His father calls his name.
Alex turns back to the man smoking on the sidewalk. Please don’t take this away from me. People jostle by while he hangs in the doorway, waiting for his father to speak.
“Don’t get cocky,” Lorca says. “I’d go with twenty-one.”
Alex vanishes into the club, leaving his father alone on the street.
11:10 P.M
Ben orders two whiskeys and two Churchills and pats his legs dry with bar napkins. Sarina makes flimsy promises to herself in the ladies’ room mirror. She will have one drink, total. Two. She will have two drinks and the third will be water. She will ask about Annie. She will not mention Annie. She will not cross her legs for effect. She will absolutely cross her legs every five seconds. She will not, under any circumstances, call anything “transcendent.” She will keep her ever-loving shit together. Even if he touches her cheek. Which he has already done three times. Why does he touch her cheek so much? Is he someone who touches people’s cheeks or is it her cheek specifically? She touches her cheek. Not bad.
Here stands Sarina in the mirror of a cigar bar, reminding herself that there is no color skirt she can wear that would make Ben single. There is no way she can fix her hair, no perfume on earth, no story amusing enough. Even if she wishes in this mirror for an hour, this night will end with a good-bye and a bowl of ice cream with cherries. She is obvious and see-through and a joke. She will never leave this bathroom. He’ll be confused initially but then will return to his life. She will live here, teach via telephone, knit in the evenings. They will say, Remember that night Georgie had a dinner party and Sarina decided to live in the bathroom? She will die here, next to this decorative toilet paper decanter and that vintage cat poster. People will say, they will say, people will say.
A jiggling sound. A stranger tries the door.
Sarina checks her watch.
11:11 P.M
Madeleine sings into a pale silver microphone, her favorite instrument the stand-up bass running like a low-grade fever in and out of the rooms of her dreams.
In the back room of The Cat’s Pajamas, Alex suits up. He wants his father to hear him and know he can play. Not only hear him, but hear him.
“No.” John McCormick halts his little sister, who was going for the door again.
Jill returns to her chair. She stabs at her wooden duck with a paintbrush filled with Winter Grain Green. It is impossible to concentrate on her mallard when her parents are fighting. Her other brother, Norman, paints the belly of his Northern Pintail with Stone Cottage Gray. John paints his duck with John-like caution. He pauses between applications to consider the ruckus in the other room, or to give a gentle no to his sister, who wants to go in and soothe. But then they’d get in trouble for not being in bed, or worse.
On the other side of the door, their parents use words like whore and dickhead.
“Do you think my duck is sad?” Jill says.
“North American mallards,” John pretends to read, “are among the world’s happiest ducks. When winter comes, they fly in happy families to Latin America.”
Jill readjusts her glasses. She considers her duck with this new information. Steve, she’s named him. “Steve?” she tests.
The unmistakable sound of a slap makes even John place his brush down on the palette. “Don’t go in there,” he says, before Jill even leaves her chair.
In the back bedroom of her family’s row home, Clare Kelly dozes on her chaise lounge, busted leg propped on a pillow, dreaming of GLORY and THIGH GAPS.
Louisa Vicino heats popcorn on her brother’s stovetop. She catches sight of herself in the kitchen window, so serious, shaking kernels in the pan. She gives herself a shimmy. Laughs. Gives herself another shimmy. Unfurls one arm, then the other. She can feel the snakes’ smooth, pearlized skins, their buttery breaths on her neck, the pleasant squeeze as they wind around her belly.
Her brother calls from the other room. “How’s that popcorn coming?”
Louisa goes into a split on the kitchen’s unforgiving floor. Hand flourishes. One last shimmy. Big finish.
Principal Randles wants a nightcap with the tax attorney. Dinner concludes over two modest pieces of mochi. He slips a credit card into the bill. “Would you like to …”
“I would love to,” she says.
He is noticeably relieved. “I know just the place.”
In the deep moss of cigar smoke, Sarina reglosses her lips and wishes for strength. She switches off the light and closes the door. Ben is where she left him, only now a man in a gray suit is pumping his hand like an oil rig, a man who, Sarina realizes with pain when he pivots to greet her, is her ex-husband, Marcos.
Midnight
Marcos is a man whose cologne precedes him. He runs a successful hedge fund in Connecticut and owns homes on two different beaches in two different countries. Ben had been reading the Sunshine book when Marcos descended upon him. Ben hasn’t seen Sarina’s overly enthusiastic ex-husband in years and has spent exactly no time weeping over it.
“What luck running into you,” Marcos says. “I’m on my way to a truly special place.”
Because he knows Marcos can’t, Ben says, “Stay for a drink.”
Sarina approaches and does not reclaim her stool. Ben has asked her ex-husband to join them which means he does not want to be alone with her. Perhaps he has been hoping for an interruption or planning a demure exit. She hates the moody figure of this night.
“Still doing pro bono work?” Marcos asks Ben. “Pro bono work is so …”
“… noble,” Sarina finishes.
Marcos chucks her shoulder. “Still finishing my sentences, hon.”
Ben says, “I am still doing pro bono work.”
“Too bad.” Marcos orders a seven and seven, hands the bartender a twenty, and tells him to keep the change.
Ben and Sarina sip their drinks.
“Tell me about this special place,” Sarina says.
“Truly special,” Ben says.
“It’s a club with a house band to beat the …”
“Band?” Ben offers.
“Oho!” says Marcos.
“Now I’m finishing your sentences.” Ben downs his drink in a succinct gulp. “We should get married.”
Marcos is regularly trailed by the feeling he is being taunted in a way he cannot articulate. He is aware of being intellectually late to every party with pissants like Ben Allen lurking in the periphery, ready to remind him. It doesn’t bother Marcos. He has five walk-in closets and a young girlfriend who thinks it’s cute to call him Daddy. He enjoys the fact that men like Ben never seem to be able to meet his gaze.
“Where is the club?” Sarina says.
“Fishtown.” He cradles the back of an invisible partner. “Dancing.”
“Dancing.” Sarina looks wistful. “But I wake up early to paint.”
“How’s it coming?” Marcos says.
“It’s coming.”
“What are you painting these days?” Ben says. “Still lifes?”
“Not exactly,” Marcos says. His and Sarina’s shared smile creates a box on the outside of which Ben simpers into his Churchill.