Page 43 of Chasing the Horizon

Now that Victor was inside, he realized that to get an honest answer out of Max, he couldn’t just storm up to him and ask him for the truth. Rather, he needed to bring Max closer emotionally, to befriend him in a way that made him an easy person to open up to. He went to the bar and ordered a whiskey, hoping it would loosen him up a little bit, then remembered, with a heavy jolt of guilt, that he needed to meet Valerie at the radio station tomorrow at noon.

What time was it now? It didn’t matter, he guessed. He was already here.

He’d deal with the consequences when they came.

With his whiskey in hand, he walked through the tables, bobbing his head and trying to look like he was having a good time. Sometimes, he made eye contact with people or clinked his glass, but usually, they just danced around him, their hands raised. It was the worst music Victor had ever experienced in his life, and it gave him new meaning behind his belief that he’d been born at the perfect time for music. But maybe everyone felt that way.

At the table directly next to Max drank a man around Victor’s age. Victor paused and clinked his glass with his and introduced himself. The other man said, “I’m Simon,” and beckoned for Victor to come closer. “Do you also think this is the worst music you’ve ever heard?”

Victor laughed, throwing his head back. “We can’t be alone in that, can we?”

“I don’t know. They all look like they’re having a great time,” Simon said, gesturing to the younger people around them. “I can’t remember why I came out here!”

“Are you here with someone?” Victor asked.

“Yeah. My girlfriend is in her forties,” Simon said, half begrudgingly, half proudly. “She always wants to chase the nights away like this. I’d rather be in bed with a crossword. But hey.” He raised his glass again. “To life, huh?”

“Do you know anyone else here?” Victor asked. He was hoping to get an introduction to Max, who bopped around with his date just two feet away.

“Just her, sadly,” Simon said, turning his head to search for her. “And I always have this horrible fear that she’ll meet someone else at one of these club nights and go home with him! How pathetic is that?”

Victor was surprised that Simon was revealing so much so quickly. But then again, Victor was a therapist and therefore had one of those faces that people opened up to, at least he hoped. And Victor was the only other person in his sixties who was standing here all by himself.

Victor let the guy talk a little bit more but was grateful when his girlfriend Caitlin came back. Caitlin was a barrel of laughs, cracking one joke after another and not bothering to care if anyone else liked them. After she talked to Victor for a little while, she reached over to poke Max’s date on the shoulder. Victor thought,Here we go!

But very soon, as Max and his date, Simon and his date, and Victor joined forces at a table, drinking cocktails and vaguely dancing, Victor realized that Max wasn’t there with the woman he’d been cheating on Catherine with. He was there with someone in her early twenties, someone far younger even than Catherine’s best friend. He looked proud of himself.

Victor wondered,Was I so proud of myself when I left Esme for Bree?

He hoped not.

But something that always brought people together was alcohol. Very soon, Simon’s date and Max’s date were dancing and shimmying, leaving Max, Simon, and Victor off to themselves with new cocktails and shoulder slaps, laughing like they were the luckiest men in the world. Sometimes Victor felt like a completely different person and had to remind himself that he’d come here on a mission and not to have a good time.

“I like you guys! We should go somewhere else!” Max said suddenly.

Victor was surprised. His initial plan was to dig deeper into Max’s psyche after the next drink—not after going to the next bar. He checked the time and saw it was after midnight, nearing one in the morning. When was the last time he’d stayed out this late?

But suddenly, he was in the back of a large hired car with Max, Simon, and their dates. Max had hired the car for the night to celebrate something—a business venture that had gone his way—and he said he was staying in a penthouse apartment on the Upper West Side.

Victor checked his left hand and wasn’t surprised to see no wedding ring.

“What kind of business are you in, Max?” Victor asked, putting on his “important” voice.

“He handles wealthy people’s finances,” Simon said, jabbing Max in the stomach with his elbow. “He rips money off people like us to line his own pocketbook.”

“Don’t say it like that, Simon. I like to think of it as making us all wealthier,” Max said.

“Must be great, living in a penthouse apartment like that. Being single,” Victor said, finding himself fishing around for details about Max’s life.

“It’s fantastic,” Max said. “I don’t know why anyone gets married.”

Victor felt it like a smack. He wanted to say,You are married!But it wasn’t the time.

He thought about poor Catherine, all alone in that brownstone, seven months pregnant, with all her “best” friends talking terribly about her. His hands were in fists.

When they reached the next bar—a speakeasy with less dancing but more expensive drinks and a live jazz band that made Victor think,all right, I’m sort of into this—Victor made sure to sit next to Max with a full view of the quintet, the alto saxophonist and the trumpeter and the drummer, whose forehead glistened with sweat. It felt as though they were deep underground in a Manhattan that he’d never gotten to know.

Simon and Pia were kissing like there was no tomorrow.

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