Set for Life by Andrew Ewell

Author:Andrew Ewell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2024-02-06T00:00:00+00:00

8

SOPHIE AND I HAD OYSTERS and martinis on Berry Street that night. Usually I didn’t go all the way into Brooklyn (there wasn’t time), but with Winston Armstrong’s help, I had a few extra hours tonight. We sat in a small round booth facing the bar. The bartender was pouring drinks in fancy etched glasses. The lights flickered on the zinc countertop. Now that we were away from the hotel together—alone in Williamsburg, not hiding, not hurrying, listening to the clamor of other nearby voices—it seemed possible we might actually make a real couple one of these days. Maybe we really should move to a little town in Maine, I said as we sipped our drinks. We could rent a house near the water, I mused. Or maybe we should go to Mexico, like we’d talked about before.

I went on like that for a while until eventually a look of sadness came over Sophie’s face. I realized she hadn’t spoken in some time. Meanwhile my lips were still flapping like sheets in the breeze. I could hear my voice babbling something about the weather in Buenos Aires. She looked past me, settling her gaze somewhere over my shoulder. Her eyes appeared tired, like they were about to close.

“What’s wrong?”

She shrugged.

“Is it something I said?”

She shook her head. “It’s nothing. I know you like to daydream, it’s fine.”

“Who’s daydreaming? I thought we were making plans.”

“Argentina?” she said.

“Why not?”

“I don’t believe you anymore.”

The next round was set down a few minutes later, and we sat in silence, sipping our drinks. When we’d started this at that bar on Lorimer three months earlier, after I’d just come back from France, Sophie had said I never should have gone home. She’d said I should have gone to Mexico, or anyplace else. She might even join me, she’d said. At the time I’d thought we were joking, flirting, having fun. But I remembered her stiff lips, her stony stare. She hadn’t been teasing. And she hadn’t been daydreaming either. Once an idea took root in Sophie’s mind it was already a foregone reality, with only the logistics of seeing the plan through remaining. What did I want? she’d asked. How would it work between us? If I really wanted to make a new life with her—if either of us actually thought we stood a chance of becoming a real couple, like the twinkling amber bar light convinced me we might—then how exactly did I plan on doing that? These were the things she wanted to know. Forget whatever I had to say about empanadas and Eva Perón. Sophie wanted facts. Prove it, she’d said. And she was right. How long could we keep sleeping around behind Debra’s and John’s backs, carrying on the way we had been? The current arrangement couldn’t last much longer. I’d wrangled Winston Armstrong into my scheme for tonight, but how many more times would that trick work? The moment called for action, decisiveness, fortitude.

“It doesn’t have to be Argentina,” I said after a while.

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