"I'm just telling you what I see."
She closed the door before I could come up with a comeback.
So I went home. I changed.
The bar was a place called Verity, one of those low-lit downtown spots that pretended to be a speakeasy without committing to the bit. It had leather banquettes and a cocktail list that ran to four pages with prices that would have horrified me if I'd still been the kind of person who registered prices. Hollis was already there when I walked in, leaning against the bar with a Manhattan in his hand and his tie loosened, looking, as he always did, like a man who'd just gotten away with something.
That was the thing about Hollis. He looked like me. He had the same gray creeping in at the temples, the same expensive suit, and the same forty-something face that was holding up about as well as it had a right to. And he did, on paper, the same job I did too. But you could tell, just by watching him stand at a bar, that he had not given the same things to it that I had. There was a slack ease in his shoulders. A readiness to laugh. A way he had of looking around a room like he was genuinely curious what was in it. I didn't have any of those things anymore. And, on a good day, I could almost remember that I used to.
He saw me across the room and grinned. "Calvin Reeve. Look at you. You're like a ghost."
"Hollis."
"How long has it been?"
"Six weeks."
"Sixweeks.Christ. We used to do this every Thursday."
"Yeah."
"And now we do it every leap year."
"Yeah."
He shook his head, signaled the bartender, and pointed at me. "Old fashioned, for the ghost. And another of these for me."
We took our drinks to a corner table. I sat down and felt, as I always did when I sat down somewhere that wasn't my office or my apartment, a kind of vague structural confusion in my body. It was like a piece of equipment that had been asked to perform a function it wasn't designed for.Sit. Relax. Have a drink with a friend.My nervous system reading the instructions and not quite finding the right way to go through the motions.
"So." Hollis stretched his legs out under the table and considered me over the rim of his glass. "How are you, Cal."
"I'm good."
"No you’re not."
"I'm good, Hollis."
"You are not good. Look at yourself. You look like a man who's about to be subpoenaed by his own body."
I laughed, which surprised me. It came out a little rusty. "That's very specific."
"It's specific because it's true. When's the last time you slept seven hours in a row?"
I thought about it. "I don't track that."
"That means you haven’t in a long time."
"How would you know that?"
"Because I can see it on your face, dude." He set down his drink. "Cal. I'm going to ask you a question and I want you to answer it like you're not on the clock. When's the last time you did something for fun? And I don't meanfunthe way you mean it, which is a thing you scheduled three months ago and then attended out of obligation. I mean actually, genuinely, off-the-leash fun? When’s the last time youfuckedsomeone?"
I opened my mouth. I closed it.
"That's what I thought," he said.
"You’re being sort of a dick, Hollis."
"I’m concerned about you." He leaned forward, elbows on the table. "Listen. I'm going to say something and you're going to let me say it without interrupting."
