The Tender Bar: A Memoir

by J. R. Moehringer

  “No clue?”

  “I mean, besides becoming a lawyer.”

  “Look,” she said. “It’s not the worst thing in a relationship if the man puts the woman on a slight pedestal.” She smiled and gave my shoulder an encouraging rub, but I couldn’t force a smile in return. “JR, falling in love is a blessing. Try to enjoy it.”

  “What if I get my heart broken?” I asked.

  She stared over my head.

  “Mom?”

  Blank.

  “Mom?”

  She lowered her gaze and looked at me.

  “You’ll live,” she said.

  Sidney met me at the airport with a bottle of champagne, which we passed back and forth as she sped north on I-95. It was a Sunday night, the temperature below zero. There wasn’t another car on the highway. We had the world to ourselves.

  We reached Yale around midnight. Frozen trees clicked in the wind. Streets were solid chutes of ice. We stopped by my room, picked up my Sinatra albums, then went to her apartment and locked ourselves inside. Sidney laughed slyly when I moved a big chair against the door.

  We didn’t leave for days. Snow fell, melted, fell again—we scarcely noticed. We never turned on the TV or the radio. The only sounds in the apartment were Sinatra’s voice and ours, his moans and ours, and the wind. When starved we ordered food from a restaurant on the corner. The phone rang off the hook, but Sidney never answered it, and she didn’t own an answering machine. If boyfriends were looking for her, she didn’t seem to care, and I took her indifference to mean that she was done with all men but me.

  Time passed imperceptibly, then stopped altogether, lost its grip on us. We would lie on our sides for an hour, staring at each other, smiling, touching fingertips, saying nothing. We would fall asleep. We would wake, make love, then fall asleep again, fingers interlocked. I had no idea if it was morning, night, what day of the week, and I didn’t want to know.

  At one point, while Sidney slept, I sat in a chair at the foot of the bed, drinking a beer, trying to organize my feelings. I’d been awed at first by Sidney’s beauty, I was honest with myself about that, but now it went deeper. This was more than sex, more than love. I’d experienced the power of sex with Lana, and puppy love with a girl or two since, but those were hasty rehearsals for this. This was big, this was going to change me forever, and this might just kill me if I wasn’t careful, because I was already desperate. Already I felt that I’d give anything to hold on to this feeling, this primal energizing force I’d been lacking for nineteen years. I’d always believed that sex and love were the great catalysts, the things that converted a boy into a man, and plenty of people I trusted had intimated as much, but until now it was all in the realm of theory. I’d never really believed how explosive those catalysts could be, how magical it might feel if sex and love occurred in one moment, one person. I’d been a cynic, I realized, but now, as Sidney opened her eyes, as I looked into those bottomless pools of brown, down to the taproots of her soul, I believed that she was capable of effecting a metamorphosis in me, and maybe pulling off a miracle. She could make me a man; more remarkably, she might make me happy.

  When we did get out of bed I would mix a pitcher of martinis and we’d lie on the living room couch, talking. A boyhood spent listening for The Voice was paying dividends at last. I could hear things in Sidney’s voice—her hopes, her fears, the subtexts and master plots of her life. To show her how carefully I was listening, I would tell her story back to her, in my own words, and venture what I thought the meaning might be. She loved this.

  Talking to Sidney about myself, I detected things in my own voice as well. All my life I’d censored myself. Now I said exactly what I felt, blurted it all out to this beautiful woman who listened as ardently as she made love. Caught up in this uncensored spirit, I told Sidney on our fourth or fifth day together that I intended to marry her. We were eating bagels in her kitchen. She stopped chewing and stared.

  “Marry?” she said.

  “Yes,” I said. “I’d like to give you a diamond ring and marry you. Someday.”

  Her eyes widened and she left the room.

  A short while later she said it was time for us to go back into the world. “I’m getting agita,” she said, pulling on a pair of tight jeans.

  “What? Agita?”

  “I need fresh air, Trouble. We have to sign up for classes. Yale? Life? Remember?”

  “Because of what I said? About getting—?”

  “I’ll call you later.”

  I caught the next Amtrak train to New York, then switched at Penn Station to the Long Island Railroad, the local to Manhasset. Uncle Charlie was startled to see me walk through the door at Publicans a week after I’d left for Yale. “Who’s dead?” he said.

  “No one. I just needed to see some friendly faces.”

  He pointed at my chest. I felt better instantly. Then he reached for the gin. I frowned. “No,” I said. “I’m off gin. Please. How about scotch?”

  He looked appalled. Changing my drink? An unthinkable breach of Publicans protocol. But he saw that I was hurting and didn’t press the point. “What’s the pitch?” he asked, pouring.

  “Girl trouble.”

  “Lay it on me.”

  He slid the glass in my direction, as if moving a bishop across a chessboard. I gave him the quick overview, omitting the precipitating event—my gaffe about marriage. “She just threw me out,” I said. “Claimed she had agita.”

  “What the hell is that?”

  “I think it’s Yiddish for nerves.”

  “She Jewish?”

  “No. She just likes words.”

  A man in a red-and-black hunting jacket and an orange hunting cap sat down beside me. “Hey punk,” he said. “How goes the war?”

  “His girlfriend has agita,” Uncle Charlie said.

  “Sorry to hear that.”

  I told Deer Hunter my story, from meeting Sidney to getting the heave-ho. When Uncle Charlie was busy helping other customers I also told Deer Hunter about my clumsy marriage proposal.

  “Whoa,” he said. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. What about your buddy?”

  “Who?”

  “Your friend who was dating this broad. Does he know you fucked her?”

  Uncle Charlie came back and leaned his elbows on the bar, listening.

  “Oh,” I said. “My friend. Yeah, well, he didn’t even like her that much. They were just dating. You know. Casual.”

  “No,” Deer Hunter said. “That’s your problem right there. Broads come, broads go, everyone gets angina. But you backdoored your buddy. You violated the code. You need to make that right.”

  “I think you’re missing the point,” I said.

  I looked to Uncle Charlie for moral support, but he was pointing at Deer Hunter’s chest.

  twenty-four | FATHER AMTRAK

  Sidney’s agita passed and I learned my lesson. I adopted a policy of speaking less, listening more. I went on loving her uncontrollably, desperately, but I tried to be quieter about it.

  I also tried to attack my schoolwork, but it was harder than ever, because of Sidney. I couldn’t concentrate. In lectures and seminars, while the professor nattered on about Berkeley and Hume, I’d stare into the distance, picturing Sidney’s face. When I heard applause I knew that the lecture was over and it was time to go back to my room and sit on the window seat and think about Sidney.

  She created a tricky paradox. If I could win her love, then I could become the man I’d hoped to become when I’d first applied to Yale. But I couldn’t hope to win her love unless I graduated, and to do that I’d have to stop obsessing about her and do my schoolwork, which didn’t seem remotely possible. Sitting in the library, trying with all my might to focus on Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, I looked up and saw Jedd Redux. We hadn’t met since he’d witnessed Bayard catch me at shirt poaching. He offered me a Vantage.

  “Was that you and Sidney walking down York Street the other day?” he said.

  “Yes.
”

  “Are you two—?”

  “Yes.”

  He threw back his head and opened his mouth, as if he were going to scream, but he made no sound.

  “You’re one lucky son of a bitch.”

  He lit my cigarette with a silver lighter that looked as if his great-grandfather had carried it in the trenches of World War I. We smoked. “Seriously,” he said. “Lucky.” Pause. “Lucky lucky lucky.”

  We looked at the book-lined walls. He blew a smoke ring that dangled over my head like a noose.

  “Lucky,” he said.

  At the end of sophomore year my luck was holding. I passed all my classes, barely, and Sidney and I were still together. Better than together. She told me she’d broken things off with all the men in her life and she was seeing only me.

  I went to Arizona to spend the summer, and Sidney went to Los Angeles to attend a program for aspiring filmmakers. I wrote her long love letters. Her replies were neither long nor loving. Quick roundups of her social schedule. She was attending cocktail parties with movie stars, working out with the USC men’s swim team, tooling around Hollywood in a convertible Mercedes. She did visit me one weekend, and managed to bewitch my mother. The first time Sidney left the room my mother stared into her dinner plate.

  “That,” she said, smiling as if she knew a secret, “is the most beautiful girl I’ve ever set eyes on.”

  “I know,” I said glumly. “I know.”

  I brought Sidney to my other home when we returned to Yale that fall. I made sure it was a Saturday night, mid-November, the most festive time of year at Publicans. Standing just inside the door I gave Sidney a quick primer on the major players, pointing out Uncle Charlie, Joey D, Cager, Colt, Tommy, Fast Eddy, Smelly.

  “What does Smelly do?” she asked.

  “He cooks.”

  “The cook is named Smelly. I see.”

  The bar was filled with familiar faces, and family faces. One of the cousins had married and moved away, but McGraw and his four remaining sisters, including Sheryl, were living nearby with Aunt Ruth, who was seated at the center of the bar that night, nursing a cognac. I introduced her to Sidney. “Upper or middle?” Aunt Ruth asked, giving Sidney the once-over.

  “Pardon?” Sidney said.

  “Upper or middle class?” Aunt Ruth asked.

  I covered my face with my hands.

  “Upper,” Sidney said. “I guess.”

  “Good. We need a better class of people in this family.”

  Sheryl was at the bar that night also, and she rushed to Sidney’s side, pulling her from Aunt Ruth, like a rodeo clown saving a cowboy from a charging bull. I pushed down the bar to get us some drinks. Uncle Charlie was working and he’d already seen Sidney. “Hubba-hubba,” he said.

  “And,” I said, “she’s smarter than she is beautiful.”

  He grabbed a scotch bottle by the neck as if it were a chicken he was going to strangle. “Then you know what?” he said. “You’re in deep shit, my friend.”

  As Sidney and I drove back to Yale she stared hard at the road. I asked what was on her mind. She said she could see why the bar had been “special” to me. She turned and showed me her blinding smile, the one that made state troopers give her warnings instead of speeding tickets, but there was something behind it. She saw why the bar had been special to me as a boy, but she couldn’t see the wisdom in continuing to cherish the place as a young man. She may also have been imagining her parents’ faces as they met Joey D and Uncle Charlie.

  Sidney had given up her apartment and was living her senior year in a dorm room. We sat on her bed and talked some more about the evening. “Why does that Dolt guy sound like Yogi Bear?” she asked.

  “Colt? I don’t know. That’s just his voice.”

  “And why’s he called Colt?”

  “Everyone in the bar has a nickname, but Steve never got around to nicknaming Colt, so Colt felt left out, and one night he announced that henceforth he wanted to be called Colt.”

  “Uh-huh. And why does that one guy who looks like a Muppet—”

  “Joey D.”

  “—talk to himself?”

  “When I was a kid I thought he was talking to a pet mouse in his breast pocket.”

  “Hm.”

  Shortly after our trip to the bar Sidney said she needed “time.” Time to catch up on schoolwork, time to plan what she was going to do after graduation. It wasn’t agita, she promised, taking my hand between hers. “Time,” she said. “Just give me a little time to get organized.”

  “Of course,” I said. “Time.”

  Without Sidney, I had nothing but time. I might have done the smart thing and attended class, caught up on schoolwork. Instead I wrote for the Yale Daily News, and haunted Beinecke Library, sifting through collections of letters by Hemingway and Gertrude Stein and Abraham Lincoln. Often I’d spend the whole day in one of Yale’s museums, especially the Center for British Art, where I’d sit and look at the John Singleton Copley portraits of people in colonial America. Their faces, lit by a certain innocence and purity, but also by mischief, reminded me of the faces along the bar at Publicans. It couldn’t be coincidence, I thought, that Copley posed some of his subjects in taverns, or so it appeared to me. I’d sit for long stretches in front of an eighteenth-century Hogarth, A Midnight Modern Conversation, which showed a table in an alehouse and a dozen drinkers laughing and pirouetting and falling to the floor. The painting sometimes made me laugh out loud, and it always made me homesick.

  I left the museum one night and stopped in a corner bar. I drank a scotch. I had with me a copy of the poems of Dylan Thomas. I read some, drank another scotch. On the way back to my room I decided to check out a party I’d heard about. It was in a basement. Fifty students were hovering around a keg while a boy in the corner played a spinet piano. I leaned on the piano and watched.

  He looked at me as he swayed up and down the keyboard.

  “I know you,” he said. “JC, right? Mo, Moo—”

  “Moehringer.”

  “Right. You and Sidney.”

  I nodded.

  “Must be rough,” he said. “She and that grad student. That’s got to suck.” He stopped playing when he saw my face. “Uh-oh,” he said.

  I ran to Sidney’s room. Sleet was falling, the sidewalks were slick, and I was drunk, so I fell. Twice. Wet, bruised, out of breath, I crashed through her door and hit the light switch. She shot upright in bed. She was alone.

  “JR?”

  “Is it true?”

  “JR.”

  “Don’t. Please, please, don’t lie. Just tell me if it’s true.”

  She pulled her knees to her chest and didn’t say anything. I wanted to slap her, interrogate her, force her to give me every detail. How long? How often? Why? But there was no point. I saw the uselessness of it all, the futility of questions. I walked out, leaving her door wide open.

  The train to New York was full and the only seat to be had was in the bar car. I wasn’t complaining. Curled against the window I sipped my scotch and watched Connecticut fly by. In the seat across from me sat a priest. His head was bald, except for a few pipe-cleaner strands on top. His blue eyes were close-set, roofed by fluffy white eyebrows, and fixed on me. I prayed he wouldn’t speak to me.

  “Where you headed?” he asked.

  I turned slowly, as if I had a sprained neck. “Manhasset,” I said. I turned back to the window.

  “Manhasset?” he said. “Where’s that?”

  “Long Island,” I mumbled.

  “Manhasset, Long Island. Has a nice lilt about it. Man-hass-et. Sounds made up.”

  “It is.” This sounded ruder than I intended. I turned to him again. “It’s the home of that lying shrew, Daisy Buchanan.”

  “And her cretinous husband, Tom.” He raised his drink in a silent toast, to me or the Buchanans, I wasn’t sure. “Home for the holidays?”

  “Unscheduled hiatus.”

  “You sound troubled, son.”

&n
bsp; “I just found out Daisy has been two-timing me.”

  “Ah.”

  “Sorry. Bad form, I guess, talking to a priest about a girl.”

  “Nonsense. That’s all I hear about. Love and death.”

  “Oh. Right. Priests and bartenders.”

  “And hairdressers.” He ran his hand across his scalp. “Or so I’m told. Let me guess. First love?”

  “Yes.”

  “‘First love or last love,—which of these two passions is more omnipotent? Which is more fair?’ Longfellow.”

  I smiled. “My grandmother used to recite his poems to me.”

  The priest continued reciting. “‘The star of morning, or the evening star? The sunrise or the sunset of the heart? The hour when we look forth to the unknown and the advancing day consumes the shadows—or that when all the landscape of our lives lies stretched behind us, and familiar places gleam in the distance—And sweet memories’—um—‘and sweet memories’—what’s the line—I’m getting old. Anyway, you get the idea.”

  The priest reached out and gave my knee an affectionate slap.

  “Let me buy you a drink,” he said. “What are you drinking, my boy?”

  He shook the ice cubes in his empty cup like a backgammon player rattling the dice.

  “Scotch,” I said.

  “Of course. What else is there?”

  When he returned I thanked him and asked where he was headed. Religious conference, he said. He was representing his church, which was in some rural New England town I’d never heard of. We talked about religion, and he was delighted to discover I’d recently read Saint Augustine’s Confessions.

  “You must be a Yalie,” he said.

  “For the moment.”

  “You’re not thinking of dropping out!”

  “I think Yale is going to drop me. My grades.”

  “Grades can be brought up. Bright boy like you.”

  “It’s hard, Father. Harder than I expected.”

  “‘The fascination of what’s difficult has dried the sap out of my veins and rent spontaneous joy and natural content out of my heart.’ Yeats.”

  “Yeats must have gone to Yale.”