The Barkeep

by William Lashner

  “Often enough.”

  “So what’s he like in bed?”

  “Excuse me?” said Lee.

  “I’m talking about Junior. And don’t even pretend any innocence about that. Let me guess. He’s rough and distant, both, which are a brilliant combination when you’re screwing the help, which, let’s be honest, is what a bartender is, right?”

  “I don’t classify people like that.”

  “No? What are you, a lawyer?”

  “I’m in investments.”

  “Stockbroker?”

  “No,” she said, as if she had been accused of something. “I’m an investment manager.”

  “Ahh, mutual funds. Vanguard maybe?”

  “Maybe.”

  “A junior manager on a hot fund with a growing capitalization? One of a score of the company’s up-and-comers who get their pictures in InvestmentNews, but the best-looking of the lot, no doubt. With the hottest shoes. And everywhere you go, all the middle managers at the companies you are investigating are lusting after you, hoping to trade a little inside information for a little more skin. And all the young men on the rise in your office are just desperate to throw at you all their upper-middle-class dreams. Kids and McMansions and top-of-the-line minivans. Vacations in Cabo. A house at the shore. Along with tedious nights of tepid role-playing sex. You be the cheerleader, and they’ll be the football heroes, when in high school they were actually only mathletes.”

  Lee laughed at that.

  “And you smile kindly as you brush them all off,” continued Annie, “so you can spend your evenings drinking at a dump like this and nights screwing your bartender. And in the middle of it all, as he’s pounding away, you detect a note of caring, and from him it’s worth the world. Because you know somewhere in there is the key to every happiness you could ever hope for, if only he’ll let you grab hold, and turn it, and open up his heart. But in truth, all he lets you grab hold of is his ass. And then the pounding is over, and though it was good, damn good, ridiculously intoxicatingly good, that’s not all you were looking for. But by the time the glow has faded, he’s retreated into his own little world and you are put in the position of a shrew, begging for more. No better than a wife. Worse than a wife, actually, because you’re not the wife, and while you’re there begging to be let into his precious little world, he’s getting dressed.”

  Lee, no longer laughing, said, “Life’s been tough, huh?”

  “Tough would be a relief. Tough would be a vacation in Aruba.”

  “What happened to make you so bitter?”

  “I finished my drink,” said Annie before finishing her drink.

  “So tell me, if you’re so prescient. How does it all end?”

  “Badly.”

  “Maybe not,” said Lee. “Maybe I can pull it out. Maybe I have skills you haven’t dreamed of. What makes you so sure it’ll turn to shit?”

  “He’s a Chase.”

  Just then Junior returned from the far outposts of the bar and stood in front of Annie. “That guy over there wants to buy you a drink.”

  “Isn’t life just so predictable,” said Annie, leaning over and waving her fingers at the man with gray in his hair.

  “What will it be?”

  “Another of those stress things, but hold the fruit juice and the peach thing.”

  “That’s just vodka and rum.”

  “Fine, but also hold the rum.”

  “Annie here says it’s not going to work out between us,” said Lee. “Annie says you’re from a family of assholes.”

  “Annie would know,” said Chase, looking not at Lee but only at Annie.

  Lee looked at the two of them, back and forth. “I think I’m done,” she said. She stood and dropped a twenty beside her empty drink. “It’s time I start taking my own advice. I’ll see you around, Justin.”

  “Sure,” he said.

  As Lee walked away, Annie turned and watched her go. “Aren’t you going to run after her? Aren’t you going to grab hold of her and tell her how much she means to you? Aren’t you going to have your precious little scene?”

  “I’m working.”

  Annie turned back and matched Chase’s expressionless face with the smile of a victor. “But the shoes were something, weren’t they? A little desperate, if you ask me, but something nonetheless.”

  “What did you tell her, Annie?”

  “I sang her the sad song of my experience.”

  “What do you really want?”

  “Another drink, Junior. I’m in the mood to celebrate.”

  “Buy it in another bar.”

  “You can’t toss me, I’m not drunk yet.”

  “Doesn’t matter, I’m not pouring for you anymore.”

  “Why, that’s malpractice. I’ll report you to the American Bartenders Association.”

  Annie stared at Chase a bit longer and felt something well inside her, the same thing she had been drinking to hold down. And suddenly her throat closed in on her and her breath came in quick gulps and she couldn’t look at him anymore. She dropped her gaze to the scarred wood of the bar.

  “Remember when you came to my apartment and you talked about your mother,” she said in a voice as soft as that of a young girl on the verge of tears. “And you said you had gotten beyond the grieving.”

  “I remember.”

  Annie had always been so damn self-sufficient, she wasn’t used to asking for anything. But now, here she was, asking for everything, and it hurt, it hurt like hell, and she didn’t know why it scared her so much, but it did. She thought of cracking a quip, but she couldn’t squeeze one out. So instead, she dropped her voice until it was so soft she could barely be heard, and then she dropped her heart’s desire.

  “Could you show me how?” she said.

  “Show you how to what?” said Chase.

  “Could you show me how to get beyond it? Please.”

  29.

  CHAI

  Annie Overmeyer let the water fall upon like her a cleansing rain. She was standing in a small shower on the tiny second floor of Justin Chase’s tiny house. The showerhead was wide; the water flow was drenching. Like a cleansing rain. In November.

  Even though Chase had told her there was no hot water in the house, that the water heater had busted and he had chosen to do nothing to fix it, it was still a shock, the cold sharp streams of water jabbing into her like thorns. At first she suffered through the burning cold pouring over her body to get the scent of the bar out of her hair and off her skin, as per Junior’s instructions. But when she finally became acclimated to the cold, she found the shower bracing in a startling way. As if the water were reaching deeper than the surface, washing away more than the thick makeup she habitually applied before stepping out into the night. Washing away some mark that she couldn’t identify but that had been staining her skin nonetheless.

  Even so, she got out of there as quickly as she could. It was a cold shower after all.

  Outside the shower, she dried her skin and hair with a rough towel before putting on a thick white terry-cloth robe that Junior had left for her on his futon. Even in the robe, she felt exposed, standing in some strange guy’s house without her makeup or her bra. She heard a noise below, and thought of going down to see what Chase was up to, and to maybe take back some control of the situation, but he had asked her to head on upstairs after the shower, to sit down and wait for him. So she did, climbing the narrow steps with just the robe around her until she reached the third floor.

  It was as small as the second floor but completely empty, the walls bare, the floor covered with pale-green mats, like some bachelor-pad fantasy of some demented Japanese salaryman. She couldn’t help but look up to see if there was a mirror on the ceiling.

  No mirror, but she knew the vibe all right, and what it foretold, and the disappointment she felt was like a slap. But, in all honestly, she had been braced for it. The shower, the robe, and now the kinky mat room. It was the story of her life: all her hopes, her mute yearn
ings that even she often couldn’t decipher, everything always devolved into sex. She sat down, leaned her back against the wall that faced the stairs, crossed her arms and legs, and waited for Junior to come and show her how exactly he intended to solve all her problems.

  And the truth was, how could she have expected anything else from a Chase?

  Her anger grew at the sound of him climbing the stairs two floors below, the sound of him turning on the shower. She waited and grew angrier. She assumed he’d be finished with his cold shower as quickly as she, but he took his time. The shower turned off, he climbed out and stepped downstairs once more, and after a moment she heard the sound of him rising up the stairs again, the first floor, the second floor. In all the waiting, she wondered what he would look like, naked and erect, climbing up to her. Probably not too bad, actually. And maybe that was what she wanted all the time, maybe this whole help-me-get-past-it thing was just a ploy to bag herself another Chase. She was still angry, as she pulled her legs close and clutched them to her chest, but now she was angry at herself most of all.

  And then he appeared, his long hair wet and loose, falling straight to his shoulders, his lean body wrapped in a robe of his own, dark and silken, carrying a tray. With a teapot. And two gray Japanese mugs. Along with a book and some papers.

  “What is this?” she said, her back still suspiciously against the wall. “Some ornate ceremony inducting me into your supersecret mystical society?”

  “No,” he said, sitting cross-legged in the middle of the floor and placing the tray beside him. “I just thought you’d like some tea.”

  “Lipton?”

  “Chai.”

  “Sounds Jewish. What’s that smell?”

  “Cinnamon, cardamom.”

  “It almost smells good. Do you have some sake to go with it?”

  “You don’t want that.”

  “You’re right. We’ll just go with vodka.”

  “You don’t want that either.”

  “You’d be surprised,” she said.

  He leaned over, picked up the pot, and filled one of the mugs. He lifted it with both hands and held it out to her, as if holding out an offering.

  She sat there for a moment, back still against the wall, hands still clasped around her legs. Then she let go of her legs and scooted to a spot close enough so she could take the tea from him, but not so close that she couldn’t kick him in the face if she had to.

  “Is this drugged?”

  “Do you want it to be drugged?” he said.

  “Ahh, yeah. That’s what I’ve been saying. Nothing like a little dose of phenobarbital to smooth out a tense evening.”

  “I’m sorry to disappoint you, but it’s just tea.”

  She took a sip, mellow yet flavorful, with a comforting aroma that somehow felt like home, though not her home. “Pretty good.”

  He filled the other mug for himself and held it in both hands, closing his eyes for a moment as he inhaled the steam. He took a sip and opened them again, staring right at Annie.

  “You asked me how I got beyond my mother’s murder,” he said. “It wasn’t easy, it took me a long time. And it only happened after I had a revelation.”

  “Hallelujah. Born again, are we?”

  “Not yet,” he said with a wry smile. “When I think back on my life before my mother’s death, it’s like remembering a book I read long ago. I had these ambitions, I had this drive, this thirst for accomplishment. And none of it was rooted in what the accomplishments might actually be. I think it was all related to my relationship with my father, which was always more competitive than loving, but I can’t blame him for everything, though I’d like to. These were my choices, this was my life. And then I found my mother’s body, and it ended. It took me a while to realize it had ended. I continued on out of sheer momentum. There is something inside of us that drives us onward even when we no longer know where we’re going or why. But eventually I discovered the truth of things: I was going nowhere for no reason.”

  “Aren’t we all?” said Annie. “Isn’t that the natural state of things?”

  “Maybe, but when the illusions that undergird it all are stripped, it’s a frightening moment. And for me, it happened with my mother’s death, though it didn’t become obvious until a little later when I sort of closed down.”

  “You cracked up?”

  “I had entered a new realm, I just wasn’t ready to accept it yet. I wasn’t ready to accept the truth of all things, until I was given a book.”

  He took another sip of his tea, put the mug down, and reached to the tray, lifting up a small book, black and ragged and worn, bound in threadbare cloth.

  “This book,” he said.

  She had seen such books before, in the hands of her family back in Minnesota, clutching them to their breasts as they sought salvation in some far-flung celestial future when they couldn’t find it here.

  “Oh snap,” she said. “You’re going to throw the Bible at me. I should have known. And now we’re going to get down on our knees and pray together. If you were going to thump the Bible, you could have told me, and avoided all this tea-and-sympathy crap.”

  “It’s not a Bible,” he said. “It’s a travel guide to a land I didn’t know I was in.”

  “Oh yeah, and what’s that? Iceland?”

  “No,” he said. “Someplace colder. The land of the dead.”

  30.

  SINGAPORE SLING

  Justin carefully observed Annie Overmeyer as she absorbed his words. He was telling her something he had never told anyone before, the absolute truth about his life now. He couldn’t help but wonder how she would take it. Or why he was telling her in the first place.

  The answer to the latter question might have been because she was flat-out beautiful and he was a sucker for beauty. Without her makeup or trashy clothes, she had the clean freshness of a wheat field after an afternoon shower. Her straw-colored hair, her high, freckled cheekbones, the pale flesh on her long legs. And there was something about the way she spoke, quickly and sharply, tossing out wisecracks that never fully succeeded in hiding the emotions underneath, that he found appealing. So yeah, he might not have wanted to fully admit it to himself, but no matter how perverse the whole thing, he was definitely attracted.

  But the real reason he was telling her was because she had been part of it all. He regretted his snappish words to her in her apartment, not just because they were snappish but because they were wrongheaded, too. Annie Overmeyer had gone through the same maelstrom that had shipwrecked his life, and she had been damaged in her own way, and like him, she was still trying to recover. She deserved to at least hear what he had to say and to see if maybe what had helped him might help her.

  “The land of the dead?” said Annie, looking at him with a furrow in her brow. “Are you crapping me?”

  “There is a before and an after in my life, and the gap between the two is unbridgeable. The before seems like a story I’ve been told about a boy who strives for so much and then finds his mother murdered and then everything sort of goes blank. The after is this waking dream that I’m living through now, in which I couldn’t for the life of me figure out where I was or what I was doing. Until someone I met, a stranger actually, gave me this book. And I started reading it, and somehow it resonated. I felt that it described more closely than anything else where I was and what I was feeling. And it told me exactly how to move forward.”

  “That must be a hell of a book. Can it predict the stock market too?”

  “It’s going down.”

  “Really?”

  “Or up. So you asked me how I got beyond what happened. I did it with this book, and now, as that stranger passed it on to me when I was in so much trouble a few years ago, with solemnity and hope, I’m going to pass it to you.”

  He held the book in both hands, much like he had held the mug of tea, and offered it to her. She stared at him for a moment, looked like she was about to burst out in laughter, and then grew suddenly s
erious. She put down her tea, held out both hands, and received it.

  And as soon as the book left Justin’s hands, he was infused with an airy lightness, he felt joyful and giddy, free of the forces of gravity as well as the past, as if he might start to rise into the air in that very room.

  “The Tibetan Book of the Dead?” said Annie. “Isn’t that a druggie thing?”

  “No,” said Justin.

  “Timothy Leary, LSD, all that hippie stuff?”

  “No.”

  “Why are you smiling so much? Is this all a joke?”

  “It’s just I suddenly feel so much lighter.”

  “I bet.” She hefted the book in her hand. “I mean this thing looks like quite the downer. I bet I’ll be happy when I pass it on, too.”

  “You seem skeptical.”

  “Really? Now why would that be? Maybe because I’m not dead yet?”

  “I understand your skepticism.”

  “Do you,” she said. “Because you don’t seem to. Junior, I hate to break it to you, but you’re not dead yet, either.”

  “I guess it’s all in your point of view.”

  “Should I get you a doctor’s note?”

  “I felt the same way before I started to read it. And it doesn’t get any better once you start. It’s like a treatise on gibberish by an addled professor, written in Greek. But I kept with it, and a pattern started to emerge, and the whole thing worked on me in a peculiar but liberating way. I hope it works the same way on you.”

  “You mean you hope I die too.”

  “I hope you find your way.”

  She looked at the book. “To tell you the truth, Junior, I don’t think this is going to work. It seems like utter bullshit to me, no offense and all.”

  “No offense taken.”

  “Here,” she said, handing it back to him. “It means a lot to you, I can tell, and I’d rather just keep self-medicating.”

  “No, you hold on to it,” said Justin, “because if that’s how you intend to continue solving your problems, you’ll be needing it sooner rather than later.”

  She looked at him for a moment and then laughed. And he laughed with her.