Another pretty decent day, although I either pulled or slept poorly on my neck last night, and it’s been aching all day.
Looking back over that day, I don’t think I did a whole lot. I read, I worked on a surprisingly very easy Sunday crossword, and I went to my weekly writing group — where a forty-minute free-writing exercise of three random words produced this:
He was drunk off what was left of the wine — not a remarkable vintage, but a serviceable enough off-the-rack Merlot that complimented his serviceable, off-the-rack mood. Stacy had called it a Zenato ’96, but she had clearly misremembered, or else been duped into buying a bottle of this knock-off brand and never realized in the several years she had owned it. Brad knew even less about wine than she did, so he could only suppose it was an easy mistake. He could tell white wines from red, sweet fragrance from vinegar, but his prowess extended no further. Why should wine be any different than his life? He’d eyed the bottle Stacy’s note had offered — “there’s also beer in the fridge, some leftover Chinese” — as simply a means to an end. And though it was no great joy on the palette, and left him feeling like a bit of a lightweight, in that one respect it had not disappointed. He was well and truly drunk.
Though maybe “well and truly” was stretching things a bit. He was buzzed, and feeling pleasantly reckless, but not reckless enough to reach for the phone and get the whole sorry thing over with. There were limits even to supermarket red wine. Stacy probably wouldn’t even be in, now that he thought about it, or if she was, she’d be worried and want to know why he was calling. Had something happened to the apartment? Was Grace, her cat, okay? The very fact that he was thinking about this, and worrying himself that he’d be unable to explain why he’d picked up the phone at 5 a.m. her time and drunk-dialed, led him to suspect that he still wasn’t drunk enough to risk professing the truth. Nor did he have the necessary nerve to get that drunk.
He was looking after her apartment while she was away, assigned to work some sales conference in the United Kingdom, and staying here while his own place was being…well, he’d told her it was being repainted, but Brad knew that was only the first step before it was rented out to someone else. He and his landlord had spoken. The writing was on the soon to be repainted walls. It wasn’t so bad, though; Grace liked him, Stacy’s apartment was actually closer to the library where he worked, and how could you beat free wine and cold moo goo gai pan?
I really shouldn’t drink, he thought. It just makes me sad and even more than characteristically stupid.
More a character sketch than a story, but I had fun writing it, which is maybe the important thing.