Joe Giggle Water

The party did not end. That was the problem with the party. It had begun on a Thursday in 1923, in a house on Long Island the host had bought with money his wife had brought into the marriage, and by Sunday it had grown a kind of architecture of its own — rooms that filled and emptied, a band that left and was replaced, a sleeping son upstairs who had stopped, by Sunday evening, asking when it would be over.

The host’s name was Carrick. He had been in the war, briefly and not well, and he had come home to a wife who was kinder than he deserved and a son who looked, increasingly, like a man he had served with and not liked. He did not think about this often. He was not, as a rule, a man who thought about things often. He poured.

The drink, by Sunday, was the coffee one. Somebody had brought a barrel of dark rum back from Jamaica, and somebody else espresso, single-estate, from a place in Italy whose name nobody could now pronounce, and somebody had thought, in the way one thinks at four in the morning, to put the two together with a dark coconut syrup and a foam on top that broke when you breathed on it. It tasted of staying. It tasted of not going to bed. It tasted, faintly, of a beach none of them had been to.

There were three men at the bar, friends of friends of friends, whose names Carrick had stopped trying to learn on Friday. One was a stockbroker. One had said he was a poet, which had turned out, after some questioning, to mean that he had once been published in a college magazine. The third did not say. The third had been at the bar the longest, and drank the slowest, and had a way of looking at the wife that Carrick had noticed on Saturday and stopped being able to un-notice.

The wife was in the green chair by the window. She had not spoken in two hours. She had not spoken much since Saturday afternoon, when she had come down the stairs in a dress she had been keeping for an occasion and found that the occasion had begun without her. She had sat in the green chair at three, and at five, and at midnight, and at four in the morning, and she was sitting in it now, at eight on Sunday evening, with her hands folded the way a woman folds her hands at a funeral.

Carrick poured another round for the three men at the bar. He poured one for himself. He looked at the wife in the chair. He had not poured her a drink, by his own reckoning, in nearly three years; she did not, ordinarily, drink. Ordinarily had become, over the weekend, an idea of diminishing usefulness.

He poured her one. He carried it to the green chair the way one carries a peace offering across a border. He held it out. The foam was still intact. The espresso was very black underneath. He could smell the coconut, and the rum, and, underneath all of it, the small specific bitterness of a thing that has been kept too hot for too long.

She looked at the glass. She looked at him. She looked, last, at the third man at the bar, who was watching the exchange with an interest he had not bothered to hide.

She took the glass. She drank it. She drank it in three swallows, the way one takes a medicine, and she handed him back the empty, and she closed her eyes.

She did not open them for some time.

The party did not end. The band came back at nine. The three men at the bar stayed until Monday. The third one stayed, in one form or another, until the following August, by which point he had a key, and a drawer, and a way of saying Carrick’s name in the hall that made the housekeeper stop polishing.

The son upstairs grew. The wife in the chair drank, after that Sunday, when she was offered to. She was offered to often. The green chair grew a stain on the right arm that no amount of work would lift, the colour of espresso going down through cream, and Carrick, when he walked past it, looked the other way.

The party did not end. It would not end for another six years, and by then it would have taken nearly everything — the house, the wife’s small fortune, the son’s good opinion, Carrick’s liver, and, last, in 1929, the money itself, which left the party the way a tide leaves a beach, all at once and without apology.

The wife stayed. She had not, in the end, anywhere else to go. She kept the green chair. She had it reupholstered, in 1934, in a different green, and she sat in it most evenings, and she did not, ever again, drink coffee.