by Andre Dubus
His voice was normal, and so was the cheerful light in his eyes, and she was relieved. She said: “I make the drinks, too.”
“This gets better.”
He smiled, and the black man said: “Our kind of place, Drew. The bartender waits outside, looking for us.”
Drew was up the ramp, his feet close to Emily’s legs; she stepped inside, her outstretched left arm holding the door open; the black man reached over Drew and held the door and said: “I’ve got it.”
She lowered her arm and turned to the dark and looked at Rita, who was watching from a swivel chair at the bar. Rita Bick was thirty-seven years old, and had red hair in a ponytail, and wore a purple shirt and a black skirt; she had tended bar since late morning, grilled and fried lunches, served the happy hour customers, and now was drinking a straight-up Manhattan she had made when Emily came to work. Her boyfriend had moved out a month ago, and she was smoking again. When Emily had left the bar to see the evening sun, she had touched Rita’s shoulder in passing, then stopped when Rita said quietly: “What’s so great about living a long time? Remote controls?” Emily had said: “What?” and Rita had said: “To change channels. While you lie in bed alone.” Emily did not have a television in her bedroom, so she would not lie in bed with a remote control, watching movies and parts of movies till near dawn, when she could finally sleep. Now Rita stood and put her cigarette between her lips and pushed a table and four chairs out of Drew’s path, then another table and its chairs, and at the next table she pulled away two chairs, and Drew rolled past Emily, the black man following, the door swinging shut on the sunlight. Emily watched Drew moving to the place Rita had made. Rita took the cigarette from her lips and looked at Drew.
“Will this be all right?”
“Absolutely. I like the way you make a road.”
He turned his chair to the table and stopped, his back to the room, his face to the bar. Rita looked at Emily and said: “She’ll do the rest. I’m off.”
“Then join us. You left two chairs.”
Emily was looking at the well-shaped back of the black man when he said: “Perfect math.”
“Sure,” Rita said, and went to the bar for her purse and drink. Emily stepped toward the table to take their orders, but Kay was coming from the men at the dartboard with a tray of glasses and beer bottles, and she veered to the table. Emily went behind the bar, a rectangle with a wall at one end and a swinging door to the kitchen. When Jeff had taught her the work, he had said: When you’re behind the bar, you’re the ship’s captain; never leave the bar, and never let a customer behind it; keep their respect. She did. She was friendly with her customers; she wanted them to feel they were welcome here, and were missed if they did not come in often. She remembered the names of the regulars, their jobs and something about their families, and what they liked to drink. She talked with them when they wanted her to, and this was the hardest work of all; and standing for hours was hard, and she wore runner’s shoes, and still her soles ached. She did not allow discourtesy or drunkenness.
The long sides of the bar were parallel to the building’s front and rear, and the couples in bathing suits faced the entrance and, still talking, glanced to their right at Drew. Emily saw Drew notice them; he winked at her, and she smiled. He held a cigarette between his curled fingers. Kay was talking to him and the black man, holding her tray with one arm. Emily put a Bill Evans cassette in the player near the cash register, then stepped to the front of the bar and watched Kay in profile: the left side of her face, her short black hair, and her small body in a blue denim skirt and a black silk shirt. She was thirty and acted in the local theater and performed on nights when Emily was working, and she was always cheerful at the bar. Emily never saw her outside the bar, or Rita, either; she could imagine Rita at home because Rita told her about it; she could only imagine about Kay that she must sometimes be angry, or sad, or languid. Kay turned from the table and came six paces to the bar and put her tray on it; her eyelids were shaded, her lipstick pale. Emily’s concentration when she was working was very good: the beach couples were talking and she could hear each word and Evans playing the piano and, at the same time, looking at Kay, she heard only her, as someone focusing on one singer in a chorus hears only her, and the other singers as well.
“Two margaritas, straight up, one in a regular glass because he has trouble with stems. A Manhattan for Rita. She says it’s her last.”
Dark-skinned, black-haired Kay Younger had gray-blue eyes, and she flirted subtly and seriously with Rita, evening after evening when Rita sat at the bar for two drinks after work. Rita smiled at Kay’s flirting, and Emily did not believe she saw what Emily did: that Kay was falling in love. Emily hoped Kay would stop the fall, or direct its arc toward a woman who did not work at the bar. Emily wished she were not so cautious, or disillusioned; she longed for love but was able to keep her longing muted till late at night when she lay reading in bed, and it was trumpets, drums, French horns; and when she woke at noon, its sound in her soul was a distant fast train. Love did not bring happiness, it did not last, and it ended in pain. She did not want to believe this, and she was not certain that she did; perhaps she feared it was true in her own life, and her fear had become a feeling that tasted like disbelief. She did not want to see Rita and Kay in pain, and she did not want to walk into their pain when five nights a week she came to work. Love also pulled you downhill; then you had to climb again to the top, where you felt solidly alone with your integrity and were able to enjoy work again, and food and exercise and friends. Kay lit a cigarette and rested it on an ashtray, and Emily picked it up and drew on it and put it back; she blew smoke into the ice chest and reached for the tequila in the speed rack.
The beach couples and dart throwers were gone, someone sat on every chair at the bar, and at twelve of the fifteen tables, and Jeff was in his place. He was the manager, and he sat on the last chair at the back of the bar, before its gate. A Chet Baker cassette was playing, and Emily was working fast and smoothly, making drinks, washing glasses, talking to customers who spoke to her, punching tabs on the cash register, putting money in it, giving change, and stuffing bills and dropping coins into the brandy snifter that held her tips. Rita took her empty glass to Emily; it had been her second Manhattan and she had sipped it, had sat with Drew and the black man while they drank three margaritas. There were no windows in the bar, and Emily imagined the quiet dusk outside and Rita in her purple shirt walking into it. She said: “Jeff could cook you a steak.”
“That’s sweet. I have fish at home. And a potato. And salad.”
“It’s good that you’re cooking.”
“Do you? At night.”
“It took me years.”
“Amazing.”
“What?”
“How much will it takes. I watch TV while I eat. But I cook. If I stay and drink with these guys, it could be something I’d start doing. Night shifts are better.”
“I can’t sleep anyway”
“I didn’t know that. You mean all the time?”
“Every night, since college.”
“Can you take a pill?”
“I read. Around four I sleep.”
“I’d go crazy. See you tomorrow.”
“Take care.”
Rita turned and waved at Drew and the black man and walked to the door, looking at no one, and went outside. Emily imagined her walking into her apartment, listening to her telephone messages, standing at the machine, her heart beating with hope and dread; then putting a potato in the oven, taking off her shoes, turning on the television, to bring light and sound, faces and bodies into the room.
Emily had discipline: every night she read two or three poems twice, then a novel or stories till she slept. Eight hours later she woke and ate grapefruit or a melon, and cereal with a banana or berries and skimmed milk, and wheat toast with nothing on it. An hour after eating, she left her apartment and walked five miles in fifty-three minutes; the first half mile was in her neighborhood, and the
next two were on a road through woods and past a farm with a meadow where cows stood. In late afternoon she cooked fish or chicken, and rice, a yellow vegetable and a green one. On the days when she did not have to work, she washed her clothes and cleaned her apartment, bought food, and went to a video store to rent a movie, or in a theater that night watched one with women friends. All of this sustained her body and soul, but they also isolated her: she became what she could see and hear, smell and taste and touch; like and dislike; think about and talk about; and they became the world. Then, in her long nights, when it seemed everyone on earth was asleep while she lay reading in bed, sorrow was tangible in the dark hall to her bedroom door, and in the dark rooms she could not see from her bed. It was there, in the lamplight, that she knew she would never bear and love children; that tomorrow would require of her the same strength and rituals of today; that if she did not nourish herself with food, gain a balancing peace of soul with a long walk, and immerse herself in work, she could not keep sorrow at bay, and it would consume her. In the lamplight she read, and she was opened to the world by imagined women and men and children, on pages she held in her hands, and the sorrow in the darkness remained, but she was consoled, as she became one with the earth and its creatures: its dead, its living, its living after her own death; one with the sky and water, and with a single leaf falling from a tree.
A man at the bar pushed his empty glass and beer bottle toward Emily, and she opened a bottle and brought it with a glass. Kay was at her station with a tray of glasses, and said: “Rita left.”
“Being brave.”
Emily took a glass from the tray and emptied it in one of two cylinders in front of her; a strainer at its top caught the ice and fruit; in the second cylinder she dipped the glass in water, then placed it in the rack of the small dishwasher. She looked at each glass she rinsed and at all three sides of the bar as she listened to Kay’s order. Then she made piña coladas in the blender, whose noise rose above the music and the voices at the bar, and she made gin and tonics, smelling the wedges of lime she squeezed; and made two red sea breezes. Kay left with the drinks and Emily stood facing the tables, where the room was darker, and listened to Baker’s trumpet. She tapped her fingers in rhythm on the bar. Behind her was Jeff, and she felt him watching her.
Jefferson Gately was a tall and broad man who had lost every hair on top of his head; he had brown hair on the sides and back, and let it grow over his collar. He had a thick brown mustache with gray in it. Last fall, when the second of his two daughters started college, his wife told him she wanted a divorce. He was shocked. He was an intelligent and watchful man, and at work he was gentle, and Emily could not imagine him living twenty-three years with a woman and not knowing precisely when she no longer wanted him in her life. He told all of this to Emily on autumn nights, with a drink after the bar closed, and she believed he did not know his wife’s heart, but she did not understand why. He lived alone in a small apartment, and his brown eyes were often pensive. At night he sat on his chair and watched the crowd and drank club soda with bitters; when people wanted food, he cooked hamburgers or steaks on the grill, potatoes and clams or fish in the fryers, and made sandwiches and salads. The bar’s owner was old and lived in Florida and had no children, and Jeff would inherit the bar. Twice a year he flew to Florida to eat dinner with the old man, who gave Jeff all his trust and small yearly pay raises.
In spring Jeff had begun talking differently to Emily, when she was not making drinks, when she went to him at the back of the bar. He still talked only about his daughters and the bar, or wanting to buy a boat to ride in on the river, to fish from on the sea; but he sounded as if he were confiding in her; and his eyes were giving her something: they seemed poised to reveal a depth she could enter if she chose. One night in June he asked Emily if she would like to get together sometime, maybe for lunch. The muscles in her back and chest and legs and arms tightened, and she said: “Why not,” and saw in his face that her eyes and voice had told him no and that she had hurt him.
She had hurt herself, too, and she could not say this to Jeff: she wanted to have lunch with him. She liked him, and lunch was in daylight and not dangerous; you met at the restaurant and talked and ate, then went home, or shopping for groceries or beach sandals. She wanted to have drinks and dinner with him, too, but dinner was timeless; there could be coffee and brandy, and it was night and you parted to sleep; a Friday dinner could end Saturday morning, in a shower that soothed your skin but not your heart, which had opened you to pain. Now there was AIDS, and she did not want to risk death for something that was already a risk, something her soul was too tired to grapple with again. She did not keep condoms in her apartment because two winters ago, after one night with a thin, pink-faced, sweet-eyed man who never called her again, she decided that next time she made love she would know about it long before it happened, and she did not need to be prepared for sudden passion. She put her box of condoms in a grocery bag and then in a garbage bag, and on a cold night after work she put the bag on the sidewalk in front of her apartment. In a drawer, underneath her stacked underwear, she had a vibrator. On days when most of her underwear was in the laundry basket, the vibrator moved when she opened and closed the drawer, and the sound of fluted plastic rolling on wood made her feel caught by someone who watched, someone who was above this. She loved what the vibrator did, and was able to forget it was there until she wanted it, but once in a while she felt shame, thinking of dying, and her sister or brother or parents finding the vibrator. Sometimes after using it, she wept.
It was ten-fifteen by the bar clock that Jeff kept twenty minutes fast. Tonight he wore a dark brown shirt with short sleeves, and white slacks; his arms and face and the top of his head were brown, with a red hue from the sun, and he looked clean and confident. It was a weekday, and in the afternoon he had fished from a party boat. He had told Emily in winter that his rent for a bedroom, a living room, a kitchen, and bathroom was six hundred dollars a month; his car was old; and until his wife paid him half the value of the house she had told him to leave, he could not buy a boat. He paid fifteen dollars to go on the party boat and fish for half a day, and when he did this, he was visibly happier. Now Emily looked at him, saw his glass with only ice in it, and brought him a club soda with a few drops of bitters; the drink was the color of Kay’s lipstick. He said: “I’m going to put wider doors on the bathroom.” Their faces were close over the bar, so the woman sitting to the right of Jeff could not hear unless she eavesdropped. “That guy can’t get in.”
“I think he has a catheter. His friend took something to the bathroom.”
“I know. But the next one in a chair may want to use a toilet. He likes Kay. He can feel everything, but only in his brain and heart.”
She had seen Drew talking to Kay and smiling at her, and now she realized that she had seen him as a man living outside of passion. She looked at Jeff’s eyes, feeling that her soul had atrophied; that it had happened without her notice. Jeff said: “What?”
“I should have known.”
“No. I had a friend like him. He always looked happy and I knew he was never happy. A mine got him, in Vietnam.”
“Were you there?”
“Not with him. I knew him before and after.”
“But you were there.”
“Yes.”
She saw herself facedown in a foxhole while the earth exploded as close to her as the walls of the bar. She said: “I couldn’t do that.”
“Neither could I.”
“Now, you mean.”
“Now, or then.”
“But you did.”
“I was lucky. We used to take my friend fishing. His chair weighed two hundred and fifty pounds. We carried him up the steps and lifted him over the side. We’d bait for him, and he’d fold his arms around the rod. When he got a bite, we’d reel it in. Mike looked happy on a boat. But he got very tired.”
“Where is he now?”
“He died.”
“Is
he the reason we have a ramp?”
“Yes. But he died before I worked here. One winter pneumonia killed him. I just never got to the bathroom doors.”
“You got a lot of sun today.”
“Bluefish, too.”
“Really?”
“You like them?”
“On the grill. With mayonnaise and lemon.”
“In foil. I have a grill on my deck. It’s not really a deck. It’s a landing outside the kitchen, on the second floor. The size of a closet.”
“There’s Kay. I hope you had sunscreen.”
He smiled and shook his head, and she went to Kay, thinking they were like that: they drank too much; they got themselves injured; they let the sun burn their skin; they went to war. The cautious ones bored her. Kay put down her tray of glasses and slid two filled ashtrays to Emily, who emptied them in the garbage can. Kay wiped them with a paper napkin and said: “Alvin and Drew want steak and fries. No salads. Margaritas now, and Tecates with the meal.”
“Alvin.”
“Personal care attendant. His job.”
“They look like friends.”
“They are.”
Emily looked at Jeff, but he had heard and was standing; he stepped inside the bar and went through the swinging door to the kitchen. Emily rubbed lime on the rims of glasses and pushed them into the container of thick salt, scooped ice into the blender and poured tequila, and imagined Alvin cutting Drew’s steak, sticking the fork into a piece, maybe feeding it to him; and that is when she knew that Alvin wiped Drew’s shit. Probably as Drew lay on his bed, Alvin lifted him and slid a bedpan under him; then he would have to roll him on one side to wipe him clean, and take the bedpan to the toilet. Her body did not shudder, but she felt as if it shuddered; she knew her face was composed, but it seemed to grimace. She heard Roland Kirk playing tenor saxophone on her cassette, and words at the bar, and voices from the tables; she breathed the smells of tequila and cigarette smoke, gave Kay the drinks, then looked at Alvin. Kay went to the table and bent forward to place the drinks. Drew spoke to her. Alvin bathed him somehow, too, kept his flesh clean for his morale and health. She looked at Alvin for too long; he turned and looked at her. She looked away, at the front door.