A teetotaller now (weight, liver, conflicting pills), Don could remember the drinks—drinks on porches and docks, on boats and lawns, in living rooms and kitchens and dens. The high metallic sheen of gin, the slightly more viscid transparency of vodka, the grain-golden huskiness of bourbon, the paler, caustic timbre of Scotch, the sprig of mint, the slice of orange, the chunk of lime, the column of beer with its rising flutes of bubbles, the hemispheres of white and red wine floating above the table on their invisible stems, the little sticky-rimmed glasses of anisette and Cointreau and B & B and green Chartreuse that followed dinner, whirling the minutes toward midnight, while the more prudent, outsiderish guests peeked at their watches, thinking of the babysitter and tomorrow’s sickly-sweet headache. Don remembered, from the viewpoint of a host, the magnanimous crunch of ice cubes broken out of their aluminum trays with an authoritative yank of the divider lever, and the pantry’s round-shouldered array of half-gallon bottles from the liquor mart beside the superette, the cost of liquor a kind of dues you cheerfully paid for membership in the unchartered club of young couples. How curiously filling and adequate it was, the constant society of the same dozen or so people. Western frontiersmen, he remembered reading somewhere, said of buffalo meat that, strange to say, you never tired of eating it. The Fairbairns’ friends would arrive for weekday drinks at six, harried and mussed, children in tow—the women bedraggled by a day of housework, the men fresh off the train with their city pallor—and be slowly transformed into ebullient charmers. Become dizzyingly confiding and glamorous and intimes, they would not leave much before eight, when the time had long passed to get the children, who had been devouring potato chips and Fig Newtons around the kitchen television, decently fed and into bed.