The Nix(107)

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Peter says.

“Sure is.”

“Drink it. Tell me how it tastes.”

“Sorry?”

“I’d like to hear a writer describe it,” he says. “Because you’re so good with words.”

You try to figure out if he’s being sarcastic, but cannot. You taste the scotch. And what can you say? It tastes like scotch. It has a very scotchlike quality. You search your memory for words that are used to describe scotch. You come up with peaty, a word you don’t really know the definition of. The only word that pops into your head as accurate and defensible is strong.

“It tastes strong,” you say, and Peter laughs.

“Strong?” he says, then laughs again, harder. He looks at Bethany and says, “He called it strong. Hah! I’ll be damned. Strong.”

The rest of the morning goes something like this. Bethany regaling you with factoids, Peter finding reasons to expound lavishly on some exquisite purchased thing: the coffee they buy, for example, the rarest in the world, coffee that has actually been eaten and excreted by a kind of catlike Sumatran mammal that has a gift for selecting only the best coffee beans to eat, plus the digestion process aids the flavor when the beans are roasted, Peter insists. Or his socks, sewn by hand by the same Italian seamstress who makes the pope’s socks. Or the sheets on the bed in the guest room with their four-digit thread counts that make Egyptian cotton feel like sandpaper in comparison.

“Most people go through life not paying attention to the small details,” Peter says, his arm around Bethany, leg kicked up on the coffee table, the three of you sitting on the leather sectional sofas that take up the center of the astoundingly sunlit apartment. “But I can’t imagine going through life that way. You know? I mean, what’s the difference between your average violin player and Bethany here? It’s the small details. I think that’s why she and I understand each other so well.”

He gives her a squeeze. “That’s right!” she says, smiling at him.

“So many people live their life so fast and never slow down and enjoy themselves and be thankful. You know what I believe? I believe you should live in each season as it passes. Breathe the air. Drink the drink. Taste the fruit. You know who said that? Thoreau said that. I read Walden in college. I realized, yeah, live life, you know? Be in the world. Anyway”—he checks his watch—“I gotta go. Meeting in D.C. in a couple of hours, then London. You hippies have fun at your protest. Don’t overthrow the government while I’m gone.”

They give each other brisk kisses before Peter Atchison throws on a suit jacket and rushes out the door and Bethany looks at you in this, the first moment you are alone together. And before you can ask What do you mean pen pal? she says “I guess we should get going! I’ll call the driver!” in this manic way that blunts any thought of actual conversation. And you hope to have a real one-on-one, heart-to-heart kind of experience with her maybe in the car on the way to the protest, but when you climb into the back of the Cadillac Escalade and get under way Bethany spends most of the time making small talk with the driver, an older and intensely wrinkled man named Tony, who is Greek, you learn, and whose three daughters and eight grandchildren are all doing fine, just fine, you learn, after Bethany insists he go through them all one by one giving little updates for each of them: where they are, what they’re doing, how it’s all going, etc. This takes you roughly to Thirty-Fourth Street, whereby the Tony conversation naturally runs its course as Tony runs out of progeny to talk about, and there occurs a blip of silence before Bethany turns on the Escalade’s overhead television screen and turns it to a news channel already very deep into its daily coverage of the Republican National Convention and associated protests, and she says “Can you believe what they’re saying about us?” and spends the rest of the trip either complaining about the news or typing messages on her cell phone.

The news is, it’s true, dismaying. Reporters saying you and your ilk are all marginal protest types. Coming out of the woodwork. Malcontents. Provocateurs. Clouds of marijuana. Playing footage from Chicago, 1968: some kid throwing a brick at a hotel window. Then speculating on the protest’s effects on heartland swing voters. Their opinion? Heartland swing voters will find it all rather distasteful. “Your average Ohio voter is not going to respond to this,” says one guy who’s not the anchor and not a reporter but rather some middle-type person: the opinion-haver. “Especially if it gets violent,” he continues. “If what happened in Chicago in ’68 happens here, you can bet it will once again help the Republicans.”

All this time Bethany clicks at her device, her violin fingers whirring over the tiny keypad, the little sound it makes like listening to a tap dancer through earmuffs, so engrossed in this she doesn’t notice you staring at her—or doesn’t acknowledge it, anyway, your staring—looking at her profile and then looking at the knot on her neck where her violin sits while she plays, a gnarled cauliflower callus there, the only not-smooth part of her, discolored dark brown spots amid the pale white scar tissue, this ugly thing barnacled onto her, the effect of a lifetime’s musicianship, and it reminds you of something your mother once said, not long before she left. She said, The things you love the most will one day hurt you the worst. And as you reach your destination—the meadow in Central Park that serves as the staging ground for today’s march—and as Bethany slaps her BlackBerry into her purse and leaps out of the vehicle, and as you realize there is just no way you’re going to get the intimate-type moment with her that you wanted and your heart sinks and all you really want now is to leave New York and hide for like a decade, you understand that your mother was right: The things we love the most are the most disfiguring. Such is our greed for them.