Ladies' Night (7 page)

He'd seen it before.

New Year's Eve was always pretty strange, and Saint Patty's Day, and sometimes even Christmas, when the bar was filled with people too lonely to have anywhere else to go. He remembered working a union bar once on a night after a long hard truckers' strike had ended — how the room was charged with a high mix of rising spirits and downright bloody murder. The kind of night when, for whatever reason, fights break out and drunks get dangerous and you kept your eyes open and an empty bottle handy just in case.

It was irrational, maybe, but he had one now behind the bar rail.

Because of the strangeness.

Since six o'clock he'd been feeling it, a sense of disquiet just below the surface. And despite Erica's response to him, he thought that the waitresses must be feeling it too. They were all a little distant tonight, working their jobs like it was sheer drudgery — when usually they managed to have some fun here. It was that kind of place.

So actually he was glad to have been able to give Tom a hand with Cindy.

That, at least, was normal.

He wondered what Susan did the nights Tom was out prowling. Or how she took it in the morning. He liked Susan, even though he didn't know her as well as he knew Tom. Not for him to judge. But this kind of stuff was not terrific for a marriage.

Down at the end of the bar a woman was crowing for a gin and tonic. He poured it for her, thinking he was going to have to cut this one off soon if she kept on slugging them down like this, unusual for a woman to get so loaded so fast and so intently, thinking this while carrying the drink over to her and looking at the two young girls who for some reason were standing there glaring at him over by the jukebox, when the weirdest fucking notion occurred.

What if it was the women?

Customers, waitresses.

What if it was all of them?

Nah
, he thought.
You're losing it. That's nuts
.

But he looked around. He poured and served and looked around.

And the thought refused to go away. Every time there was the slightest lull in business the thought would prick at him and he'd feel the thickness start to rise in the room and the walls start to close a little.

It wasn't the guys.

It was the women who kept reminding him of those truckers blowing off steam after four months of no pay and no work and the wife and kids howling, who reminded him of bad Christmas Eves and bad Saint Patrick's Days.

It was the women.

And then he thought,
that's bullshit, just look at Cindy sitting there with Tom, nice woman, everything fine. Check her out. Look at her looking at him like she'd like to reach over and just
. . .

. . .
eat him up.

I'm gonna have to watch this closely
, he thought.

The wind was hot.

It was a burning wind — it burned through Susan's sleep like acid on silk, reaching deep into each smooth furrow of her body. The nightgown was too much. Her breasts felt as though covered with sand, with insects, as though she lay buried to the neck in an anthill in a hot summer storm. By turns it was terrible and then sweet — a tickling, moving, crawling sensation. An awareness of the physical that not even sleep could override.

Her fingers moved to the neck of her nightgown, traveled down its front and parted it over her body. The feeling remained but it was better now, more purely pleasure, less frightening in the complexity of its overwhelming sensuousness.

Her tongue moved over dry cracked lips. Her fingertips went to her breasts, plucked the nipples up, caressed them as through layers of sand. A groan escaped her open mouth into the blasting wind.

~ * ~

What was that?

Elizabeth sat bolt upright in bed, listening.

Some sort of cry.

The sound had poured through her sleep, snatched her into wakefulness, its final tendrils dragging over her like scraps of vine.

It had come from outside.

She leaned toward the window, her fingernails brushing the wire mesh screen. She looked down through the branches of the tree to the street. It was empty. A gust of wind slid a sheet of newspaper along the sidewalk, rustled the shrubbery below. The entrance to the building was silent.

A dream
, she thought.

The newspaper lay
stirless
in the gutter. She listened to the sounds inside her apartment. The clock ticking, the distant hum of her refrigerator, the dense silence.

She was beginning to feel sleepy again.

Something screamed, it sounded like a child's scream and just beyond the screen something hurtled through her field of vision, a sudden pale blinding flash of movement.

Then stopped.

And meowed.

A cat
.

A slim white cat with a black-spotted tail.

You little shit
, she thought.
You scared me half to death
.

The cat stared in at her wide-eyed, wary. It paced the ledge.
Must have come from the floor above
, she thought. Living dangerously, making a jump like that.

Her heart was still pounding.

The cat sniffed the ledge and window screen, its pink nose twitching. It gazed at the tree and seemed to contemplate the downward climb. Then it glanced back at Elizabeth. It did not seem terribly comfortable with her there, close enough to touch were it not for the screen. She wondered why. Cats usually took to her immediately.

Poor thing. It really did look scared out there.

The tip of its ear was missing.

There was only a little blood, it wasn't much more than a scratch, but the wound looked very recent. The blood was still glistening.
Catfight
, she thought. The eyes looked alert, frightened.

Frightened of her
. She could swear it.

"What's the matter?" she whispered.

It was as though she'd hit it with a stick. The cat jumped out onto the nearest branch, ran to the main trunk of the tree and then raced suddenly down, disappearing into the shrubs below.

She watched until it was out of sight and then fell back away from the window into the cool softness of her bed. She lay a moment staring at the shadows playing across the ceiling and then closed her eyes.

Too bad
, she thought.
I could have patched her up a little
.

The cat's amber-yellow eyes appeared before her, bright and full of some strange knowledge, before she fell asleep.

This lady is terrific
, he thought.

Close quarters had revealed a number of things. Slim waist, small firm breasts beneath the tight white sweater — with mercurial nipples that went hard or soft according to some runic chemistry, some internal winds of change — pale, smooth skin and delicate collarbones, a long and graceful neck, and full wide lips. Which smiled at him frequently.

Her name was Cynthia Jackson and she lived on 74th Street just off Central Park West. She was probably ten years younger than Tom and did not seem to mind the fact that he was older, she had a sister from Chicago whose visit last week she'd found very trying, and she was a photo-
retoucher
by trade and worked at home.

She in turn had elicited from him that he was an editor and that he was both married and had a child. This did not seem to faze her either.

If they got by Andy they were usually interested.

So that when she got up to use the john he knew she'd be back.

He ordered another round of drinks and watched her walk past the tables to the ladies' room, tight jeans promising equally fine slopes of leg and thigh.

It was only when the drinks arrived that he noticed the woman beside him.

She was drunk, leaning low over the bar. Not much to look at to start with and getting much worse by the moment. Scrawny inside a faded red t-shirt and tired-looking.

She smiled at him.

"Hi," she said.

She licked her lips.

Uh-oh
, he thought.
This one wants to talk
.

"I'm gonna make you a promise," she said. Her words slurred together like a bad erasure.

"Shoot."

"Somebody don't give me a job soon, say one week, I'm gonna fucking murder myself. I swear it."

"Uh-huh."

"Waitress job. HMV. Anything. One week and then the hell with it, I'm checking out. That asking too much? Job as a waitress in a place like this?"

"No."

"Damn right. It's something to me, though." She took a slug of what appeared to be a gin and tonic.

"Look," she said. "I'm not stupid. Just finished my dissertation. Been
writin
' it three and a half weeks — first time out in nearly a
month
. So what do I do? Go out and drink up what's left of my money. In a joint like this. Drink so much I can hardly talk to anybody. Nobody to talk to in a month and now I can't talk to anybody. That make sense to you?"

"No. You're doing okay, though."

"Thank you. But
doncha
see it's self-destructive? I gotta have something
normal
happen to me. Got to make some money. Maybe waitress. 'S normal. People tip you. Know how much it costs to write a dissertation? How much they
charge
you for the privilege of writing yourself to death?
Lotta
money."

"What was the dissertation?"

"Schizophrenia."

He could think of nothing to say to that so they drank their drinks.

What a mess
, he thought. Hair long, limp and tangled. Skin the color of mushrooms. Eyes all red and bleary — they were disturbing eyes. Beneath the weird conversation you could sense real pain, and a lot of it, just below the surface. Beneath the eyes there was something else. He didn't know what and didn't want to.

"It's the dissertation's made me crazy," she said, almost to herself. "Dissertations break up a lot of marriages, you know that? 'S very common." She waved her hand in dismissal. "Me, of course, I ain't married."

He saw Cindy walking toward him through the crowded tables. "You'll be all right," he said.

"Sure I will. 'Course I will."

Bailey was looking at them and Tom nodded toward the woman.
Better cut her off
, the nod said. Bailey nodded back.

"Friend of yours?" said Cindy, sliding onto the barstool.

There was a cattiness there he didn't like. It surprised him. She hadn't seemed the type. It was as though between the time she'd left the bar and the time she returned something had changed about her.

"We just met," he said. His tone was cool.

"That's nice," she said, a sardonic smile playing at the corners of her mouth.

But he saw that his tone of voice had not been lost on her. She was staring directly into his eyes. And the look on her face said,
I'm taking you home tonight. So don't he a pain in the ass, please. Not over her, anyway. Relax and enjoy it
.

He looked at her. She was lovely. He guessed that compassion should have its limits.

The drunk was not long for the world anyhow. Her eyes kept closing.
The long blink
, his father used to call it. There was always a hotplate down at the end of the bar with a full pot of coffee going and Bailey was pouring her a cup.

He brought it over. Said something to get her attention.

She waved him away. Lurched suddenly to her feet and began to wobble through the crowd toward the door.

"Hey!"

Her purse was lying on the bar.

The woman stopped.

"Your purse," Tom said.

She wobbled back to them. Tom handed it to her and she smiled. The smile was pretty ghastly.

"Thanks," she said. Then her smile faded. "
Thank you very much
."

She wasn't thanking him for the purse. She was thanking him for talking. He felt a wave of pity. Even concern. There was something so
final
about the way she'd thanked him — as though they were the last words she ever expected to utter. He'd not given it much credence before but maybe the woman was a potential suicide after all, maybe she was serious and this last drunken lurch back through a crowd of strangers for a pocketbook she did not much care about and would not need where she was going was the end of it.

Jesus, he hoped not.

He watched the door close behind her. Through the window he could see her ascend the stairs.

Maybe not
, he thought. Drunks were full of drama.

He saw that Cindy was watching her too, very closely. Her eyes were distant.