She wasn’t hungry, but she thought that she had better eat for the sake of her strength, and besides, eating was something to do that would pass some time. She walked along, looking for a place, and in the next block, or maybe it was in the block after the next, she came to a basement restaurant with a flight of steps leading down from street level to the door, and she descended the flight to the door and went inside. On her right as she entered was a long bar with two men and one woman in front of it on stools and a bartender behind it in a white jacket. The men and the woman and the bartender were all watching a prize fight on an elevated television set at the far end of the bar, and she walked past them down two more steps into the restaurant.
Since she had so little money, she felt compelled to order wisely, to get as much food as possible for what she would have to pay. Considering this, and feeling very sensible and efficient in doing so, she decided that a steak would be best all around, one of the cheaper cuts, and he ordered the steak medium rare and ate it slowly after it was served, cutting small bites and chewing each one thoroughly. From where she sat, she could see at an upward angle, over the top of a low partition, the heads of the two men and the woman at the bar. They were now faced squarely around, no longer looking downbar toward the television, and so she assumed that the fight was over.
The bar seemed all at once a wonderful place, a sanctuary, and she made up her mind suddenly that she would go in and have a drink and sit there for a while in the sanctuary. She couldn’t afford it, of course, not even one drink, but she thought of the cost in terms of warmth and casual companionship and the pleasant passage of time, and the price of a drink for all this was surely little enough. The waiter had left her check, and she picked it up and carried it over to the cashier and paid it. With part of her change, she got a package of cigarettes from a machine, another extravagance which she did not even try to justify. She was beginning to feel, in fact, strangely compatible with immediate circumstances, indifferent to matters which had previously, only a little while ago, seemed enormously important and threatening. At the bar, the bartender stood opposite her and smiled politely. He had a twisted nose and a thick ear on the left side, but these acquired defects had the effect of making him more attractive than he would otherwise have been, giving distinction to a face that would have been nondescript without them, and she wondered if he had been a prize fighter or wrestler before becoming a bartender.
“Good evening,” he said.
“Good evening,” she said. “I think I shall have a double manhattan, if you please.”
Double. She had said double promptly and quite naturally, without thinking about it. From a cheap cut of steak to a double manhattan was a long way in terms of economy, but the inconsistency in this was more apparent than real, and there was definitely an underlying sense and purpose in it, although she couldn’t immediately isolate it. The bartender brought her double manhattan and left her with it, and an incredibly short time later, lifting her glass, she discovered that it was empty. This would not do. It simply would not do. It was all right to allow oneself a drink, especially if it contributed to survival in a period of time, but such careless extravagances as this was another thing entirely. She had intended to nurse the double manhattan, to make it last, but she had gulped it down at once instead, and now she would have to leave or buy another.
The prospect of leaving being intolerable, there was only one thing to do, and she beckoned to the bartender, who returned, and ordered another double manhattan. With this one, however, she would mind what she was doing. She would drink slowly, in sips, with attention to time. Having made this resolution, she no longer regretted having drunk the first one quickly, for the result had been beneficial. It had increased her sense of compatibility, the capacity to cope, and had given her the beginning of a feeling of pleasurable excitement.
“Excuse me,” she said to the bartender. “Would you mind very much if I were to ask you a question?”
“Not at all, lady,” he said. “I gets lots of them.”
“I was wondering if you were once a prize fighter or a wrestler.”
“Both. I was a fighter first and a wrestler later.”
“Did you prefer wrestling to prize fighting?”
“No. I prefer bartending to either.”
“Really? That’s very interesting. Why did you quit prize fighting for wrestling if you didn’t prefer to wrestle?”
“I quit fighting because I wasn’t any good at it. I kept getting my brains beat out. Wrestling wasn’t as tough on a guy. It was all rigged, you see. Just a show. It was always decided in advance who would win.”
“Is that so? Were you allowed to win often?”
“Not often. The way it is, you got a hero and a villain. I was always the villain.”
“You don’t look like a villain to me. In my opinion, you look like a perfect gentleman.”
“As a bartender, I’m expected to look like a gentleman. As a wrestler, I wasn’t. I made a pretty fair villain, if I do say so myself.”
“Then how did you happen to quit wrestling for bartending?”
“I got too old. Too slow and brittle. One night In Dallas a Swede named Igor the Golden accidentally broke my arm. He was the hero and was supposed to win, but he wasn’t supposed to break my arm. It wasn’t his fault, though. It was all arranged, but I was too slow in shifting my weight in the right direction at the right time. In giving with the hold, you know.”
“I see. I’m sorry your arm was broken, but if you prefer tending bar, as you say, it has all worked out Jill right in the end.”
“Yes. It’s all worked out all right.”
He went away, and she sat nursing her double, but soon he was back to serve a customer who had taken the stool next to Ivy, on her left. The new customer was a man. Ivy knew this by the smell of him, even before she had heard his voice or had seen, looking down at a sharp angle from under lowered lids, a worsted knee against the wall of the bar. He ordered a rye on the rocks in a voice that had a trace of an accent, and she tried to identify the accent, whether it was foreign or sectional or one modified by the other, but she couldn’t even be certain that he had an accent at all. Neither could she get a clue from his appearance, which she examined covertly in the mirror over the backbar. He had a narrow face with a scar diagonally across his chin, and although she could not tell in the shadowy mirror, she had an idea that his eyes must be pale blue. The assumption of pale eyes was based, perhaps, on the observable fact of pale hair. He wore a soft hat, but it was pushed so far back on his head that she could see the hair brushed flatly across the front part of his skull. There was, she thought, a peculiar quality in this particular man, something that made him exceptional among other men, but she was no more successful in identifying this quality than she had been in identifying the accent, if any, and she did not learn until later, too late, that it was the quality of danger, the elusive essence of a dangerous man.