The Tender Bar: A Memoir

by J. R. Moehringer

  At the restaurant I ordered a scotch. Sidney ordered a vodka and tonic and came straight to the point. She apologized for hurting me again. But this apology was different. It didn’t sound like the standard prelude to reconciliation that I was expecting. She talked about Trust-Funder—his family, his yacht, his sense of humor—as if he was more than a friend, more than a fling. She cared about him, she said, though she cared about me too. She was torn.

  I couldn’t bear to hear so many details about Trust-Funder. All the scotch at Publicans wouldn’t be enough to erase the details Sidney was putting into my head. To change the subject I asked what she was doing. Working for a small ad agency, she said, and loving it. Apparently she’d abandoned her dreams of architecture and filmmaking. She asked what I was doing. I told her about my novel, the working title of which was Tales of a Wayside Gin Mill. I’d written eighteen pages so far. I told her about Smelly heaving a meat cleaver at someone in the bar, how the blade stuck in the wall like a tomahawk. I thought I might open the book with that. I knew that Publicans made Sidney uneasy, but I didn’t have anything else to talk about, and I was trying to avoid the subject I knew would make her sick. Sensing that I was hiding something, she bore down.

  “What are you doing for money?” she asked.

  “I’ve got a job.”

  “Where?”

  “Nowhere. It’s hardly worth mentioning, just a stopgap kind of thing.”

  “JR. Sweetheart. Where are you working?”

  “The Home Fashions department of Lord & Taylor.”

  “What fashions?”

  “Ho-home.”

  The waiter came to take our order and Sidney waved him away. “We’re going to need more time,” she told him. “A lot more time.” She straightened her silverware, refolded her napkin and stared at the white tablecloth as though it were the first page of a speech she was about to give. Then she delivered not so much a speech as a lamentation. Where’s your ambition? What became of your hopes and goals? What was the point of going to Yale? Why in the hell are you selling candles and crystal?

  “Because,” I said miserably, “I’m good at it.”

  “Have you applied to newspapers? Have you sent out your articles from the Yale Daily News? Have you contacted the New York Times?”

  “New York—? Please. You’re cut off. No more vodka for you.”

  “You’ve always talked about the Times. You’ve always said the Times was your dream.”

  “I have?” I wasn’t aware. “Look. The Times is way out of my league. The Times is like—you. It was a miracle I got into Yale, a miracle I met you. Lightning doesn’t strike three times.”

  “You have to stick your neck out in this life, Trouble.”

  “I stuck my neck out. With you. Look where that got me.” I scrunched my head into my shoulders. She laughed.

  After dinner we went for a walk on Madison Avenue, looking in the windows of the shops. Sidney took my hand, pressed herself against me. I hated myself for how much I wanted her.

  Back at her apartment we lay on the floor of her living room, talking, mostly about books. She was reading more than she had at Yale, she said, and discovering a whole new group of exciting young writers. I envied every writer she named, less because they were talented and published than because they had impressed Sidney. I also suspected they weren’t her discoveries but Trust-Funder recommendations. I rolled across the floor toward Sidney and kissed her. Her lips were softer than I remembered. I undid her blouse. I cupped her breast, nudged her knees apart with my leg. She undid my belt and ground against me and started to say ooh and yes. Abruptly she stopped and pulled away. “Wait,” she said. “Tonight’s been lovely. Let’s not ruin it.”

  “How will this ruin it?”

  “I need to go slow.”

  A voice in my head told me Sidney wanted to go slow because I was hanging out at Publicans and working at Lord & Taylor. If I’d walked in the door talking about my new job on Wall Street, we’d already be naked. I jumped to my feet. Dizzy. The room was spinning. I’d had too much to drink. And yet not nearly enough. Sidney jumped up, caught me by the arm, asked me to stay so she could explain. I pulled my arm free. If I left right then I could salvage some pride. More important, I could catch the 1:19 and be at Publicans before last call.

  twenty-eight | TIM

  The bar was packed. I squeezed between a quartet of salesmen complaining about their bosses, or their bonuses, I couldn’t tell, and a man whose wife had recently left him for another woman. Uncle Charlie had his hands full, advising them all at once. When he saw me, saw the look on my face, he snapped his head back as if someone had waved smelling salts under his nose.

  “Who’s dead?”

  “Me. I just had dinner with Sidney.”

  “Bitches,” he said, slamming a Dewars bottle on the bar. “They’re all bitches.”

  The salesmen and the cuckold grunted in solidarity.

  Uncle Charlie poured, and poured, and set before me a glass brimming with scotch. A Trevi Fountain of scotch. He then started opening bottles of beer for the salesmen and lost track of me. I looked around the barroom. Someone else might have seen nothing more than a random crowd of drinkers, but I saw my people. Kith and kin. Fellow travelers. Every sort of person was there—stockbrokers and safecrackers, athletes and invalids, mothers and supermodels—but we were as one. We’d all been hurt by something, or somebody, and so we’d all come to Publicans, because misery loves company, but what it really craves is a crowd.

  Uncle Charlie turned again to me. “Okay,” he said, “let’s hear it.”

  I took a deep breath. Bad idea. Oxygen, combined with the scotch, made me sad again—and mumbly. Uncle Charlie told me later that I said something like, “Whenever someone dies, people talk about life being fragile, but fuck that, seems to me love is the fragile thing, it’s hard to kill someone but love dies faster than fresh-cut flowers, is what I think, mumble mumble, fucking mumble.” Uncle Charlie didn’t know how to reply, but he didn’t have a chance to reply, because I’d inadvertently set off a free-for-all. Men began voicing their opinions about love and women from every direction.

  A man wearing a snazzy seersucker suit said love was no different than other intoxications. “All euphoria is followed by depression,” he said. “What goes up—down. The measure of how drunk you are is how much pain you’re in the next day—am I right? Same goes for love. You pay through the nose for every orgasm.”

  “Thanks,” Uncle Charlie said. “It’s going to take me a week to get that image out of my head.”

  A man beside Seersucker, whose hair looked like a large tobacco leaf spread across his scalp, stepped forward. “Okay, here’s the deal on beautiful women,” Tobacco Leaf said. “Beautiful women are often lonely, but never alone. See, they always have a boyfriend, so even if they’re vulnerable, they’re never available. It’s one of life’s conundrums.”

  Uncle Charlie nodded. “Conundrums,” he said.

  I heard a voice behind me. When I turned no one was there. I looked down. Level with my navel was a large aquiline nose. Attached to the nose was a man with piercing blue eyes and cheeks dented by deep Shirley Temple dimples. In an incongruous basso this dimpled imp asserted that women were more “evolved” than men, therefore more capable of contradictory emotions. They could hate you and love you at the same time, he said. With men, he said, it’s all or nothing at all.

  Uncle Charlie hummed a few bars of “All or Nothing at All.” “Half a love never was dear to me,” he said to Dimpled Imp.

  A fourth man, with a forehead so large and blank that I felt an urge to write something on it, chimed in that if women were more evolved, it was only in the sense that extraterrestrials were more evolved. “Ever notice the peripheral vision broads have?” he said. “A man sees a woman, say, on the train, he stares like a bird dog staring at a dead duck. He can’t help himself. But a woman can size you up without turning her head. When you’re staring at a woman, she knows, pal, she know
s, and she’s staring right back, even if it looks like she’s reading her paper. They’re aliens, I tell you.”

  Uncle Charlie grumbled his agreement and pointed at Forehead’s chest.

  “The other thing about women that no one likes to talk about,” Seersucker said to Tobacco Leaf, Dimpled Imp and Forehead, “is how they disappear. Like phantoms.” Sometimes, Seersucker confessed, when he saw a beautiful woman, he followed her for a block or two, just to see where she was going. Was she married? Was she meeting a lover for an afternoon tryst? Was she shopping for underwear? Invariably the woman ducked into a doorway or a store, and when Seersucker followed, zap, she was gone.

  “You sick fuck,” said an off-duty cop drinking a Spanish coffee. “Do you have any idea how many creeps like you I collar every day?”

  Seersucker, Tobacco Leaf, Dimpled Imp and Forehead all looked at their feet, ashamed.

  “Know who’s a very unattractive woman?” Uncle Charlie said. “Sigourney Weaver.”

  “I love her!” Seersucker said. “I’d leave my wife and kids for her.”

  “You’d leave your wife and kids for Earl Weaver,” Tobacco Leaf said.

  “You’re not serious about Sigourney Weaver,” Uncle Charlie said.

  “Dead serious,” Seersucker said.

  “He looks serious,” Dimpled Imp said.

  Uncle Charlie lifted his hands off the bar as though it were a hot stove. He studied the cocktail glasses hanging over the bar, trying to choose the right glass to break over Seersucker’s head. “In that case,” he said to Seersucker, “there can be only one ineluctable conclusion. You don’t mind if I say ‘ineluctable,’ do you? If you think Sigourney Weaver is sexy then you are a homosexual.”

  I too thought Sigourney Weaver was sexy, and I liked her name, a stage name chosen from a guest list in The Great Gatsby. Uncle Charlie was so indignant, however, that I didn’t make a sound. He railed on about the “unfuckability” of Sigourney Weaver, then whammed his hand on the bar. Case closed. None of us was allowed to date Sigourney Weaver. And if we disobeyed, if any of us did date Sigourney Weaver, ever, we wouldn’t be served in Publicans. We then debated who was the quintessence of womanhood. Which siren could there be no disagreement about, among any group of men? A straw poll was held, Elisabeth Shue won, though an old-timer with ears like apricots kept insisting that we were shortchanging Myrna Loy.

  “Enough about broads,” Uncle Charlie said. “It’s depressing. I haven’t had sex since the Cuban Missile Crisis.”

  The conversation shifted from women to baseball, a frequent segue at Publicans. Uncle Charlie began an impassioned disquisition on the subject of “those other fickle bitches—the Metropolitans.” The Mets had clinched the National League East, and Uncle Charlie analyzed for us their chances in the playoffs and the Series. As Mets fans we were eager for his predictions, but just as he was getting warmed up a rowdy gaggle of college girls at the end of the bar held their empty glasses over their heads and shouted, “Can we get some service?”

  “The aliens are thirsty,” Seersucker muttered.

  Uncle Charlie went to help the girls. I turned to my right, where a man about ten years older than I was leaning against the bar, reading a book. He had large black eyes, a bushy black moustache, and wore a smart black leather coat, very fashionable, very expensive. Handsome in a hard-to-believe, almost preposterous way, he held a martini glass as if it were a thorn-covered rose.

  “Hey there,” I said. “What are you reading?”

  “Rilke.”

  I introduced myself. His name was Dalton. He was a lawyer—or said he was. He’d just gotten back from a ’round-the-world trip—or said he had. He wrote poetry—or said he did. Nothing he said seemed true, because he flatly refused to give any details, like what kind of law he practiced, where he’d traveled, or what kind of verse he wrote. All kinds of law, he said impatiently. Somewhere in the Far East, he said, waving his hand. Just your basic poetry, he said, adding, “Asshole.” I thought his boldness, his vagueness, his black leather jacket, and his James Bond handsomeness, meant he must be a spy.

  For someone so guarded Dalton turned out to be quite a talker. As long as the subject wasn’t himself, he had a wide range of opinions he wished to share. Better than anyone at Publicans he understood how to keep the conversational shuttlecock from hitting the ground. We talked about art, movies, poetry, food, and we talked about talking. We agreed that Publicans was paradise for talkers. At most bars, Dalton said, people talk to justify drinking—at Publicans they drink to justify talking. I told him that Thomas Jefferson and Montaigne and Cicero all thought conversation the manliest art. I said that I thought conversation was still the best way we had of knowing each other. He seized my hand and shook it. “You said it!” he cried. “You said a mouthful, Asshole.”

  When Dalton asked why I was so dressed up, I told him I’d gone into the city to have my ex-girlfriend remove my heart from my chest and eat it in front of me. He shoved his book into my sternum. “You need to meet my friend Mr. Rilke,” he said. “Rilke says, ‘We are not to know why this and that masters us.’ Rilke says, ‘Sex is difficult; yes. But they are difficult things with which we have been charged. . . .’”

  I wrote these and other lines on a napkin, along with the random and certifiable observations of Seersucker & Co. At closing time I felt fine. Sidney was a blur, like something that had happened decades before. I drank the last of my scotch, slammed the glass on the bar and pointed at Uncle Charlie’s chest.

  “What the?” Uncle Charlie said.

  I looked down. I’d shattered my glass.

  “Leave it, sport,” he said, seeing the look on my face. “Go home.”

  “Yes,” Dalton said, looking down at his leather coat, which I’d splashed with scotch. “By all means, Asshole. Go home.”

  I reeled down the sidewalk to Grandpa’s house and passed out on the bicentennial sofa. Waking at dawn I did an impetuous thing. I gathered all my articles from Yale and put them, along with a hastily typed résumé, into an envelope addressed to the New York Times. I’d show Sidney. And when the Times turned me down I’d forward the rejection letter to her. Dropping the envelope into the mailbox outside Publicans, I continued on to Lord & Taylor, where I sold more than one thousand dollars’ worth of merchandise, winning a silver letter opener, which I contemplated plunging into my heart.

  A few days later I was shaving, getting ready for my shift at Lord & Taylor. Grandma came to the bathroom door. “Pat died,” she said.

  Pat? Pat died years ago. I squinted at Grandma’s reflection in the mirror.

  “Uncle Pat,” she said. “Pat Byrne.”

  She meant the father of my other cousins, the boys Grandma had always held up as “perfect gentlemen.”

  “Those poor boys,” she said, wiping her eyes with the towel I handed her. “Nine boys without a father. Imagine.”

  The church was hot, airless, overflowing with people. Grandma and I sat pressed together in a back pew and watched the Byrne sons carrying their father’s casket. Each son had slicked-back hair, pinkish cheeks, and great wads of muscle under his suit. They were all from the same mold, they all looked like their father, though one son seemed to stand apart. He even seemed to shoulder most of the weight of the casket. My heart ached for him, for all the Byrnes, and yet I wanted to leave. I wanted to run to Publicans, talk with Dalton about Montaigne, drink away all thoughts of fathers and death. But after the service Grandma insisted I drive her to the Byrne house.

  We sat in the living room with Uncle Pat’s widow, Aunt Charlene. She was my mother’s first cousin, my first cousin once removed, but I addressed her as Aunt Charlene, as I always had. When I was a boy Aunt Charlene seemed to sense the storm of thoughts blowing through my head, and she spoke to me with a kindness that made me instantly calmer. She was no different that day. We talked for a long time, but I remember only one subject we covered. Fathers. She confided in me that she worried how her sons would cope without their fat
her. I sensed that she wanted me to tell her something helpful, impart some wisdom about being a fatherless son, but I had none to give.

  Just then Aunt Charlene’s son Tim, the strongest pallbearer, stepped forward. He apologized for interrupting. He shook my hand, accepted my condolences. His hand dwarfed mine. He was exactly my age but twice my size. He’d just graduated from Syracuse, where he’d played football, and his arms were the width of my legs. He spoke with the kind of blunt Long Island accent I’d worked hard to lose, but listening to him I wished I could get it back. His accent made him sound tough.

  He asked if Aunt Charlene needed anything. Drink? Food? He held her hand as he asked. He was so sweet with his mother that Grandma looked at him with a mix of disbelief and adoration. Tim bent down and gave Aunt Charlene a kiss, then went off to get her a drink, fix her a sandwich, make sure the guests were comfortable. Grandma stared after him, then turned to me, her eye twitching, as if batting out a message in Morse code.

  She didn’t need to say it.

  Real men take care of their mothers.

  twenty-nine | TIMESMAN

  Dora answered the phone at the sales desk while I was with a customer. Above my fraudulent spiel about the candles and soaps I heard Dora telling the caller I was busy and couldn’t possibly be disturbed. “Who?” she shouted into the phone. “New York Times?”

  I sprinted to the sales desk and ripped the phone from Dora.

  “Hello?” I said. “Hello?”

  It was a woman from the personnel department at the Times. Her name was Marie. In the weeks since I’d sent my clips to the Times, I’d forgotten putting the number for Lord & Taylor on my résumé. It had seemed safer than the number at Grandpa’s, where someone might think a caller was trying to get down a bet. Marie said my clips had been read by an editor, who liked them. Half of me wanted to scream. The other half wondered which wise guy from Publicans was doing a pretty fair falsetto and pranking me. Smelly—is that you? But this Marie person kept using words Smelly wouldn’t know, so I decided she was the real thing. The Times offered a training program for recent college graduates, she said. You started as a copyboy, but you could work your way up to a position as a full-fledged reporter. Was I interested? I tried to think of the perfect way to say that I was. I wanted to sound casual, but not too casual. Eager, but not overeager. I gripped the phone tighter and looked at Dora. No help. I looked at the customer I’d just abandoned. Less help. She was tapping her foot, checking her watch. I decided to keep it simple. “I’m interested,” I said to Marie.