The Tender Bar: A Memoir

by J. R. Moehringer

  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.

  thirty-nine | THE EDITOR

  I lifted my self-imposed embargo on my mother that same spring. Once again I phoned her regularly from the newsroom. She never asked why I’d stopped phoning, or why I’d started again. She understood, better than I, and picked up where she’d left off, offering encouragement and wisdom. Sometimes I would quote her at the bar—without crediting her, of course—and the men would compliment me on my sagacity.

  Keep writing, my mother said. Keep trying. Maybe if I forgot the Kelly Debacle, she said, the Times would too. This sounded like too much to hope for, but I fol
lowed her advice because I couldn’t think what else to do.

  Each week the Times real estate section ran an obscure feature called “If You’re Thinking of Living In . . .” A different town was highlighted every Sunday, and I proposed a piece about Manhasset. The editors gave me the nod, and for weeks I roamed up and down Plandome Road, interviewing people about my hometown. I was glad to be reporting again, and I enjoyed learning things about Manhasset, like the fact that the Marx Brothers used to go there specifically to get drunk. When I sat down in the newsroom with my notes, however, I was more blocked than when I tried to write the bar novel. Haunted by the voice of Stephen Kelly Jr., compulsively checking and rechecking the spelling of every name and word, I couldn’t get past the first few paragraphs. Eventually I took the story to Publicans on a quiet Sunday and sat with Mapes, polishing my words while he polished his brass letters. I wrote the whole story in longhand at the bar, which may have been why it started and ended there. The final word of the story was “Publicans.”

  It ran on a Sunday in April 1989. When I walked into Publicans that night Steve was waiting. He came toward me, his face unusually red. I thought he looked furious. Maybe I’d misspelled the name of the bar. “Junior!” he shouted.

  “Yes?”

  He gave me his biggest Cheshire smile, the one he saved for his closest friends and his greatest softball victories, and folded me in a hug. “What a nice job,” he said.

  I saw my story spread across the bar, his Heineken holding it down like a paperweight.

  The story was trivial, a dry overview of Manhasset—schools, home prices, that sort of thing—and two mentions of its most important gathering place. But Steve acted as if I’d written Finnegans Wake. He said I had “a way with words,” and I took a step back, knowing that this was one of Steve’s highest compliments. Steve was a word man. It showed in the care he took naming his bar, in naming all of us, and in the crowd his bar attracted. Silver-tongued raconteurs, bullshit artists, florid storytellers. Also, maybe more than all the men, Steve esteemed newspapers, and seeing his gin mill mentioned in the world’s finest newspaper was one of the few good things to happen to him of late. I’d briefly taken his mind off the other Publicans, the dying Publicans, which had all but gone bankrupt. He was so appreciative, so kind, that I got carried away, and told Steve that I hoped to write a novel some day about Publicans.

  He responded with about as much enthusiasm as my mother had when I made the same announcement to her, at about the same spot in the barroom. “Uh-huh,” he said. His reaction puzzled me, and thinking it over later I wondered if Steve believed that Publicans already was a book. Walking through the door always did feel like entering a sprawling work of fiction. Maybe Steve intended that feeling when he first named the bar Dickens. He’d created his own Dickensian world, complete with a Dickensian fog—clouds of cigar and cigarette smoke. He’d even named all the characters. Maybe Publicans was Steve’s Great American Novel and he didn’t see the point of someone writing another novel about it.

  Then again, I thought, maybe Steve just had a lot on his mind.

  The editors liked my Manhasset story, but not quite enough to forget my past sins. I was told that my case would soon be coming up for final review. The secret committee would meet and decide once and for all if J.R. Moehringer was Times material, and to help them in their deliberations I was “asked” to write a one-page letter, addressing the following question: “Why does a Yale graduate have so much trouble spelling?”

  Bob the Cop shook his head when I told him about this humiliating assignment. I was considering writing the secret committee a letter in which I used a few well-chosen four-letter words, each spelled correctly, but he told me to stay cool, do whatever the secret committee asked. Steady as she goes, he said. You’re in the home stretch.

  Working late in the newsroom one night, drafting my I’m-sorry-I’m-such-an-idiot letter to the secret committee, I got a call from Bebe, my barroom-loving friend from college, the only one of my friends who had ever “met” JR Maguire. She invited me out for a drink. We met at a Broadway bar we both liked. She threw her arms around my neck when I walked in. “Let’s get smashed,” she said.

  “Twist my arm.”

  We ordered martinis. They came in glasses as big as upside-down dunce caps. Bebe caught me up on the gossip from our class. I asked about Jedd Redux. She’d seen him recently at a party and he looked swell. While talking she kept one eye on the bartender. Whenever our glasses were half empty, she’d signal him to bring another round.

  “Whoa,” I said. “I haven’t eaten any dinner. I’ll be flat on my back.”

  She told the bartender to ignore me, keep the martinis coming.

  As I finished my third martini she rocked forward and asked, “Are you drunk?”

  “God yes.”

  “Good.” She rocked back. “Sidney’s getting married.”

  There are 206 bones in the human body and I was suddenly conscious of each one. I looked at the floor, then Bebe’s feet, then the bartender, who was standing with his arms folded, eyes narrowed, watching me closely, as if Bebe had warned him ahead of time what was going to happen.

  “Honey, I wasn’t sure if I should tell you,” Bebe said tearfully.

  “No, you did right. Tell me what you know.”

  She knew everything. She heard it all from a friend of Sidney’s best friend. Sidney was marrying Trust-Funder.

  “Have they set a date?”

  “Memorial Day weekend.”

  “Okay. That’s enough. I don’t want to know any more.”

  I wanted to pay my check and hurry to Publicans.

  The Friday before Memorial Day weekend I was separating carbons in the newsroom, thinking about Sidney and how to survive the next seventy-two hours, when I looked up. Beside me stood the secretary for the editor in charge of the training program. “He was just looking for you,” she said, pointing her pencil at the editor’s glass office.

  “I’ve been right here.”

  “I looked. You weren’t.”

  “I must have gone for sandwiches.”

  “That’s a shame. He wanted to see you.” She widened her eyes to indicate that the editor’s desire to see me was important and without precedent. “But he’s gone now. Left for the holiday weekend. Are you free Tuesday?”

  “Is it good news?”

  Her eyes still wider, she pursed her lips and turned an invisible key.

  “It is good news?” I said.

  She turned the key again and threw it over her shoulder. Then she gave me a warm and congratulatory smile.

  “I’m going to be promoted!”

  “Tuesday,” she said.

  How perfect. How fitting. On the same weekend Sidney became Mrs. Trust-Funder, I would become a reporter at the New York Times. If only I’d been at my desk when the editor wanted me, I might have spent the weekend reliving the happy scene, which would have helped blot out the recurring image of Sidney walking down the aisle.

  No, I told myself, this will be better. The anticipation will be sweeter.

  It was Game Six all over again when I announced at Publicans that I’d been promoted. The men threw napkins in the air and cheered. They tousled my hair and begged Uncle Charlie for the privilege of buying the reporter his first drink as a reporter. Steve insisted my promotion had something to do with my story about Manhasset, which he kept referring to as my “story about Publicans.”

  I decided to spend my last weekend as a copyboy visiting college friends in New Haven. Still woozy from the big celebration at Publicans I caught a train early Saturday morning. I felt sad when the train stopped in Sidney’s hometown, but it was a sadness I could manage. Things were working out for both of us. We’d been traveling different roads, and now we’d reached our separate destinations at the same moment. Everything made sense. Everything had happened for a reason. Had I been wooing Sidney the last three years, fighting to wrest her from Trust-Funder, I wouldn’t have had the energy necessa
ry to become a reporter at the Times. Still, I thought, she must look lovely walking down that aisle, her blond hair up, her face breathtaking as Trust-Funder lifts the veil. I couldn’t imagine how much more agonizing these visions would have been if my own special day weren’t hours off.

  Before seeing my old friends at Yale, I visited my oldest and steadiest friend, my spreading elm. I sat beneath the tree, drinking a cup of coffee, feeling how far I’d come. I walked around campus, pausing at every bench and stone wall where I’d despaired as an undergrad. I visited the courtyards and street corners where Sidney and I had laughed or kissed or planned our future. I listened to the bells of Harkness, ate lunch at my old bookstore café, and I felt more grateful, more alive, than the day I’d graduated, because I considered this graduation, from copyboy to reporter, a greater miracle.

  Tuesday morning I presented myself to the editor’s secretary at nine sharp. She made a motion for me to wait, then walked into the editor’s office. He was on the phone. I saw her point to me. The editor smiled and waved. Come in, come in.

  He motioned to a seat across from his desk. “Overseas,” he whispered, pointing to the phone. I sat.

  The editor in charge of the training program was a former foreign correspondent, and trotting around the world for many years had given him a worldly air. Though bald, his scalp was deeply tanned and the vestigial hair around the perimeter of his head was thick and yellow. He made baldness chic, enviable. His suit was custom-made—London, no doubt—and his shoes, chocolate brown lace-ups, had clearly been hand-sewn in Italy. Someone had once told me that this editor had been buying his shoes from the same old cobbler in Italy for years. I wondered if this was true. I’d also heard rumors about his affair with a notoriously trampy movie star, and his profound disenchantment when he discovered that her breasts were fake.