Not Drinking With Erin
25A
A Holiday Love Story By Edward S. Barkin
still had to work the room. She knew twenty or thirty people in the place, so it was a pretty big job. Also, it was only nine or ten o’clock. So who knew how many people she knew might show up eventually. There was no way of telling. She knew a lot of people. Eric wasn’t sure what kind of time he was having at the party. His last name was Hunt, and people kept asking him if he was related to Helen Hunt, the actress. He kept saying no. He was hoping the conversation would pick up once everybody had had a drink or two. Once he had had a drink or two.
E
rin had been to Bob Ellis’s Christmas party five years running. Eric had been there either two or three out of the last five years. He couldn’t remember which.
He might have been there the year before, but he couldn’t be sure. He thought he might have been there, but there was no way of telling. It was a year ago. Or longer, if he hadn’t actually been there. Which he wasn’t sure he had. Erin went to parties all the time. Going to parties was part of her job. She liked going to parties, but like anything fun parties were work. Eric went to parties occasionally. Usually, when someone invited him. Eric wasn’t sure if he had been invited to Bob Ellis’s party this year. Bob had invited Eric’s friend Eric to the party, when the three of them had been chatting briefly a week earlier -- but it was anybody’s guess if both Erics were included in the invitation. Eric thought maybe he’d been invited, but there was no way of telling. Only Bob Ellis knew for sure. In a way, it didn’t matter. Eric’s friend Eric invited him to this particular party every year, even though he didn’t have the actual authority to do that. Eric the friend was perennially invited to Bob’s party. Only he didn’t really need an invitation to show up. He lived in Bob’s building and the man with the clipboard in the lobby who had been hired by Bob couldn’t very easily prevent him from riding the elevator. He paid his maintenance like everyone else. Erin was having a good time at the party. But not a ridiculously good time. She had just come from another party, where she had had a drink or two, and now she wasn’t drinking. There was no sense in getting sloppy drunk at Bob Ellis’s party. It was only nine or ten o’clock and she
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25A Metropolitan Magazine | Metmagny.com
He was drinking what tasted like Duvel, the Belgian beer. Everyone loved or hated Duvel, because it was so alcoholic. Eric couldn’t remember if he loved or hated Duvel. He was drinking some, though, so he figured that that would refresh his memory. Erin first saw Eric loitering in the hall-like foyer area of Bob Ellis’s apartment, directly underneath a gigantic “Lolita” poster. At first glance, she thought she might like to kiss him. She watched Eric talking to his friend for a moment. They were having a chuckle about something. She looked Eric up and down once. They kept talking to each other, rather intimately. She hoped he wasn’t gay. Eric first noticed Erin the first time she passed through the hall-like foyer of the apartment. What he noticed was that she had an unusually pretty face and that her sparkling gray top showed off her figure advantageously. (He also noticed that she had extremely good posture – which showed off her figure advantageously as well.) Eric noticed Erin a second time when his friend Eric pointed out that she was staring at him from her vantage point in the middle of the hall-like foyer. Actually, what he noticed was Erin walking away, because his friend Eric had been so obvious about telling him that Erin had been noticing him.
talking to a gay guy he knew. That seemed to be keeping him pretty busy. After Erin and Eric met, Gray talked non-stop for ten or fifteen minutes. Eric had no idea how long the conversation was. He wasn’t looking at his watch. He was drinking his Duvel and looking at Erin. He was also trying to listen to Gray, but Gray was talking so fast he couldn’t keep up with the conversation. Gray was a married guy on the loose for the night, and he wasn’t wasting any time. He was trying to have as much fun as possible before his curfew time, whenever that was. After Gray turned his attention elsewhere, Erin asked Eric if he wanted to accompany her to the bar. She wanted a glass of water. “You’re not drinking?” Eric asked. “I better not drink if I want to get through a whole week of these parties.” “If I had to get through a week of these parties,” Eric laughed. But the noise level suddenly rose and he didn’t get to finish the joke. After Erin got her water, she started wandering around the party with Eric. Erin was the kind of girl who liked to keep moving. That was okay with Eric. He didn’t really care if he was moving or stationary at the moment as long as he was somewhere in the vicinity of Erin. He was busy just soaking up her ambiance. Her aura. He was busy not drinking with her. Erin wanted to go out on Bob Ellis’s deck, but it was too cold out. She started to get goosebumps as she neared the sliding glass door. The previous year, she had let a handsome young movie star kiss her on the deck, and that had been kind of memorable. Things were different for me last year, she reflected -though the reflection was not completely conscious. Things are always changing. Always different... in big ways and small. Last year, for example, she wasn’t cheating on her boyfriend. (The incident with the movie star didn’t count, really.) Another example: This year, there was no Christmas tree in Bob Ellis’s living room. Big ways and small.
“Nice going,” Eric said to his friend Eric. “Eric.” As it turned out, Erin and Eric met several minutes later in the hall-like foyer, right underneath the gigantic “Lolita” poster. Eric’s friend’s Eric’s friend Gray stopped Erin as she passed by and said, “Hi, I’m Gray... We’ve been admiring you from afar.” “We” meant Gray and the Eric whom Erin had been admiring from afar. Eric’s friend Eric was off
After Erin got cold, Erin and Eric moved back into the crowd near the bar. The bar was the party’s source of life. It kept it alive and warm and festive. Uncoincidentally, it also contained many different kinds of alcohol. Adorning it were huge, gift-sized bottles of Duvel that two French girls were mistaking for champagne. One of the French girls was wearing one of the lowest-cut dresses Eric and his friend Eric
