The Tender Bar (33 page)

When school let out in May I went to Manhasset to spend the summer. I told my mother I’d have a better chance of finding a summer job in New York than in Arizona. But of course the truth was that I wanted to catch up on lost time at Publicans. My first night at the bar I celebrated two milestones—my academic survival and Sidney’s graduation. In my mind the latter was the greater cause for rejoicing, because from now on I’d have Yale to myself. Never again, I told Uncle Charlie, would I have to hear rumors about Sidney, or witness her biting other boys’ apples.

As senior year began I was myself again. Going to class, writing for the
News,
close to the number of credits needed for a diploma. I sat at my desk, typing a paper, listening to Sinatra, feeling strong. All at once, out of nowhere, my happiness got the best of me. I heard new meanings in Sinatra’s lyrics. If Sidney is no different than other women, I reasoned, maybe I should forgive her. If beautiful women lie and cheat, such is the price of loving a beautiful woman. I wondered where Sidney was at that moment. Had she broken up with the grad student? Did she think of me? Did she ever want to hear my voice?

She answered on the second ring. She cried, said she missed me, and we made plans to meet for dinner the next night.

We sat at a table in a dark corner of the restaurant, and the waiter knew to leave us alone. Sidney explained carefully, in detail, why she’d done what she’d done. She’d been unhappy at Yale, she said. Depressed, homesick, she’d behaved in ways that she now couldn’t believe, and she placed most of the blame on her first love. She’d been sixteen, and he was a much older man, who misused her, and cheated on her. The experience left her disillusioned and cynical, with warped ideas about fidelity.

She was older and wiser now, she promised, touching my arm. As was I, she added. She saw it in my eyes, she said—a new strength and self-assurance, which she found “insanely attractive.” By the time our waiter brought the check Sidney was on my lap. “So,” she whispered in my ear, “would you like to take me back to your place and show me your etchings?”

Standing in the middle of my bedroom, undoing her blouse, Sidney glanced at my desk. “What’s all this?” she asked, pointing to a stack of papers.

“Stories.”

“About?”

“A dumb rube and the beautiful girl who crushes his heart.”

“Fiction or non?”

“I’m not sure.”

She took a pen from the desk and wrote a giant heart on one of the pages, and inside she wrote, in her perfect architect handwriting, “The End.” Then she turned off my gooseneck lamp. In the dark I heard the antique buttons of her blouse hit the floor.

This time, I told myself, everything would be different. Success with both Sidney and Yale depended on balancing the two, devoting myself to neither. I had to do a better job of managing my time and emotions, especially the latter. In the past I’d led with my heart, displayed my desperation like a badge of honor. I’d thought I was being honest, but I’d been a sucker. This time around, I vowed, I’d be cool.

Sidney noticed the difference, and it made her act different as well. Though I no longer talked about the future, Sidney wouldn’t shut up about it. Many nights we sat in bars, long after last call, after the other barstools had been turned upside down and the bartender wanted to go home, and she would make lists of names for our future children. On Friday afternoons she would insist that I take the train south to spend the weekend with her and her parents. (She was living with them until she decided what she wanted to do with her life.) Her parents were different too. They didn’t frown at things I said. They smiled encouragingly when Sidney and I discussed living together. After dinner we’d all move into the living room to drink cocktails, read the
Times,
watch public television, as if we were already a family. When Sidney’s parents went up to bed, Sidney and I would stoke the fire and she’d read Proust while I studied. Sometimes I would look out the window and imagine some little boy watching from across the street. Once or twice I felt that part of me was still out there, in the woods, peering in.

On my twentieth birthday Sidney and I drove to Boston, which Sidney thought would be a good place to live together after I graduated. The city was close to her family, so she wouldn’t be homesick, but far enough that we could blaze our own trail and be independent. “Won’t this be a lovely place to start our new life?” she said, speeding up and down the narrow streets of the North End. “We’ll have a cute little apartment. And every night we’ll build a great big fire and drink coffee and read to each other from
Remembrance of Things Past
.”

“And there are several good law schools in the area,” I said.

“I thought you were going to be a newspaperman?”

“Lawyers make more money than newspapermen.”

“We don’t need money,” she said. “We have love.”

But we needed money too. Since the laundry disaster sophomore year I’d held a series of part-time jobs, always earning just enough to pay for booze and books, but senior year I found full-time work at a bookstore-café next to the Center for British Art. The store would have been Bill and Bud’s idea of paradise. Its front wall was plate glass from floor to ceiling, so the sales floor was always flooded with natural light, and a horseshoe-shaped bar in the middle of the fiction section served gourmet coffee and pastries. My job was to sit on a stool at the cash register and ring up the occasional sale. Since the place catered almost exclusively to homeless people and grad students—who took advantage of the free-refill policy, guzzling coffee until they were jittery as crackheads—sales were few, and I had plenty of time to read and eavesdrop on conversations about art and literature. The atmosphere was invigoratingly, absurdly intellectual. I once watched a fistfight break out between two busboys over who would get to keep Jacques Derrida’s silver pipe cleaner, which the famous literature professor had left beside his plate after eating a sandwich.

I was also in charge of the bookstore stereo, which meant Sinatra all the time. Grad students would clap their hands over their ears and plead for something else. Even the homeless complained. “Jeez kid,” a homeless man shouted at me, “a little Crosby would be nice for a change.” I relented one winter day and played Mozart. Bud’s favorite—the Quintet for Piano and Winds in E-flat. I opened my copy of Chekhov and my eye fell on the line “We shall find peace. We shall hear the angels, we shall see the sky sparkling with diamonds.” I snapped the book shut and felt the words hit my bloodstream like an Uncle Charlie martini. I’d found peace, I’d heard angels, and the sky
was
full of diamonds—it was snowing, thick feathery flakes, making the glass-walled store feel like a snow globe. I watched the snow sprinkle the campus, sipped my coffee, listened to Mozart, and told myself—warned myself—this might be it. I might never be happier. I was going to graduate, I was applying to law schools, I was reunited with the love of my life. Even my mother was feeling better. She was having some success selling insurance, and dating again.

A customer approached the counter. I rang up his book and as I handed him his change I heard something smash against the front window. I turned, the customer turned, everyone turned. A huge snowball was flattened against the glass. Outside, in the middle of the street, Sidney stood with a hand on her hip, beaming. I ran outside, picked her up and twirled her in circles. I told her that one minute ago I thought I’d never be happier, and now I was twice as happy, and it was all her doing. “I love you,” she said, over and over.

In my memory it seems like five minutes later that I was walking out of Sterling Library, a rough draft of my senior thesis in my backpack, and it was spring again. I bumped into Franklin Dean Roosevelt. He congratulated me on how well I looked. He added pointedly—with some emotion—that he was looking forward to seeing me, above all people, in a mortarboard and gown on commencement day.

Sidney and I went skinny-dipping in a secluded cove that she knew of in Long Island Sound. We swam to a wooden float far from shore and lay on our backs in the sun, holding hands, talking in low voices, for some reason, though there was no one near us. In fact the world seemed to have been covered in a second Great Flood, of which we were the only survivors.

“Tell me the truth,” I said.

“Always,” she said.

“Have you ever been this happy?”

“Never,” she said. “I never dared to hope that I would be this happy.”

My mother wrote to say she’d bought an airplane ticket and a new blue suit for my graduation. I read her letter under my spreading elm, then looked up at the high branches, bursting with new green buds, and fell peacefully asleep. When I woke it was twilight. Walking back to my room I spotted a handbill announcing guest lecturers coming to speak on various topics.
Who has time to sit in a stuffy lecture hall and listen to these drones, particularly at the start of spring?
The name of one drone caught my eye. Frank Sinatra. Poor bastard. A geeky economics professor at MIT, and he’s named after the coolest man on the planet.

I read more closely. The handbill seemed to suggest that this Frank Sinatra coming to Yale was Frank Sinatra, singer. He’d been invited to speak about his “art.” I read the words over and over. A joke, obviously. Then I realized the date. April 1. Very funny.

My schoolmates, however, swore it was no joke. Sinatra was coming, they said, though they didn’t care. I went by the lecture hall on the appointed day. No crowd, no commotion. I sat on the steps and watched cars go by. Some joke. Standing to go I saw a student hurrying up the steps with a huge ring of keys. “You here for Sinatra?” he asked.

“He’s really coming?”

“Four o’clock.”

“Where is everybody?”

“It’s only two o’clock.”

“I thought there would be a line, people hoping to get a good seat?”

“It’s not like George Michael is coming.”

He let me in. I picked a good seat and waited while the hall filled around me. There were still empty seats when Sinatra stepped quietly through a side door, no entourage, no bodyguards, flanked only by his wife and a frowzy dean. He sat calmly beside the lectern and crossed his legs, waiting.

He didn’t look the way I’d pictured him. He was thicker and more avuncular than I’d expected. He seemed no more exceptional than the dean who fluttered about the podium, adjusting the microphone, maybe because Sinatra was dressed like the dean. In every photo I’d ever seen, Sinatra wore a tux, or a sharkskin suit with a thin tie. That day he wore a tweed blazer, charcoal slacks, a golden necktie, and polished cordovan loafers. Sinatra was trying to look collegiate, to fit in. My heart went out to him.

I watched his eyes. I’d seen those blue eyes so many times, on album covers, in movies, but no camera could convey their full blueness from a few feet away. They darted left and right, sweeping the room like blue searchlights, and I noticed that they turned different shades of blue as they moved—indigo, royal, navy. Behind the blueness I saw something more striking. Fear. Frank Sinatra was afraid. Eating a plate of pasta with hit men didn’t scare him, but speaking to a roomful of nerds made him sweat. His hands shook as he fumbled with note cards and slipped them into his breast pocket. He glanced at his wife, down front, who sent him a you-can-do-it smile. Watching him writhe, seeing him suffer the same desire to be liked that I’d suffered for four years at Yale, I wanted to shout,
Relax, Frank! You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together!

The dean said a few introductory words and Sinatra stood and walked to the lectern. He coughed into his fist several times, to clear his throat, and began. The Voice was scratchy. It sounded like my oldest vinyls. He thanked us for inviting him to speak on the subject of his “art,” and though he was an artist, he said, he wanted us to know first and foremost that he was a saloon singer. He loved
saloons,
and clearly loved the word. Every time he said “saloon” his vocal cords relaxed and his streetwise Hoboken accent reemerged, overtaking his valiant attempt at Ivy League elocution. A saloon was the birthplace of his voice, he said. A saloon was the launch pad of his identity. A saloon was where his mother took him as a boy and sat him on the bar and told him to sing for all the men. I looked around. Was everyone getting this?
Frank Sinatra grew up in a bar!
No one seemed all that surprised, but I was pounding my fist on my thigh.

I hadn’t thought it possible to feel more grateful to Sinatra. I already gave him half the credit for getting me over Sidney, getting me back together with Sidney, and helping me graduate. But when he made me feel there was nothing wrong with loving saloons, that growing up in a saloon didn’t disqualify a young man for success, or happiness, or the love of someone like Sidney, I wanted to rush the podium and wrap my arms around him. I wanted to thank Sinatra for seeing me through a dark time, for singing me through. I wanted to invite him to Publicans, and I almost did. I raised my hand to speak during the question-and-answer session.
If you love saloons, Frank, have I got a saloon for you!
But before The Voice could call on me, the dean stepped forward and said it was time for our honored guest to leave.

Sinatra thanked us for our time and, looking relieved, slide-stepped out the door.

twenty-six
| JR MAGUIRE

I
N THE DAYS BEFORE GRADUATION, I HAD ONE LAST ASSIGNMENT,
one last requirement to fulfill, though this one was self-imposed. I needed to legally change my name. I needed to jettison JR, and Junior, and Moehringer, to sweep aside those burdensome symbols and replace them with something normal, some name that didn’t come from the German neighbor of my father’s pseudonymous father. I wanted to deny my father and refuse my name, and I wanted a name that Sidney wouldn’t be able to deny or refuse when I asked her to take it in marriage.