I perk up with delight. “Really?”
“Yep. That’s another place you’d love. It’s Indiana’s oldest bar—they say it’s haunted,” he adds, smiling. “It’s only a five-minute drive from my apartment now, but I used to go there all the time when I was younger. Wilson and I would often get talking at the bar—we’ve been friends for years.”
“I can’t wait to meet him.”
We have one more drink up on the roof before heading downstairs to the basement. The space down here is furnished with authentic 1950s and ’60s paraphernalia, with red-and-white-checkered floor tiles in the dining section and red vinyl chairs and barstools. Neon signs hang on the walls as well asvintage posters, and there are glass-block partition walls dividing up the areas.
Loads of Anders’s friends are here already and it’s such an interesting, eclectic crowd. He introduces me to artists, musicians, and even an architect with kind eyes and a hipster beard. There’s one woman who’s wearing a 1950s red-and-white-polka-dot dress and she carries it off so well, right down to her red hair styled in a retro side sweep, that I ask Anders if she dresses like that every day. He tells me that she does.
By the time Wilson arrives to much fanfare, I’m three drinks in and well on my way to drunk. Wilson is about six feet tall and slim, dressed all in black except for a silver-studded belt around his narrow hips. He has chunky black locs that come to well past his shoulder blades.
“Who’s this?” he asks Anders, his brown eyes gleaming.
“This is my friend Wren,” Anders replies.
That’s how he’s introduced me to everyone, his “friend Wren.”
“Happy birthday,” I chirp.
“Wren’s an architect,” Anders tells him, a smile playing about his lips.
“Have you met Dean?” He nods at the bearded hipster.
“Only briefly.”
“Where are you from?”
“England.”
“I hear that. Where in England?”
“A place called Bury St. Edmunds.”
“I have never been to Bury St. Edmunds, Wren. Tell me about it.”
I describe the fairy-tale ruins and the historic architecture,going into detail about a tiny little pub called the Nutshell, which is one of the smallest pubs in Britain and is crammed full of a bunch of weird stuff, including a mummified cat.
Anders seems as fascinated as Wilson to hear about my hometown, but he lets his friend do the talking. And I think that this must be something Wilson is good at, asking lots of questions and putting people at ease. But the more he asks me, the more I realize that this is him. He’s interested—in people, in things. And in turn, I find myself asking him questions about his music, the instruments he plays—which seems to be all of them, but he loves the electric guitar the most.
Anders stays with us for a while before going off to get more drinks, and then he leaves us to it, mingling with his friends. It belatedly occurs to me that he gave Wilson a hug when he arrived, and he threw his arm fondly around Dean’s shoulders when he introduced us, but he’s not tactile with any of the women. He still seems intent on making it clear that he’s unavailable, even though it’s been almost four and a half years since he lost his wife.
I guess everyone handles grief differently, but it’s desperately sad to think of him keeping up his barriers for so long.
After a while, the red-haired girl in the fifties-style dress comes over and Wilson introduces us properly. Her name is Susan and she’s a photographer, but she also works at a record store up the road from here. She insists I come and visit her sometime so she can play me this vinyl record by an obscure band that she recently discovered in an antiques market.
Dean joins us and I lose more time talking to him about architecture. He’s recently been working on a coffee shop that’s housed in a mid-century former bank building and has justfinished designing a low-lying modernist house with an overhanging roof and giant sliding glass doors. They sound like the sort of projects I would kill to work on.
And maybe it’s the alcohol rush, or maybe it’s the-grass-is-always-greener syndrome, but I feel as though I’m in the middle of one of my favorite nights out ever.
I haven’t really found my tribe yet in Bury St. Edmunds. My only good friend is Sabrina, but she and her fiancé, Lance, feel intrinsically linked to Scott because we met them while we were together. All my other pals from work and uni are in London or spread across the country. I’d love to have a big group of local friends like this. Anders is lucky.
Wilson insists I team up with him and one of his bandmates, Davis, for our first game of duckpin bowling. The lanes are shorter than ten-pin bowling alleys and the balls are smaller, but it’s essentially the same concept: hit the things at the end.
Of course, I can’t hit them for the life of me. I’m far too drunk.
“What am I doing wrong?” I ask Anders.
“I can’t tell you, you’re not on my team,” he replies with a smirk.
