(For Part One published quite a while ago, scroll down to the asteriked bit below first and then read from the top for continuity's sake.)
The table was a
thick old-school oak, much like the new banquet table my wife and I recently
bought from the farmer couple who sold her the oranges I love. It was a sizeable
investment, but well worth it for the way the elderly owners nursed it into
being from large trees they’d had to down from their own property, over time,
rubbed repeatedly and over years with orange oil, accumulating hour upon hour
of the spills and enjoyments of evening parties stolen after hard days trying
to make a living off the FDA grid.
It had been
their own dining table. We only took it off their hands because my wife
fell so hard and fast in love with it as the second reason; the first was
because it helped them replace an essential piece of farm equipment which, left
broken, would have left them with far less than just a dining table.
I picked up my
glass and put it to my forehead as the good-ole-boys around me grew rowdier.
Staring through at the roomful of regulars muddled by the prisms and
distortions of liquid gin, beveled glass, and half-melted ice cubes made their
questions put to me every seeming half-minute less nonsensical, and the fear of
the knowledge that I’d have to sacrifice my integrity to make things
financially right from now on less nauseating.
It was either
that, or tell my twins they’d have to leave the house they’d grown up in a mere
years before leaving to go to college. Well, and then there was that, too. No
college for you, boys, because Daddy had to make a point and be true to
himself.
And there’d be no more oranges, because the table would have to go. Who spends that much on a bloody table in this damned economy anyway…
“Excuse me.”
I was jolted
out of my heading-off-a-cliff angry reality check of a fantasy by the dulcet
(and slightly off) tones of a deep but decidedly female voice. It emanated
from a place far closer to my head than I’d been able to anticipate.
“I think you
dropped this.”
The reading
girl had uncrossed her legs and appeared suddenly, too close to my side with
her awkward, slim arm extended toward me clutching the worn-down business card
of our (that is, my wife’s and mine) orange farmers.
“Yes, yes, I
did,” I fumbled, both in response and in taking back the card that made my
brain hurt because it was in her hand and I didn’t know why this total stranger
holding something so intricately representative of my family would bother me – and
intrigue me – so much.
The girl turned
to go immediately after the frown and furrowed brow of “I knew I shouldn’t have
given it back to him” passed over her face, and the image of holding her naked
and kissing the look off her face flashed deeply in me for a nanosecond before
I saw the selfsame pen that fell to the floor earlier hurl itself fatefully out
of the back pocket of her very worn cargo pants and onto the floor.
“Excuse me,” I
stuttered, replacing my now-empty gin drink on the table corner and swooping up
the pen in one surprisingly capable motion. “I think you dropped this.”
****
(CHEATER, PART ONE)
I love my wife.
She bought me oranges yesterday. Not
the yellowing, chalky-skinned kind, but the bright, clean orbs of
more-juice-than-pulp from the farm with the orchard in the country she knows I
love but don't have the time to frequent due to the demands of my job.
She has a job, too, oh yes – and one in the city,
too, a dozen streets and avenues from our small but decently equipped
people-box downtown. Coming back from a meeting that took her to the suburbs,
she drove two hours out of her way to get me the oranges in the wood-lattice
box that smells like hay and tobacco, because she knows I've been orange-crazed
since I was a kid.
And it's not as if we're new to this,
with the sheen still on, butterflies in full attack, with five-times-a-week
lovemaking sessions no matter what even if they must be stolen in a public
place.
We're twelve two-twin-teenage-boys,
taxes together, "I fucking hate you" hurled into the city streets
through open windows, marriage-counseling regulars years into this. I have a
loveseat in what the realtor called the "entertainment area" farthest
from our bedroom with my name on it several times a month.
If work has gone badly for me, it's
several times a week.
But every time I'm sent there (or flee
there, as the case may be), I'm but a good REM hour into sleep before I feel
the ends of her straight blonde hair brushing the sides of my sometimes
drooling face with the creased-brow, just-woke-up-and-found-me-not-next-to-her
expression – one that immediately makes me forget the harsh things I
whisper-yelled about her to myself as I punched the couch
pillows into
submission at first exile. She then kisses my chin upside-down, grabs my
forearm, pulls me back to our bed.
I love my wife.
Then there was this bar I was in one night,
with its low light and reflective, brushed metal surfaces so unlike the table
at my mother-in-law's house. It pulsated with the low grumble of club-worthy
bass lines so unlike the piano my sons' saxophone teacher accompanies them with
at their small-room recitals.
I didn't want to go, not being a
particularly bar-loving guy myself. Not that I never had been – it's just that
two kids and a mortgage will do that to a certain kind of
man.
I met my wife at a bar. Back then she
didn't want to be there, but I had, and she mocked me for it. It's one of those
things that drew me in to her.
My coworkers took me there one night
after we had barely escaped alive the sort of day at work that involves threats
of furloughs and unpaid overtime. "Come on, James (Jamie was my
father/husband name). This calls for happy hour. Just one beer. On me,"
they said.
The bar was just around the corner from
work, and just about a world away from home.
I was in no mood to not kiss my twins
hello this evening ("That's just not COOL, Dad!"), and though I love
my wife and she is not generally a complainer, I knew she had spoken with her
mother today. It was Tuesday. She always speaks with her mother on Tuesdays.
And with a mother like that, she was certainly allowed the weekly hour of
necessary complaint that routinely followed just after I had hung my suit
jacket up in the bedroom closet and she had, out of empathy for what she was
about to unleash on me, asked me with those too-often bunched brows how my day
went. She didn't expect an answer because she knew I'd never give one.
However, that night, with two
simultaneous college tuitions having been dangled in front of my face as a
bullying-one-into-selling-one's-soul-for-peanuts tactic, I would not be able to
respond with the usual, anticipatorily brief, "Fine. How's your
mother?"
I needed an hour to prepare. A happy
hour, frustration emulsified slightly by beer.
So I went into this bar with my
coworkers for a drink. They were greeted by name by a bartender half my age
dressed in tapered-leg dark-blue jeans faded in the stylish places. They were
accustomed to the "just one beer" bit as a way to combat similar work
days they experienced more frequently than I had, perhaps because I was not THE
superior, but I was theirs. Perhaps I'd even driven them here on occasion,
though I fancied myself a reasonable boss.
The stress drained from their faces as
the bartender drained different drafts into draft glasses that were far larger
than the pint I was used to.
"It's the Sucks-to-Be-You Special,"
the bartender who donned the pants I thought only worn by women said to me in
explanation with a knowing wink even though he really did not know anything at
all. How could he? He was hardly twenty-two.
Coworkers' beers poured, they migrated
to what they termed "their table" before I had the chance to order my
own Tanqueray and tonic, which at the moment made me feel exceptionally
elderly, even though my age never truly gave me pause – except, perhaps, when
my wife would joke on occasion and with no mal-intent that when I was
graduating college, she was a sophomore in high school. And even then, after
the initial evolutionarily defensive impulse, I wound up feeling proud about
it.
"So I suppose it doesn't quite
suck to be you tonight," the bartender told me as he twirled the Tanqueray
bottle once in his hand in a circle before unleashing it into my beveled rocks
glass. I didn't understand at first that he was not only referring to my
decision to pass on the giant frat boy beer. He then smiled from just one
corner of his mouth with his lips pressed poignantly together and slightly
jerked his head in the direction of the far end of the bar.
After I had concluded he was not in
fact bopping to the beat of the music with this gesture (as he had been
consistently while pouring my coworkers' beers), I turned my head toward the jerk.
I caught the tail-end of the dark-eyed
stare of a woman perhaps ten years the bartender's senior, but no more than
that. As she snapped her head back toward the book she was reading alone, her
long reddish-brown and slightly unkempt hair whisked in a halo around her
shoulders, betraying her less-than-sly attempt to avoid meeting my gaze.
The whole thing struck me as odd. And I
was momentarily hurled back to the time when I met my wife. She had been
reading, alone, at a bar, too. But there was jazz music playing, I remembered.
That's why my wife tolerated that bar. I also remembered hating that it wasn't
rock, and my embarrassment about my own musical preference in comparison to my
not-yet-wife's more sophisticated one made me strangely uncomfortable.
"She's been checking you out since
you walked in," the bartender said as he mixed some unknown martini-like
concoction with the greatest of ease like a circus boy. I never understood how
restaurant people did what they did, slinging drinks and food like monkeys, and
then I remembered why I was at that bar in the first place.
"Well, that's fine," I
answered, caught off guard and regretting the words even as I said them. Fine?
I'd been tongue-tied and unable to properly express myself to my simian of a
boss in so many instances that day, I suppose it'd become a habit. Distracted
by the hellish remembrance, I over-tipped the bartender, took a too-big swig of
my simple mixed beverage, and walked toward my coworkers' table.
On my way there, the book-reading woman
dropped a pen she'd had swaddled behind her ear and hair, which caused my eyes
to move automatically to her, and to the sort of sad way she sat on her bar
stool cross-legged.
“This is why we stick with the
sucks-to-be-you special!” one of my coworkers called out to me with the pre-tipsy
joviality of a man who plans to be drunk. “It doesn't take the entire happy
hour to serve!” I covered the remaining distance between myself and the crew,
chose a place just beyond the end of the banquet style table, took a sizeable
swig, and placed my drink on the table’s corner.
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