Stone Cold Dead by James Ziskin (great novels of all time txt) 📕

up a forty-nine-cent Salisbury steak frozen dinner. Having withered in the heat of the oven and long since given up the ghost, the steak sat mired in an epoxy of reduced gravy, like a mastodon trapped in the La Brea Tar Pits. The mashed potatoes had stiffened to a grayish plaster, and the peas and carrots had somehow come out sodden toward the edge of the tray and dried out in the middle. I lost my enthusiasm for the meal and left it to clot before me on the coffee table.

I rose to change the channel, and the television threw a fit. Jack Benny warped and skipped rhythmically from the bottom of the screen to the top, and neither the vertical-hold knob nor the rabbit ears remedied the situation, despite my repeated fiddling. I switched off the set and plopped back down on the sofa, wrapped the afghan around my shoulders, and gazed up at the painted tin ceiling and alabaster light fixture above me. In moments like this, I especially appreciated these unexpected touches in such a simple duplex.

I tried to will time to pass. It was too early for bed and too late to make anything of the day. I turned my head, and my eyes fell on the unopened letter on the end table beside the sofa. Not ready to deal with that.

Across the room to my right, a pair of mahogany pillars framed a wide passageway between the kitchen and the parlor. Two waist-high hutches with glass windows and shallow drawers anchored the columns. I assumed the cabinets had been designed to display books or curios. Picture Hummel figurine knockoffs or pressed-glass swans trying to pass as crystal. But the hutches were, nevertheless, well built and tasteful. I kept my liquor in the one on the right.

The cabinet beckoned me, as surely as if it had crooked a finger. It wasn’t yet seven, but I’d waited long enough. Answering the siren’s song, I poured myself a thimbleful of Scotch, then, after a moment to consider properly the miserly amount, I topped it off with another two fingers and some ice. The first sting of whiskey, the sip you take before the ice has had a chance to melt and dilute the kick, that’s the one that reminds you it’s alcohol, reminds you why you drink. With each passing glassful, you think less and less that it’s booze. It dissolves into a simple beverage, transforms as if by alchemy into a social lubricant, something to hold in your hand and raise to your lips every so often. It loosens the binds of your corset, and makes you smarter and more attractive. You sparkle with charm. Personality in a bottle. At least for me. But once the burn of that first undiluted swallow has faded in your mouth, your guard drops, you drain the bottle, and end up snoring on the sofa hours later, fully clothed, with the Indianhead test signal glowing blue from the television set across the room. That’s still better than waking up with a stranger in your bed. Or you in his.

Two whiskies later, the letter was still there on the table.

I pulled a record at random from the bookshelf and placed it on the hi-fi: Brahms’s “Academic Festival Overture,” the one that ends with an old German university drinking song: “Gaudeamus Igitur.” I raised my empty glass in a toast to nothing. Then I refilled it. I must have been really smart and beautiful by nine o’clock, when I popped the spring cap off a new fifth of White Label and poured myself another drink. Then Fadge showed up with a pizza and a couple of quarts of Schaefer beer.

“About time you showed up,” I said, giving him a New Year’s peck on the cheek and grabbing the pizza. “I was about to drown.”

He pulled off his coat as I dug into the pizza.

“What’s that?” he asked, nodding at the envelope on my kitchen table. It was the one Irene Metzger had left me.

“Nothing,” I said, picking it up and tossing it to the counter next to the toaster.

“How come you didn’t come by the store today?” asked Fadge a while later, once we’d settled in on the sofa with our drinks.

“I was busy,” I said. “New story I’m working on.”

He eyed the empty bottle in the wastebasket. The recently opened one stood without shame in plain sight on the table before us.

“Tough, working on a Sunday,” he said. “And a holiday to boot.”

I shrugged. “Yeah, well, you know how it is. You worked today, too.”

“Sure, but I didn’t get as much done as you did.”

We stared at each other. Fadge was no saint and wasn’t judgmental either. I couldn’t believe he would begrudge me a lazy Sunday of overindulgence.

“How was that party you went to last night?” he asked after a suitable moment of discomfort had passed.

“It was all right,” I said. “What did you end up doing?”

“Worked till about eleven thirty, then closed up and went over to Timmy Gallo’s.”

“Sounds like fun. Did you ring in the New Year there?”

“I wouldn’t exactly say we rang it in. I drank beer with Timmy’s father-in-law, Lou, and we watched Guy Lombardo.”

“No girls?” I asked, mugging a pout.

“Timmy’s wife changed their one-year-old daughter’s diaper on the coffee table in front of the TV. Does that count?”

I shook my head.

“I was so hard up, I drove back here around one thirty to peep through your windows, but someone took away the ladder.”

“And after I’d left the curtains open for you . . .”

“Your light was on anyway, so I figured you were busy.”

I had to tread carefully now. Joking was fine as long as I didn’t cross certain lines. Fadge was sweet on me—I knew that much—and I didn’t want to parade my indiscretions in front of him.

“I had an unexpected, late-night visitor. A lady named Irene Metzger.”

Fadge took a gulp from the quart of beer and waited, watching me, his eyes bulging from an