Whiskey & Charlie by Annabel Smith Page B

think about these things. He and Juliet had talked about it endlessly at the time, and they had both felt the same: Whiskey and Rosa hadn’t known each other long enough, and Whiskey was fickle; their marriage couldn’t last. Charlie was doing them a favor by saying no. Charlie had communicated his decision not to Whiskey, but to Rosa, in a letter. He knew it was cowardly, but he was afraid that face-to-face, Rosa would work on him, wear him down, change his mind. After the letter was sent, the subject was never raised again. Neither Whiskey nor Rosa ever questioned Charlie about his reasons, and if his mother or father knew, they never spoke of it to him. As far as he knew, Rosa had never mentioned it to Juliet. Charlie and Juliet did not discuss it either; they had agreed on this, that they had to be resolute; there was no point rehashing it again and again, doubting themselves, wondering if they had done the right thing. They had made the decision that seemed best at the time, and they had to leave it behind them.
    But there, in Whiskey and Rosa’s house, Charlie is struck by the thought that though he and Juliet had tried to be objective, tried to look at it from every angle, he had never imagined how Whiskey and Rosa would feel, rattling around in their five bedrooms and two living rooms, every doorway a reminder of what they couldn’t have.
    Charlie takes his tea into the room that was to have been the kids’ playroom. Whiskey jokingly calls it his “man room.” He had done it up a year or so earlier, had talked about it once at their mother’s, but Charlie hadn’t listened. Instead, he had created his own image of Whiskey’s man room, furnished it with clichés—a corner bar, a pool table, a trophy cabinet, and a Sports Illustrated calendar—and then joked with Juliet about it, mocked Whiskey for being so puerile.
    Puerile. Charlie thinks about the word. His mother, who must be one of the only people in the world who still remembers the Latin she learned at school, has told him it comes from puer , the Latin word for boy . In English, it has a negative connotation, but all it really means is boyish. And what is so wrong with Whiskey being boyish? Charlie wonders now. There are worse things a person could be, self-righteous being one of them.
    As it turns out, the room is nothing like Charlie has imagined. There is no sporting memorabilia, no rifles on the walls or high-backed leather chairs. There is a vast desk and a bookcase covering an entire wall, a big comfortable-looking armchair, and a record player—a brand-new Technics, Charlie notices—on top of a shelving unit built to hold records. Charlie immediately feels envious of this setup, thinking of his own meager record collection, his secondhand turntable.
    He sits down on the floor and begins to flip through the records. Rosa’s “guy with the big suit” turns out to be David Byrne; Whiskey has everything by Talking Heads, and some later, solo stuff Charlie has never heard. Awed by the size of the collection, Charlie drags the armchair over to face the shelves, sits down for a closer examination. Whiskey has hundreds of records, most of which are in pristine condition, all stored in plastic sleeves and alphabetized. Bob Dylan and Benny Goodman, Django Reinhardt and De La Soul, Stevie Wonder and the White Stripes. Looking through his brother’s records for the first time in more than ten years, Charlie finds everything from the ultrahip (Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy) to the truly ridiculous (Hall & Oates), and within those circles of vinyl, Charlie learns things about Whiskey he has never known.
    Listening to Sonic Youth’s “Teenage Riot,” Charlie remembers Whiskey being in a band once, when they were about nineteen. The band was called Silent Revolution, a name they had thought brilliantly ironic and incisive at the time. Whiskey was the drummer. The guitarist and bass