Bob nodded and looked up at the female bartender as shepoured his whiskey. She reminded him of someone and now he knew who it was. Chrissie Hynde, the singer and guitarist from the Pretenders. Black hair, bangs cut straight. Sassy, self-assured, interesting-looking rather than pretty. High cheekbones, narrow, slightly slanting eyes. A bit too much mascara. Russian genes? Long, thin limbs. Tight jeans she knew she looked good in. A baggy T-shirt, meaning she had nothing there worth promoting. No problem, Bob had always been more of aleg-and-ass man.Sure, the half-closed venetian blinds in the bar blocked the morning sunlight, but he could make out the lines marking her face. She looked like she’d lived a bit. Mid-thirties going on forty. Good. Gave him more of a chance.
Bob took a sip and hissed through his teeth again. The sign on the sidewalk outside the bar advertised Happy Hour, but just for a handful of whiskey brands, and you take what you can get. Bob coughed.
“Liza. It is Liza, right?”
“Whatever,” she said and yawned as she picked up the empty beer glass of a customer who had just left the bar.
“That’s what the guy who was just here called you.”
“Well, that’s all right then.”
“Okay,” said Bob and took another sip. “I know you’ve heard this before, Liza, but you know what? My wife doesn’t understand me.”
Liza came back at him without missing a beat: “And there was me hoping you didn’t have one.”
Bob smiled stiffly. “You get tips for that line of yours, honey?”
“You get cunt for yours, honey?”
Bob looked thoughtfully at her expressionless, stony face. “If you want a ballpark figure, and by cunt you mean the whole way, then we’re talking—”
“Forget it,” she interrupted. “Let’s just say never mind aboutthe tip so long as I don’t have to be…” She mouthed the wordcunt,then turned her back on him to rinse a cloth in the sink.
“Fair enough, Liza. But just for the record, my wife really doesn’t understand me. For a long time she understood everything, and then it stopped. Suddenly she couldn’t make me out at all.”
Liza gazed longingly in the direction of the tables where the only other two customers were sitting, as though hoping they would give her something else to do other than stand and listen to this. Bob moved his right hand toward his jacket pocket. The No Smoking law had been in place for the last ten years, but after a drink or two old habits took over and he could still find himself reaching for the cigarette pack that wasn’t there. It hadn’t been there since that evening twelve years ago when they’d met. He’d been sitting minding his own business, listening while a colleague hypothesized about what turned the ladies on: it was Bob’s French inhaling, the way he slipped the smoke out of his mouth and at the same time drew it up into his nostrils. That showed muscular coordination at the same time as there was something vulgar about it, the man said. Something suggesting an unbridled and dark sexuality. That was the moment another colleague entered the bar with this woman. He’d introduced her, her name was Alice, she was a psychologist, a couple of inches taller than Bob and insanely good-looking. So good-looking Bob immediately crossed her off his list. Another of his pickup rules involved setting realistic goals, and Alice was obviously way out of his league. On top of that—and this was a practical rather than a moral hindrance—she was on a date with a colleague. And anyway, this colleague had already warned her about him, she knew his nickname was One-Night Bob, and even before Alice got the first drink down she’d asked him straight out about it. Not, like the guys, asking him how he did it, but asking him why. Why did he have to have all thesewomen he didn’t really want? Because she was a psychologist, and because anyway he’d already made up his mind she was out of his league, he decided to tell her as honestly and openly as he could, and not give a damn about how bad it would make him look. He said it probably came from having a weak bond with his mother, that he hadn’t been loved enough as a child, and that this gave him a compulsion to seek out intimacy and recognition, at the same time as he didn’t dare to risk a closer relationship for fear of being rejected. And that, as well as all that, it was exciting and pleasurable to fuck new women. He asked her what she made of this. She said he seemed self-obsessed and radiated a deep loneliness, and that she didn’t like men who smoked and had it never occurred to him that the smell would get into the fibers of his cashmere coat? Bob then embarked on an intense lecture on the subject of the difference between the goat hair of his coat and camel hair generally, segueing into an equally intense lecture about how “Purple Rain” was so much more than the clichéd rock ballad people thought it was, that when the last verse was over the song wasn’t even halfway through. After that came five minutes of a brilliant, howling guitar solo, an implosion, followed by two minutes of beautiful, delirious anarchy. He got the bartender to put the record on and sang along with it, doing the guitar parts too, dancing like Axl Rose. Alice looked as though she didn’t know whether to laugh or throw up. A month later they were a couple. And from that day on Bob hadn’t cast so much as a glance at other women, she’d transformed him, she’d kissed the frog. Until three months ago. Now—twelve years on—the frog was out hopping again.
“If you really want to know, she’s left me,” said Bob.
“I don’t want to know.”
“No, well, now you know anyway. Isn’t that actually part of your job? To listen and pretend to understand?”
“No. But okay, she’s dumped you and I can’t say I’m surprised.”
“No?” Bob took hold of the lapels of his cashmere coat andparted them, heard how his speech was a little slurred. “Do I look to you like a guy ladies would dump, Liza?”
“Dunno. But when someone comes in here in the middle of the morning and drinks like an amateur then it’s a good guess they’ve been kicked out either by their lady or by their boss. And from the way you’re dressed you look like a guy who has a job to go to.”
“Jesus, you ought to be a detective.”
“You trying to tell me I don’t make it as a bartender?”
Bob laughed. “Tough lady.” He held out his hand. “The name’s Bob.”
“Hello, Bob. No offense, but I don’t touch the customers and they don’t touch me.”
“Fair enough,” said Bob and withdrew his hand. “What about you, Liza? You ever had your heart broken?”
“I’m a bartender, that’s all you need to know about me.”
“Okay, but at least tell me this. A man with a broken heart: in your eyes, does that make him more attractive or less attractive?”
She raised one eyebrow. “Are you asking me what your chances are of fucking me?”
“What makes you think I want to fuck you?”
“You mean you don’t?”
