I’m on the phone when the doorbell rings. Who could that be? Then it hits me. Oh hell, she’s gonna be mad. I forgot to tell her. “Hang on a minute,” I mumble into the phone and yell, “Can you get the door, Cassie. I’m on the phone. I think it’s the people who moved in downstairs. I invited them over.”

“You what?” she says, sounding as cross as I feared. I put my hand over the phone and shout back, “Aw, just open the door, hon. Sorry I didn’t tell you before—forgot all about it. We met in the elevator when I came home. I’ll be there in a sec.”

“I got papers to grade tonight, you know,” she shoots back testily. But a second later the door opens and I hear her chirping sweetly, “Oh, hi. Come on in.”

Somebody says, “We thought you weren’t home. Your husband asked us to come by.” Then some polite banter and I get back to my phone conversation.

A minute later I hang up and walk into the living room. Two guys are sitting on the sofa and Cassie is setting wine glasses down on the coffee table. “Ah, there they are,” I say in my hardiest host voice. “Glad you could make it.”

“Hope we’re not intruding,” says the guy from the elevator, looking uncomfortable. They probably heard us yelling while they were standing in the hallway. He was wearing a dark suit and tie when I ran into him earlier, but now he has on a shapeless gray sweater that maybe his mother or an aunt knit for him. Still, you could tell that he has an angular, athletic build. His black-rimmed glasses give him a studious look. Clark Kent is who he reminds me of.

“No, of course not,” I protest. The other guy starts saying how nice it was of us to invite them over, this being New York and people live their whole lives without saying hi to their next door neighbor et cetera. He introduces himself as Charles. There’s something oleaginous about him and he rubs me the wrong way.

He puts his hand on his friend’s shoulder and clears his throat. “This is my mate, Bryant,” he announces, and there’s something defiant in the way he says it that tells me they’re not just roommates. Who gives a damn? What’s weird is how he’s taken over as if he’s the one I invited in the first place. Then he goes on, “I really appreciate you having Bryant and I come by tonight.”

I see Cass wince. She’s an English teacher and grammar infractions irritate her. But she covers her annoyance and says, “I’m Cassie. Nice to meet you both.” Then she turns to me. “Arthur, look at the nice bottle of wine they brought. Why don’t you open it.” She hands it over, telegraphing me a private, venomous look.

“Ah, a Malbec,” I say, reading the label as I walk over to the cabinet to get the corkscrew, happy to have a task to busy myself with.

“A Vista del Sur 2011,” beams Charles. “Hope you like it.” He says it in a way that implies that if we don’t, it just shows our ignorance and lack of taste.

“I’m sure we will,” Cassie says, holding out her glass for me to fill, but not looking at me. I fill all the glasses and we make a toast to good neighbors. We all take a sip of wine and make appreciative noises but nobody says anything. We drink some more. The silence is embarrassing but I don’t know how to break it. What are complete strangers supposed to talk about anyhow?

Cassie finally says, “What do you fellas do?” and then, blushing a little adds, “for a living, I mean.”

I try to keep a straight face. I’m in enough trouble with her already. Bryant looks straight ahead and Charles is barely suppressing a smirk. “I’m a financial guy and Bryant here is a hotshot lawyer,” he says, slapping his friend’s knee.

“Hardly,” Bryant protests. “I’m just out of law school, low man on the totem pole at the firm.”

He’ shy, self-effacing, likable. I guess that’s why I invited him over. Charles is the opposite—outgoing in a pushy, obnoxious way. I feel kind of sorry for Bryant and wonder what brought them together.

“You’ll be climbing that pole in no time,” says Charles, thumping his friend on the back and chuckling. It sounds obscene the way he says it. “How about you, Artie? What’s your racket?”

I hate being called Artie. I should call him Charlie. Or maybe Chuck. “I’m a teacher,” I say. “High school biology.” I can tell that Chuck dismisses me right off the bat. He probably works on Wall St. and pulls in ten times the salary I do.

“And what do you do, Cassie?” asks Bryant after a pause. I think he’s embarrassed that his partner didn’t think to ask Cassie about her work. Maybe women aren’t important enough to have vocations or include in conversations. So Bryant has to step in to recognize that women are people too.

“I teach ESL,” she answers.

“Huh?” says Chuck, his interest momentarily aroused. “What’s that?”

“English as a second language,” she explains. “You know, for students from other countries.”

“Ah, I thought it was something technical.”

Maybe if she was involved in applied science Cassie would have gotten a little respect from him. But as soon as he hears what ESL is, you can almost hear him thinking: Well, of course, women’s work. Nothing serious.

We’ve all been drinking to fill the silences and I pick up the bottle and refill everyone’s glass, hoping that when the bottle’s empty they’ll get up and leave. “Nice wine,” I say. “Very fruity.” I set the bottle down on the table and when I see the look on Cassie’s face realize what I said. Chuck doesn’t notice. He’s looking around the room, taking everything in: big box store furniture, bourgeois decor, a couple of lowly teachers wearing off-the-rack clothes. Nothing to hold his interest here. He probably paid more for the casual designer clothing he’s wearing than I did for everything in my closet.

“Sounds like interesting work, Cassie—how’d you get involved in that?” Bryant asks, making up for his partner’s implied dismissal of it as a creditable job.

“Well, I majored in Russian and linguistics, but that was the only language-related job I could find. I guess I just kind of fell into it, but I like it.”

He presses on. “How do you teach students who don’t know English?”

It’s a subject Cassie is passionate about. She can talk about it for hours and I’m just hoping she won’t. I’m itching for the conversation to end and for them to leave.

“Well,” she says, “it’s not so much about teaching but getting them to learn.”

“Huh?” says Chuck, a quizzical look on his face. “How do students learn if you don’t teach?”

He’s chuckling again as he says it. Chuckling Chuck. Chuckles—that’s the name for him. It’s not a serious question. He doesn’t give a damn. He’s just mocking her. But it doesn’t matter. She’s off and running, explaining that you don’t learn a language but acquire it.

“You can’t teach language,” she says, “just like you really can’t teach somebody to swim or ride a bike. All you can do is try to make it easier for them to learn.” Here she pauses and swirls the wine in her glass. It’s just about empty. “Arthur,” she says to me. “We have another bottle, don’t we?”

I want to say no, but she might get it herself and I’ll just look like a jerk, so I march back to the cabinet while she continues her lecture. “It’s all about what you do to help students learn.”

Now I’m making the rounds, re-filling everyone’s glass again. I’m waiting for Chuckles to say something snide about the Three-Buck Chuck I’m serving and if he does, I’ll say he should enjoy a wine with his name. But for the moment his attention is elsewhere.

“Sounds kinda touchy-feely,” Chuckles says, with a smug smile, feeling that he’s discredited everything she’s said by using that label. But Cassie doesn’t give in and goes into a full blown lecture about Bloom’s Taxonomy, the affective domain and Carl Rogers’ principles of learning. Oh boy.

“Sounds like mumbo-jumbo to me,” Chuckles says, slowly nodding his head back and forth.

Cassie is ready to take him on and I’m not surprised. Wherever we are and whatever we happen to be doing, our conversation gravitates to language or teaching. We could be washing dishes or snuggling in bed and find ourselves talking about language or teaching. So now she says, “First you have to understand that language acquisition happens through exposure to the language.”

“I spent a week in Taiwan,” Bryant says, “and heard nothing but Mandarin the whole time, and when I left, I didn’t know any more than I did when I first got there. I thought I’d get something out of exposure—they call it immersion, don’t they?—but I didn’t.”

“Maybe if you stayed longer the exposure would have turned you yellow,” offers Chuckles, laughing as usual at his own wit.

Cassie goes on as if she didn’t even hear him. “You had exposure but not comprehensible input.”

Here it comes. I’ve heard it all before. Now Cassie is explaining to Bryant that he was exposed to Chinese but since none of it was comprehensible there was nothing to build on. “You don’t learn a language just by hearing it,” she says. “It’s all gibberish if you can’t understand any part of it. But if you understand a little, maybe because of context or accompanying gestures or pictures, you can work with it and that core of understanding grows as you get more and more input that you understand. It’s like a snowball rolling down a snow-covered hill, picking up more snow along the way and getting bigger. The bigger it gets, the more surface area there is and the more snow sticks to it.”

“Sounds like a snow job to me,” Chuckles predictably exclaims, but it doesn’t faze Cassie who forges on.

“Do you see what I mean?” she asks, looking at Bryant. “You start with something you know and keep adding to it. If you start with zero, you can multiply it by any period of time and the product is still zero.”

“Makes sense,” Bryant says.

“Not to me,” Chuckles objects. “Why not just teach the language—vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation and stuff like that instead of expecting students to learn things they aren’t being taught?”

“That’s what happens in most language classes,” Cassie explains, “and it doesn’t really work.”

“Why not?” Chuckles asks.

“That’s not the way language works. You acquire a language by hearing it, by using it. The rules get formed inside your brain from what you take in. You don’t learn rules first and then apply them. It’s the other way around. It’s inductive, not deductive.”

“So you make students figure out the rules for themselves?”

Cassie gives him the kind of look she might give a student who used the simple past when he should have used the present perfect. Not that I would ever know what a simple past or present perfect was if not for Cass. I’ve become quite the linguist from listening to her rants for the past six years. Now she’s explaining it all patiently to Chuckles, saying, “Even if we knew the rules, which we don’t, they’d be hard to teach and even harder to learn. Imagine trying to teach someone to walk by explaining what muscles to contract. We don’t need to know anatomy to learn to walk and we don’t need to know rules to learn to talk.”

“What do you mean we don’t know the rules?” Bryant asks. “Aren’t they what’s in grammar books—all the information about nouns, verbs and adjectives?”

“Those aren’t the real rules of language,” Cassie says. “They’re just labels for classifying words. People used language for thousands of years before those labels were invented. It’s an innate, internal grammar I’m talking about, not the formal grammar they teach in school. You don’t have to know about verbs and nouns to be a fluent speaker. Just listen to any five-year-old who never went to school and has no idea what a verb or noun is.”

“So you’re saying the grammar we learn in school isn’t important?” Chuckles asks. “What about a rule like not using a double negative? Don’t we have to learn that?”

“That,” Cassie laughs, “is an example of a rule artificially and mistakenly fabricated from the laws of logic—two negatives cancel each other out. But language isn’t always logical. Using two negatives can intensify a point, make it stronger.”

“The people that came up with that rule didn’t know nothing,” I put in, trying to lighten things up a bit. Cassie ignores me. In fact she’s pretty much ignored me the whole time. Still mad, I guess, but if she hadn’t started lecturing they’d be gone by now.

“Those kinds of prescriptive rules,” she goes on, “are all about making sure you speak a certain way—they’re not the rules for producing language.” Even though Chuckles is the one she’s arguing with, she’s looking at Bryant and directing her comments toward him.

“So what are the real rules of language?” Bryant asks, genuinely curious.

“That’s what people like Chomsky work on,” Cassie says, and that’s as far as she gets.

“Chomsky!” Chuckles bellows. “You don’t mean the commie, anarchist Chomsky, do you?” He’s animated now.

Cassie is nonplussed and splutters, “I, I, yeah, it’s the same Chomsky, but this has nothing to do with politics. They call him the father of modern linguistics . . .”

But Chuckles is hot and cuts her off. “I’ll tell you what he’s the father of.” He hasn’t been too keen on the whole language discussion. I have to admit I kind of enjoyed watching Cass treat him like a slow schoolboy and seeing him bristle at being lectured to. I think the only reason he participated at all was to try to control the conversation. But this is a subject he can sink his teeth into. He rants wildly about Chomsky. Something else is going on too. He’s denying the validity of everything Cassie said because it’s connected with Chomsky. He finishes his tirade almost shouting that Chomsky should stop blaming America for everything wrong in world and go back to wherever he came from.”

“You mean Philadelphia?” I put in. Even a biology teacher can know a thing or two. Not that I know much about Chomsky but I heard somewhere he was from Philly and it stuck in my gourd because that’s my hometown. Anyhow, I just say it to get a rise out of Chuckles and because I want to say something. I’m tired of being ignored.

“Is that really where he’s from?” Chuckles laughs and relaxes a bit.

Now that he’s calmed down, everyone is quiet. It’s hard to believe we’ve all gotten so worked up talking about language. I’m trying to think of how to end the conversation, but Bryant pipes up asking what she actually teaches in class.

“As I said,” she answers, “it’s not about teaching but learning. That old idea that the student is an empty vessel waiting to be filled by the teacher’s knowledge just doesn’t work for language.”

“Or other subjects either,” I put in. It’s a chance to take Cassie’s side and maybe get a smile out of her. Besides, I really believe it. I like to do hands-on stuff in my classes when I can. I don’t lecture unless I have to. For the zinger I add, “You know what Einstein said . . .”

“E=mc2,” deadpans Chuckles, cutting me off.

“Well, besides that,” I say, annoyed that he stepped on my line. “He said, ‘I never teach my students. I only provide the conditions in which they can learn.’ Or something like that.”

“You see?” Cassie says, smiling triumphantly at Bryant, not me. “Even in science and higher ed—learning, not teaching.”

“But what do students do in class?” he asks.

She describes some activities and methods she uses and when she’s done Bryant says “I wish my language classes were like that. I took French in high school and college but can’t speak it at all. I thought I was just bad at languages.”

“Tell me about it,” I say. “I took two years of French in high school and a year of German in college and the full extent of my ability in those languages is to say merci beaucoup and Gesundheit.”

“You guys shoulda took Spanish, like I did,” puts in Chuckles. “I can say muchas gracias and pinche culero—oh, wait a minute, maybe that wasn’t from Spanish class.” That gets a laugh after he translates.

Cassie says, “I doubt many people can use the language they took in high school. Most students feel like failures That’s sad.”

We start talking about our high school language class experiences. Everyone has a story to tell and for the first time all evening the conversation is fun. I’m enjoying myself enough to ask if anyone would care for a strawberry margarita now that the wine’s all gone.

“Sounds good to me,” Bryant says.

Everyone is up for it so I grab a bottle of Cuervo Silver from the cabinet and retreat into the kitchen with it, leaving them all boisterously discussing their school days.

I’m already feeling a pleasant buzz from the wine as I rummage around in the fridge for strawberries and a couple of limes. I hit the pulse button the blender and when I look around I see them all standing in the doorway, laughing and joking with each other. “We thought you might need some help,” says Bryant brightly.”

“I just wanted to see what you’re up to in here,” chortles Chuckles.

“Too late to do either,” I yell over the whir of the blender—the ice makes a racket. “It’s just about ready.” I dump some sea salt on a small plate, pick up a leftover wedge of lime off the counter and rim the glasses as they hand them to me. In place of the somber-hued wine, our glasses now contain a gaudy pink mixture. It feels like we traded our serious adult beverage for something more frivolous and childlike and it fits our mood which has turned kind of giddy too.

Cassie raises her glass in a toast and says, “Here’s to lowering the affective filter.”

I doubt the others know what she’s talking about but it doesn’t matter. We’re enjoying our drinks and each other. Slurping sounds mix with outbursts of laughter and disjointed remarks. “I may have put in a bit too much tequila,” I remark as we all spontaneously slide into chairs around the kitchen table.

“Impossible,” Chuckles counters, picking up the bottle from the table and studying the label. “Hecho en Mexico,” he reads. “Hey, I can understand that. You see, I still remember something. Good old high school Spanish class.”

“First time I ever tasted tequila was when I was in high school,” muses Bryant, “and I sure remember that.” After a little prompting he tells us about it and we laugh not only at the story but at his genteel way of narrating his raunchy tale.

We take turns telling about the first time we ever drank alcohol and the first time we ever got drunk, and laugh hysterically at incidents that once caused us the utmost embarrassment and mortification. Chuckles has the most outrageous stories and as I watch him reenacting scenes from his past, I realize for the first time how ugly he is. Repulsive, really. It amazes me that I didn’t notice it before. Maybe it’s because of how he carries himself and his expensive clothes. But as he’s sitting there, contorting his face and pretending to retch, I can’t help noticing his pale, almost translucent skin, his beak-shaped little nose, his misshapen, almost lip-less mouth. I bet high school was tough for him, ugly as he is, and feel a little sorry for him.

We drain our glasses. “Can you make another batch of that, hon?” Cassie asks, but there’s no more strawberries and the ice is all gone.

“No problemo,” Chuckles says. “All we need is Señor Cuervo here.” He picks up the bottle, unscrews the top and pours a couple of fingers into her glass and then into the other glasses. No one protests.

I bring over the salt and remaining lime wedges. “Well,” I say, raising my glass for a toast. “Here’s to high school. Maybe we didn’t learn a foreign language there but we learned how to drink.”

“Yup,” agrees Chuckles. “That’s a subject I learned without being taught. Spontaneous learning, you might say.”

“I like the idea of spontaneous learning,” I say. “I wish my students could learn spontaneously. I had a student once who asked where he could get brain pills. He was serious. He thought there was a pill he could pop to learn things without any effort.”

“That’s the problem with kids these days,” Chuckles complains. “They expect everything to be easy. They don’t know how to work hard.”

Frowning, Cassie says, “I don’t think kids mind working hard if they like what they’re doing. Just look how hard they work at skateboarding and other really difficult stuff.”

“Sure, they’re willing to work hard at having fun,” Chuckles laughs.

“Well,” Cassie says, “maybe if school was more fun and they’d work harder at learning.” Her voice has a sharp, petulant quality, not quite shrill but not exactly calm.

“What is fun, anyhow?” Bryant asks. He’s the only one who still looks absolutely sober, even though he’s been drinking as much as everyone else, but that question makes me doubt his sobriety. Chuckles makes a lewd gesture with his fingers as a response, but Bryant smiles and says, “I mean, what is it that makes something fun to do? Sure, some things feel good. They’re pleasurable in their own right. That’s one kind of fun. I can see how skateboarding can be exhilarating when you’re flying through the air. That’s fun, but it takes lots of effort to be able to do it. I see kids practicing on their boards all the time, over and over again. It looks like the opposite of fun. So maybe some things are fun because of the satisfaction you get when you accomplish something difficult.”

“That’s exactly right,” Cassie beams. I wish she looked at me in the way she’s looking at Bryant. It doesn’t make me jealous exactly, just kind of sad. Chuckles looks irate. Cass is looking at Bryant and Bryant is looking at her. She goes on, “What I was trying to say is that learning is fun, but school makes it a drag. Kids end up hating school and even the idea of learning. It doesn’t have to be like that. Students can have a good time learning. I see it all the time. Teachers complain about students being lazy, but maybe it’s because they’re too busy teaching instead of helping them learn.”

I pick up the bottle and pour myself another drink. “What do you expect teachers to do?” I ask. “There’s a curriculum to follow, textbooks to get through, standards to meet, tests to pass.”

“That’s the problem,” she says. “Too much focus on those things instead of learning.”

“Not all subjects are like language,” I say. “Maybe students can learn language without being taught, but if you want them to learn biology you have to teach it to them. That’s just reality.” So much for Einstein, I’m thinking as I say it. But I don’t care and I don’t give a damn if I sound peeved. Not only is she ignoring me and flirting with a guy who likes other guys, but she’s making it sound like I don’t know anything about teaching. That’s what I do for a living and I think I’m pretty good at it.

“What he’s talking about,” she says to Bryant as if I’m not even there, “isn’t learning. It’s only memorizing stuff for a short time to pass a test.”

“Isn’t passing tests important?” Chuckles asks.

“Sure, tests can be useful,” she shrugs. “It’s helpful to know what students understand and what they don’t, and tests can give information about that. That can help learning, but tests usually aren’t used for that.”

“What are they used for?” Chuckles asks.

I take another swig of tequila, content to sit back and watch the two of them go at it.

“Mostly for ranking students,” Cassie answers.

“What do you mean by ranking?” Bryant asks.

“You know,” she says, “rating students, classifying them according to their ability—or according to whatever it is that tests measure.”

“Tests motivate students to work harder, to study more, don’t they?” Bryant asks. He says it gently, a little hesitantly, not wanting to sound like he’s piling on and joining Chuckles and me in criticizing her ideas, but it looks like even he’s having a hard time swallowing what she’s saying.

“They probably do, but motivating students to get better grades isn’t the same thing as motivating them to learn. The message students get is that they’re too stupid or lazy to learn and that learning is just drudgery that no one would do if not for rewards and punishments.”

How did the conversation get so damned serious again? Just a little while ago we were laughing and clowning around, having a good time. Now we’re all up in arms.

“Don’t you think,” Chuckles says, “that we need tests to keep teachers accountable?” He’s refills his glass and takes a gulp.

“The focus is on grades,” she says, “not learning. That whole accountability thing is a sham, a way for teachers and administrators to cover their asses. Real accountability means being responsible for every student learning and not just proving that you taught what’s in the curriculum.”

“What do you think,” Bryant says in that god-damned earnest way of his, “the perfect school would be like?” His question is sincere. He’s looking at her admiringly, like she has the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything.

And she’s off talking about how all humans have a natural curiosity and drive to learn that schools tend to quash instead of trying to nurture. She says students should be able to explore what they’re interested in and make their own discoveries. She paints this picture of a Utopian school with students playing music, speaking foreign languages and programming computers before third grade. They’re building robots, planning cities and doing all manner of science experiments on their own. They become good readers and writers and learn algebra and calculus not because someone makes them but because they’re eager to learn and acquire the tools they need to work on projects that they themselves take on. School is this wonderful place where students find fulfillment and get all the skills and knowledge they need to lead intelligent, enlightened lives.

It all sounds so grand. It’s wonderful all right and if you’ve never set foot in a classroom and tried to teach a group of rowdy fifteen-year-olds you might even get swept away and believe it’s all possible. But I know just how eager students are to learn about the circulatory system or how meiosis works. I don’t buy it. Her ideas are hopelessly idealistic. It drives me crazy even if it’s also what I love about her, how she’s never satisfied with the way things are and is always trying to improve everything. I put up with things as they are. Maybe that’s why she’s ignoring me and looking at Bryant like that.

Chuckles has been scowling the whole time but hasn’t uttered a word. Now he clears his throat and says, “So that’s what you think education is, eh? That’s what you think school is all about?”

It’s something in his tone. We all turn toward him. Bryant says, “What do you think the purpose of education is, Charles?” There’s not a lot of warmth in his voice or in the way he’s looking at his friend.

“I’ll tell you,” he says, “if you really want to know. School is boot camp. It’s a training ground for life. It’s not a god-damned playground and isn’t meant to be. It’s where we become who we’ll be for the rest of our lives. She says tests are used for ranking. Damned right. That ranking is the glue that holds society together. Everyone learns their place in school and if they didn’t, the world would be a jungle with everyone thinking he was just as good as anyone else.”

Chuckles can see the look of revulsion on Bryant’s face. He’s revealed something about himself that a guy like Bryant, who’s capable of being enchanted by Cassie’s idealism, can’t stomach. But he can’t restrain himself anymore, or maybe it’s because he knows he’s already blown it. Glaring at Cassie he sneers, “You think education is all about self-fulfillment and self-actualization and all that crap, don’t you? Where would society be if everyone was educated and self-actualized? It couldn’t exist. There’d be no laborers, no workers. Everyone would be a god-damned philosopher or artist. You want to know what school is for? It’s to make things exactly the way they are. And it works perfectly well as long as people like you don’t go mucking it up.”

I feel like I’ve been whacked on the head. I didn’t like Chuckles before but this is too much. Who knows if he believes what he’s saying or if he’s being spiteful and malicious? It doesn’t matter because it still gets to me. I’m a teacher and I work hard at my job. I do it as well as I can. I care about my students, want them to succeed. I work within the system and teach what I’m told to teach. Give me a curriculum and a textbook and I’ll teach. Cassie is different. She questions everything and doesn’t take anything for granted. If something seems wrong to her or doesn’t make sense, she won’t do it. Sometimes I think she’s too radical because she wants to reform everything—not just the curriculum but the school system, the health system, the transportation system, the justice system, the military, the government. She wants everything to be better.

What Chuckles is saying isn’t just radical—it’s diabolical. For him schools aren’t for learning but for maintaining the status quo. He wants students to fail. Reform is futile. No, not futile, wrong-headed. He doesn’t want any tinkering with a machine that already does exactly what it’s supposed to. And what am I? A cog in a machine that’s not meant to produce anything but noise, a machine whose only purpose is to keep things the way they are. No doubt that’s the way Chuckles sees me. A worthless part of a useless machine. And how does Cassie see me? As someone content to be a cog? A good little soldier ready to carry out whatever orders are given without question or objection? Should I fight the system every step of the way like she does, even though she’ll never get anywhere because there are too many people like Chuckles at the controls? I feel like all the meaning has been sucked out of my life. I thought I knew who I was. A teacher. A husband. Someone with some worth. Now I don’t know anything except how empty I feel.

The others are lost in their thoughts the way I’m lost in mine. No one has said anything for a while. No one has anything left to say. We sit there, staring at the empty bottle on the table.