More Bitter Than Death (3 page)

T
HERE WAS SCATTERED APPLAUSE AND A LOT OF
muttering in the audience and some up on stage. Scott ran offstage to see what was going on. He came right back, alone.

“I guess Professor Garrison wanted to get started on the serious drinking,” he said into the mike, with a conspiratorial DJ’s voice. There was a little laughter, but much more concern and buzzing still over the strange performance. “In any case, I’d like once again to thank our speakers and invite the rest of you to the main ballroom, where we can get this party started!”

He sold the line; everyone laughed, but I could tell that there was going to be a lot of talk about Garrison’s little performance for a long time to come.

“Damn, Scott’s still cleaning up after Garrison after all these years,” Carla muttered to me. She stretched, her shirt riding up and showing the waistband of her pantyhose, but she didn’t care in the least. “Quick turn about the floor of the reception and then off to the game?”

“Sounds good. Hey, Scott, what’s up with Garrison?”

Scott had just got done shaking the hands of the more senior members of the panel and reassuring some of the audience who were concerned about Garrison.

“I think he’s just tired, he was complaining of fatigue when Petra caught up with him. And when Julius Gilbert Garrison has decided he’s done, you know he’s not the kind of guy to stand around. He thinks that everything’s been said and there’s no point.”

With the plenary session abruptly completed, everyone was herded out into the hallway and into the next ballroom for the reception. This is where I got to finally say hello to a lot of old friends and start the perennial catching up, but typically enough, the lines for the cash bars instantly jammed things up. The line I was in stalled by a glassed-in case containing a few artifacts associated with the hotel’s construction and history. There was a silver-plated trowel and spade, both inscribed with the dates of the hotel’s refurbishment in the nineteen fifties. There were a few fragments of pottery that had been collected by some curious observer of that period, and a series of maps showed the location of the hotel over time. One plan from the early nineteenth century showed a series of outbuildings around the old structure, as well as the post road and other towns on the lake that caused the inn to grow from a large farmhouse into a tavern and, eventually, a hotel.

“Could be a piece of a hinge, maybe,” a woman’s voice said a few bodies down from where I was standing. I saw a well-manicured hand pointing toward a strip of rusted metal.

“No, I don’t think so,” I said absently. “It looks like a piece of a pair of ice tongs. You can see in that second map, there’s a little block that says ‘ice house’ underneath it.”

I pointed to the clue I’d seen. I glanced over at the woman and found myself on the wrong end of a venomous stare. Oh crap, Noreen McAllister. Just my luck.

A loud “tch” was her reply. Noreen flipped that big mess
of blue-black hair—she never bothered tying up her pride and joy—and pursed her lips, but fortunately for me, the line shifted forward and took Noreen away. Someone had wised up and got another bartender on duty.

Once I got my drink, I said hello to a few more folks, but I wasn’t sticking around for long. I caught my friend Chris’s eye and he nodded; then he jerked his head over to where another fellow conspirator, Lissa Vance, was talking to someone. I caught her eye and raised my eyebrows. She nodded and began to extricate herself from her conversation with Bea Carter, which if history was any indication, would be an involved process. The Bat Signal had been lit and it was time to go. I put down my empty glass and surveyed the scene.

The hotel had a little combo playing in the reception area, and the lights came down when they went on. This was obviously meant as a treat, but the musicians were more enthusiastic than talented, and those who were grooving to them did so with a pronounced sense of irony. Though most of the older folks left the floor in a hurry, some remained and cut a fair enough rug, but then the younger cadres came out, graduate students, some ABDs, a smattering each of new PhDs and undergraduates snaking their way onto the floor, laying claim to the one place this weekend where they might have some authority. One Gypsy-clad young lady slinked onto the floor, taking a willing guy by the hand; I could see a pint bottle of vodka stuck in his back pocket. Their skins were tribally pierced and colorfully illustrated. Ties and skirts were still in suitcases waiting for paper presentation time; now it was either hyperbaggy pants or skin-tight jeans hovering three inches and more south of where I thought they should properly rest. Others were scrounging the “free” food at the buffet, squirreling some away for later. Standard operating procedure.

I didn’t know many of them and realized that as much as I might feel it, I was no longer a part of the puppy crowd. At
their age, for us, it had been a single pierced ear or maybe long hair for the guys, big, bad hair for the girls. I wasn’t even an aging puppy, I was a big dog now, and the thought made me sad as I watched the dancing.

The game, our game, was scheduled during the dance reception. I wasn’t much for dancing, myself, and the music was usually pretty wretched. The other folks in the game would stick around for a few minutes, sometimes, but we always ended up in someone’s room, with the same nasty sticky deck of cards we’d been using to cut for years—featuring the shaved and slicked charms of the Chippendale dancers—and a new deck for the game itself.

The game had started out as a reaction by me and my friends when we were the puppies. We got tired of trying to meet up with the people we were trying to imitate, trying to accost for whatever reason. We decided that if they could withdraw, pointedly excluding us, to their rooms for private drink, and who knows what else, then we could jolly well do the same. So we instituted the poker game and kept it to ourselves, fifteen years ago or so, with all the vindictiveness of snubbed mid-twenty-somethings. There hadn’t been much variation over the years—everyone brought something to drink, ordered something to eat, and left their attitude at the door, as much as humanly possible—but the rules were strict: no discussion of professional news, only catching up with each other. No telling others outside the group about what went on in the room, save to say that it was a card game, nothing more. No television, and no radio either, because it only distracted and caused fuss. Bring cash and no whining, about anything.

I picked my way through the crowds toward the exit. Over the years the game had devolved from a rebellion into a retreat, a counter to the overstimulation that characterized most conferences. For many of the attendees, the attraction of being at a conference was the chance to slip the leash, behave badly in the company of their understanding profes
sional peers, or find a little extracurricular sexual activity. I had been naively shocked when I realized this, early on, and it only tired me to think of it now. Drinking too much and dancing too late were one thing, but I just didn’t understand how, morals quite apart, anyone could possibly have the time or the energy for an affair.

So the game was a chance to catch up with friends who’d known each other for, well, almost two decades now; the longevity, a shock in itself. We’d passed the age in our lives when a wave across the room was enough to hold us until the next conference, because there’d always be another event. Now, however, we wanted to spend some time with each other.

I guess I shouldn’t have been so surprised when my graduate student Meg Garrity appeared in my path.

“I was wondering if you needed another hand at the table,” she said. I saw her flushing red to her roots, which were now what I assumed was her natural brown, for about two inches, then to another three-inch fringe of platinum. It looked interesting, but I couldn’t tell whether she was doing it on purpose or just getting sloppy about color maintenance.

I blinked. “Well, I—”

“I mean, only if it’s cool,” she hastily added, when she saw my surprise. I realized she’d been watching me, waiting for this moment.

“Well, we’re actually pretty full.” I saw her face go carefully blank, and she nodded. “It’s just cards, Meg. It’s just a bunch of us getting together, you know, to catch up and all. It’s nothing special.”

“You don’t have to explain,” she said quickly. But if the look on her face was any indication, I did have to explain.

“Honestly, Meg, it’s not like it’s the hot ticket of the social season. It’s just…friends…no big deal. I mean, we don’t even talk about work, all that much. If it was only up to me,
I’d say yes, but it’s not. You understand. Maybe you and Neal will be free later for that drink?”

She nodded, but she turned away, her jaw set. “Sure, no problem. I’ll catch you later.” Meg hurried off, even before I could say another word. I saw her find her fiancé Neal and lead him to the dance floor. He complied with a fair competence and I wondered why I should be at all surprised he could dance.

She didn’t understand, I realized, she even thought that I was trying to keep her out of something. Well, I was, but not the way she thought. This was not some kind of Star Chamber, a sanctum sanctorum where important and discipline-changing decisions were made. It was a room of friends in their late thirties and forties trying to act like human beings.

Shit. Well, I would have thought exactly the same thing at her age. I didn’t even know whether I’d have had the guts to ask to join the game, if I’d been in her place. But it wasn’t my decision, and it was over now.

With a sigh, I turned and headed for the elevator banks.

“Hike up your skirts, ladies, we’re entering the gates of hell,” I said, as I finished dealing the cards. Brad DuBois removed the emptied plates. “Who’s in? Carla?”

“Wait a minute, don’t change the subject!” Scott said. “Never mind skirts! You were in your
underwear
?”

Jay Whitaker furrowed his brow. “Never mind that. Are we here to play cards or what? Chris, man, lend me twenty?” Jay ran his hand through thinning brown hair; at least he’d had the sense to cut off the damned ponytail he’d been clinging to for years, leaving the last of his misspent youth behind him. He’d been partying hard since he arrived the night before and needed a shave and a change of chinos, but that was understandable as this was as much of a vacation as he ever
got: The struggling contract company he’d founded kept him digging all summer, and in the lab all winter.

“Of course I was in my underwear,” I said. “That’s what makes the story embarrassing. What about it, Chris?” I was only asking to keep Jay on tenterhooks; it was just so funny to watch, and plus, it kept him off his game. He and I played hard in our competitions over the years.

“I’m folding.” Chris threw down his cards in disgust. “I might as well still be at home, snowed in with Nell and the herd. Here,” he said, handing some bills to Jay, “make these last awhile this time, Jay-Bird.”

“I’m sure that Nell would love to hear that,” I said. “Looks like lots of folks got hit by the storm on the way in last night; I noticed the crowd seemed pretty thin. What about it, Brad?”

Bradford DuBois, occasionally known to his intimates as “Brad the Boy,” stood up, which didn’t take long. He was short, thin, brown hair curled as tight as his uptight attitude. He was one of the most phenomenally lucky archaeologists I ever met, which counts almost as much as being good, which he also was. “I’m out. Anyone want a beer? I brought low-carb.”

“Thank God!” Carla said. “Now we can get down to the serious partying.” She snorted in disgust, whether at her cards or the notion of Brad’s fake beer, no one could tell.

“I’m sorry, but can you please tell me the point of lowcarb beer?” Lissa, known only to her parents as Elizabeth Bell Vance, wiped the last of the crumbs from her place at the table onto her empty plate. “Isn’t that water? Bring me a Bass. And a glass, would you? Thanks.” Lissa was a poster child for the perfectly turned-out blond sorority sister, never a hair out of place, even when she chases bulldozers across battlefield sites in her hard hat.

“Don’t tell me you’re going all carnivorous and carbo
phobic on us?” Chris asked. “Weren’t you a vegetarian this time last year?”

“Now we’re totally vegan,” Brad said. “Still am. And occasionally, we go uncooked, just for good measure. I’m just watching my weight. Some of us could stand to.” He glanced meaningfully at Chris’s straining shirt buttons.

“And by doing so, with one stroke, you’ve eliminated two of man’s finest achievements: the invention of fire-on-demand and animal domestication.” Chris remained happily unconcerned with his diet and his thickening waistline. “Bring me a beer, boy!” he called in his best imitation of Hagar the Horrible. “Make it two! Real ones, none of your pallid
Schweinwasser
!”

The rest of us put in our orders and Brad was kept busy for a few minutes ferrying beers to us. Carla, of course, changed her mind three times about brands, and he actually obliged her twice, then finally told her to go to hell when she complained about the label coming off the last bottle.

“And may I say thank you again for rescuing me, Em?” Lissa said. “I swear, Bea Carter’s just like a big, obnoxious octopus, and once she gets you trapped, she sucks the life out of you.”

“Kinda mixing your metaphors there, aren’t ya, Lissa?” Carla said.

“You know what I mean. And Brad, thank
you
so much for finally, finally shaving that darn porn-star mustache of yours. You look ten years younger.”

Brad bowed, on his way back with the beers. “Francine likes me clean shaven too.”

“Anyway, who’s got dirt?” Lissa asked, after she opened her bottle and carefully poured it into a glass. As if we hadn’t heard that hoary old line a thousand times.

“No, you’re not going to do this to me!” Jay said. “Let’s play the damned game!”

Scott was right there with him: “I’m out, too, but Emma, tell me what happened! There was underwear, you left off with underwear!”

“Okay, okay,” I said. Carla and I exchanged raised eyebrows: something was up with Jay’s hand. “So I was in there cleaning the bathroom—”