She’s so petite, in fact, that all the furniture in our furnished apartment has the effect of making her look tinier. She’s like a child in this big drafty apartment with its high, molded tin ceilings, its dark woodwork, its faded wallpaper with vases of faded flowers.

       She’s looking at me, her head cocked, a smile on her face that conveys no mirth, no joy, no playfulness. What would we have said to each other? The way we were with each other at the time it could have gone something like this:

       Me: What the fuck is it with you? Aren’t the Stacys supposed to be here? You’re on your way to being shitfaced and the place is a pit. What is it with you?

       Katie: I’m leaving you, Jack. That’s what it is with me. I mean it this time.

       Me: Don’t do me any favors. How come you’re drinking? You never drink by yourself.

       Katie: I plan on doing lots of things by myself from now on.

       Me: Where’s Lucy?

       Katie: Having her nap.

       And I probably would have flung my coat onto the armchair across the room because by now I would have begun to get angry and, yes, a little scared. It’s not that she hasn’t announced a hundred times before that she’s leaving me and it’s clear, I suppose, to both of us, that it’s only a matter of time before we actually break up, but I always imagined that I would be the one to walk. There’s something different about her today, something calm and self-possessed. She’s in control and this time I know she means business and I’m unprepared. So, in anger I fling my overcoat because that’s the way I am in those days whenever I feel cornered, confused, threatened and out of control. I would have stalked into the kitchen to make myself a drink. I’ve already had plenty to drink at the office party, but Jack Scanlon can always find room for another drink.

       The kitchen’s a mess. Last night’s dishes strewn all over the counter top and kitchen table; ashtrays full (we both smoke like fiends), the garbage can spilling over. It’s my job to empty the garbage, a job I can’t be depended upon to do. But Katie’s your fanatic when it comes to housekeeping. It’s simply not in her nature to let a kitchen get like this. I pry a tray of ice cubes out of the glacier we call a freezer and get the whiskey down from the cupboard. I knock down a good hooker, then pour myself another man-sized drink over ice.

       I go back to the living room stirring the drink with my finger. Katie’s in the exact same position I left her. She has her finger pressed into her chin, the same hateful smile on her pretty face. Except, to me she is no longer pretty and hasn’t been for a long time. In fact, I find her grotesque with her turned up nose and small mouth. Does she think she taunts me with the bare thigh? We don’t sleep together anymore. She can’t bear to have me touch her and I no longer have the wish to. Our marriage was bad from the start. How could it have been otherwise? Lucy is all that has kept us together this long, and as I think about Lucy I feel a chill, as if the ice in my whiskey has drained off my body heat. Then I think about the Stacys and things begin to fall into place. It had been Katie’s idea to invite them down from New Hampshire for New Year’s Eve and I was too obtuse to see that it was a set up. Katie despises the Stacys. She despises all my friends but especially she despises the Stacys. It has to do with the fact that George Stacy’s sister used to be her best friend and that George and Elaine and I are older than she is and college educated, and she thinks we condescend to her when we’re together which I suppose we do, but as I say, I don’t care anymore and probably never did.

       There is a knock on the door. When I don’t move, Katie asks me in this superciliously sweet voice if I’m going to ask my friends in.

       The Stacys are framed in the doorway, the low-watt bulb on the landing casting them in this oily light. Elaine is a dresser and for this occasion she has on a gray suede coat with fur collar, calf length suede boots to match her coat, even matching suede gloves. In shabby contrast, George wears a too large car coat with big wooden buttons. The shoulder seams hang halfway down his upper arms. He needs a shave. George always looks like he needs a shave, even after he has just shaved. His hairline has receeded drastically since I saw him last. He cradles a beribboned bottle of champagne and I can see the way his eyes are wide open that he senses danger.

       Elaine pushes past me into the living room; George hangs back. Elaine wants to know where her little girl is. She means my little girl Lucy, not Katie.

       Katie says to Elaine, "I’m leaving your friend. Happy New Year."

       Hearing this, George rolls his eyes, mutters something under his breath.

       I invite George to come in. He just stands there with this dumb expression on his unshaved face, stands there in his stupid car coat and that stupid bottle of champagne with the silly red ribbon. I say lamely that I’m sorry, and he just stands there stricken until Elaine finally orders him in the house.

       He says "Jesus Christ," and now I invite him to take off his coat and stay awhile even though I don’t really want them to stay. I am profoundly embarrassed and humiliated. George doesn’t take off his coat. Elaine takes off hers. And her stylish gloves she removes in very dramatic fashion, pulling each finger out separately, all the time looking directly at Katie who holds Elaine’s gaze without flinching. George puts the champagne bottle on the coffee table next to the tabloids that Katie always puts out whenever I have friends over educated beyond tenth grade. She does it only to annoy me.

       Katie stares down Elaine, her thin lips pressed together, her head thrown back like a fighting cock. Elaine reaches out and puts a hand on Katie’s arm. I expect Katie to pull away but she doesn’t. Elaine whispers something to her that I can’t hear. The next thing they’re up and moving toward the kitchen.

       I ask George again to please take off his goddamn coat. He unbuttons his coat muttering to himself how he can’t believe this and asking rhetorically if I invited them down here for this on purpose. Did I imagine that they would be amused by this scene?

       He doesn’t remove his coat but begins to pace in front of the window, the one window we have in the living room, a window that looks out upon the alley between apartment buildings where tenants who have them are allowed to park their cars. Maybe if I owned a car things might have been different. I’m a drunk and I know it, but even if I am a drunk I’m a responsible one and know better than to put myself in charge of a lethal weapon. The truth is I’ve been taking lessons.

       Now that I’m finally starting to get somewhere in the company I’d planned to take my driver’s test, buy a used car. By June I would be making nine bills; I was going to get a car like normal people.

       I repeat to George how sorry I am and inform him that it was Katie who had invited them down here, not me. This news has the effect of getting George to take off his coat. He drops it on top of mine. Elaine had apparently not told him that Katie was the one with the invitation. He would have smelled a rat had he known, he tells me.

       I go to the kitchen to fetch the bottle, some ice and glasses because I don’t have to ask if George needs a drink. Katie and Elaine are at the kitchen table which has been cleared off of dishes and crumbs. On the stove a kettle of water is heating.

       Elaine greets me again, as if she’s seeing me for the first time today. I have to take a screwdriver to the freezer to get out a tray of ice cubes. I’m so angry and embarrassed I make a mess of it.

       I’m sarcastic with Elaine and before she can come back at me Katie is all over me, telling me how she’s taking Lucy and that there isn’t a thing on earth I can do about it. She sounds sure enough of herself to convince me that she has everything worked out. Something happens to my stomach and I suddenly feel like throwing up.

       I retreat with glasses, ice and bottle with Katie yelling after me, reminding me that she’s free of me, free of my put downs, my filthy habits, my sarcasm, my body. She puts a lot of emphasis on the word body. This is for the Stacys' benefit because she’s been free of my body for a long time.

       I pour my pal, George Stacy half a glass of whiskey. He’s perched on the edge of the sofa pulling at what remains of his wiry hair, a study in misery. I remind him that it’s going to be a long night, and he should get busy.

       George does as he is told and drinks up. What we do best together is drink. We have always drunk well together, ever since we met back in high school. We drank our way through high school and freshman year in college; we parted company for four years while I represented the U.S. Navy in the Far East, then we were back at it, drinking our way through my crummy marriage.

       I say to George that he must feel like a prophet, remembering how he had predicted that nothing good would come of my marriage back in L.A. when I told him about Katie and me. He’d been incredulous, but what could I do? She was pregnant and I was the product of New England ethical training. I had no choice but to marry her. George disagreed. I could get a dozen affidavits signed by guys who’d banged her, he told me. She’s my sister’s age, for Christ's sake, he wailed, she’s jail bait! Indeed. Another cogent reason for my agreeing to marry her. You’ll live to regret this, he’d said. Nothing good will come of this.

       George tells me not to make him say "I told you so." Then he says that it’s for the best, that he and Elaine frankly were surprised we’d lasted this long.

       I go over to the window. It's already dark outside though it can’t be later than four-thirty, five o’clock. The wind howls through the alley rattling the window in its frame. Paper trash flies like demons, parked cars are pelted with street grit. I’ve got plastic up inside to keep out the draft. It billows into the room like a sail. The heat comes with the rent and we have our own thermostat. Katie keeps the temperature in the eighties because she’s worried Lucy will catch cold from the drafts.

       I tell George to put on some music if he feels like it, remembering that the last time we fought Katie scaled a bunch of my favorite records off the back porch; since George and I share the same taste in music, many of his favorites are gone too. It doesn’t matter because George doesn’t feel like music. And he’s not in the mood for TV. There's nothing on TV this time of day anyway unless he wants to watch the stuff Katie likes to watch in the afternoon.

       I pour more whiskey in George’s glass and mine. The bottle is almost finished. I must be drunk but I don’t feel anything like drunk. George takes his drink down fast; we kill the bottle and go in his car to the package store for another fifth and a case of beer.

       The women are still in the kitchen when we get back. I can hear their muffled voices through the swinging door. What can they be talking about? Elaine has never gone one on one with Katie. Whenever the Stacys are down it’s just the three of us, George, Elaine, and me. Katie is on the outside looking in, and don’t think she doesn’t resent it. It’s fair to say that Elaine has tried to include her but it hasn’t worked out. I suppose it’s my fault; I treat George and Elaine as allies in the battle against this small woman who trapped me with her sex. And now she's going to take away the only thing I care about, and as she so eloquently put it in the kitchen, there is not one thing I can do about it. This is Massachusetts where the husband has virtually no rights in a divorce case.

       I go into the bedroom to get Lucy up from her nap. She’s awake and sitting up in bed with two pillows behind her back. She has her little thumb in her mouth, pumping at it for all she’s worth. She holds onto the filthy knot of her security cloth with a death grip in her thumb-sucking hand and tugs at her ear with the other.

       "Whatcha doing, sweetpea?" I say when I wake her up from naps, and take her in my arms and ask her to tell me she loves me. She’s all damp and sleep-rumpled, smelling of stale pee. She’s a bed wetter, a thumb sucker and I suppose this is because she's insecure and I guess she's insecure because of our crummy marriage. The thought of this and the feel of my little girl breaks my heart. My throat constricts. I wonder if the alcohol on my breath offends her. Will her most vivid childhood memories be the smell of her old man’s alcoholic breath as he whispers endearments in her bedroom?

       Lucy sucks fiercely at her thumb, tugs at her ear. She knows something is up. I tell her there’s a surprise for her in the other room. Like any kid, she loves surprises. She gives me those big brown eyes and I almost lose it. I hold out my arms and she allows me to pick her up. She hangs on to the dirty cloth for dear life, her thumb still buried in her small mouth.

       I take her to the living room first to show her to George. George is not fond of kids and Lucy senses this. She stares past his shoulder as he tickles her under her chin and asks her if she’d like to suck on his thumb for awhile just for the change. Now that he has some whiskey in his belly George is more relaxed. He sits down on the wing chair, on top of our coats, and I take Lucy into the kitchen where I have been dying to go all night. Lucy makes for a good excuse to butt in on the women, to find out what they’re up to.

       Lucy has taken a fancy to Elaine; Elaine, for her part, adores Lucy and scoops her from my arms and smothers her with hugs and kisses. I can see peripherally that Katie has her eyes on me, measuring me. I think about things like alimony, child support and again I feel like I’m going to throw up.

       I go back to the living room to find a thoroughly relaxed George Stacy conducting Mahler’s Fifth symphony with a beer bottle.

       George actually looks the part of conductor with his unruly hair and rumpled clothes. I ask him to help me with my options and he reminds me that we’re in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and that I can expect to take it up the ass if Katie follows through and files for divorce. Then I must start raving about absconding with Lucy, because he gets this serious look and tells me to calm down, not do anything rash, not compound my troubles. Then he gets me pissed off by waxing philosophical, by giving me half-assed counsel. I’m no family man according to George Stacy, and in that respect I’m like him, an isolate, better off on my own. Neither of us was cut out for family responsibilty. If Elaine were to hear him talk like this she’d make him pay. George sits down beside me on the sofa. His lips are wet and his eyes are moist from all he’s had to drink. He makes me promise not to do anything weird. I tell him he’s an unfeeling prick. (Do I actually say this to him or just think it? In those days I wasn’t one to say what was on my mind so I probably just think it).

       George leans back, looking smug, and peels a swath of beer bottle label down the middle, then works inward from the edges. Little piles of labels are accumulating on the coffee table. Should I put the champagne in the fridge? Will there be a midnight toast to the new year? Goodbye forever 1967. It’s been real, as they say nowadays. What will 1968 have in store for me?

       I get up and pace around the room. George closes his eyes, moves his head to Mahler. I should kick him out, him and his well-dressed meddling wife. I will do nothing of the sort, of course. If I’m not one to speak my mind I also have an aversion to confrontation.

       George asks me if I’ve got a lawyer. Of course I don’t have a lawyer. I tell him that Katie has one and this gets him started again. He can’t believe that I’ve been taken by surprise by little Katie. He laughs with the same incredulity he laughed in L.A. when I told him about Katie and me. I tell him we’ve been at each other’s throats for five years. Why should it be any different now? So how do I know it is different this time? he wants to know. How do I know she’s not just bluffing, trying to bust my balls, he says. I tell him this time it’s no drill. I know this in my gut. I should have seen this coming a long time ago, George tells me as he gets up and begins to pace the floor with me. As for lawyers, he should know me better than to think I’d hire a lawyer anymore than I’d consult a shrink. So don’t cry to me when you get hosed, he says. If I had taken care of business I might have stood a better chance, not a good chance, but a better one than I have now.

       George speaks the truth. It’s because I’ve become so inured to a life filled with bad words, bad intentions--bad karma as the hippies would call it--that it has taken on the deadliness of routine, a routine I haven’t been able to see or imagine beyond. I'm a victim of inertia. Now it’s out of my hands, out of my control. What if Katie is bluffing? Or what if Elaine talks her out of it, if that’s what she’s trying to do in there? I have no assurance that Elaine would even want to talk Katie out of leaving me. She’s of the same mind as George where it concerns my married life; I’d be better off on my own. She doesn’t seem to understand, or maybe doesn’t care, what it would do to me to lose my daughter.

       Elaine appears, carrying Lucy. She says she’s going to put her down. What have they been saying in the kitchen all this time for Lucy to hear?

       I tell Elaine that I’ll put her down myself, and take Lucy in my arms. She resists and I have to exert some force. Lucy begins to whimper. "Come on, darling," I remember saying, "let daddy put you to bed." I think idly of sleeping arrangements on my way to Lucy’s bedroom. The Stacys will have to spend the night. George and Elaine will sleep in our bedroom; Katie will crawl in with Lucy. That leaves the sofa for me but I don’t mind because I will never be able to sleep anyway.

       I lay my daughter down on the bed, tuck in the bedclothes around her. She asks me if I’m drunk and I ask her if mommy told her to say that. She stabs her thumb in her mouth and just stares at me as if I’m someone she doesn’t know or care about. This time I break down. I put my face down in the blanket and weep. Lucy thinks I’m playing our cry-baby game. But after awhile, with me slobbering out of control, she gets afraid and starts to hit the top of my head with the heel of her little hand.

       "Stop it, daddy," she says, "Stop your crying." I take her in my arms and hug her so hard she complains I’m hurting her.

       After putting Lucy down I stop in the bathroom for a look at myself in the mirror. I’m puffy around the eyes from booze and crying. My eyes remind this chick, Donna, over at the plant of Tommy Smothers. She should see Tommy Smothers’ bloodshot eyes now. I hate my eyes. As a kid I should have had an operation. If I’d had any kind of parents I wouldn’t have to spend every morning of my life in front of a bathroom mirror hating my looks because of one wandering eye. And when I’m torched it really moves off course. I wish the Stacys would just leave, get out of my private life. It wouldn’t be so bad if it were only George. Elaine will probe and cross-examine and not be satisfied until she knows everything. And she’s the type who has to share everything with her husband, and then they will both know everything about my private life, things nobody has any right to know. What else can she be doing in the kitchen with my wife all this time except gathering the facts of our wretched marriage?

       In the living room George is hunched over his beer. He looks morose the way only George Stacy can. What has he got to look morose about? I’m the one being abandoned, my child taken away from me. I tell him he looks the way I’m supposed to look, ask him to put on some more music, something a little more life-affirming than Mahler. He tells me I don’t look so pretty myself. I don’t feel so pretty. How long have the two of them been in that kitchen? It has to be close to midnight..

       The champagne with its gay ribbon is still on the coffee table. Beer bottles have accumulated on the floor, on the arms of the sofa, on the mantle of the boarded up fireplace, on the window sill. The whiskey is gone. As drunk as I look in the mirror, as legitimately drunk as I have a right to be, I feel oddly sober and clear headed.

       I say to George that I thought Elaine was my friend and George doesn’t understand. Of course she’s my friend, he says, all impatient. He looks better than I do; you’d never know he’s consumed better than half a bottle of whiskey and who knows how many beers. If she’s such a friend, I want to know, then how come she’s in my kitchen collaborating with the enemy? George tells me I’m talking like an asshole. I can’t take any more waiting, wondering what’s going on behind that kitchen door. I announce to George that I’m going in there to have it out when, as if on cue, Katie pushes through the door and marches right past me to Lucy’s bedroom, her nose in the air. I start to follow her but Elaine is there with a grip on my arm, telling me to let her go, I’m in no condition to deal with her now. Wait until morning she tells me. I’ll be better off, she says, believe me. I ask her what Katie’s been saying about me. Elaine just looks at me as if I’m demented. I’m confused, I don’t know what to do. My nose and extremities are cold. I feel numb all over.

       Elaine appraises the living room like an interior decorator. She looks at the room, shakes her head, claims she hasn’t seen a room like this since her last fraternity party. George and I sit down like naughty boys. We know all about Elaine’s disapproval of the way we drink whenever we’re together. This is probably why we haven’t got together so much lately. I’d begun to think they were both put off with the way Katie and I were with each other.

       I ask Elaine if she wants a drink. We’re out of whiskey and what’s left of the beer is warm. Does she want warm beer or warm champagne? She wants neither. She blows smoke at the ceiling, looks at her nails, her forehead creased in a frown. When she finally looks at me it’s with a coldness I’m not used to seeing from her. What stories has Katie told about me? They would be true stories because whatever else Katie is she is not a liar. I’m the liar in the family. Besides, to make me look bad she wouldn’t have to stretch the truth. And if there was one person she would delight in painting me black to it would be Elaine Stacy. To Katie it would be like killing two birds with one stone because she dislikes Elaine intensely. I’m surprised, frankly, they lasted so long together in the kitchen tonight. Surprised and worried.

       I want to know from Elaine what they’ve been talking about all night in there. Has Katie been boring her with stories about what a swell husband I’ve been, or what? I hear my voice coming out all phlegmy and squeaky. Elaine doesn’t say anything for a long while. She looks at me in a way I don’t remember her ever looking at me even when I’ve given her plenty of reason to look hard at me. Then she tells me that she loves me dearly but has never been blind to my faults.

       I want very much to tell her that my faults are none of her business, and that she has no right forcing her way into my life, judging me for the way I live, no right at all. But I can’t say things like that in those days. If I were the type to make New Year’s resolutions I’d resolve to start telling people exactly what I feel and what I think. No more bullshit, no more oblique. I keep my mouth shut.

       And then George pipes in, suddenly appearing as drunk as he should be, telling me again to face facts, I’m no family man. I remind him that he’s already pointed this out. Then Elaine has to tell me that as cruel as it may sound that I’ll eventually get over Lucy. So there it is. My heart, along with all hope, sinks in my chest. George and Elaine look at each other, pass little head and eye signals. I let this go without comment.

       Then Elaine is next to me, her hand outstretched, inviting me up to Garrison for a few days to just do nothing. I notice how she emphasizes "few days," no doubt remembering the last time I spent time with them four years ago when I came back from California. They were newly married and George said to me a couple of years later that my little visit had nearly cost him his marriage. I didn’t tell him at the time that he’d probably be better off if it had.

       I tell Elaine that I don’t see how that would be possible. I see her eyes flicker. With relief, I imagine. What makes her think I would want to come to their place, subject myself to their domestic strife? Still, she tells me to give it some thought.

       Anyway, I say, with mock joviality, happy new year, and swallow the dregs of warm beer. Elaine won’t look at me. Neither will George. Suddenly I’m an embarrassment to my best friends. I can’t bear to look at them anymore either. I announce that I'm tired and want to go to sleep. Elaine gets up quickly and goes to the closet where we keep sheets and extra blankets and goes straight to the master bedroom as if it’s understood that’s where they’ll sleep. It’s all right with me except it irks me sometimes how people just take certain things for granted. Elaine yells from the bedroom for George to come in and help her make up the bed. George rolls his eyes and with a supreme effort, as if he’s pulling himself out of quicksand, gets up from the sofa to help his wife make up my bed. Elaine comes back with some sheets, a blanket, and a pillow for me. She tells me to get some sleep, tells me I’ll feel better in the morning. Sure I’ll feel better in the morning. She drops the bedclothes in my lap, gives me a sisterly kiss on top of my head. I mean it, Jack, she says, come spend some time with us. Give yourself a chance to deal with this. Then, as an afterthought, she tells me in this soft voice that maybe I should give some thought to seeing someone.

       I tell her thanks, not sure what she means by ‘seeing someone,’ though

       knowing her she probably refers to a shrink, I’ll think about it. Then she actually tells me to go to sleep, that things will look brighter in the morning. Go to bed yourself, Elaine, I think, before you make me puke.

       I throw the bedclothes on the floor and lie down on the sofa. I’m wide awake with a buzzing in the back of my head. If I had any gumption I’d go get Lucy and take off with her to where nobody would ever think to look for us. I don’t know where on earth that would be. Elaine knows everything about me, things she shouldn’t know. And now George will know, too. It will be impossible for us ever to be friends again.

       New Year's day, 1968. The sun is bright in my eyes. I can hear George snoring in my bedroom. Lucy's door is open. I go in to find the neatly made bed, the bureau drawers open and empty, empty coathangers in the closet. She was quiet, so quiet not even Elaine Stacy, a notorious light sleeper, had heard them go.

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