squeeze.
“Very well, Sam. So it’ll be.”
He exchanged an uninterpretable look with Hayden before going back to the game, which he won, along with the next two. He declared himself the eight-ball champion and suggested we go to three-way straight pool. By then it was dark outside, and with enough vodka inside me to sharpen my faculties and weaken my better nature, I ran the table my first time up.
Hayden looked at me with a suspicious eye.
“What do you call that?” he asked.
“Killer pool, baby,” I told him.
PART TWO
EIGHT
A FTER LEAVING MY WIFE A BBY and my job running a corporate R&D operation I lived in hotel rooms around Connecticut and the northern exurbs of New York. I paid for them with my corporate credit card, which no one at the company, inexplicably, had thought to shut off. Given my mental clarity in those days, this was an important convenience. All I needed to sustain my existence was to reach into the first inside sleeve of my wallet.
I also conserved energy by going from room to room without bothering to bring along my clothes. This resulted in frequent trips to discount stores where I was delighted to find good quality underwear at very reasonable prices. It was at one of these cavernous emporia that I discovered cheap polyester tote bags, an excellent solution to the challenge of transporting my ever-renewed wardrobe of Levi’s and cotton T-shirts.
During all my years of marriage to Abby I almost never walked into a retail outlet of any kind, unless you included thedeli in White Plains where I bought coffee and a copy of
The New York Times
. Shopping had become an abstraction. Abby purchased all the family’s food and furnishings, picked out the restaurants and vacation accommodation, and bought all my clothes. Except for Levi’s and T-shirts and workout gear, all of which I ordered through the mail. I had them sent to the company to prevent Abby from throwing out the packages, an unexplainable habit of hers. I got all my books out of the library, and before the company started supplying them, bought my cars from the ad hoc inventory stuck out on lawns with homemade signs taped to the windshields.
For my job I’d spend a fair amount of time in Bombay, Kuala Lumpur, Dubai and the fetid alleys of Cairo, but I never felt more alien than I did walking under the blue-green fluorescent lights of those retail monstrosities.
I eventually misplaced my company car, which they’d also failed to retrieve. It was a silver four-door imported luxury sedan that vanished one night somewhere in Bridgeport, Connecticut. I really liked that car. It was fast and quiet and comfortable. It had a cupholder big enough for a large Diet Coke, which you could fill up partway with bourbon, plus an ashtray and a startlingly loud stereo. I’d occasionally launch the day lying naked on my bed in the hotel room, smoking cigarettes and watching pay-as-you-go movies on the TV, and then suddenly find myself driving the car through the leafy, curvaceous countryside of northern Fairfield County. Usually dressed.
If you head north of Fairfield, past Danbury, you find yourself in Litchfield County, a Manhattanite preserve thick with white Congregational churches and twentieth-century novelists.
One day I managed to wander my way straight through Connecticut and into Massachusetts, where I was met by abig welcome sign at the border. I’d lived a lot of years in Massachusetts, so I took the welcome for what it was worth and drove on anyway. I went as straight north as the twisted two-lane roads would allow, aided by the car’s electronic compass with a read-out built into the rearview mirror.
It was a warm, soft summer day following several days of rain. The dominant oaks and maples were laden with billows of dark green leaves. Radio reception filtered out everything but NPR stations playing Mozart or Oscar Peterson or vaguely condescending commentary on issues of the day I regrettably knew nothing about. The roads
“Very well, Sam. So it’ll be.”
He exchanged an uninterpretable look with Hayden before going back to the game, which he won, along with the next two. He declared himself the eight-ball champion and suggested we go to three-way straight pool. By then it was dark outside, and with enough vodka inside me to sharpen my faculties and weaken my better nature, I ran the table my first time up.
Hayden looked at me with a suspicious eye.
“What do you call that?” he asked.
“Killer pool, baby,” I told him.
PART TWO
EIGHT
A FTER LEAVING MY WIFE A BBY and my job running a corporate R&D operation I lived in hotel rooms around Connecticut and the northern exurbs of New York. I paid for them with my corporate credit card, which no one at the company, inexplicably, had thought to shut off. Given my mental clarity in those days, this was an important convenience. All I needed to sustain my existence was to reach into the first inside sleeve of my wallet.
I also conserved energy by going from room to room without bothering to bring along my clothes. This resulted in frequent trips to discount stores where I was delighted to find good quality underwear at very reasonable prices. It was at one of these cavernous emporia that I discovered cheap polyester tote bags, an excellent solution to the challenge of transporting my ever-renewed wardrobe of Levi’s and cotton T-shirts.
During all my years of marriage to Abby I almost never walked into a retail outlet of any kind, unless you included thedeli in White Plains where I bought coffee and a copy of
The New York Times
. Shopping had become an abstraction. Abby purchased all the family’s food and furnishings, picked out the restaurants and vacation accommodation, and bought all my clothes. Except for Levi’s and T-shirts and workout gear, all of which I ordered through the mail. I had them sent to the company to prevent Abby from throwing out the packages, an unexplainable habit of hers. I got all my books out of the library, and before the company started supplying them, bought my cars from the ad hoc inventory stuck out on lawns with homemade signs taped to the windshields.
For my job I’d spend a fair amount of time in Bombay, Kuala Lumpur, Dubai and the fetid alleys of Cairo, but I never felt more alien than I did walking under the blue-green fluorescent lights of those retail monstrosities.
I eventually misplaced my company car, which they’d also failed to retrieve. It was a silver four-door imported luxury sedan that vanished one night somewhere in Bridgeport, Connecticut. I really liked that car. It was fast and quiet and comfortable. It had a cupholder big enough for a large Diet Coke, which you could fill up partway with bourbon, plus an ashtray and a startlingly loud stereo. I’d occasionally launch the day lying naked on my bed in the hotel room, smoking cigarettes and watching pay-as-you-go movies on the TV, and then suddenly find myself driving the car through the leafy, curvaceous countryside of northern Fairfield County. Usually dressed.
If you head north of Fairfield, past Danbury, you find yourself in Litchfield County, a Manhattanite preserve thick with white Congregational churches and twentieth-century novelists.
One day I managed to wander my way straight through Connecticut and into Massachusetts, where I was met by abig welcome sign at the border. I’d lived a lot of years in Massachusetts, so I took the welcome for what it was worth and drove on anyway. I went as straight north as the twisted two-lane roads would allow, aided by the car’s electronic compass with a read-out built into the rearview mirror.
It was a warm, soft summer day following several days of rain. The dominant oaks and maples were laden with billows of dark green leaves. Radio reception filtered out everything but NPR stations playing Mozart or Oscar Peterson or vaguely condescending commentary on issues of the day I regrettably knew nothing about. The roads
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