Jonathan Dee - A Thousand Pardons

“I’m glad you think it’s funny,” one of them said to Hamilton, who was straight-faced as far as he could feel. “We might not have jobs tomorrow. Where were you, in some bar?”

He nodded.

“Oh, great,” said the angry one. “And I’m sure no one whipped out a phone and took your picture there. I’m sure you were totally incognito there. I’m sure that picture isn’t on TMZ already.”

“That’s all correct, actually,” Hamilton said. “Though weirdly expressed. Why, were you out looking for me?”

The two handlers’ four eyes flashed toward each other, then back at Hamilton. “Seriously,” said the relieved one, “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry right now.”

“Have a drink,” Hamilton said, clapping them both on the shoulder, “and for God’s sake, never, ever separate into two people. Because that is a slippery fucking slope.” He made the journey from the bar at one end of the ballroom to the bar at the opposite end. People waved, and he waved back, and he hugged and kissed them lustily whenever they hugged and kissed him, but whenever they spoke to him it was as if they were a hundred feet away, and with no idea what they were saying he had to try to make the appropriate facial expressions until they stopped. Time passed and he had a vague sense of the ballroom being less crowded than it had been, unless it had somehow gotten bigger. He saw a young, red-haired woman in a very short black skirt — hot, but small, like some sort of curvaceous doll — sitting alone with her heavily tattooed arm across the back of her chair; at the far end of the arm was her hand with a martini glass in it; at the near end, her chin was sunk gloomily into her shoulder. With her legs crossed, she was more exposed to Hamilton and the rest of the room than she seemed to realize—

“Whoa!” Hamilton said. “Bettina!”

Bettina raised her eyes, the way a dog would do. “Well great,” she said. “There goes my last shred of hope, which was that you’d forgotten what I looked like.”

She was very drunk, which was exciting because it ran so afoul of his first impression of her. It was so boring to be right about people. “Bettina, don’t worry, Bettina,” he said, pulling up a chair in front of her; whoever had been at Bettina’s table had abandoned her there. She had the look of someone who had already embarrassed herself, who was regretful but also past caring. “Are you afraid of me? There’s no reason to be afraid of me.”

She looked at him and smirked, as if offended to be considered stupid enough not to be afraid of him.

“Bettina, it is so important that we found each other,” he said. “Let me go get you another martina. Martini.”

The crowd had thinned out to the point where he didn’t even have to wait in line at the bar. He held up the martini glass and then two fingers, as if it were very loud in the ballroom, which it no longer was. The chandeliers were so clean — whose job was that? — but he could not look up at them, he had to look down at the two precious martinis as he made his way across the floor, which seemed to have opened up to the size of a parking lot. Please let her still be there, Hamilton said to himself, please please please.

Not only was she there but she seemed to have perked up a bit. Her head was almost vertical. She accepted her martini with a look of deep cynicism. “What are you doing?” she said.

“I need,” he said, “to get to know you.”

She took a sip and closed her eyes. “You mean you think you’re going to fuck me?” she asked him.

“It is not about that,” he said. “I mean it is honestly only partly about that.”

“I’m sure you’re used to getting whatever you want.”

“If only,” he said. “I wish. As if.” He tried to think of another phrase that meant the same thing.

“Can I ask you something? That old broad at the theater tonight, the one with the Asian daughter: you don’t even know who she is, do you?”

“No,” he said. “No idea.”

She sat back and flipped her hands up in the air, satisfied and disgusted at the same time.

“I get treated like shit in my job,” she said. “This is the part where I say: ‘But I’m not a bad person.’ But you know what? I am a bad person.”

“No,” Hamilton said soothingly.

She closed her eyes and nodded loosely. “This is the part where I say: ‘Seriously. You don’t know me.’ But you know what? I think you do know me. You look at me and say, ‘Oh, I know her,’ and you’re actually probably right.”

“No, I do not know you,” Hamilton said, his voice reverent now, a whisper. You are the one, he was thinking. Though he was unsure what he meant by that. You are the one . She was some kind of kindred spirit, that was for sure, some kind of sinner who understood what an unfairly hazardous world this was, at least when she was drunk, a state in which he determined to keep her. Himself too: usually these evenings shot up like a firework and ended in a blackout that was like a depressive rebirth, but with a partner like this at his side, a partner in crime, he had an interest in keeping things going, in postponing tomorrow morning for as long as humanly possible. He now found himself kneeling on the floor in front of her, in order to hear her better and also to worship her. Right alongside these feelings of worship, but somehow not corrupting them or affecting them in any way, were sexual imaginings of the most baroque, polluted kind, having to do with her smallness, her perfect scale, her miniature manipulability, various humiliating scenarios in which no part of her touched the floor, in which he dominated her as a giant might do.

“I mean I don’t know why I should care,” Bettina was saying, “about my stupid fucking job, whether I lose it, whether I keep it. Public relations — what the hell does that even mean?”

“I don’t know anyone who knows,” Hamilton said. He patted her hand with his. She didn’t seem to notice, and in truth he couldn’t really feel it either. He looked around for her martini and handed it to her.

“Don’t you wish you could become someone else,” she said, “just like that? Just say, ‘This is the night I am absolved for every mistake,’ and then just start again as this other person? Look who I’m talking to, though. Hamilton Motherfucking Barth. Like you’d be free to change who you are even if you wanted to.”

“What do you mean?” he said. “I could do it.”

She laughed at him. “No way José,” she said. “You’re fucked in that department. The world owns your ass.”

He stood up. His anger only sharpened the sexual outline of his every thought. “Here’s what we’re going to do,” he said, with no idea what his next sentence would be. But he needed to stay with her, and he needed to be somewhere that was not here. “Can you rent a car?”

“What?”

“I can’t. I mean I can, but I know from experience that if they see it’s me they’ll drop a dime and five minutes later there’ll be photographers up our ass like Princess Di. So can you rent it?”

“Don’t need to rent any car. I own a car. I drove here. But where do you need to go?”

“We, Bettina. We. We need to go somewhere and be alone together.” He lifted her gently to her feet. She was like a feather. “You have a coat somewhere, right? Where are you parked?”

“Is this really happening?” she said. They started toward the door. Already he felt reborn and invisible. “I need to tell you something,” she said. “Back at the theater? I lied to you when I said my name was Bettina.”

“That is the best news of all,” Hamilton said.

SARA AND CUTTER did not have any classes together — not so unusual, in a school that size — and by third period on Wednesday she still hadn’t seen him, though they’d been texting all morning, after texting well into the night before. They’d snarked on every camera-phone photo she’d sent him of that stupid ass-kissing zombie movie premiere, where everyone was so in love with themselves; still, she looked forward to doing it in person all over again. But when she got to the cafeteria, he wasn’t there. She went to his French classroom before the start of next period, and he wasn’t there either. Where had he been texting her from? She typed the question and received in return a photo of Cutter, grinning and wearing pajamas, in what she presumed was his own kitchen.