
“Don’t you find that you’re awfully tempted to have a cocktail when you go out?” Belinda asks. She raises her drink, sips it, raises her eyebrows, gives Gwen a questioning look over the rim of her glass.
“Oh, she has that solved completely,” says Harold. “We don’t go out anymore. If it weren’t Gwen’s birthday, we wouldn’t be out now. We used to have friends, at least I seem to recall that we did, but they were all — drinkers. So of course we don’t want to know them. They kept falling down stairs, sticking lamp shades on their heads, laughing at jokes that weren’t half-funny, vomiting into their soup — disgusting, really. I don’t know how we ever put up with them.” This is delivered as a joke, of course, but Matthew and Belinda can tell that it’s not a joke at heart, that Harold has lost something, has given up much more than he got in exchange. This thought chills Belinda, and it reminds Matthew of his former neighbor, Vic. When Matthew and Liz lived in Lincoln, Vic would telephone now and then, when he wanted drinking companions. Vic was a prosperous building contractor who had moved his wife and family from Brockton to Lincoln, thinking to give them the gift of the executive idyll, two acres of lawn in the best of the emerald suburbs; but his wife had wanted more from the move, a complete break with their past, which meant, specifically, that she didn’t want any of his old cronies coming around, and she didn’t want him stopping at his former haunts after work to drink with them. He was an executive now, living among executives, and he should get to know his executive neighbors and do his drinking with them, at home. Because Vic had met Matthew the day they moved in, Matthew was the only neighbor Vic ever invited over. The invitations always began with the same preliminary; Vic would say, as soon as Matthew answered the phone, “Hi. It’s Vic. What’re you doing, nothing?” Even after Matthew came to understand that this was only a conversational tic, he was offended by Vic’s assumption that he wasn’t doing anything, especially bothered by the fact that Vic had an uncanny knack of calling when, in fact, Matthew was doing nothing, at least nothing important enough to make it easy for him to say no to the invitation to come over for a few drinks. Because Vic’s wife was a willowy blonde who thought the toy business “interesting” and Matthew clever, Matthew usually went. Sometimes Liz went along.
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