What’s In Boston?
A short story
“So she says to me, ‘Come to Boston tomorrow.’”
Steve pauses to take a swig from his beer.
I say, “And?”
He puts down his glass and looks at me. “What do you think I did?” He takes another drink for effect.
I assume the question is rhetorical, given the circumstances. We’re in a bar off Shaftesbury Avenue, on the Soho fringes, drinking strong Dutch beer in an effort to drown Steve’s sorrows. It’s Tuesday. Mary, the woman he had felt certain he was to marry, left him last Thursday, telling him she was off to Australia and that she didn’t want him to follow. The drinks we’ve had so far have brought him to the point where he’s telling me stories from a recent trip to New York.
Steve answers his own question, as I knew he would. “I was flying home on the Sunday. This was Friday. How could I go to Boston?”
“But you wanted to, right. I mean, you would’ve if you’d had more time?” I get the attention of the barman and order two more pints of Oranjeboom.
Steve says, “God but she was attractive.”
I’m not sure whether we’re back with Mary, so I say, “I always liked her.”
“No. I meant the New York woman, the actress.”
“She was an actress?”
“Studying.”
“Ah.”
“But good. I could tell. She had this incredibly husky voice.”
“Like all the great actresses have, right?”
Steve reaches for his new pint. “Yeah, yeah. But whatever, she was sexy, especially that voice.”
“You were tempted by a voice?”
“Truthfully, yes. At first I fancied her friend. Then I heard the other one talk.”
“Where was this?”
“Where was what? Where she spoke?”
I take a drink of my own beer. I’m being left behind and I realise that I’ll probably be paying for most of it. Mary took a large part of their joint account when she left.
“Where did you meet them? You started this with the punch line as far as I can see.”
“Off Broadway somewhere. A small disco place. I think it was on Amsterdam. It was just around the corner from this restaurant we’d been to. The grey hairs and top suits went off home or to their hotels but I went off with a couple of their finance guys to this place. I don’t remember the name.”
“Doesn’t matter,” I say. “I wouldn’t know it. I haven’t been there.”
“Oh, right. I forgot.” Steve lets a look of pity cross his face that means he’s getting one less free pint.
“Carry on,” I say.
“These finance guys were all braces and tiepins and couldn’t drink enough to fill their fucking Montblancs. We’d only been there about an hour — they had a special on Michelob Dry — when they wanted to split. They offered to see me back to my hotel but I’d already half decided to stay when this group of women walked in and made my mind up for me. There were five of them and each one was stunning. And the thing was; nobody seemed to notice. You’ve got to get to New York.”
“Mm.”
“I told the guys I was enjoying myself and I’d stay for a few more Michelobs. They looked a little downcast until I made them understand that I was happy to stay on my own. They left.” Steve takes a long draught of his beer. It takes him nearly to the bottom of the glass and this time he looks up and orders two more before continuing. I wonder whether the fact that he ordered means he’ll pay. In fact, I miss the next part of what he says because the barman is hanging about waiting to be paid. Steve pushes on with the story and I put the barman out of his misery. Sometimes it’s hard to guess if Steve’s an asshole by design or accident. I don’t bother to ask Steve to repeat what I missed.
“. . . basketball machine. Towards the back. More fun than it sounds, especially with a gallon of Michelob on top of a carafe of Masson red.”
“I bet.”
“The two prettiest of the women were playing and attracting serious attention from a couple of guys in trainers and baseball caps the wrong way round.”
“Not a dressy place, then?”
“The guys didn’t seem unpleasant and the women were having a fun time with the game. With a confidence inspired by the drink I just sort of attached myself to the group. On my turn I did well enough to beat one of the guys. This obviously pissed him off a little, or made him pissed, as they would say.”
“I bet.” I speak only to make myself feel part of the thing but I’m not sure Steve feels an audience is necessary anymore.
“Things got squared when I bought everyone a drink and they realised I was British. You only need to say ‘Hello’ and it’s a dead giveaway. The women immediately wanted to talk about London theatre.”
“That was lucky, considering how often you walk past London theatres.”
“Yeah, well I bluffed on that one for a while.” Steve pauses, but not for a drink this time. “Mary always wanted me to go to the theatre with her more often. Do you think that was a factor?”
“Who knows? She certainly went often enough herself.”
“After a while she stopped asking me. I just assumed we’d got that sorted out. She went to the theatre and I hired out videos. A live and let live situation.”
“Hey, maybe she felt the same. It’s useless looking for single reasons.”
“Yeah, you’re right.” He slides off the stool and heads for a door at the back of the bar that opens onto the stairs down to the bogs. I wait. The pub clientele is changing shift, the after-work drinkers giving way to the pre-dinner brigade, the suits being replaced by smart casuals. There’s an opportunity to grab a table but I reckon that could mean too many walks to the bar. I stay on my stool and hope someone nicks Steve’s while I look the other way. He comes back too quickly, though.
“Whoo, needed that,” he says.
There’s a certain type of man who always feels he has to comment when he returns from the loo. Steve is that type. The longer our relationship continues the more I find myself amazed that Steve and I ever thought we were friends. Our first meeting left us drunken survivors of a long night in the company of mutual acquaintances. In the alcohol intensity of the early morning we discovered we shared a love of Woody Allen, The Rolling Stones, and the inevitable nationalism of the expatriate Scot. I hope fervently, of course, that I relate to all these in a different way to Steve. However, in a city, and in a city as big as London, acquaintance built on the flimsiest foundations has a momentum of its own that drags itself towards friendship, or at least tolerance, and the other person becomes part of the carry-on baggage of your residency.
“What are you thinking?”
“Nothing, really. Just letting the beer settle.”
“I know you,” he says. “Come on. Tell me.”
He knows me like he knew his girlfriend’s hobbies. I say, “Well, to tell you the truth I was just feeling a little envious of your trip to New York.”
Steve leans back, satisfied, and raises his glass to his mouth. He doesn’t drink, though, but puts the beer down again on the counter and turns towards me with a serious expression on his face. I think for a moment he’s going to pat my knee or rest a hand on my shoulder, so avuncular does he look suddenly. Or it could be imminent cardiac arrest.
“Let me give you a friendly piece of advice,” he says.
“OK,” I say.
“Loosen up, get to New York, get laid.”
“Get AIDS?”
“Get laid.”
“Can’t I do that here?” I ask. “In London, I mean. Without loosening or travelling.”
Steve shakes his head at his pint. “It’s a question of attitude. In New York you can do anything and it seems almost normal. I mean you can be outrageous and not be noticed.”
“I’ll get there, I promise. Maybe I’m just not loose enough to enjoy it right now.”
“Maybe, yeah. Even I was taken aback by some of the things I saw at first.”
“Really? Well, there you are, then.”
“Yeah,” he says.
We both sit and swallow beer for a little. Finally, I visit the loo and wonder why alcohol removes the ability to sense sarcasm. I return to my stool hoping the end of the story will mark some natural boundary in the evening and I can go home. I hope the end of the story comes soon.
“So,” I say. “After you’ve exchanged theatre reminiscences with these actresses, then what?”
“It was late by now and the club was getting quiet and the two guys said they knew a bar fairly close — down towards Riverside — that stayed open all night. We all said ‘great’ and we left.”
I wonder if they said ‘great’ in unison, huddled like a winning sports team, or if they had taken it in turns. However, I don’t want to halt the flow of the story so I don’t ask.
“The cold air of the night hit me like all the booze went straight to my head at once and I don’t remember getting to the new bar at all. I realised the woman I’d originally fancied was arm in arm with one of the guys and the other woman was between me and the other guy. I was too spaced out to care. Where the other three women went I’ve no idea.”
Listening to Steve say ‘woman’ you can almost hear him stopping himself from saying ‘girl’. Steve feels this gives him feminist credentials. If he says ‘look at the tits on that woman’ it’s supposedly less offensive than just ‘look at the tits on that’. He can be a man of touching sensitivity.
“We got into the bar and I sobered up again in the relative warmth of the place. I’d squeezed into a booth next to the other woman. She asked me what I wanted to drink and it was the first time I’d heard her speak. She’d spoken, sure, but I’d been concentrating on the real looker and not paid her much attention. Anyway, when I really heard her voice for the first time I was lost.”
“Husky?”
“Like treacle over gravel.”
I’m not sure I can picture that but I like the sound of it.
“After that I didn’t care about the other one, my original choice. She was busy swapping palettes with her guy anyway. My one snuggled close and gave me a smile to melt. . . “
“An iceberg?”
“A glacier.”
“So what happened to the third guy? He must have started feeling a bit of a spare prick.”
This time Steve’s beer got a laugh and a couple of nods. “That’s the thing,” he says. “The two women decided they needed to go to the loo. Together.”
“Of course.”
“Well, off they go and the two guys sort of box me in to the booth. We pick up our drinks and clink glasses and then the one with the woman says, ‘Look, we know we’ve all been drinking and that you’re a visitor and all, but there’s a limit to hospitality.’ I say, ‘What?’”
“I bet that put him in his place.”
“Listen.”
“Sorry.”
Steve looks me squarely in the eyes and says, “The woman whose lap you’re climbing into is my fiancée.”
This gives me a bit of a shock, what with Steve looking at me so closely, and there is a definite moment before it clicks that this is still part of the story. Steve seems to take my momentary look of shock as the result of his narrative timing and he leans back and then takes a long swallow of his beer. He puts the glass back down on the counter slowly, enjoying the effect of his last words. I say nothing. I just wait.
“Of course I was stunned. The woman had definitely been friendly. Then, of course, I began thinking about cultural differences, you know, how American women are open and friendly etc.”
“Uh huh.”
“I apologised to the guys, well to the one guy especially, and offered to get some more drinks in.”
“Always the answer.”
“Yeah, well, these guys didn’t want any more. The fiancée’s fiancé said it might be better if I just left.”
“Sounds reasonable.”
“I got out the booth and was about to go when I thought that really I should apologise to the women, too.”
“To one woman, especially. Very British.”
“Right. But I didn’t want her to think that everybody from Britain was going to misread the signs as badly as me.”
This is a Steve I don’t recognise and I don’t know how to take him. “You were thinking of other people?” I don’t mean it to sound quite so blunt but the beer is telling. He looks at me for a moment in puzzlement before an expression of pain crosses his face as he realises I am genuinely surprised. I’m scared that he’s going to clam up on me but he lets out a sigh, drinks some more beer and gives me a world-weary smile.
“So I started to head towards the back where the loos were and these guys get up and physically push me through the doors and on to the street. As I head backwards I see the women appear from the back of the bar. The fiancée rushes out after us and asks what the fuck is going on.”
“In a husky voice.”
“Very husky at this point. Her man tells her that I’m too drunk and am heading home. I feel this is a bit unfair since I’ve got it into my head to end the evening on a nobler note. So I spout a long stream of apology, telling her I’m sorry that I misread all the signs and that I didn’t realise that the other guy was her fiancé and that all British guys are not as stupid as me.
“Nice,” I say.
“About half way through this the woman starts laughing and I can see the two guys giving each other a kind of ‘oh shit’ look and then it clicks, not immediately, because I’m out in the cold again and the beer has rushed up to my head like I’d called for reinforcements, but it does click that these guys have been lying.”
“The bastards.”
“No. I wasn’t angry. I thought it was great, a great practical joke. I started laughing, too, and went over to the guys and told them I thought it was the best line I’d heard and offered to get them a drink.”
“Again.”
“Yeah. They thought I was taking the piss at first but I convinced them and we went back inside and had some more beer.” Steve stands again. “I need another pee.”
The story has confused me. Here is this friend of mine, who for most of our relationship I have considered a complete jerk, telling me a tale where for the most part he is the butt of the joke. At the same time he is endearing himself to me in a way that no story of a straightforward New York seduction could do. I think of the packing I have to do when I get home later and feel some guilt for the first time. Real guilt, not the tongue probing the tooth with the cavity sort of guilt that spices up more mundane misbehaviour.
I don’t see Steve get back onto his stool.
“You’ve gone all pensive again, and I don’t believe it’s because you’re longing for a trip to New York.”
I almost tell him then but I laugh it off and take a long swallow of my beer. Partly as a result of my guilt and partly to change the subject I order two more pints. “So you’re back in the bar, all pally. What next?”
“Cheers.” Steve lifts his glass to me. “I get back into the booth next to the woman whose name I still don’t know but I’m too drunk to think it matters and she turns and kisses me, just like that.”
“Sweet.”
“I said, ‘thank you,’ like an idiot and she laughed. So I kissed her back and I suppose we got into a snogging session. You know how it is when you’re drunk and you think you’re acting all cool but if you saw a video of it you’d be watching some guy painting a woman’s tonsils with his tongue? That was us. She wasn’t holding back.”
“From out in the street and into her throat. Nice turnaround.”
“Yeah.” Steve swings his legs around and faces the bar, leaning over his beer. He doesn’t look at me when he speaks next. “That’s when it began to get crazy.”
“Crazy?”
“Not crazy, I suppose, just strange. It wasn’t the booze in me, I know that. The room didn’t start spinning or anything. But something else took over.”
“I don’t get you.” And I don’t.
“I know. After we’d surfaced from another long kiss I asked her if I could see her the next day. The same day, I guess. Or the next night. She said she had classes all day and then she was flying straight up to Boston with some friends.”
“Shit.”
“I told her the next night would be my last in New York.”
“And that’s when she said. . .”
“Stay over. Don’t go back. Come to Boston.” A smile crosses his face. It’s wistful, not smug or self-satisfied, and I realise something important has happened to him.
“A proposition and a half. The drink?” I try to ask the question without overloading it with cynicism.
“Possibly. But at the same time it seemed an important decision had to be made.”
“And you said, ‘no’.”
“That’s where the weird happened. I would say that six months before I would have taken up the offer with no hesitation. Yet I sat in that bar, my brain floating in a bag of beer, fully working out the consequences of saying ‘yes’. I actually considered my job, Mary, my flat.”
It’s touching to find Mary had made it into the top three. “Mary, of course,” I say.
We both sit and think about Mary. At least, I sit and think about Mary and assume he is, too. I met Mary, through Steve, about two years before. She and Steve had started seeing each other a month or so before that and I remembered feeling sorry for her but grateful at the same time. Sorry because I felt I knew Steve better than her and had the right to pity any woman he got involved with. But grateful because he was calling me up less often and I was seeing him less regularly. Mary was beautiful and as soon as I saw her I knew that she had probably become attached to Steve in the same way I had, through some drunken misunderstanding. I remember wishing I had been at the party or meal or whatever it was where they met so I could have warned her off Steve. Maybe I even thought I could have tempted her myself, such was my arrogance and my loyalty to Steve. This evening’s revelations about Steve’s sensibilities and sensitivity were not helping my guilt and I sat hoping that this more positive appreciation of him would disappear with the morning’s hangover.
“Here was this woman offering me, it seemed then, a chance to recover something, I don’t know, the spontaneity that marks youth. . .” He trails off.
I nod. “I know what you mean,” I say. “Go on.”
Steve turns to me. “Almost a feeling of a last chance.”
The look on his face is desperate and I feel for the first time that perhaps we’re not here mourning Steve’s loss of Mary — a hypocritical mourning on my part — but mourning something else, maybe even something as shallow as his missed opportunity to get laid in New York and then Boston. Steve is obviously trying to piece together what he wants to say. He seems startlingly sober all of a sudden.
“I fancied this woman. She was even sexier than Mary, I thought, but that could have been strange pussy syndrome. But that’s not the point. What she was offering was a step back for me that was so tempting because it was a step back to a time when I could fool myself I was happy. I had no responsibilities and I thought that was a definition of happy. I knew what would happen. I’d go to Boston with her, move in with her, live with her and then off her and then move out in a year or so and find myself god knows where.”
“Right.”
“It was the fact that I looked ahead at all told me I wasn’t going to go through with it. Of course by now I’d taken so long to answer she thought I was getting all heavy about it. She said, ‘I’m not asking you to marry me.’ I smiled and told her I was sorry but I thought her proposition merited serious consideration.”
“I suppose you can get away with saying things like that in New York if you’re British. Try saying that in a London club.” Steve looks at me with that same hurt and puzzled look from earlier, which tells me he probably does say things like that in London clubs. I make a mental note to ask Mary later.
“She kissed me again but it had the flavour, now, of a parting kiss. I stood and held out my hand. I told her that it had been a pleasure meeting her and that my memories of New York would focus on the image of her face and voice, and the taste of her lips. She took my hand, squeezed it, and told me to come back to that bar on a Friday night if I came back to New York. I left.”
“A classy exit,” I say. I mean it. Steve heads for the loo again but I don’t believe he really needs to pee. He stops half way to the back of the pub and returns to stand by his stool.
“Tell me about Mary.”
This takes me by surprise. “Tell you what?”
“When did you last see her?”
The mood of the evening has been honesty, at least on his part, so I say, “This morning.”
Steve rocks back on his heels. His face looks a little grey but I can’t tell if that’s shock or the beer or just the lighting. “She’s not in Australia?”
“Not yet.”
He sits down. “I made a mistake in New York.”
“Did you? I don’t see that. You made an adult choice. You’re over thirty. It’s too late to be chasing students up and down the eastern seaboard of the United States.”
“I’m going to go back.” He obviously isn’t listening.
“Where? New York? Boston? That bar on a Friday? Your youth? Come on, Steve.”
There is no reply. I try again. “Mary’s gone but there will be others. You know that. You’re not stupid.” I surprise myself again by believing it as I say it. But I feel a heel with the remark about Mary. After all, she’ll be lying in my bed when I get home later, with two tickets for Australia in the drawer of the bedside table.
Steve says, “I was going to tell you before. That’s why I wanted to see you. I wanted to explain what happened but I don’t suppose I did that very well.”
“You did it very well. I just think it’s a mistake to go back.”
“Mary’s with you, isn’t she? I mean, permanently.”
“Permanently, Steve? I don’t know.”
“Did you steal her?”
“No.” I feel this is true. Strictly speaking.
Steve nods and stands. He holds out his hand and for a moment I think he is going to demonstrate his New York exit. “I’ve enjoyed our friendship. You listened to me. I hope you and Mary are. . .good.” He puts his hand on my shoulder as he brushes past.
I call after him. “What will you do? Will you go to New York? Boston? What’s in Boston? Steve?”
Steve turns and looks at me. He shrugs and I watch him exit into the darkness of the street beyond.
THE END
