The Perfect Manhattan

by Leanne Shear

  “But you’ve seen me up there. I work really hard, and you said yourself I did a great job,” I said defensively. “And I sold bottles. I know I sold more bottles than Jake. He said it’s a big deal to sell bottles at the bar.”

  “It is, but it doesn’t really matter. Numbers don’t lie. Jake still rings circles around you. Don’t get me wrong, we still want you to work here, which is a huge compliment—we’ve already let three bartenders go. It’s just that, like I said, I can’t argue with the numbers.”

  My head was spinning. I didn’t want to leave Jake, and I didn’t want to lose the cash flow of the front bar. “Okay, Teddy,” I said, resigned, “I’ll give it a try.”

  “Great,” he said. “See you Friday.”

  Defeated, I walked back into Finton’s and grew even more dour when I saw that Dan was comfortably seated right in front of my register. He was drinking Wishing Tree Shiraz out of a globular Riedel wineglass and talking to the attractive young redhead sitting beside him. “When dealing with old-country wines, the grape itself is the primary focus, and winemakers don’t concern themselves as much with the casking. With new-country wines . . .” He rambled on to his captive audience of one. “Hey, Cass,” he said, interrupting himself to offer me a half-smile when I returned behind the bar. Then he returned to his private tutorial.

  While Dan was normally impeccably groomed and even dashing, I was noticing he tended to degenerate as the night wore on. When he indulged in too much red wine (as he often did), his teeth would turn a purplish black and the stain would eventually bleed into the cracks of his chapped lips. The writer in me wondered if that discoloration wasn’t a physical symbol of the toll the bar world took on its inhabitants. It was like when I counted out money at the end of a shift at Spark. After handling thousands of dollars in cash, my fingers would literally turn black from the dirt and grime on the bills. When you work in a bar, surrounded by every imaginable vice, it’s hard not to have some of it rub off on you.

  I walked over to Billy’s end where he was reorganizing the CDs.

  “Where’s Maya?” I asked.

  “She just ran out to get some cigarettes,” he said, trying to locate the case for Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers’ Greatest Hits. Then he lowered his voice. “What’d Dan want to talk to you about downstairs?”

  “He showed me his secret surveillance room—thanks for the warning.”

  “I thought everyone knew about that room. What happened—did he catch you giving away free drinks or something?”

  “No. He accused me of throwing myself at a customer. He was watching me on the cameras.” I handed him the case, which was sitting on one of the beer coolers. “It’s such bullshit. He doesn’t yell at you when Maya is stretched halfway over the bar making out with you.”

  Billy laughed. “We weren’t making out,” he scoffed. “And it’s different with me. I’m a guy.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Dan can get really weird about some of the girls that work here—really possessive and territorial. He has this fucked-up idea that this is his bar, his domain, and his women. He wants to be the only man getting attention when he’s here. Sometimes I think the only reason he bought this place was so he could enjoy a little celebrity. Know what I mean?”

  “Not really.”

  “When you own a restaurant or bar, even if it’s not some crazy hot spot, you’re still a celebrity whenever you’re there. Everyone that comes in is always asking ‘Is Dan Finton in tonight?’ It’s in everyone’s best interest to be on his good side, so customers and employees kiss his ass. You know how it is whenever he comes in here. Laurel, the waitresses, the regulars, everyone runs over to him. So he doesn’t like it when anyone threatens that.”

  I nodded, mulling over this insight.

  “We used to have this manager here a couple of years ago,” he went on. “His name was Philipe, and he was pretty much the polar opposite of Laurel. He was from France, and he was really charismatic with both the customers and the staff. And everyone that came in here asked for him. He more than tripled the business of this place, and he would turn tables in the dining room four times a night. He was an absolute genius at bringing in business. Basically, any time pretty girls came in, he would make sure they had a great time, buy their drinks, play great music—everything. Then, of course, they came back with more of their girlfriends to see him. Pretty soon this place got to be known as the spot where pretty girls hung out, so of course all the guys started streaming in and spending all their Wall Street cash. We were mobbed seven days a week. Anyway, one day without warning, Dan fires him.”

  “Why?”

  “He couldn’t handle all the attention Philipe got. People thought Philipe was the owner, and Dan just lost it.”

  “But that doesn’t make any sense,” I said.

  “No shit. Now Philipe works for Keith McNally at Balthazar and Pastis. Dan literally gave up a gold mine when he fired Philipe, but he didn’t seem to care. He’d rather sacrifice great business and great money than play second fiddle to anyone. That’s why he got mad when you were talking to your boyfriend before.”

  “He’s not my boyfriend,” I refuted, like a third-grader.

  “Well, whoever he was, you two seemed really into each other, and it touched a nerve with Dan.”

  “CASSSSSSSSSSSSSSIE!!!” I turned around to see Alexis standing by the front door carrying one of her Manolos, her highlighted hair falling halfway out of the smooth ponytail she usually wore to work. Her chic Balenciaga suit was wrinkled, and I could see even from behind the bar that she had a giant run in her hose. She was hanging on the arm of a middle-aged man with combed-back salt-and-pepper hair who was wearing a dark suit and shiny shoes. I could tell she was absolutely wasted.

  “This is my best friend in the entire world,” she crowed to the man as she approached and steadied herself by gripping a bar stool. “I don’t know what I’d do without her. I love her. I’m obsessed with her. She’s my best friend.”

  “Nice to meet you,” the man said, offering his hand, his platinum wedding band glinting in the candlelight. “I’m Bob.”

  “Bob is my managing director who I’ve been telling you about,” Alexis slurred. “He took me out to dinner tonight. We went to Le Cirque, and it was fabulous.”

  “It’s nice to meet you,” I said to him.

  “Shots!” Alexis clapped her hands. “Let’s do some shots, Cassie! What do you say? Jameson?” she sputtered.

  “Lex, I don’t feel like drinking tonight,” I said, hoping to thwart her plan for getting even more wasted.

  “Cassie, your straight edge is cutting me! Now pour us some shots!”

  Reluctantly I grabbed the bottle of Jameson and poured two shots, one for Alexis and one for Bob.

  They slammed them, and Bob ordered a Lagavulin neat. Once I’d poured him the expensive single-malt scotch and given Alexis her usual glass of Fumé Blanc, they sat down a few stools from Dan. (His redheaded companion had just jotted her number on a bev nap, slipped it to him, and left the bar.) Bob was smiling at Alexis lecherously. “Alexis,” he was saying, “I never get to see this side of you at the office. You’re really fun when you have a couple in you.”

  I wasn’t sure how he had seized on the word “fun” to describe her at that moment. To me, she looked like she was about to either throw up or fall over. Bob slid his hand around her shoulders, massaging her neck, while Alexis rambled on to him about something work-related, drunkenly attempting to keep her hair out of her eyes. Suddenly it registered to her that Dan, whom she’d met several times over the past few weeks, was sitting two stools away.

  “Dan!” she cried. “I haven’t seen you in forever! This is my boss, Bob. Bob, this is Cassie’s boss, Dan.” She got off her stool and went over to Dan, dragging Bob with her.

  For a minute, as I stood there watching them, I was transported to a surreal world where Bob and Dan looked like Alexis’s and my fathers. I poured a club soda with a l
ime and passed it to Alexis, hoping I could trick her into thinking it was a drink. She was now draped up against Bob and drunkenly chattering at Dan, who was looking on with amusement.

  I decided that I should try to pull Alexis into the ladies’ room for a girls’ powwow where hopefully I could convince her to drink some water or, better yet, coffee—and then see if I could sneak her out the delivery entrance to a cab. But when I looked back up, Alexis and her boss were kissing passionately, running their hands over each other.

  I sprang out from behind the bar and raced up to them, tapping Alexis on the shoulder as hard as I could without injuring her. When she didn’t respond, I tugged on her arm forcibly until she pulled away from Bob and looked dazedly in my direction.

  “Lex, wanna run down to the bathroom with me?” I asked, giving her what I hoped was a meaningful look.

  “Whatever,” she slurred.

  I hurried her down the stairs, watching closely to be sure she didn’t trip on her one remaining shoe, and not saying a word until the bathroom door was shut safely behind us.

  “What are you doing?” I hissed.

  “Whaddya mean?” she asked, trying to apply her Trish McEvoy lip gloss and smearing it all over her upper lip in the process.

  “You’re kissing your married boss in front of me and Dan and everyone else at the bar!” I admonished.

  “What do you care?” she asked.

  “Well, first of all, it’s a little awkward for me since I work here. And second, are you sure you want to do this? He’s your boss. What’s going to happen when you see him tomorrow at work?”

  “I already told him I’m calling in sick.” Alexis sniffed.

  “But what about the next day? You’re going to have to see him again eventually.”

  “Lighten up,” Alexis whined.

  “Lighten up? He’s married. He has a wife. And probably kids.”

  “Oh, don’t be so naïve, Cassie. People do this all the time. I’m just having fun.” She stormed out the door and I could hear her tripping up the stairs. I followed her glumly back to the bar, where Dan and Bob were laughing amiably.

  “I’m not feeling well, Bob, I gotta go,” Alexis said, gathering up her bag and other shoe and doing her best to flounce out the door without looking in my direction.

  “Nice to meet you,” Bob said to me and Dan as he followed after her.

  I watched them leave, hoping Alexis would have enough sense to get in a cab by herself and go home. But given the look in Bob’s eyes, I doubted he was going to let that happen. Part of me was in shock—Martin and Lily had been bad enough, but now my best friend was fooling around with her much older, married boss? Was it impossible for some young women to resist the money, power, and prestige that defined many men in Manhattan?

  “Hey, Dan, is it okay if I go home with Maya?” Billy asked. He’d just emerged from the employee bathroom where he and Maya were doing God-knows-what. “It’s so dead in here. Cassie, you don’t mind closing alone, do you?”

  Before I could answer, Dan said, “Not a problem at all. Tell José he can go home too. I can stay with Cassie until she finishes.”

  I inwardly cringed. The night’s events—the surveillance room, Alexis making out with Bob, Bob and Dan fraternizing at the bar, and Bob chasing after Alexis—all swam in my mind, making me wary. I didn’t want to think about what Alexis might be doing with her boss right now, and I didn’t feel like being left alone with mine.

  Once the bar was empty and I had begun to close out, Dan turned to me. “Bob seems like a nice guy.”

  “Um . . . I guess,” I said reluctantly. “But I just can’t figure out what he’s doing out this late with Alexis when he has a wife at home.”

  “Having a wife at home doesn’t always signify happiness, Cassie,” he said.

  “No, maybe not. But I’m not sure making out with a twenty-three-year-old does either,” I replied. My stomach was suffering an Alexis-induced ulcer of worry and annoyance, and I just wanted to count my money and go home.

  “Come on,” Dan chided. “Give the guy a break. Here he is with this beautiful young girl who’s all over him—”

  “She was drunk,” I said, even more irritated now that Dan was trying to defend the situation.

  “All I’m saying is that I can’t blame him,” he said as he walked around, lowering all the blinds in the bar and restaurant. “Men are simple creatures, Cassie. There are few who could resist an opportunity like that. At the end of the day it’s basic human nature. Older men will always be attracted to younger women.”

  “What are you doing?” I asked as he finished closing the blinds.

  “I just thought we should have some privacy as you close up.”

  Eight

  ____________

  JACK AND COKE

  “Up, rocks, or frozen?” the gray-haired bartender asked us. He had a tanned, leathery face and a friendly smile and was wearing a bright red Hawaiian-print shirt.

  “Rocks,” I said. “Annie, up, rocks, or frozen?”

  “Frrrrrrrrrrrrozen!” Annie trilled, popping up beside me at the bar. She looked like a sun goddess in her white sundress and turquoise beads, with her olive skin and glowing blond ringlets.

  “Salt?” the bartender confirmed.

  “None for me, thanks,” I said. “Annie?”

  “Nope!”

  “Okay, so one margarita on the rocks, no salt, and one margarita frozen, no salt,” I recapped, wanting to help out my fellow bartender. He disappeared to make our drinks as Annie wilted onto a bar stool and scooped up some salsa with a dark blue tortilla chip.

  “I like this place,” she said, looking around at the brightly colored T-shirts and license plates that adorned the walls. The outdoor seating area was packed with families and young couples drinking margaritas and beers, and the inside bar where we sat was just as bustling. “I feel like I’m on vacation. When are the boys getting here?”

  Earlier that day, while I was on the train, James had called. His invitation for Annie and me to join him and Tom for happy hour margaritas at the Blue Parrot in East Hampton was the only thing that stopped me from plotting to kill Alexis. In addition to the previous night’s sordid display at Finton’s, it was on her account that I’d missed the earlier train I usually took, because she was retching all morning in the bathroom. Thankfully, I’d discovered after my first weekend in the Hamptons that there was a train called the Cannonball, which ran only once a week during the summer on Friday afternoons and, as its name would suggest, got you from Penn Station to Amagansett in under two and a half hours, while the local train, comparable to the Slow Boat to China, took well over three.

  I’d felt like screaming at Alexis not only because she’d hooked up with her boss, who had gray hair, wrinkles, and a wedding ring, but because it had opened the door for Dan Finton to openly convey what deep down I’d suspected all along—that he believed that May–December relationships between employer and employee were perfectly permissible. I feared Alexis’s behavior might inadvertently suggest something to him about me—if my best friend was up for it, why wouldn’t I be? The night before, after I’d dropped my money in the safe, I’d hightailed it out of Finton’s to escape what promised to be a sticky situation before Dan could make an overt advance. Still, I’d reflected, my predicament with Dan wasn’t really all Alexis’s fault. Looking back, I wondered if I’d been toeing the line with him since we first met.

  “Cassie, I swear I’ll never get that drunk or do anything like that ever again,” Alexis had said, tossing five Advil Liqui-Gels into her mouth and washing them down with a two-liter bottle of Pepsi. “Promise you won’t let me drink for at least a week. No drinks after work—nothing.”

  “Okay,” I’d promised, wishing I had the luxury of avoiding alcohol, since it was obviously a catalyst for debauchery and dysfunction. But unfortunately, alcohol was the center of my professional universe, and while it seemed to embolden or empower people like Dan and Bob, their resultant drunke
n alter egos made me ridiculously uncomfortable. If I was going to survive in this world, I decided, I had to start sticking up for myself.

  But I’d brushed all my Manhattan drama aside the moment I’d arrived in the Hamptons, and all I could think about was seeing James. “He said they’d be here at eight,” I told Annie, glancing at the vintage Coca-Cola clock on the wall, which read 8:04. “But they might have gotten stuck in traffic. Tom specifically requested your presence.”

  Annie dismissed my comment with a giggle.

  “Are you into him?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. He’s cute. I’d fuck him.”

  “Good to know.” I rolled my eyes. “Anything new with Teddy?”

  “He booty-called me the other night at three in the morning,” she said cavalierly. “But who cares about that? What’s up with you and James?”

  “Everything’s great. He’s incredible. It seems to be going really well. It’s just—”

  “The Pearls Girls,” Annie interjected, reading my mind.

  “Yeah,” I said. “It drives me crazy that he’s friends with those girls. They were so awful to us. It makes me wonder about him. Why would he hang out with them?”

  “Maybe they’re not really his good friends,” Annie suggested. “I mean, they probably just grew up together and their families are friends. I can’t imagine how anyone as cool as James and Tom could be friends with those stuck-up bitches.”

  “Excuse me, ladies,” a strange man in a taupe linen suit interrupted. He had a large shiny forehead and a receding hairline of black wiry locks. He wore Coke-bottle glasses, and his breath smelled like Listerine. From all exteriors, he looked pretty harmless, but I detected the subtly slimy look of a private eye from the 1970s—maybe it was the shirt, which was unbuttoned just a little too far. Upon further examination, I decided that he looked like the pimp from the Facts of Life episode where the girls go to the city and have a close encounter with a teenage prostitute at a seedy diner.