Big Swiss(90)
“Keith comes from a family of twelve called the Hickeys. They’ve been around forever. They’re clannish, high on themselves, high on each other, very us-against-the-world, except they all suck. But Keith—he got away. He grew up refinishing furniture for one of the antique dealers in town and then suddenly he was calling himself a designer and making tables for rich people. Someone married him—blond, leggy, out of his league—and they moved to the city. He had clients in the Hamptons and on Nantucket. Famous people, supposedly. He’d come back to Hudson every so often to brag and show off. Like all the Hickeys, he’s really hard to listen to. You just want to walk away. I’m guessing he was making decent money but at the end of the day, he was still a Hickey, so I wasn’t surprised when I heard he beat up his wife. And then, when his wife left him for a woman, he went off the deep end. He’s been in and out of prison ever since. You’d think he’d leave, or move out of state, but he’s a Hickey, so he’s here to stay. And then there’s Vera, one of the younger sisters, who was obsessed with Keith, visiting him in prison every week, telling people he’d been framed. I’m always suspicious of people who openly worship their families. Protecting your family—fine. But blatant reverence? Seems like a cover-up, or maybe it’s just a sign of stupidity…”
Eyes closed, Greta felt like she was eavesdropping on a conversation Sabine was having with herself. It poured out in an unfiltered stream, and she knew that she would miss this aspect of working for Om, the inherent surprise of receiving information she hadn’t asked for, or hadn’t known she’d been seeking.
She drifted off and immediately started dreaming of feet, an old motif. A man’s bare feet climbing over rocks, crossing a creek. The same feet, paler, slightly magnified, floating underwater. Whose feet were these? They were resting in her lap now, cold, heavy, covered in hickeys left by leeches, and she thought they must belong to Keith.
17
Now that she was officially single and unemployed, no longer in thrall to Big Swiss or a confidentiality agreement, she was free to explore, go wherever she wanted, talk to whomever she pleased, and so why was she standing here, of all places, in a narrow alley between two buildings?
To her right stood Cousin’s, one of the oldest and least celebrated bars in town. The outside reminded her of the long ash on Grandma’s cigarette: gray walls, dirty white trim, red neon sign in the window. She had the feeling she might get burned if she stepped inside, that her presence would be unwelcome, that she would be knocking over the ashtray, so to speak, which, as she could see through the dark glass, was overflowing with crushed butts, or at any rate a bunch of gray geriatrics sitting on stools made of marbled beige pleather. She imagined herself sitting among them, sipping a vodka soda and smoldering, wondering if she should finally extinguish herself.
On the other side of the alley, Cousin’s antithesis: Lil’ Deb’s Oasis, a queer restaurant and destination, welcoming and inclusive, the warmest lap in town but also as wet and alive as a jungle. Their wine descriptions were the best poetry in town, and the place was overflowing with pastels, pineapples, plantains, and performers, and here and there a pop of pink neon. She got the feeling she might drown in gender fluids if she stepped inside, or that her own gender, not all that solid to begin with, might deliquesce like fungi and stain the pink counter stool, but that it might be good for her, just what she needed. She stared at the bright fruit painted on the side of the building and wondered if she should cut her bangs.
Of course, she was more inclined to find friends in the fruit bowl than the ashtray, but would she fit in? She’d never claimed an identity for the same reasons she’d never gotten tattoos: she couldn’t imagine settling on anything. In the early nineties, when she’d had the energy for such things, she’d flirted with the idea of getting avocado halves tattooed on her elbows and embracing her bisexuality, but it had all been so rigid back then, so black-and-white, such a commitment, and avocados and bisexuals weren’t as cool as they were now, and only seemed to come from California. No one had wanted them on their toast, certainly. It was a consistency thing. They were treated with apprehension at best, or else outright discrimination from both the straight and gay communities. But now that she was oldish, the crowd in there youngish, and it was finally acceptable to be gayish, she might as well sit at the counter and eat some octopus. Right?
She walked into the ashtray instead. The drop ceiling was lit up with strings of colored lights—Christmas in late June—and there were a few small TVs showing harness racing, and a large flat-screen playing a boxing match. Everything was coated in sticky dust. Most of the stools were occupied at the horseshoe-shaped bar, but she found an empty one along the curve.
No one acknowledged her, not even the bartender, the only other woman there. “Caught Up in You” started playing through the speakers, and Greta studied the bartender for nearly the entire song, unnoticed. Her strawberry blonde hair had long white roots, and she wore low-rise jeans and a pink T-shirt with a desert-island cartoon printed on the front—a tiny island with a single palm tree, no castaways—over which ICELAND was printed in frosty blue letters. She was maybe fifty. Greta spent a little too long wondering if her shirt was a meaningless novelty, or if it was about climate change, or if she’d actually traveled to Iceland, and if so, what she’d done there. She had a habit of resting her hands on her hips when she talked to her customers, all of whom resembled old newspapers, and of laughing at her own jokes. Her laugh was manic and grating.