The Dead Romantics (11)
To forget that I had failed at the one thing I was ever good at. To pretend like tomorrow wasn’t the last day of the best career of my life. To be someone else for a while.
Just for a night.
Someone who didn’t fail.
4
Fated Mates
ROSE WAS LIKE an encyclopedia of the night. She knew exactly what restaurant had the best deconstructed burger, and which warehouses housed the most recent silent rave. (And how to get there.) She knew which cellar jazz bars made the best sidecars and the best diner for 3:00 a.m. hangover cures and the cheapest cocktails at the local artisanal bar where the next Franzen lamented about not having the time to pen his Great American Novel. She came from a small town in Indiana, with only a duffel bag and money stuffed into her shoes, and somehow, she’d made New York City her home in a way I never could.
I think it was the stars. I missed the stars too much. Especially the way they looked from the brick steps of my parents’ front porch.
There really wasn’t a sight like it.
There also wasn’t a sight like whatever murder back alley Rose led me to that night. There were three streetlights, and every single one of them flickered like they were all auditioning for the world’s most cliché horror movie. I followed Rose down the narrow alley, one hand stuck in my purse, around my pepper spray.
“You’re going to murder me,” I said. “That’s it, isn’t it? You want my Gucci crossbody bag.”
She snorted. “I don’t know how many times I have to tell you that it’s fake.”
“You can barely tell.”
“Yeah, if you close your eyes.” Then she stopped at what I realized, a moment later, was a door, and knocked.
“Who are your murder accomplices?” I asked. “Is it Sherrie from HR? Or my new hunky editor—”
The almost-hidden door gave a creak and swung open to reveal a tweed-dressed grad student with small round glasses and gelled-back hair. Rose motioned with her head for us to go inside, and I followed her.
I didn’t know what I expected, but it definitely wasn’t a narrow low-lit bar with wooden round tables. It was crowded, but everyone was whispering, as if they didn’t want to break the mood, so it was surprisingly quiet. Rose found us a table near the back, a single flickering candle in the center. At the front of the bar, where we came in, there was a stage with a microphone and a single amp. The crowd was a strange amalgamation of tweedy-professor types and boho artists who painted themselves naked and pressed their tits to a canvas to make art. Some of those art pieces were on the walls, actually.
“What is this place?” I asked, baffled.
“Colloquialism,” she replied.
“Bless you.”
She rolled her eyes. “A bar, Florence. It’s a bar.”
I looked for a menu on the table, or maybe it had fallen to the ground—but there wasn’t one. “I’m definitely not cool enough for this.”
“You are more than cool enough,” she replied, and when the bartender slipped out from behind the slab of cherry oak that served as a bar to greet us, Rose ordered something that sounded very fancy.
“Oh, I’m good with Everclear—”
Rose put a hand on my arm, giving me a warning look, because the last time we’d gotten drunk on Everclear was in college and it had been dumped into a tub of Jungle Juice. Neither of us remembered how we’d gotten from Bushwick to the Lower East Side that night, but some mysteries were better left unsolved.
I shifted uncomfortably at the table, feeling so incredibly out of my element in a too-tight black dress, ordering a too-expensive cocktail, in a quiet hole-in-the-wall bar full of people who probably all were so much cooler than me. I was half-afraid someone would come up and ask for my artistic credentials, and when I took out my Costco card and a cardboard-printed membership to a smutty book club—
Well.
Much like with Ben Andor, I feared I was not tall enough to ride this ride.
Rose slipped a credit card out from her glittery silver clutch and handed it to the bartender. “Put everything on this, please.”
The bartender took her card with a nod and left. Everything? How long were we going to stay? I guessed it didn’t matter anymore, did it? We could stay all night, or only a few minutes, and I would still wake up tomorrow not knowing how to write that scene. The bartender returned with two very fancy drinks named the Dickinson, and Rose held hers up to cheers with me. I stared at her like she was no longer my roommate, but an alien entity who had assumed my dear Rose’s smokin’-hot body. She gave a one-shouldered shrug. “What? It’s a Mastercard.”
“I thought you were trying to get out of debt.”
“Florence Minerva Day, you deserve someone to take you out and treat you nice once in a while.”
“Are you going to take me back to your place and have your way with me after?” I teased.
“Only if I get to be the little spoon and you let me make you pancakes in the morning before I leave and never call you again.”
“Perfect.”
“Cheers,” she said, raising her cocktail. “To a good night.”
“And a good tomorrow,” I finished.
We clinked our cocktails together. The drink tasted like strawberries and awfully expensive gin. Definitely not the ten-dollar handle I used to buy at the bodega in college. This stuff was dangerous. I took a larger gulp as a woman in a brown shawl stood from one of the tables near the front and made her way toward the microphone.