Homesick for Another World(58)
For the six weeks since the incident at Schoolbells, I’d limited my drinking to Fridays and Saturdays, and only beer from bottles, and only alone in my room, safely cast away in my dark corner of the flophouse. As a result of this discipline, I was sleeping better. My morning jogs were faster. My small talk at work was funnier and more enjoyable. When I met Britt Wendt, I wasn’t bloated or burpy. My eyes were clear. I was in prime condition. Such self-improvement was worthy of reward, I thought. And it was Christmas, after all. I stopped in front of Iga, a Polish bar across the street from Schoolbells. I’d passed by it countless times, but I’d never been inside. A buzzer sounded. I pushed on the door.
The place was bigger than I thought it would be. There were a dozen tables with red checkered tablecloths and worn metal chairs with black vinyl seats. The floor was parquet, and my footsteps squeaked as I walked haltingly toward the bar. There was no music on, nothing. A small cat slunk by, then rubbed itself against a stack of old newspapers. A radiator hissed and sputtered. The only light came from neon signs on the walls, and an old light-up beer advertisement with a broken clock. The back wall of the room was covered by a dark curtain. In the corner by the door to the toilet sat a large potted plant and a statuette of Adonis or David or Hercules or somebody, a Santa hat on its head. A middle-aged woman stood behind the bar, smoking a cigarette. Otherwise the place was empty.
“Jewish?” asked the woman, waving her cigarette smoke around with a thick, grubby hand. She seemed a little drunk to me. She asked again. “No Christmas for you. So, Jewish?”
“Well, half,” I said.
She put a cocktail napkin on the bar. Her face under the strange pink light was yellowish and waxy, her hair purple, slightly bouffant, but she was not unattractive for a woman her age. “Half is good. You have both sides. What will you? Beer?” She lowered her voice mockingly. “Ho ho. You are a beer man?” I sat on the stool, put my plastic bag from the bodega on my lap. “Or for your Chrystus half, maybe we celebrate tonight. You know slivovitz?” She didn’t wait for an answer. She poured out two shots from an old water bottle. “This is coming from Warsaw. Homemade,” she said, sliding my glass toward me. “The best.”
“Thank you,” I said, smelling it.
“Very good. Na zdrowie. Ha!” She swallowed hers in one gulp, then coughed and belched. Her eyes filled with tears. “Now you,” she said, pointing her thumb at me.
I drank mine and coughed and cried, too. The stuff was like perfume mixed with battery acid and lighter fluid. She gave me a pint glass of water and offered me a cigarette. I took one. We sat quietly, smoking, me fingering the plastic bag in my lap, her tapping a finger on the bar in time to nothing. After a few minutes, she blew her nose and stared into the crumpled tissue. “I see blood,” she said softly, then tucked the tissue into the cuff of her sweater.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
She snorted and poured out two more shots. We drank and coughed and cried again, the woman eyeing me comically, her gaze distant and soft now in the weird light. My eyes paced the shiny surface of the bar. The cat purred. Then the woman went to the bathroom. A few minutes passed. I thought to leave, to go home to check my e-mail. If Britt Wendt had written to me, I’d have to be careful not to write back too quickly. The last thing I wanted to do was send her a drunken e-mail. Then I pictured Lacey Freeman’s buffet spread—roasted suckling pig with an apple in its mouth, whiskey-laced yams, German chocolate cake. I was hungry. I ate a piece of jerky and listened as the woman flushed the toilet and blew her nose again. When she returned, she poured out two more shots, and this time when we drank them we winced and moaned, but we didn’t cry.
“You like it here?” she asked. “Nobody comes here. But you? You like it?”
“It’s great,” I said.
She nodded, folded her arms, and rested her elbows on the bar. Swaying absentmindedly, she started singing an out-of-tune folk song, then caught herself and laughed. She seemed deep in thought for a while. I can’t really say what her deal was. It was like I had walked into some kind of cosmic warp zone. Then all of a sudden she looked up at me. We locked eyes. When I blinked, she smiled cruelly and squinted, as though calling me a coward. What nerve, I thought, to try to take me down, her only customer. I felt insulted by her bravado. And so we had a staring contest, like a game of chicken, to see who was the least penetrable, whose mind would conquer whose. I cleared my throat and stared long and hard. I felt my face go cold, my teeth clench. Her face remained relaxed, eyes open wide. Even when she puffed on her cigarette and the smoke rose up, she didn’t blink. She was amazing. There was nowhere to hide in the eyes of this woman. I could see that she was reading me, and my challenge was to resist her taunting expressions and try to read her even more deeply, with even more scorn and disgust than she had found for me. I tried as hard as I could, but all I came up with was my own foolishness. I blushed. It was like I was naked before her, holding my own limp dick in my hand.
She sucked her teeth and stubbed her cigarette out in the ashtray, still staring. It was clear that she had beaten me. But I didn’t want to look away. Nor did I want her to. I enjoyed the attention, the scrutiny. So much of my life I’d been faking my reactions, claiming to myself and others that I liked what I liked because I believed it was good for me, while in fact I didn’t like that shit at all. This woman could see that I wanted to be ruined. I wanted someone—Britt Wendt, maybe—to come and destroy me. “Murder me” my eyes said to the woman. She laughed, as though she heard my thoughts and found them ridiculous. I laughed back at her, a false, triumphant laugh, as though she were a bitter ex-lover come to dance on my grave and mine was the zombie hand rising up out of the earth to strangle her.