Roder made a face, as if repulsed by a worm.
“Ansel, come on. When have I ever come to you like this?”
“What is wrong with you?”
“I shouldn’t have mentioned money. That was a mistake—I’m sorry.”
Roder shut the door in his face. Out of reach, not fifty feet from where he stood, in a drawer in Roder’s bedroom, were three ounces of weed, schoolyard in quality but adequate to the task at hand, and he couldn’t even blame the cosmos. It was he who’d offended Roder. By proposing a deal today, he’d rendered glaring a fact heretofore overlookable in the bonhomie of being high, of Roder’s generosity and his own capacity to amuse. The fact was that he didn’t love Roder. He loved drugs.
Pursued by the crater’s edge, he made his way to First Reformed. Of the friends of his who might be holding, only Roder wasn’t in Crossroads, and so the concert was his only recourse. His mother had lost her mind. She’d been committed to a loony bin, her father had drowned himself, and she’d named these facts to Perry—named two outcomes that had lurked behind doors in his head which he’d never permitted himself to open, not even on the most sleepless of nights. And yet, as if with X-ray vision, telekinetic intelligence, he must have seen through the shut doors, because nothing she’d told him had surprised him. He’d had only a dull sense of recognition. The outcomes were ugly but not shocking; he knew their faces.
He would tell her nothing more. Not now, not ever. In a sense, the crater he was fleeing was his mother.
He’d hoped to find a party in the church parking lot, but he’d arrived too late—the lot was empty. Inside the function hall, at the rear margin of the crowd, a couple of Crossroads alumnae were dancing with a blissy sloppiness to the instrumental jam in “Wooden Ships,” performed by a band Perry recognized by general repute, and also from having silk-screened its name on the concert posters, as the Bleu Notes. Through shifting lanes in the crowd, he caught glimpses of the fabled Laura Dobrinsky frowning over an electric keyboard, studious in her syncopations, and a tall Afro’d guitarist vaguely moving his lips to his riffing, and Tanner Evans behaving more like a rock star, tossing his hair and making little lunges as he whaled away on rhythm. They sounded note for note like Crosby, Stills and Nash on their first record, and the crowd, unfortunately, was totally into it. Except for the dancing girls, all he could see was the backs of nodding heads. Disappointment was rising in his throat when someone touched him on the shoulder.
Of all the useless people, it was Larry Cottrell. Larry had done something dumb to his hair, overcombed it, and the result was to make everything else about him—jean jacket, straight-legged corduroys, hiking boots—seem similarly overconsidered. He spread his arms as if, Jesus Christ, he expected a hug. Perry turned toward the stage and craned his neck, pretending to be greatly interested in the band. Having admitted to his mother that he’d been a dealer, and thereby inoculated himself against paternal discovery, he no longer had anything to fear from Larry.
We are lea-ea-ving, came the refrain onstage. You don’t nee-ee-eed us.
Larry, undiscouraged, shouted into Perry’s ear. “Where were you?”
As in a game of chess, Perry saw that, unless he took bold action, his little pawn would be dogging him at every turn, complicating the task of finding drugs. Again the sense of cosmic unfairness. Again the recognition that he had no one but himself to blame.
What to do? A bold move came to him as it did on a chessboard, with a frisson of do-I-dare. He beckoned Larry to follow him, which Larry eagerly did, out into the deserted vestibule.
“I had a thought,” he said.
“What, what,” Larry said.
“We need to get drunk.”
Larry’s fingers went straight to the sebaceous sides of his nose. “Okay.”
“I assume your mother has a liquor shelf?”
The fingers rubbed. The nose sniffed sebum. The eyes were wide.
“I want you to go there now,” Perry said. “Take something she won’t notice, triple sec or crème de menthe. Any bottle that’s more or less full.”
“Yeah, um. What about the rules, though?”
“You can hide the bottle in a snowdrift—it won’t freeze. Will you do that for me?”
Larry was obviously scared. “You have to come with me.”
“No. Too suspicious. You can take however long it takes—I’ll wait.”
“I don’t know about this.”