On the other hand, he could just sit here and say the hell with it all. With Casey gone till Sunday night, he could sit and drink all weekend if he wanted to. He didn’t even have to go out for more booze. There were three fresh bottles of the Macallan just sitting in the pantry waiting for him. All the makings for his own Lost Weekend. His mind flashed on images of the alcoholic Ray Milland throwing his life away in the 1945 Billy Wilder classic. Another bit of detritus from McCabe’s alternative life twenty years ago, as a young wannabe director at NYU film school. Would Kyra have wanted to marry him if he’d gone into the movie business instead of the police business? He supposed so. The artist and the auteur. A better fit than the artist and the cop. Except he never would have met her. Alternative lives.
He watched the lights of a giant tanker, laden with half a million barrels of North Sea crude, work its way into Portland harbor. A couple of tugs pushed and prodded its blue hulk toward the marine terminal in South Portland where the oil would be pumped into holding tanks to await transmission via pipeline to refineries in Quebec. As he watched he wondered about the men who worked big ships like these. Lonely men, he imagined. Hard men as well. Used to living without the comforts of women. Would they think him soft or self-indulgent? Whining about a woman who gave him everything up to a point. And then stopped. He supposed they would, but he didn’t much care.
He got up, took a last sip of the whisky, walked to the kitchen, and poured the rest, more than half the glass, down the kitchen sink. Hell of a waste of fine single malt. He was already feeling the effects, though, and he realized getting drunk wasn’t what this was about. He washed out the Waterford glass, the last of a set of four his sister Fran, twenty years a nun, gave Sandy and him for a wedding present. He thought about the irony of that. Of Sister Fran, the daughter of a drunk and the bride of Christ, giving her younger brother whisky glasses to celebrate his marriage to a slut. A beautiful slut, but a slut nonetheless. When the marriage failed and Sandy walked out on him, she took two of the glasses with her to her new life as the wife of a rich investment banker. The third was broken in the move to Portland. This was the last, and it was precious to him. He dried it carefully and placed it back on its high shelf out of harm’s way.
McCabe glanced at his watch. Nearly six o’clock. If he was going to make it to Kyra’s opening at all, he’d better get moving. He called Casey’s cell to make sure she’d arrived safely at Sunday River. She had. He took a quick shower. Before dressing, he clicked on the small TV in the corner to look at the Weather Channel. Fifteen degrees. Wind chill of minus five. Going down to single digits overnight with heavy snow predicted for after midnight. Jesus. When was this goddamned cold ever gonna let up? It’d been brutal all winter. Even forced him to renounce his inner New Yorker and buy some thermal underwear at the Bean’s outlet on Congress. He found a clean pair still in their plastic wrapper and put them on. He hated wearing the things but had to admit they did make the cold more tolerable. His small closet was stuffed with his minimal selection of clothing plus boxes of stuff he hadn’t unpacked from the move to Portland four years ago. He picked out a pair of brown corduroys and slipped them on over the long johns. Then a dark brown crewneck pullover. Then his sport jacket. Brown wool, butter soft.
A present from Kyra, purchased just before Christmas at a high-end men’s boutique in Copley Place in Boston. ‘Somebody’s got to dress you decently, McCabe,’ she said at the time. ‘Since you’re obviously incapable of doing it yourself.’
He remembered the weekend with pleasure. Casey was away that weekend, too, visiting her mother in New York. Sandy had only begun seeing Casey again last year after three years of total abandonment. This was the first time she’d be staying in her mother’s apartment, meeting Peter Ingram, Sandy’s new husband. Thinking about it had been making him edgy. Anxious. He needed a distraction. Turned out a friend of Kyra’s from Yale was heading out of town and offered Kyra the keys to her apartment in Cambridge. So they snuck down, just the two of them, for a romantic interlude. The idea was to eat well and maybe take in a Celtics game – the Knicks were in town, and Kyra’s friend, an art director at one of Boston’s hot young ad agencies, had access to season tickets. On Sunday, they planned to see a Hockney show at the MFA. As it turned out, they did eat well. But skipped both the Celtics and the Hockney and wound up spending the weekend alternately in restaurants and in bed. It was probably what both of them had in mind in the first place.
He strapped on his service weapon, a heavy Smith & Wesson 4506. The PPD was changing over to Glock 17s. Lighter. More accurate. In McCabe’s mind a better choice. Though he hadn’t made the switch yet. He pulled the sweater down over the gun. He considered his choice of outerwear. Either a lined army field jacket. Warm, but it’d look ridiculous over the sport coat. Or the old black cashmere that’d come with him from New York. Not warm enough for this kind of winter, but it’d have to do. Next year, if it was cold again, maybe he’d trade it in on a fleece-lined parka. Maybe not. He still preferred dressing like a grown-up.
Frigid air smacked him full in the face as he stepped out of his condo. Even so, he decided to walk the mile and some to the North Space Gallery on Free Street. The snow wasn’t supposed to start until after midnight, and the idea of being picked up for drunk driving wasn’t appealing. He didn’t feel like messing with a cab. Besides, a good dose of cold fresh air might be the best way to clear the buzz in his brain. He didn’t want to look the clown for Kyra’s opening. Even if he might be. If he walked fast enough, maybe he wouldn’t succumb to frostbite.
A steady wind was blowing in off the bay. Force five or six on the Beaufort scale. McCabe’s mind played with the words. He didn’t have a clue what the Beaufort scale was, but he always liked the sound of it. It was the kind of thing David Niven might say before sending a squadron of Spitfires out to confront the filthy Hun. McCabe sometimes wondered if his own secret life might be a little too much like Walter Mitty’s. Is that why he became a cop? To live out his fantasies? Freeze, asshole! Easy to do in this weather.
McCabe turned right and headed down the Prom, pulling the coat more tightly around himself. Dating back to his early days on the NYPD, it looked and felt its age. Worn elbows. Fraying cuffs. Maybe Kyra’d take him shopping to Boston again. He turned right on Vesper. The wind was at his back now, which felt better. He passed a couple of dog walkers, identities and gender hidden under heavy hooded parkas and boots. Great night for a mugging. What did the mugger look like, ma’am? Well, Officer, he was wearing this heavy parka with a furry hood out front. Nanooks of the North. More than ready to tackle the tundra. He remembered reading Endurance. The British explorer Shackleton spent a winter on an Antarctic ice floe with only a lined Burberry for warmth. Stiff upper lip? Absolutely. Not because Shackleton was British. The lip was just frozen in place. He turned left on Congress and headed west down Munjoy Hill. In spite of a decade of gentrification, the Hill still retained the look and feel of its working-class roots. Smallish wood-frame houses built sometime around 1900. Most divided into apartments. Tonight they were all closed up tight, curtains drawn. He continued down the hill, passing a few couples heading for one or another of the bars and restaurants that were sprouting like weeds. The Front Room, the Blue Spoon, Bar Lola – and, of course, his home away from home, Tallulah’s. All crowded on a Friday night. Each with a few intrepid twenty-somethings hanging out front, desperate enough to brave the cold just to suck up their daily ration of nicotine.