The Tender Bar: A Memoir

by J. R. Moehringer

  Response was overwhelming. Boys dropped off Santa Claus sacks bulging with shirts, and soon I was ironing several hours a day, a great deal of work for a little bit of money, but the alternative was to lose my friends, stay home while they were trotting off to nightclubs and bars, and this I couldn’t do.

  My best customer was Bayard, a fellow sophomore whose superiority to me in every way was expressed in his melodically Waspy name. I’d heard of only one other Bayard—Bayard Swope, whose estate had been the model for the Buchanan mansion in The Great Gatsby. Tall, blond, unflappable, the Yale Bayard played polo and owned his own tuxedo and was said to trace his roots back to the Huguenots. He’d come to Yale from one of those famous prep schools, and he dressed as if he’d leaped off the drawing boards of Ralph Lauren. He owned a shocking collection of shirts—paisley, broadcloth, candy-striped, button-down, spread-collared, silk—and seemed to own exactly two of every style, as though he were preparing to ship off on some Noah’s Ark of Garments. He also owned several custom-made white dress shirts with British collars and paper-thin French cuffs, each a work of art. Dropping them off at my room he fanned them across my bed and we stood before them in mutual admiration. “It makes me sad,” I said, “because I’ve never seen such—such beautiful shirts before.” I assumed he’d recognize the quotation from Gatsby. He didn’t.

  I promised Bayard I’d have his shirts washed and pressed in two days, but time got away from me. I had papers to write, bars to haunt, and by the end of the week Bayard was miffed. He had nothing to wear. He left four progressively angrier messages with my roommates, and I didn’t dare return his calls. I pledged to wake up at dawn and fill his order. Meanwhile it was Friday night. My friends were getting together at a bar near campus. I put Sinatra on the stereo and stood before my closet. I’d cycled countless times through all my jeans and Bud’s Lacostes. If only I had something new to wear. I glanced at Bayard’s laundry bag. I was going to do his shirts in the morning anyway—what was the harm? I ironed a pale pink button-down and slipped it on.

  It was autumn. It was always autumn at Yale, as if Yale were the birthplace of autumn, as if autumn had been invented in one of the labs on Science Hill and escaped. The air was heady, bracing, like a slap of aftershave on each cheek, and I told my friends we should drink gin, quoting Uncle Charlie’s theory that each season has its poison. Great idea, my friends said. After two rounds we were drunk. And starved. We ordered steaks, and more martinis, and when the bill came I was heartsick. I’d blown two weeks of laundry profits in three hours.

  We headed for a house party off campus. Students were dancing on the lawn and the porch when we arrived. We pushed up to the front door, into the dense swaying crowd inside. I saw Jedd Redux leaning against a wall, smoking. I asked if he had an extra cigarette. From the breast pocket of his ultracool blazer he pulled a pack of Vantages. I admired the bull’s-eye on the wrapper, the hollowed-out filters. Each cigarette looked like a rifle shell. I introduced myself. His name was Dave. He said he needed another drink. I followed him like a puppy toward the kitchen and squeezing through the crowd we bumped smack into Bayard. “There you are,” Bayard said.

  “Heyyy,” I said.

  “Need my shirts, man.” He was wearing a wrinkled flannel, the kind of shirt I’d normally be wearing.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. “I had two papers due and fell behind. I’ll get to your shirts first thing in the morning. Promise. Scout’s honor.” I put my hand over my heart. Bayard looked down and noticed the monogram on my cuff. His cuff. His monogram.

  “Is that my—shirt?” he said.

  “I’ll let you two work this out,” Jedd Redux said, backing away.

  I started to explain, but Bayard stopped me. With a half smile of pity on his face, he took a step sideways and walked on past me, delivering a swift and forceful lesson in class.

  I went back to my room and stayed up all night, washing and ironing Bayard’s shirts. At dawn, starching the last of his cuffs, I made a string of promises to myself.

  I will never drink gin again.

  I will learn to smoke Vantages.

  I will apologize to Bayard and then avoid him for the rest of my time at Yale.

  I will try, try again.

  She was with a friend of mine, whom she was dating, and we all reached the door of the lecture hall at the same moment as class let out. She had thick yellow hair, almond-shaped brown eyes, and an exquisite nose—a perfect isosceles triangle in the center of her oval face. There was such geometry about her face, such symmetry, that I did what the art-history professor advised when encountering great portraits. I saw her in sections. First the full lips. Then the white teeth. Then the high cheekbones and exquisite nose. Lastly those brown eyes, soulful and scornful at the same time, as if she could love you or hate you, depending on the very next thing you said.

  “Sidney,” she said, offering her hand.

  “JR,” I said.

  She wasn’t wearing the androgynous Yale uniform of sweatshirt, torn jeans and sneakers. Instead she wore black wool pants, a gray cashmere turtleneck, and a leather driving coat. She had the kind of figure molded by years of competitive ice skating, I could just tell. That high hard bottom, like Dorothy Hamill. She even had a version of the Dorothy Hamill haircut. It was an effort not to stare.

  “Don’t you love this class?” she asked. “Isn’t it so fascinating?”

  “Not really,” I said, laughing.

  “Then why are you taking it?”

  “I’m thinking about law school.”

  “Uck. I wouldn’t be a lawyer for all the money in the world.”

  I thought, That’s because you already have all the money in the world.

  My friend put a proprietary arm around Sidney and pulled her away. I went back to my room and listened to Sinatra and tried not to see her face in sections, floating before me, while I read the decision in Dred Scott.

  We bumped into each other days later. A chance meeting on the street. I made a motion to hurry away, not wanting to waste the time of the campus goddess, but she forced me to stop, asking me questions, touching my arm lightly, tossing her hair. I didn’t flirt back, because she was dating my friend, and my reticence seemed to confuse and arouse her. She touched my arm more.

  “Are you ready for the final in Con Law?” she asked.

  “Oh right,” I said sarcastically. “When is that? Tomorrow?”

  “Would you like to study together?”

  “Together?” I said. “Tonight?”

  “Yes.” She smiled. Flawless teeth. “Together. Tonight.”

  She lived in an apartment off campus. When I arrived she had a bottle of red wine opened, so we spent ten minutes studying the Supreme Court before we set the books aside and studied each other. I wanted to give her the Sheryl Treatment, ask her lots of questions, but she beat me to the punch, barraging me with questions, and I found myself telling her about my mother, my father, Publicans, everything. I felt the wine and her brown eyes cracking me open. I told her the truth. I made my father sound more like a rogue than a villain, and built up the men of the bar into gods, but these exaggerations weren’t false. They were what I believed, just as I believed myself authentic when imitating the men of the bar, using their language and gestures. The impression fooled me as much as it did Sidney.

  Opening a second bottle of wine, she told me about herself. The youngest of four, she grew up in southern Connecticut, on the water, directly across the sound from Manhasset. She was two years older than I, a junior, and hoped to become a film director or an architect. The next Frank Capra or the next Frank Lloyd Wright, I said. She liked that. Her parents were powerful, brilliant, thoroughly involved in the lives of their children. They owned a construction company and lived in a large house her father had built with his own hands. She admired her mother but idolized her father, a real Hemingway type, she said, down to the white beard and fisherman’s sweater. Her naturally husky voice dropped an octave when she mentioned a bro
ther who had died and how her parents had never been the same since. She had a way of talking intimately that felt as if she were drawing a curtain around us.

  Just after midnight it started to snow. “Look,” she said, pointing to the window. “Let’s go for a walk.”

  Swaddled in hats and mufflers, we roved around campus, holding our faces to the sky, catching snowflakes on our tongues.

  “Do you realize we’ve been talking for hours?” she asked.

  “We haven’t done any studying,” I said.

  “I know.”

  We looked at each other uncertainly.

  “So what does JR stand for?” she said.

  “I’ll tell you when I know you better.”

  It was a reflex—I didn’t want to tell her my standard lie, and yet I didn’t want to divulge the truth—but somehow it sounded flirtatious. Before I could retract or soften it Sidney pressed against me. We walked on through the snow, hips touching, looking at our footprints side by side.

  Back at her apartment we drank hot chocolate and smoked cigarettes and talked about every subject but Brown v. Board of Education. At dawn she fixed us eggs and coffee. I left her apartment an hour before the exam, totally unprepared, and totally unconcerned. I pushed the pencil along the pages of the blue exam booklet for four hours, writing nonsense about the Constitution, knowing I’d fail and yet feeling ecstatic, because I also knew I’d see Sidney minutes after the exam ended. I knew she’d come through my door without knocking, and she did. “How’d you do?” she asked.

  “Not good. You?”

  “Aced it.”

  I asked if she’d like to go for a cup of coffee, but she was in a hurry. She was driving home and wanted to get there before the roads were bad.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “I’m leaving for Arizona in the morning.”

  “Well. Merry Christmas. Thanks again for a lovely evening.”

  She gave my cheek a peck and waved over her shoulder as she sailed out the door.

  I bought a six-pack and sat on the window seat, drinking, listening to Sinatra, watching students in the courtyard below. They were saying goodbye, hugging, rushing off to Union Station. I felt the campus emptying like a balloon losing air. The phone rang. My mother calling to see how I did on the exam. No. Sidney, calling from the car. A phone in the car? I’d never heard of such a thing. “Hey you,” she said. “Come have dinner.”

  “Together? Tonight?”

  “Together. Tonight. Call me back and let me know what train you’re getting. I’ll meet you at the station.”

  I hung up, took a swig of beer, and burst into tears. The first time in my life I ever wept with joy.

  Standing on the platform as my train pulled in, she was wearing a white overcoat and her hair and eyelashes were sprinkled with snowflakes. She’d made reservations at a waterfront restaurant, where neither of us touched our food. Plates came and went, unnoticed as our breath. Then we were speeding through deep woods in her sports car. We roared up to her parents’ house and sat in the car, the heater blasting, Phil Collins playing on the radio, each of us waiting for the other to speak. Through the falling snow, through the trees, I saw a silver river flashing in the moonlight. I thought with a wince of the canal in Arizona.

  She took me inside. All the lights were off, everyone asleep. She led me upstairs to a guestroom. “What about your parents?” I whispered as she shut the door. “Won’t we wake them?”

  “They’re very liberal,” she whispered.

  The lamp beside the bed gave off a harsh light, like a lamp at Grandpa’s, but I didn’t want to turn it off. I wanted to see Sidney. I slipped one of my argyle socks over the bulb and turned just as Sidney was unhooking her bra and dropping it to the floor. She stepped out of her pants, and her panties, and came forward, suffused in an argyle glow. She took off my clothes, put a hand on my chest and pushed, once. I fell onto the bed. She slid on top of me, under me. Ooh, she said softly, then again, louder. Then much louder. Your parents, I said. They’re cool, she said. Ooh, she said again, then yes, then ooh and yes in breathless combinations. I didn’t think there could be so many combinations. I concentrated on the combinations, numbering them, using them to block out all other thoughts, including any thought of enjoying myself, because I was determined to hold on, to perform, to last. The feel of Sidney beneath me, the sight of her body, was a dream, and if I enjoyed it, paused for one half second to take any pleasure in it, the dream would end. Yes, Sidney said, through clenched teeth, yes, yes, until the word lost all meaning, becoming a sound on which we both concentrated, then a soft whoosh of contentment that was a counterpoint to the wind outside.

  Lying together we said nothing for so long that I thought she was asleep. At last she said, “Do you smell something burning?” I looked at the lamp. My sock on the bulb was smoking. I grabbed it, knocking the lamp over, making a tremendous racket. Sidney laughed. I then made the burned sock into a hand puppet, “Sockrates,” who offered a philosophical commentary on the shocking behavior he’d just witnessed.

  “You’re trouble,” she said, laughing into her pillow.

  “Why?”

  “You just are.” She hugged me. “I’m not sure I need your kind of trouble.”

  I woke to find her standing over me with a mug of coffee. “Morning, Trouble,” she said.

  She wore a billowy white satin robe that was falling open. I took the mug from her and as she turned away I grabbed her and pulled her onto the bed.

  “My parents,” she said.

  “They’re liberal.”

  “Yes, well, the liberals are awake, and they have expressed some interest in meeting the man in the upstairs guestroom.”

  Since my suitcase was still in Sidney’s car, I put on my clothes from the night before and followed her downstairs. Her parents, though white-haired and a good deal older than my mother, were liberal as advertised. They didn’t seem at all scandalized. They poured me a cup of coffee and invited me to join them at the breakfast table.

  Each had Sidney’s husky voice, and like her they fired questions at me. I wasn’t sure they would find my stories as entertaining as Sidney had, so I deflected their questions with questions of my own. I asked about their interests. They were passionate about Italian opera, hothouse orchids, and cross-country skiing. I knew nothing about these subjects, and felt as if I’d failed my second exam in twenty-four hours. I asked about the family construction business.

  “Some companies build houses,” Sidney’s mother said. “We build dwellings.” She said this word, “dwellings,” in the same rapturous tone Professor Lucifer used when he said “POY-um.” Her voice rose and her cheeks pinkened as she spoke about the human need for shelter. I told her about Manhasset’s mansions and Shelter Rock and what they symbolized to me as a boy. I could see that she liked this story.

  Sidney’s father stood, put his hands in the pockets of his chinos and asked casually about my family. I bragged about my mother. He smiled. “And your father?” he said.

  “I didn’t really meet him until recently.”

  He frowned. I couldn’t tell if it was a frown of sympathy or disapproval. Sidney’s mother changed the subject and asked what I was studying at Yale. What do you hope to be? I mentioned law school, and both parents looked relieved.

  “We’d better be going,” Sidney said. “I have to drive JR to the airport.”

  Along the way, however, Sidney had a change of heart. She said she’d decided to drop me in Darien, where I could catch the shuttle the rest of the way.

  “Why?” I asked. “What’s going on?”

  “I just think it’s for the best.”

  “Tell me why.”

  “Look. I’m seeing someone else.”

  “I know.” I mentioned my friend, the one who had introduced us in Constitutional Law. No, Sidney said. Someone else besides. My stomach dropped, and I felt a lump in my throat.

  She spun off the highway at Darien and when we reached th
e shuttle stop she jumped out. I sat motionless while she grabbed my suitcase from the trunk and ordered me out of the car. I refused. She set my suitcase on the pavement and waited. I didn’t budge. The standoff lasted five minutes. Finally she put my suitcase back in the trunk and got back in the car. Neither of us said a word as she raced south on I-95, weaving in and out of traffic like an Indy-car driver. By the time we reached the airport, however, she wasn’t angry anymore. I even sensed some grudging admiration on her part when we kissed good-bye.

  “Merry Christmas,” she said. “Trouble.”

  The first nickname I ever liked.

  I knew less about love than about constitutional law, but on the flight to Arizona I decided I was in love. Or else I was having a stroke. I was sweating, shaking, suffering pains in my chest. It didn’t help that I could still smell Sidney on my hand, and in my pocket I found a crumpled napkin that bore her lip print. I held my hand to my nose, pressed the napkin to my mouth, and the flight attendant asked if I was ill.

  My mother asked the same thing as I stepped off the plane.

  “I think I’m in love,” I said.

  “Wonderful!” she said, throwing her arm around me as we walked out of Sky Harbor. “Who’s the lucky girl?”

  In the car, over dinner, late into the night, I tried to talk with my mother about Sidney, but I found the conversation unexpectedly complicated. I wanted to question my mother about love, but I felt the need to be careful, because I didn’t want to stir unpleasant memories of her romantic disappointments. I wanted to ask if our apartment by the canal disqualified me for a goddess who lived beside a silver river, but I didn’t want to disparage the home my mother had done her best to make for us. Finally I just said, “Sidney’s so up here.” I held my hand above my head. “And I’m so down here.” I dropped my hand to my knees.

  “Don’t say that. You have so much to offer.”

  “Yeah. No money, no clue what I want to do with my life—”