This time it wasn’t all right. Jason, the manager, was behind the bar when I came in, and the look on his face told me he wasn’t especially thrilled at having this unlooked-for opportunity to dole out cocktail onions and bar mix to a roomful of sunburned hotel guests, enchanted tourists and golfers warming up for dinner. He didn’t say a word. Just dropped what he was doing (frothing a mango margarita in the blender), brushed past me and hurried down the corridor to his office as if the work of the world awaited him there. He was six years younger than I, he had a Ph.D. in history from a university far more prestigious than the one that ruled our little burg, and he wielded a first-rate vocabulary. I could have lived without him. At any rate, I went around to each customer with a smile on my face — even the lunatic in tam-o’-shanter and plus fours drinking rum and Red Bull at the far end of the bar — and refreshed drinks, bar napkins and the bowls of pretzels and bar mix. I poured with a heavy hand.
Around seven, the dining room began to fill up. This was my favorite hour of the day, the air fragrant and still, the sun picking out individual palms and banks of flowers to illuminate as it sank into the ocean, people bending to their hors d’oeuvres with a kind of quiet reverence, as if for once they really were thankful for the bounty spread out before them. Muted snatches of conversation drifted in from the patio. Canned piano music — something very familiar — seeped out of the speakers. All was well, and I poured myself a little Irish whiskey to take some of the tightness out of my neck and shoulders.
That was when Samantha walked in.
She was with two other girls — Gina, I recognized; the other one, tall, athletic, with a nervous, rapid-blinking gaze that seemed to reduce the whole place and everything in it to a series of snapshots, was unfamiliar. All three were wearing sleek ankle-length dresses that left their shoulders bare, and as they leaned into the hostess’ stand there was the glint of jewelry at their ears and throats. My mouth went dry. I felt as if I’d been caught out at something desperate, something furtive and humiliating, though they were all the way across the room and Samantha hadn’t even so much as glanced in my direction. I fidgeted with the wine key and tried not to stare, and then Frankie, the hostess, was leading them to a table out on the patio.
I realized I was breathing hard, and my pulse must have shot up like a rocket, and for what? She probably wouldn’t even recognize me. We’d shared a beer for twenty minutes. I was old enough to be her — her what? Her uncle. I needed to get a grip. She wasn’t the one watching me through a hidden lens. “Hart? Hart, are you there?” a voice was saying, and I looked up to see Megan, the cocktail waitress, hovering over her station with a drink order on her lips.
“Yeah, sure,” I said, and I took the order and started in on the drinks. “By the way,” I said as casually as I could, “you know that table of three — the girls who just came in? Tell me when you take their order, okay? Their drinks are on me.”
As it turned out, they weren’t having any of the sweet rum drinks garnished with fruit and a single orange nasturtium flower or one of our half dozen margaritas or even the house chardonnay by the glass. “I carded them,” Megan said, “and they’re all legal, but what they want is three sloe gin fizzes. Do we even have sloe gin?”
In the eight years I’d been at the El Encanto, I doubt if I’d mixed more than three or four sloe gin fizzes, and those were for people whose recollections of the Eisenhower administration were still vivid. But we did have a vestigial bottle of sloe gin in the back room, wedged between the peppermint schnapps and the Benedictine, and I made them their drinks. Frankie had seated them around the corner on the patio, so I couldn’t see how the fizzes went over, and then a series of orders came leapfrogging in, and I started pouring and mixing and forgot all about it. The next time I looked up, Samantha was coming across the room to me, her eyebrows dancing over an incipient smile. I could see she was having trouble with her heels and the constriction of the dress — or gown, I suppose you’d call it — and I couldn’t help thinking how young she looked, almost like a little girl playing dress-up. “Hart,” she said, resting her hands on the bar so that I could admire her sculpted fingers and her collection of rings — rings even on her thumbs—“I didn’t know you worked here. This place is really nice.”
“Yeah,” I said, grinning back at her while holding the picture of her in my head, asleep, with her hair splayed out over the pillow. “It’s first-rate. Top-notch. Really fantastic. It’s a great place to work.”
“You know, that was really sweet of you,” she said.
I wanted to say something like “Aw, shucks” or “No problem,” but instead I heard myself say, “The gesture or the drink?”
She looked at me quizzically a moment, and then let out a single soft flutter of a laugh. “Oh, you mean the gin fizzes?” And she laughed again — or giggled, actually. “I’m legal today, did you know that? And my gramma made me promise to have a sloe gin fizz so she could be here tonight in spirit — she passed last winter? — but I think we’re having like a bottle of white wine or something with dinner. That’s my sister I’m with — she’s taking me out for my birthday, along with Gina — she’s one of my roommates? But you probably already know that, right?”
I shot my eyes left, then right, up and down the bar. All the drinks were fresh, and no one was paying us the least attention. “What do you mean?”
Her eyebrows lifted, the silky thick eyebrows that were like two strips of mink pasted to her forehead, and her hair was like some exotic fur too, rich and shining and dark. “You didn’t check out the Web site?”
“No,” I lied.
“Well, you ought to,” she said. The air was a stew of smells — a couple at the end of the bar were sharing the warm spinach and scallop salad, there was the sweet burned odor of the Irish whiskey I was sipping from a mug, Samantha’s perfume (or was it Megan’s?) and a medley of mesquite-grilled chops and braised fish and Peter Oxendine’s famous sauces wafting in from the kitchen. “Okay,” she said, shaking out her hair with a flick of her head and running a quick look around the place before bringing her eyes back to me. “Okay, well — I just wanted to say thanks.” She shrugged. “I guess I better be getting back to the girls.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Nice seeing you again. And hey, happy birthday.”
She’d already turned away from the bar, earrings swaying, face composed, but she stopped to give me a smile over her shoulder, and then she made her way across the room and out onto the darkened patio.
And that would have been it, at least until I could get home and watch her shimmy out of that gown and paint her toenails or gorge on cake or whatever it was she was going to do in the semi-privacy of her own room, but I couldn’t let it go and I sent over dessert too, a truly superior raspberry-kiwi tart Stefania had whipped up that afternoon. That really put them in my debt, and after dessert the three of them came to the bar to beam at me and settle in for coffee and an after-dinner drink. “You’re really just twenty-one today?” I said, grinning at Samantha till the roots of my teeth must have showed. “You’re sure I don’t have to card you, now, right?”
I watched the hair swirl round her shoulders as she braced herself against the bar and reached down to ease off her heels, and then she was fishing through her purse till she came up with her driver’s license and laid it out proudly on the bar. I picked it up and held it to the light — there she was, grinning wide out of the bottom right-hand corner, date of birth clearly delineated, and her name, Jennifer B. Knickish, spelled out in bold block letters. “Jennifer?” I said.