The Trouble with Bliss

by Douglas Light

“This is rustic, right?” Andrea says, glancing about the Old Homeplate as she and Morris enter. It’s seven p.m. and the first time Morris’s ever brought a woman with him to the bar. Mrs. Cruxo throws Morris a glance, a look that says, Good job, or Not in here, a look he can’t decipher. “I just love to go to places like this,” Andrea says, her face pinched in a thoughtful manner. “Makes me appreciate the life I have. Can we sit at the bar?”

  After Morris had collected his hundred and twenty-five dollars from the harelipped receptionist who acted like she didn’t know who he was, Andrea had stopped him. She asked, “You’re heading home, right? Let’s share a cab.” While he didn’t want to waste his windfall, he didn’t want to seem cheap either. He said sure.

  Bunched together in the back of the cab, Morris’s knees pressed to the hard, bulletproof partition that divided the driver and them, Andrea kept tapping his arm as she spoke, like she was translating everything she said into Morse code. He was acutely aware of her every touch, her closeness, the thick, tangy, sense-dulling smell of her perfume. It was like he’d entered a sweltering sauna filled with eucalyptus leaves; she enveloped and overwhelmed him.

  “So, right, I think to myself,” she said, clicking her fingernails on the partition and telling the cabbie to pull to the northwest side of the street. “I’m good with people, I like to shop, so this is the perfect job, right, doing focus groups? It’s not.” Andrea paid for the fare and deftly slid out of the cab, like she’d been practicing for years. Morris struggled to get out, his leg trapped.

  On the sidewalk, Andrea told him, “I don’t want to go home yet.” She suggested a drink, somewhere close. “You choose,” she said.

  The Old Homeplate came to mind. It’s the only place he’s familiar with, and the drinks were cheap.

  Perched on the battered, red vinyl covered stools, Morris asks Andrea what she wants. “A Latino Temper, hold the salt,” she says.

  Mrs. Cruxo sets down two draft beers before Morris can even order.

  “Beer all right?” Morris asks, relieved he didn’t have to negotiate a Latino Temper. Morris has never heard of the drink, and he knows from experience that Mrs. Cruxo’s cocktailing repertoire doesn’t include drinks with more than two ingredients.

  Morris tinks his glass to Andrea’s, says, “Cheers, and thanks for the focus group.”

  “Right, of course,” Andrea asks. “Know why we do that? Know why we clink the glass together before drinking?”

  From what he’d read, Morris explains, during the medieval times, the host would always poured a bit of his drink into the guest’s chalice, and vice versa, thus insuring that if one is poisoned, the other was too. It was a sign of trust. Now, the touching of the glasses’ rims signifies the act. “As a show of good intentions,” Morris concludes, then asks, “Is that what you heard?”

  “Right, well, no,” she says, “I hadn’t heard that. I’d heard it’s done to make the beer’s foam go down.”

  “It does that, too,” Morris says.

  Andrea suddenly looks stricken, ill.

  “Are you all right?” Morris asks, and touches her shoulder. He’s surprised by his action, that he’d reach out on his own.

  “Yes, of course. Of course, I’m fine,” Andrea says, her eyes growing glossy and wet. “No. I’m not. I’m not all right.”

  “What is it?” Morris asks.

  “Did you know I almost didn’t marry George, right? I almost got married to someone before him, a guy named Carl.”

  “No, I didn’t,” he says. “What happened?”

  “Nothing happened, that was the problem. Carl was a good guy, but a Hydrox, right?”

  “A Hydrox? You mean like—”

  “The cookie,” she says. “Right. The cheap, knockoff Oreo. He wasn’t an Oreo, you know, wasn’t real. He looked pretty good, had pretty nice teeth, right? Had a pretty good job and was a pretty solid guy all around. He was—” She searches for a word. “What’s it called, to be in between? When a person is neither too much one way nor the other?”

  “Indecisive?”

  “Moderate,” she says. “Carl was moderate. In everything he did, right? Ordered his steak medium, his latte with one-shot decaf, one regular. Folded his dirty laundry before putting it into the hamper,” she says, “which is plain strange. But I liked him, right? I guess I liked him. I didn’t dislike him. We got along fine. No arguments. Nothing, right? And that was the problem. Who wants to spend their life with someone they like. Who wants to be just fine? This is my moment, my life. I want better than like and fine. But the longer I dated Carl, the more fine we became. It was terrible, right? Like one of those movies you sit through and can’t remember a thing about the moment it’s over. If it had been a bad relationship, okay. Then at least I’d have something to remember. I mean, if he’d beaten me, or cheated, or had the habit of picking his toes—which I can’t stand—just something, then well… Really, you don’t know how awful it is to see your future and be bored with it. I saw my skin sagging and no excitement to show for it. But what made it worse was that I knew, I knew it wasn’t getting better, but I kept on, for nearly a year and a half, I dated him, thinking, ‘Well, maybe…’ Things moved too quickly.” Her eyes, glossed, hold Morris’s. He can’t look away. “I lost a part of my twenties to him,” she says. “I allowed him to steal my life, right? I’ve learned that there are no maybes. There is a yes, there is a no. More nos than yeses. But no maybes. Cut your losses, move on. Don’t pretend that the soy hotdog you’re eating over your kitchen sink filled with dirty dishes is a Nathan’s and you’re at Coney Island. It’s not, right? You’re not. Anyway”—her hand flickers before her face, like she’s trying to disperse a foul smell—“lesson learned. And I was fortunate to be going through my demented beige stage while I was with Carl. I don’t know what I was thinking. Beige isn’t my color. It isn’t a color; it’s a symptom, right? I’d have been miserable if I’d been trying to date, trying to find a boy, while wearing beige.”

  “Then you met George.”

  “Right, then I met George,” she says. “We dated six months, then got married. Been married three years, and I can tell you one thing, unlike Carl, George and I aren’t fine. We’re anything but fine. I don’t like him.” She breaks off, realizing what she’s said, that she’s disparaging her husband. “Right. Well, you know what I mean. Still,” she says, her hand trembling, “I don’t want to go home right now, right?” she says. “Had a terrible, terrible fight with him last night.” The clack of the pool balls bumping into each other sounds behind them. The jukebox plays a gentle, pleasant song from an album that fails to generate any interest. “Why can’t things be clear and clean with smooth edges?” Andrea asks, speaking softly, quietly, like she’s waking from a sleep. She stares at herself in the mirror behind the bar, stares straight ahead.

  Morris senses the sadness, the searing loneliness of being surrounded by people.

  “I stormed out of the house, right,” she continues, her voice firm, sure again. “I stayed with my friend who lives on Eighty-Eighth and Lexington in this tiny place she claims is a one bedroom but is really just a glorified studio with a Pullman kitchen.” She drinks her beer quickly, like she's filling something empty as fast as she can.

  “I’m sorry,” Morris says, not knowing what else to say, then motions to Mrs. Cruxo for two more beers.

  “You know what frightens me the most?” she asks Morris. “Not being appreciated. At home, I don’t feel appreciated, right? That, and turning shabby. I’m twenty-eight and fear I’ll never look better. I don’t want to be like a couch, don’t want to get worn and run down and lumpy. I don’t want to wake one day and realize I look used. You know what happens to shabby couches, right? They get junked. You’ve seen them, right? On the street. They’re thrown out.”

  Two fresh beers are set before them. Both Morris and Andrea are silent. Andrea runs her finger around the rim of the glass. “Tell me something interesting,” she says, after a minute. S
he turns to Morris. “Something about yourself that few people know.”

  “I’m half Greek,” he says, not certain that is even interesting.

  “I knew there was a reason I liked you,” she says. “Mediterranean men know how to handle women, right? You have a way with women.”

  “No, no,” Morris says, awkward with the shift of attention, the way Andrea’s studying him.

  “Tell me something else,” Andrea says, scooting her stool closer to him. “Tell me a story. Tell me about your first concert.”

  “My first concert,” Morris says. “Well, my first first concert was Liberace.”

  Andrea laughs, clear and hard and bitter. “Right, great,” she says, “no, really.”

  “Really,” Morris says. “Liberace, Bob Hope, and for some reason, Bruce Jenner. All three on one stage, one night.”

  “Bruce Jenner, you mean the guy from the Wheaties box?”

  “The Olympian,” Morris says, “yeah, him.”

  Andrea’s face sobers, then she breaks out laughing. “You almost had me, right?” she says. “I thought you were serious.”

  “I am serious,” he says. “I was twelve. My mother took me.” The three were the closing act for a teacher’s conference in Staten Island, and though Morris’s mother wasn’t a teacher, she’d somehow got tickets for the conference. “I was too young to appreciate the oddness of the whole thing,” Morris says. “I didn’t understand who these people were, what we were going to see. That, and I was angry with my mother then.” His mother had returned from her three-month absence, had tried to double her attention for Morris to make up for the time.

  “I can’t think of a time I wasn’t angry with my mother,” Andrea says, leaning on the bar. “Then she died, right? Now I don’t know who to be angry with.”

  “How’d she die?” Morris asks, a cheerlessness fluttering over him. His mother had returned, had come home, to spend her last months with Morris, her family. And Morris had been angry with her, angry that she’d left in the first place.

  She was to leave again, for good.

  “How does anyone die, right?” Andrea says, lifting her beer. “Something stops or something won’t stop. Cancer, a car wreck, a coronary. Something stops or something won’t stop, right? But enough,” she says. “All’s good.” She sits up straight, forces a smile. “I’m not complaining, right, not saying things are bad.” She takes his hand in hers, laces her fingers with his.

  Something thick and coagulated breaks in Morris's bloodstream, like cold syrup heated over a flame. He feels it rise in him, slowly push through his body, warm and dizzying.

  “Why can’t things be clear and clean with smooth edges?” she asks him, leaning in. “Like in a novel or a movie. Why can’t I bolt off witty lines and responses when I need to?”

  “You speak well,” he says.

  “I speak well,” she says. “Right. But tell me something,” she says. “Tell me something you like about me.” She holds his hand to her chest, his palm flat to her sternum.

  “I like…I like your blouse,” he responds, the fabric at his fingers.

  “And I like you, right?” she tells him. “I like you a lot.” She pulls him to her, kisses him hard, hard and ferociously.