She Poured Out Her Heart

by Jean Thompson

  “That’s a good idea,” Bonnie said. “Admirable.”

  “What’s wrong?” Eric said after a moment.

  She didn’t speak. She was crying stupid tears. “I wish you’d talk to me,” Eric said. “Hold on, I have to go to Bluetooth.”

  That helped dry her up. She hated talking to him when he switched over to the car phone and his voice receded into a metallic echo chamber. “OK,” he said in his Martian car voice, “what’s going on?”

  “I guess I’ve just been reminding myself of all the things I already know.”

  “What happened? What are you so upset about all of a sudden?”

  “It’s not all of a sudden,” Bonnie said, wondering if that was true. “Look, let’s talk some other time, this phone drives me crazy.”

  “This might be the best chance I have for a while.”

  “Well that right there is a good reason,” Bonnie said, and waited through a space of his saying nothing. “Look, we can talk some other time if you want. It’s not like I’m mad.”

  She hadn’t managed this very well and he was the one who was mad. He said, “So what are you, exactly? If you don’t mind saying.”

  “Tired, I guess.”

  “What?”

  “Tired,” she said loudly, but the connection scrambled and cut out.

  So that was that, except of course it wasn’t. It was only a tug at one end of the knot that drew the tangles into a worse snarl, and so a few days later Bonnie called Eric. She got his voice mail, as she expected she would, and left him a message saying that she was thinking of him and she hoped they’d talk soon. Eric waited a few days after that to call her back and she expected that too. He spoke as if attempting to come to terms with an exasperating child. “I don’t understand, why now. What brought on this crisis of hurt feelings, if that’s what it is. Because I’ve got no clue.”

  He was the one with the hurt feelings, though it wouldn’t have helped anything to say so. Bonnie said, “I guess you just reach a point where things aren’t sustainable. You can’t predict it. I’m sorry. It doesn’t mean I’m mad at you or tired of you”—except that she was, a little—“it just means things don’t work anymore. Too much dishonesty. Jane’s my oldest friend, for God’s sake. Where are you, anyway?”

  “Me? I’m in my office. Why?”

  “Just wondering.” He wasn’t trying to fit her in during some errand run or commute, and she was glad for that. All you ever had to do for a man to take you more seriously was to up and leave.

  “Can I say something that’s going to sound really self-serving but it’s true? I always thought it was . . . not all right, entirely, with you, but better—more genuine—than with somebody Jane didn’t know. Because there’s all this real feeling among the three of us. Because she loves you too.”

  “Yes, that is self-serving,” Bonnie said. What? What? Was he declaring his love, was that one more advantage of ending an affair? On the way out the door you might hear the most amazing things from a man. “Look, let’s leave this in some good place. Because you know we’re going to see each other. We’ll have to.”

  “Yeah, we can go back to the zoo.” He sounded glum now, realizing that Bonnie might be serious and things between them had come to an end.

  “Not the zoo, please.”

  “Did I screw up? Did I do something then, something that made you think, ‘I can’t stand this guy anymore’?”

  “Eric.”

  “You’re taking yourself away from me and I know I’m not entitled to you or any part of you and there’s nothing I can do about it. Don’t expect me to be around if Jane invites you over for lunch or whatever, not for a good long while, because I can’t do it.”

  “Eric,” she said again, but he’d hung up.

  One of the sad things, though one she certainly deserved, was that she couldn’t talk to Jane about the end of the affair. Couldn’t blab about this or that annoying or heartbreaking development, couldn’t lament and complain as she’d been used to doing for the last twenty years. Well, it was a kid’s stupid habit, all those too-personal disclosures. She should be beyond that by now. Grow up.

  Still, she missed her time with Jane. Missed it every bit as much as she missed Eric.

  She didn’t want to be alone. She never had. But every wrongheaded choice she made seemed to funnel her into the alone zone.

  Bonnie spent the next week keeping busy at work, cleaning her apartment, even attempting to cook meals. All the things you did when you’d had a breakup and needed to get used to the idea and move on. Eric didn’t call and Bonnie didn’t expect him to. She congratulated herself on not coming up with some necessary and unimpeachable reason for calling him. Like, having heart attack symptoms, needing a sudden surgical consultation. By Saturday night, lonesome and bored with herself, she drove to the bar where Patrick worked to see if he might cheer her up.

  She didn’t get there until after eleven, since the evening didn’t take shape until then, and if there was some other girl Patrick was sniffing around, Bonnie would find something else to do. You couldn’t get your hopes up, even if your hopes were not very elevated in the first place.

  She found a good parking place, right across the street from the bar. The front windows were half-covered with wooden shutters and the light behind them was a convivial red and yellow. Bonnie tried to get herself into the mind-set of an adventure, an intrigue. A night out on the town, involving certain pleasant, rowdy possibilities. But she was tired of walking into places alone and trying to look like she enjoyed it or at least didn’t mind, and she almost started the car up again and drove home. Instead she fluffed her hair, got out of the car, and headed across the street for the next good time.

  Bonnie locked onto Patrick right away, one of three bartenders working a busy Saturday night. He was wearing a red T-shirt that might as well have had SEX printed across it in strobing letters.

  She watched him even as she took in the room, making a quick decision about where to sit. Not at the bar, she decided. Not right away. There was room at the end of a long table with a group of people she knew well enough to join, and so she settled herself there and said her hellos. It was a neighborhood place with a steady, older clientele, by which Bonnie meant, older than herself. On weekends it drew a younger, sassier crowd who pumped up the noise factor and were inclined to misbehave. Patrick’s red shirt orbited in and out of her vision like a wayward erotic planet. You had to wonder how many other patrons, male and female both, were tracking him. He’d done so much lifting and other muscle work that his torso looked nearly anatomical. He did his chores behind the bar with ease and more than a bit of swagger, and Bonnie felt herself pulsing agreeably.

  Had he seen her? She couldn’t tell. She supposed that sooner or later she’d have to get up and sashay around, make a trip to the ladies’ or something. A server came and took her drink order. Bonnie talked with the people around her in a way that did not distract her from her own thoughts. Bar conversations about the Cubs (bad), the hot weather (worse), who’d seen what’s-his-name lately. Her Scotch and soda came and she drank just enough so that the alcohol could do its thing. A hard knot of sad was stuck in her throat and she guessed it was going to be with her for a while.

  She missed Eric, missed the habit of him and missed him for himself. Missed him for his faults as much as his lovely and loving self. Well, pine away. She was an idiot, as she already well knew. She watched Patrick lean back from the bar, resting with his arms behind him. When he did this his shirt rode up and showed a few inches of furry stomach. Lordy Sweet Jesus. She guessed she should just keep drinking and fall into bed with Patrick and pretend he was Eric, or no. That hardly seemed wholesome. If she wanted to give wholesome a try.

  Meanwhile, looky here! Patrick was waving and grinning at her, yes her, not somebody next to her or behind her, and now Bonnie was waving back and smirking like the fool s
he was. For her next drink, which was coming all too soon, she’d take herself up to the bar. Just to say hello.

  Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Eric never liked her going out nights by herself. He disapproved, which delighted Bonnie. It was so retro, so chivalrous! “Women should be escorted,” he said, severely. The idea, of course, was that they needed protection from uncouth men. It did not occur to him that society might need protecting from the likes of Bonnie.

  She had to stop thinking about him. It made her melancholy. It made her feel like a bad joke to herself. She guessed she prided herself on having poor impulse control, made it into a kind of virtue. Which was fine if you were, say, a zoo animal. She reached the bottom of her drink and waited to let it settle. Patrick drew two beers, topping them off perfectly, and set them down on the bar without jostling their foam collars. Maybe he was right to call himself a simple barkeep, to want no more than what he had, be no more than what he was. So what was the matter with her, always at odds with herself, always bemoaning her faults without, as Jane said, doing much of anything to change them? Not that she wanted to think about Jane either.

  Bonnie gathered her purse and stood, leaving her empty drink glass in case she decided to come back to the table. There was a space at Patrick’s end of the bar where she could slide in to order. A very normal, nonprovocative thing to do. On the way she stopped to talk to somebody she knew, taking her time. In her next life, she was going to be one of those women who held themselves aloof, who genuinely did not care, and then the men swarmed all over them.

  Patrick was deep in conversation with two of the old man regulars, wizened alcoholics who had grown to the bar stools like moss, and what either of them had to say that was so interesting was beyond her. Bonnie stood and waited and eventually one of the other bartenders got her drink for her. She turned to head back to her table and that’s when Patrick called out to her, “Hey! Bonnie, hey!”

  She pretended not to hear him and he had to call her again and then she had to pretend surprise. “Oh, hey Patrick. How’s it going?”

  “What?” He cupped his hand to one ear. He had a handsome, oversized face, like a movie actor’s. Big jaw, craggy forehead.

  “I said, how’s it going tonight?”

  “Crazy busy.” By this time of the evening he was a little sweaty, a little disheveled. He pushed his damp hair back from his forehead with one hand and grinned. Bonnie had a wobbly moment of remembering her own wet skin smacking rhythmically against his.

  “Yeah, you look busy.” They had to shout to hear each other.

  “Saturday.” He raised his hands and let them fall to his sides. Unable to convey in words the amazing properties of a Saturday.

  “Comes between Friday and Sunday,” Bonnie said helpfully. Getting a conversation going tonight was like trying to strike a spark from a damp stick. “OK, well . . .”

  “Hold on a minute.” A waitress needed a drink order filled and he tended to her while Bonnie looked on. Another waitress crowded in behind the first. “I want to talk to you,” Patrick said over his shoulder. “Why don’t you . . . Here.” A seat opened up at the bar and he pointed her toward it. “Let me get caught up, give me a sec, OK?”

  Bonnie squeezed herself into the narrow space and perched on the stool to wait. Things were looking up, even if talking hadn’t seemed to be something he’d been able to do just a minute ago. She wondered if he was going to work all the way up to three a.m. close, which would be a lot of time to kill and she’d definitely have to switch to club soda or fall asleep in a chair or both. She checked herself out in the mirror behind the bar. She thought she looked all right, that is, she looked the way she always did. The mirror was crowded with a row of bottles, things nobody ever drank, like Drambuie and Pernod and Cherry Heering. There was also a layer of postcards tucked into the mirror frame, various Cubs and Bears tokens, last spring’s St. Patrick’s Day green and gold garland, an old black and white photograph of a top-heavy woman in a striped sweater, a plaque containing a mechanical talking fish, more. And in the middle of all that, and further obscured by her cloud of hair, was her wary face peeking out like a forest creature from the underbrush.

  Then Patrick was leaning over the bar and beckoning to her to lean forward too. Now what, he needed privacy? The place was so loud, you could plot murder without anyone overhearing. “Hey cutie,” he said. A whiff of his hot breath reached her, a not entirely pleasant sensation. “Can I ask you something? A favor?”

  “What kind of a favor?” Wary.

  “I have a chance to buy a little blow.” He leaned back to see what she thought of that.

  “Not the best idea you ever had. What do you mean, a favor?” Although she thought she already knew.

  “If you could loan me, say, a hundred and fifty. I can get an eight.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Come on. Fun. What do you have against fun?”

  “Patrick,” she said in a tone of sorrowful disapproval.

  “It’s only once in a moon. I can’t afford it more often than that.”

  “Sounds like you can’t afford it now.”

  He made an impatient face, then somebody farther down the bar needed a refill and he went to tend to them. Bonnie was left alone to sit and feel dismal. Patrick had a bit of a history with substances and if he was going down that road again, she needed to back off and leave him be.

  Not that she had anything against the occasional drug holiday. The occasional cocaine-fueled fuckathon.

  But why did he have to ask her for money?

  Patrick must have had his own second thoughts. Here he was again, planted in front of her.

  “Look, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—”

  “Yeah, it’s all right.”

  “I thought maybe . . .”

  “It’s all right,” Bonnie said again. “It’s your business, not mine.”

  “No, I can’t argue with you. Moment of weakness.” He reached for a glass and fixed Bonnie a new Scotch and soda. “This one’s on me.”

  “You don’t have to—”

  “Please. Least I can do.”

  “Thanks,” Bonnie said, and then he was gone again, working the bar, talking up a customer, making change, wiping down the bar surface. When he got back to Bonnie, he said, “I’m getting too old for this job.”

  “You’re not old.”

  “I can’t keep up the pace like I used to. I need to figure out something else I’m good for besides having my first heart attack at forty-five, like my old man.”

  “That’s just Celtic doom talk. It’s maudlin, cut it out. You could do anything you set your mind to.”

  Patrick didn’t answer right away, only scanned the bar briefly, watching for empty glasses, troublemakers, whoever it was that wanted to sell him an eightball. He did seem tired tonight. His eyes had a dry, abraded look that aged him. He saw Bonnie staring at him, smiled, shrugged.

  “Did I tell you I applied for a manager’s job? You know Kevin, the guy with the red beard? He’s moving to Texas. Don’t ask me why anybody would do that. Anyway. I tell them I want a shot at it, I want to step up my game, not to mention a real salary. You know what they come back with? I’m a valued team member. My skills are a great match for my current position. Meaning, I’m too stupid to run the place. They don’t want to give me the keys and let me hire and fire and schedule.”

  “I’m sorry. They’re not being fair.”

  “Yeah, but that doesn’t mean they’re wrong.”

  “So apply for a manager job someplace else. They’re stuck here, they only think of you as a bartender.”

  “I’ll do that,” Patrick said. “Just as soon as I update my résumé.”

  They looked away from each other then and out over the room, which was packed with people at the tables, and in between the tables. People stood two deep at the bar, everybody w
orking on their best Saturday-night drunk, all loudy rowdy and crowdy. The old timers getting cross-eyed, the young kids in their punk T-shirts and half-scalped hairdos and little hats. Patrick turned back to her.

  “You ever get so sick of yourself, you might as well run headfirst into a wall? Or maybe not a wall. Maybe it’s a . . . mattress.” Here he made such a funny, mugging face, his eyebrows arching like a lecherous comedy villain’s, that Bonnie giggled in spite of herself. “Oh yeah, party time! What the hell. It’s not like I’m saving myself for anything.”

  “Come on,” Bonnie said. “It’s not so bad, being you. You’re like, lord of all you survey.”

  “Yes, and it’s all of it lovely.” He wriggled his eyebrows again and went off to fill another drink order.

  Bonnie sat for a time, calculating. She finished her drink and looked at the one Patrick had bought her, took a few sips, put it down again. He’d mixed it extra strong and it sent a new current of loopy merriment through her. Good idea, bad idea, fun idea. She thought she could afford it, and she thought she could keep from telling herself it was some selfless gesture designed to cheer Patrick up at a low point. Although she guessed it would do that too.

  There was a convenience store around the corner with an ATM and it wouldn’t be too hard to get herself there and back without being mugged. She slipped off the bar stool and waved down one of the other bartenders, told him she was coming back in a couple of minutes, don’t get rid of her drink, OK? Now that she’d made up her mind, she was excited and in a hurry, wanting to get it done before she changed her stupid mind or lost her nerve. She pushed her way to the door, past people who didn’t want to let her through, and she was a little under the influence or maybe more than a little but not so much she couldn’t manage a simple, semi-criminal transaction.