The Glass Inferno

CHAPTER 29

There had to be another bottle around, Bigelow thought; he was sure there was one left over from the staff meeting the week before which had been half meeting and half party. He pawed through the desk drawers in the outer office, then stood up and tried to focus on the room.

Damned room didn’t want to stand still, kept circling around him….

He clutched at the edge of a swivel chair, closed his eyes hard, then suddenly opened them very wide. The metal edge of the chair was cold against his naked belly and even that helped some. God, he was smashed! He had started drinking early so he would have the courage to go ahead and break off with Deirdre that night. By the time she got there, he was already half a bottle down.

Deirdre had promptly joined in so she could forget it all, and between them the drinking had gained a momentum all its own.

Damnit, he knew there was a bottle out here someplace! If the room would only settle down…. Of course, how could he have been so dumb!

The little cabinet beneath the bookshelves that they had stocked with plastic cups and a few bottles of mix and a small styrofoam ice bucket for the occasional office party. It had to be down there.

He weaved over to the bookcase, clung to the shelves a moment for support, then knelt by the cabinet doors and yanked them open.

Success! He chortled to himself.

Any time anybody could hide a bottle on a Bigelow, that ,would be the day. He pulled it out. Goddamn, only half full. Somebody had been tapping it. He thought for a moment of Krost, then shrugged.

Hell, no, that lush had access to better sources for booze than Motivational Displays. He stood up, clutching the bottle in his hand, then suddenly remembered the office party and squinted at the label.

Bourbon, and cheap bourbon at that. They had drunk all the good stuff at the meeting and made the mistake of sending out the office boy to pick up a bottle in the building’s liquor store.

Bigelow hiccuped once and started for the storeroom leading back to the executive suite. It only proved once again that you shouldn’t send a boy to do a man’s job, he thought. Funny. But both he and Deirdre were too far gone for quality to matter.

A splinter in the wooden storeroom floor made him yelp and also partly sobered him. He clung to the horns of a polystyrene reindeer for partial support while he stood on one leg and tried to pull the splinter out of the sole of his foot. He ought to have worn his shoes; it had been a dumb thing not to. He managed to focus his eyes and pulled the splinter out. A tiny drop of blood followed it and sobered him even more. He was so drunk, he hadn’t felt it go in that deep.

Had to be careful. Get too drunk and he wouldn’t be able to get it up and that wouldn’t do, at least not with Deirdre.

She’d never let him forget it. Not that he was ever going to see her again anyway….

He had forgotten to Turn off the light in the outer office.

He started to Turn back, then thought: What the hell?

He’d do it later. If he went back now he’d probably pick up another splinter. He threaded his way through the displays and suddenly caught himself thinking that the damned elves and Santa Clauses were a lot of polyester voyeurs. He imagined them looking at him and snickering and he felt his face Turn red. It wasn’t what you had; it was what you did with it, he reminded himself-then wished, absurdly, that he had slipped into his trousers before going to the outer office in search of another bottle.

He was almost to the door of the executive suite when he heard the sirens. They kept coming closer and then stopped and he wondered idly if he could see the blaze from the windows. They could Turn off the lights and watch it like watching a fire on the hearth-only their hearth would be twenty-one floors up.

He felt the bottle begin to slip and clutched it against his sweaty chest. Then he was in the suite and had placed the bottle safely on the bar, next to his trophy. He patted it briefly: It was the only trophy he had ever won in his whole life, awarded to him two years ago for having created “The Most Outstanding Display” at the Small Engines and Motors Show. He stood back a few feet and stared at it affectionately, then made a slight adjustment to the cant of his hat he had dropped on top. Nice trophy.

He felt drunkenly sentimental. It was a big mother, he thought, over three feet tall. Win a small one and you had to buy a display case and a small spotlight and …

“You just gonna stan’ there or you gonna pour me a drink?”

Deirdre was sitting on the edge of the now unfolded couch, a sheet wrapped around her. She had turned on the TV set against the wall a few feet away and was staring at it intently. Bigelow glanced at the screen. Old movie, probably one of Deirdre’s favorites. She could drive anybody nuts with trivia when it came to the oldtimers.

“Jus’ hold your horses, Deedee, and I’ll pour you two.”

He splashed three inches of bourbon over an ice cube in the bottom of her glass and handed it to her. She took it absently, still staring at the screen.

“That good?” Bigelow asked. It was an old Busby Berkeley clinker with hundreds of chorus girls looking very 1930ish. What was it?

“When a Broadway baby says goodnight …” No, that had been from a song in it, Lullaby of-* “The news a minute ago,” Deirdre said.

“They cut into the film. Something about a fire.” Her words were slurred and Bigelow had trouble making them out. “I didn’t get it all.

You know, that guy on K.Y.S. A real bastard, I can tell by his eyes. .

. .”

She sipped at her drink and murmured, “Thanks,” and then, “Something about a fire.” She frowned again and Bigelow sensed that she was going to go through the whole bit all over. She must be like that when she was learning lines, he thought.

He leaned past her and flicked off the set.

“What the hell did you do. that for?” She said it with all the huffiness of the local drunk in the corner bar and for a moment Bigelow caught a clear image of what she might be lilt in the near future. The tiny lines were already forming around her neck and eyes. The elasticity was going from her upper arms and the flesh was dimpling Portion of lyrics from “Lullaby of Broadway,” music by Harry Warren, lyrics by Al Dubin. Copyright 1935, M. Witmark & Sons. Copyright renewed. Used by permission of Warner Bros. Music.

just below her buttocks. He had been right, something deep within him whispered; it had been’time to drop her.

And then he was gulping his own drink, letting the warmth fill his body and chase away his more sober thoughts. He turned out the room light so only the lights on the small Christmas tree were burning.

What was the song in Finian’s Rainbow? “If I’m not with the girl that I love, I love the girl I’m with.”* Something like that. He reached for Deirdre in the dusk and she turned and cuddled closer to him. The sheet was no longer wrapped around her. He buried his face in her neck, blowing lightly against her skin.

The phone rang.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” Bigelow sat bolt upright and grabbed the phone off the end table, shoving it beneath a pillow behind him so the ringing seemed distant and far away. One damned interruption after another, he thought.

Who the hell could be calling tonight? Wrong number, probably.

He turned back to Deirdre, who was open and waiting for him.

Even while reaching for her, he was dimly aware that for some strange reason his eyes were beginning to water.

He automatically closed them. Making love was one of The few activities for which human beings needed no sight, he thought. He was unaware of the slight haze of smoke that was starting to drift out of the suite’s ventilation grill high on the wall and was promptly lost in the dusk of the room.

Behind him, smothered by the pillow, the telephone continued its futile ringing.

Portion of lyrics from “When I’m Not Near the Girl I Love,” music by Burton Lane, lyrics by E. Y. Harburg. Copyright ) 1946 by Chappell & Co Inc. Copyright renewed. Used by permission of Chappell & Co Inc.