“That’s better,” she said.

I took a drink myself, and as it hit bottom I remembered that I was pouring it into a very empty stomach. It would be a lot easier to get me drunk than to get Carolyn sober, but I wasn’t sure it was a good idea. I opened the fridge and built a sandwich of thin-sliced Polish ham and Monterey jack cheese on one of those dark musky rye breads that comes in little square loaves. I took a big bite and chewed thoughtfully and could have killed for a bottle of Dos Equis.

“What about Archie?” I said.

“He doesn’t drink.”

“Carolyn-”

“Sorry. I don’t mean to be drunk, Bern.” She tilted the bottle and helped herself to a few more cc’s of the CC, as it were. “I went home and fed the cats and had something to eat, and then I got restless and went out. I kept bopping around. I think I had a touch of moon madness. Did you happen to notice the moon?”

“No.”

“Neither did I, but I’ll bet it’s full or close to it. I kept feeling as though the problem was that I just wasn’t in the right place. So I’d go somewhere else and I’d feel the same way. I went to Paula’s and the Duchess and Kelly’s West and a couple of straight bars on Bleecker Street, and then I went back to Paula’s and played a little pool, and then I hit this pigpen on Nineteenth Street, I forget the name, and then I hit the Duchess again-”

“I get the picture.”

“I was bouncing is what I was doing, and of course you have to have a drink when you go to a place, and I went to a lot of places.”

“And had a lot of drinks.”

“What else? But I wasn’t looking to get drunk, see. I was looking to get lucky. Will true love ever come to Carolyn Kaiser? And, failing that, how about true lust?”

“Not tonight, I gather.”

“I’ll tell you, I couldn’t get arrested. I called Alison a couple of times, which I swore I wasn’t gonna do, but it’s all right because she didn’t answer. Then I went home. I figured I’d make it a reasonably early night, maybe have a brandy before I turned in, and I opened the door and the cat was missing. Archie, I mean. Ubi was fine.”