The Tender Bar (49 page)

We were an unlikely duo, the cop and the copyboy, but so much about Bob the Cop was unlikely. The stoic storyteller. The brutish bookworm. The softhearted tough guy. I once heard him tell a story about his kids that was so sweet, Cager was wiping his eyes. Not five minutes later I asked Bob the Cop if his wife ever got suspicious about his being out every night. “Nah,” he said. “She knows I’m no Irish fag.” I said I wasn’t familiar with the term. “Irish fag,” he said. “A guy who’d walk past a bar to be with a broad.”

Ever since he’d begun borrowing my books, Bob the Cop seemed changed. He was more talkative, more likely to venture an opinion on various esoteric subjects. The books seemed to give him not so much new opinions as new confidence in his opinions. He wasn’t happy, exactly, but he wasn’t quite so burdened, and even his tread seemed a bit lighter. He no longer plodded into the bar with the world on his shoulders. I was surprised therefore to find Bob the Cop at the bar one night, sorrowful, morose, guzzling Rusty Nails.

“What’s up, flatfoot?”

He looked at me as though we’d never met.

“You work today?” I asked.

“Funeral.”

His white dress gloves were on the bar.

“Someone you knew?”

He didn’t answer.

“You look beat,” I said.

“I don’t do well at funerals. Especially cop funerals.”

He told me about the ceremony. Flag-draped coffin. White-gloved hands crisply saluting. Bagpipes. Nothing in the world, he said, half as haunting as a bagpipe.

“But you didn’t know the cop who was killed?” I asked.

“I know them all.”

He rubbed his eyes and then drank off the rest of his Rusty Nail, quaffed it like an iced tea. “You never looked me up at the
Times,
” he said. “Did you?”

“No.”

He waited, as if the words were floating up from deep inside him. As a rookie, he said, about my age, he was on patrol when he heard gunshots. “You know how they talk about everything going in slow motion?” he said. “It’s true. You’re running and running and your feet feel like they’re tied to cinder blocks.” He turned down a street, came around a blind corner, and there before him was a man holding a gun on another man. When Bob the Cop yelled, the gunman turned and pointed his gun. Bob the Cop fired, killing him instantly.

“Jesus,” I said.

“It gets worse,” he said. “The guy I killed was a cop. Nineteen years on the force. Plainclothes. He was trying to collar the other guy.”

Friends of the dead cop demanded Bob the Cop’s badge, even after an investigation found that the shooting was an accident. An
accident
, Bob the Cop repeated. The friends weren’t satisfied. They stalked Bob the Cop, jumped him, ganged up on him, beat him bloody. That’s why Bob the Cop transferred to Harbor, he said. He needed a place to lie low, hide.

“Did the cop have—family?” I asked.

Bob the Cop looked deeply into the grain of the bar top. “A son,” he said. “He killed himself a year later.”

All the conversations I’d had with Bob the Cop came rushing back. I thought how differently I’d have worded every sentence if I’d known about his past. I thought of my tantrum over misspelling Kelly. I remembered calling it a mistake I’d have to live with the rest of my life, and going on and on about making things worse for Kelly’s sons—after some cop had gunned down their father.

I told Bob the Cop how sorry I was. He waved off my apology.

“Honest mistake,” he said. “Like I told you, that’s why they put erasers on pencils. But J.R., believe me. They do not put erasers on guns.”

thirty-eight
| MICHELLE AND THE FISHER QUEEN

M
ANY PEOPLE THOUGHT OF PUBLICANS AS THE PLAYBOY MANSION
of Manhasset. Like sanctuary, sex was one of the foundational premises of the bar, so it made a kind of sense that people had sex all over the premises. In the parking lot, in the bathrooms, in the basement—people who drank away every inhibition couldn’t be expected to resist the strongest urge of all. Even employees were swept away by the hormonal undertow. A waitress and a cook once got caught having sex on the same butcher block where Fuckembabe packed the hamburger patties. There were many jokes thereafter about how strange the burgers tasted, and Uncle Charlie never tired of asking customers if they
really
wanted their burger “between two buns.”

In the spring of 1989, however, the standard sexual energy at Publicans increased tenfold. A virulent epidemic of spring fever broke out, and everyone went staggering around the barroom in a daze, though it took a keen observer to detect how this was different from the rest of the year. Each night we’d stand outside the bar at sunset, in groups of twenty or thirty men and women, watching the April sky turn a dark, ethereal blue—“a Maxfield Parrish blue,” one waitress remarked as we all went back inside. After tracking mud and slush into the bar all winter, each of us now trailed into Publicans a patch of that blue sky.

The Actor turned up again. He told us he was home to visit his mother, but it was a lie. He was nursing a broken heart. He’d been jilted by a beautiful starlet, a wildly sexy blond we’d all lusted after. Many nights The Actor would bring his guitar to Publicans and sing mournful Spanish love ballads—he sounded a little like Neil Young—while Dalton would recite Rilke to a gorgeous ash blond from the Upper Hudson Valley, who he talked about marrying. Even Uncle Charlie had a girlfriend that heady spring. He bent himself into the phone booth and sang to her: “My Funny Valentine.” He didn’t bother to shut the door, so we all had to listen. He also didn’t bother to check the time and his girlfriend wasn’t happy about being awakened at two in the morning. She let him know it, and he stopped singing to rebuke her for scolding him, then resumed singing, and it all sounded something like this: “‘My Funny Valen’—shut the fuck up! ‘Sweet comic Val’—shut your goddamn mouth! ‘You make me smile with my’—pipe down while I’m fucking serenading you, you bitch!”

Like the chokecherries and black locusts along Manhasset Bay, a fresh batch of women bloomed overnight in the barroom. Uncle Charlie and I watched them appear all around us. “Where do they all come from?” he asked. “Where do they come from, J.R., and where do they all go?” He was asking abstractly, existentially, but the fact was that many of them came from Helsinki and London, to work as au pairs for wealthy families in town. Others were new salesgirls hired at Lord & Taylor. And at least a dozen were new emergency-room nurses from North Shore. There were also scores of college students and grads living with their parents until they could find apartments in the city. Among this last group was Michelle.

She had jet-black hair and warm brown eyes with a spot of cinnamon in the center. Her voice was smokier than the bar, and it made her sound strong, which she was, though she was also shy. She would cower meekly from Uncle Charlie, then turn and mock me fearlessly about my “borrowed” suspenders and ties. I liked Michelle a lot. I liked the way she laughed, silently, her mouth open a second or two before she made a sound. I liked her smile, which in another era would have been called fetching. I liked that I’d known her family all my life—McGraw and I had played Little League with her older brother. After only a few dates I had high hopes for our budding romance, even after Michelle confessed that she’d once made out with McGraw.

“You and McGraw?” I said. “Not possible.”

“We were in seventh grade, at a party. Drinking rum and—milk, I think?”

“Yep. That’s McGraw.”

Michelle was perfect, the best Manhasset had to offer. I should have thrown myself at her, dedicated all my energy to winning her, but I found it hard to be the man she deserved. After Sidney, and several failed attempts at replacing Sidney, I wasn’t sure I believed in romantic love anymore. My only objective with women was to avoid being fooled again, which meant remaining aloof, noncommittal, like Sidney herself. Besides, I didn’t know what to make of a woman like Michelle—loyal, kind, true. Her virtues clashed with my experience and my lowered expectations.

I held Michelle at bay, therefore, while keeping the occasional rendezvous with a heavily mascaraed woman who was just the right combination of discreet and undiscriminating. At last call she’d catch my eye from across the barroom and give me a thumbs-up with a querulous look. If I gave thumbs-down she’d shrug and wave good-bye. If I gave thumbs-up she’d hop off her stool and hurry out of the bar, meeting me five minutes later in front of Louie the Greek’s. When Thumbelina wasn’t around I’d spend time flirting and getting nowhere with a snub-nosed British au pair who talked like Margaret Thatcher and drew me into long discussions about the Battle of Hastings and Admiral Horatio Nelson. I found her accent distracting, her passion for British history difficult to share, but I was fascinated by her skin, which was like bone china, and her eyes, which were sapphires. I also had a few frustrating dates with a grad student I met in the city, who took a bohemian view of hygiene. Her hair was tangled, her clothes wrinkled, her feet dirty. I overlooked her grubbiness because of her other redeeming qualities—a towering intellect and mesmerizing pear-shaped breasts. When she told me that she was writing her graduate thesis about marine life in New York City, I brought her immediately to Publicans and introduced her to Bob the Cop. She told Bob the Cop what was swimming in the rivers and harbors, and he told her what was floating. The first time she went to the ladies’ room Bob the Cop pulled me aside and said excitedly, “I cannot believe you found a broad with cans like those who knows about fish!” Cager, however, did not like my date. He ordered me to break up with the Fisher Queen, immediately.

“Why?”

“She’s too—smart.”

I scoffed.

“Suit yourself,” he said.

Hours later, at my apartment, I lay on the floor with the Fisher Queen, listening to Sinatra. “Why do you love Frank Sinatra so much?” she asked.

No one had ever asked me that question. I tried to explain. Sinatra’s voice, I said, is the voice most men hear in their heads. It’s the paradigm of maleness. It has the power men strive for, and the confidence. And yet when Sinatra is hurt, busted up, his voice changes. Not that the confidence goes away, but just beneath the confidence is a strain of insecurity, and you hear the two impulses warring for his soul, you hear all that confidence and insecurity in every note, because Sinatra lets you hear, lays himself bare, which men so seldom do.

Pleased with this explanation, I turned up the volume, a recording of Sinatra’s earliest stuff with Tommy Dorsey.

“Have you always liked him?” the Fisher Queen asked.

“Always.”

“Even as a boy?”

“Especially as a boy.”

“Interesting.” She dragged a finger through her hair, stopping at a knot. “I’ve been meaning to ask you. Did your father leave anything behind when your parents split? Any pictures?”

“My mother threw all his pictures out.”

“Clothes?”

“He left some turtlenecks. Stuff like that. Junk.”

“What else?”

I closed my eyes. “I remember some Italian cookbooks with red sauce stains on the covers.”

“And?”

“I remember a big stack of old Sinatra alb—” I turned my head. The Fisher Queen looked sad, but proud, almost gloating, as if she’d guessed the ending of a mystery novel after the first page.

“Yeah,” she said. “There had to be a reason.”

“I must have started listening to Sinatra when I couldn’t find my father’s voice on the radio.”

I stood and started pacing.

“Have I freaked you out?” she asked.

“You mean Heimliching extremely painful revelations out of me? Nah.”

I lay awake most of the night, and in the morning I said good-bye forever to the Fisher Queen. Who knew what disturbing truths she might discover next? The only hard part was telling Bob the Cop, who was hoping to see a lot more of the Fisher Queen. But when I told him the story, he understood. More than most men Bob the Cop believed that things at the bottom of our inner harbors should float up in their own time, of their own accord.

I thanked Cager for warning me, and apologized for doubting him. Unlike the Fisher Queen, he didn’t gloat. “Dumb ones,” he said. “Stick to the dumb ones, kid.”

He was half joking, but that was the moment I decided to stop calling Michelle. I considered it an act of kindness to Michelle, removing myself from her life. I was too confused about women to do anything but waste her time. She deserved the best, and I didn’t deserve anyone better than Thumbelina.

Not long after my decision about Michelle, I was drinking with Dalton and his new girlfriend. Peter was behind the bar, reading some of my pages. I told Peter that while his editing was improving, my writing was getting worse. Everything was getting worse, I told him. Peter started to say something encouraging, but like a sleepwalker I went to the phone booth and dialed Sidney.

It was two in the morning. A man answered. Trust-Funder? I said nothing. I listened to him listening to me. “Who is it?” Sidney asked in the background. “I don’t know,” Trust-Funder said. I was going to ask for Sidney, then burst into “My Funny Valentine.” I was drunk enough, bold enough with spring fever, but I wasn’t entirely sure that singing was the best way to win Sidney back, and while confidence and insecurity were warring for my soul, the line went dead.