the Bar Studs) Read online

  After his second cup of coffee he decided to go outside. He put on his brown and gray hounds tooth overcoat, turned up the collar, and stepped into the corridor. When he closed the door behind him he felt as if he were escaping from something terrible. He took the elevator downstairs and on the sidewalk in the clear winter air he wanted to take a taxi to the airport and fly to a remote part of the world where he could hide.

  He walked up Broadway, looked absent-mindedly in the windows of stores, and saw old people bundled up in coats and scarves and sitting on the benches in the tiny park between the two lanes of traffic. His parents used to sit out there almost every day after his father sold the store. He thought of Harry fucking Dorrie in his parents’ bed and was so overcome with self-loathing he wanted to vomit in the gutter. If he had listened to his parents and lived like an Orthodox Jew they’d have found him a wife and now he wouldn’t have all these problems.

  At 88th Street he looked west and saw the Tifereth Israel Synagogue, where he had been bar-mitzvahed. He attended services regularly there until he was eighteen, when he started hanging around street corners, going to bars, and sleeping with prostitutes. Pretty girls wouldn’t go out with him so he had to pay. He wondered if old Rabbi Gelberman was still at the synagogue. Maybe he’d drop in and say hello someday. Rabbi Gelberman had been a close friend of his father.

  When he passed the RKO Theatre on 90th Street he saw the ticket girl in the box office reading a paperback book. He stepped closer and noticed on the schedule taped to her window that one of the features, the reissue of a James Bond film he’d never seen, had started ten minutes ago. He had nothing better to do so he bought a ticket, entered the huge old theater, and climbed the carpeted staircase to the balcony, which was completely empty. He sidestepped into the back row in the far left corner, took off his coat, and sat down.

  On the screen in vivid color James Bond was driving his Aston-Martin at high speed up a dangerous mountain road. Leo crossed his arms, closed his eyes, and fell asleep.

  * * *

  Jake Griffin was awakened by the ring of his telephone at eight o’clock in the morning. After the fifth ring he managed to reach over the ashtray full of cigar butts and pick it up. “Yeah?”

  “This is Larry,” his brother said gruffly. “How come you closed the place early last night?”

  Jake yawned. “The kitten got sick and I had to take him to the animal hospital.”

  Jake could hear Larry breathing. “That’s nice—we lost about a hundred bucks’ worth of business on accounta a cat.”

  “What can I tell ya, Larry? I couldn’t let it die there.”

  “Who knocked the bottles on the floor?”

  “The cat.”

  “All of a sudden that cat’s gettin’ to be a pain in the balls.”

  “It won’t happen again, and I’ll make the money up to you.”

  “Me!” Larry exploded. “It ain’t me—it’s the fuckin’ landlord I’m worryin’ about! He don’t care about your fuckin’ cat! All he wants is his money!”

  “We’ll pay him—don’t worry. I’ll live cheap for the rest of the month.”

  “Okay, okay. What time you be in today?”

  “Five-thirty like always.”

  “I’ll see you then.” Larry hung up the phone.

  Jake rolled out of bed, pushed his feet into his slippers, and lurched toward the bathroom to take a leak. He wore baggy white boxer shorts decorated with little red hearts. After his leak he walked into the living room and saw Khrushchev lying curled on the floor beside the sofa, on which slept the floozie. She had showered and shampooed her hair before she went to sleep last night, and Jake was pleased by how nice she looked underneath his old Army blanket.

  She opened her eyes suddenly. “What do you want!”

  “I don’t want nothin’.”

  “Then what are you doing sneaking around here?”

  He was surprised by how precisely she pronounced her words now that she wasn’t drunk. “Whataya mean sneakin’ around? This is my fuckin’ house!”

  “You try anything with me, buster, and I’ll scratch your eyes out.”

  “I got better things to do.”

  “Then go do them.”

  Jake turned around, walked back to his bedroom, closed the door, burrowed into his covers, and went to sleep again.

  He awakened after one o’clock in the afternoon, scratched, and sat up. The sweet odor of frying bacon was in the air. He arose and walked to the closet, but his old plaid bathrobe wasn’t there. His slippers were missing too. He pulled on a pair of forest green cotton pants and shuffled in his bare feet to the kitchen.

  The floozie wore his robe and slippers and stood in front of the stove, flipping over an egg with the spatula. She looked neat and proper as somebody’s wife, a far cry from the drunken bum of the night before.

  “How do you like your fried eggs?” she asked, not looking at him.

  “I like ’em boiled for three minutes.”

  “This morning you’ll get them fried. Do you want them sunny-side up or what?”

  “Over lightly.”

  “Sit down.”

  “I wanna take a shower before I eat.”

  “Breakfast’s ready now—you can take your shower afterwards.” She looked sideways at him. “By the way, where do you keep your booze?”

  “None of your fuckin’ business. I don’t want a drunken broad on my hands.” Last night while she was in the shower he hid his whiskey bottle in his dresser underneath his shirts.

  “I won’t get drunk on you—I just want a shot to steady me.” She held up her left hand and it was trembling.

  “I don’t give a shit—no booze for you. You couldn’t stop with just one shot and I hate drunks.”

  She arranged toast and bacon on two plates. “If you hate drunks so much why do you own a bar?”

  “Because it’s better than drivin’ a cab, which is what me an’ my brudder Larry used to do.” He looked around. “Where’s my cat?”

  “Sleeping behind the sofa.”

  “He all right?”

  “Yes.” With the spatula she laid fried eggs on the plates. Her hands were shaking so badly she knocked a piece of bacon to the floor. “Boy, do I need a drink,” she said as she bent over and picked it up.

  “Forget about it.”

  “I can’t forget about it.”

  “Well, thinkin’ about it ain’t gonna do you no good because I ain’t gonna give you no booze.”

  She carried the plates to the table. “You’re a sadist.”

  “No, I ain’t. I’m doin’ it for your own good.”

  She returned to the stove and got the coffee pot. “That’s typical sadist talk.”

  He watched her sit down opposite him. “Bums ain’t known for takin’ advice,” he said. “That’s why they’re bums.”

  “Eat and shut up. You sound like somebody from the A.A.”

  With his fingers he picked up a piece of bacon, put it in his mouth, and crunched down on it. “You need somebody from the A.A.”

  “Do I have to listen to all this bullshit?” she asked wearily.

  “Not unless you stop askin’ for booze and stop callin’ me names. What’s your name, anyway? I don’t even know.”

  “Melinda.”

  “Melinda what?”

  “Melinda Donnelley.”

  “Is the ‘Donnelley’ the vet’s name?”

  “It’s my name. I don’t want anything from that son-of-a-bitch.”

  “You don’t even get alimony from him?”

  She shook her head no.

  “You’re nuts.”

  She smiled and nodded her head yes.

  “Too proud, huh?”

  “That’s right.”

  “But not too proud to sleep in fleabag hotels, right?”

  She sighed. “There you go again, you bastard.”

  Jake sniffed. “I couldn’t help it. We’ll talk about some-thin’ else. Whataya want talk about?”


  “What can you talk about?”

  “Lotsa things. I ain’t as dumb as I look.”

  “That’s your opinion.” She looked at him over the cup of coffee she held in both her hands. “Why don’t you tell me how you got to be such a rotten bastard?”

  He shrugged. “Life is tough so you gotta be tough if you want to survive.”

  “And to hell with everybody else, right?”

  “Everybody’s gotta look out for himself.”

  “Don’t you think it would be a better world if people tried to help each other instead of just looking out for themselves?”

  “Then a lotta people would just lay back on their asses and let everybody else take care of them. That’s bullshit.”

  “Some people can’t help themselves.”

  “Then they should die and get it over with.”

  She spread jam on a piece of toast. “How about your kitten? Since he wasn’t able to take care of himself last night he should have died, right?”

  Jake wrinkled his brow. “That was different.”

  “Why was it different?”

  He peered into the yolk of his egg. “It was just different.”

  “Should I tell you the difference?”

  “I got a funny feelin’ you’re gonna anyways.”

  She leaned forward in the chair and pointed her fork at him. “You took care of the kitten because you loved it. That’s the difference, and all I’m saying is that you should love people the same way and try to help them too.”

  “I’m sayin’ you’re fulla shit. You’re a bum and you expect people to take care of you. You should stop boozin’ and take care of yourself.”

  “I do take care of myself.”

  “You do? When I first saw you last night you looked like the last chapter of ‘Who Got Fucked Up?’”

  She stiffened her back. “Well I certainly don’t want anything from you, that’s for sure. People like you always have strings attached.”

  “You’re wrong there. You don’t have anything I want.” But he was lying, because she did look nice this morning.

  “Well I wouldn’t take anything from you anyway.”

  They finished breakfast in silence, and afterwards Jake went to the bathroom for his morning crap, shower, shave, tooth brushing, and hair combing. He looked at himself in the mirror and thought he looked pretty good for his age, which was 48, except for his broken nose. He got that when one of his customers clipped him with a chair during a brawl in the Reno. Wrapped in a towel, he walked to his bedroom and put on his green slacks and a white T-shirt. Still barefoot, he returned to the living room and saw it was empty, so he walked to the kitchen.

  There was no one in the kitchen except the kitten lapping milk from a saucer on the floor.

  “Melinda?”

  There was no answer; she was gone. And she hadn’t even left a note or said goodbye.

  * * *

  John Houlihan took the Lexington Avenue Subway to 86th Street, where he got out and walked west to Fifth Avenue. It was a brisk November night and the cool air invigorated him as he breathed in deeply; it rushed into his lungs. He walked along in precisely measured steps and had his hands clasped behind his back. Perched on his head was an Irish tweed hat woven of thick brown threads. At Fifth Avenue he turned right and walked uptown, passing the Guggenheim Museum, which he thought weird. He couldn’t understand why someone would want to construct a building which looked like that.

  Douglas Wilson lived in the old stone apartment building on the first corner after the museum. The building occupied over half the block, was twenty stories high, and under its canopy stood a doorman in a long sky-blue coat and peaked military-style hat.

  “Good evening sir,” the doorman said when he saw John heading for the front door.

  “Good evening. I’m here to see Mr. Douglas Wilson.”

  The doorman, who was about John’s age, bowed slightly, stepped inside the vestibule, and called upstairs on an old-fashioned telephone. He spoke into it, listened briefly, and waved John in with a white-gloved hand. In a mild state of euphoria John entered the small lobby whose walls were paneled with old varnished wood. Brass light fixtures attached to the walls bathed the lobby in a dim golden effulgence, and above an unlit stone fireplace was a painting of mallard ducks flying off the surface of a pond. He joined an attractive blonde girl waiting for the elevator.

  He removed his hat and unbuttoned his topcoat, and when the elevator arrived he followed the girl inside and they pressed their respective buttons. She was going to the seventeenth floor and he to the twentieth, the penthouse floor. As the elevator rose he leaned against a wall and was aware that the girl was looking at him. He felt uncomfortable because she might be thinking he didn’t belong in this elegant building where rich people lived.

  After the girl got off on the seventeenth floor John made the remainder of his journey alone. On the top floor he stepped into a long carpeted corridor, and after some initial confusion over apartment numbers, headed to where Mr. Wilson lived. At the end of the corridor he pressed the button beside the door and heard chimes go off inside. After waiting a few minutes he pressed the button again, and then he heard footsteps.

  “Who’s there?” asked Mr. Wilson drunkenly.

  “John Houlihan.”

  “Who?”

  “John Houlihan the bartender.”

  Mr. Wilson swung open the door, the effort causing him to lose his balance. He tottered and fell against the white-papered wall of his vestibule, his knees buckled slightly, but he didn’t drop. He held out his pale, feminine hand to John.

  “Good to see you, John, old boy,” he said. “I didn’t think you’d make it. Come in and have a drink.”

  John entered the vestibule and followed the stumbling Mr. Wilson into his living room. Two sofas with curving armrests faced each other beside a white marble fireplace, and between them was an antique coffee table on which sat a bottle of Jack Daniels bourbon, a glass, and a bucket of half-melted ice.

  “You can hang your coat up in the closet there,” Mr. Wilson said, “or just drop it anywhere. The maid’s gone home to Jamaica for two weeks and my wife has decamped, so you’ll have to do the honors yourself. I’d try to be a good host but I’m so smashed I can barely stand up.” As proof of this statement he collapsed onto the sofa.

  John draped his topcoat and blazer over a chair with a wood back and set his hat on the fabric seat. As he walked to the sofa he looked to the far wall at the large window, through which he could see the black night and the twinkling skyline of Central Park West. How wonderful it must be to live here.

  “What’re you drinking, John?”

  “Do you have cognac?”

  “Oh, yes. My brother-in-law Jason drank cognac, a little cordial glass full after meals to aid his digestion. He died of a heart attack five years ago, but I still have his cognac. It’s over there in the liquor cabinet.” Mr. Wilson pointed to a large boxy cabinet finished in dark wood.

  Above the cabinet was an oil painting of a middle-aged woman with brown hair and thin lips. She was sitting with her hands in her lap and looked sideways at the painter. It was Mr. Wilson’s wife, more than twenty years ago. John stood and stared. She was so beautiful, so refined. You could see it in the angle of her head and set of her jaw.

  “You like that picture, John?”

  “It’s very nice.”

  “That’s Mrs. Dim Bulb herself.”

  “I recognized her.” John had seen her picture, which Mr. Wilson had once shown him in the Oak Room at the Plaza.

  “I’m surprised—she’s changed a lot.”

  “Not really that much.”

  Mr. Wilson burped. “I can’t believe she’s finally left me.”

  “Maybe she’ll come back.”

  “I hope not.”

  John found the bottle of cognac and poured some. He carried the glass to the sofa opposite the one where Mr. Wilson sat, and lowered himself.

  “Make me another one, wil
l you John?”

  “Sure, Mr. Wilson.”

  “Call me Doug, for Christ’s sake.”

  Bleary-eyed and with his jaw lolling open, Mr. Wilson held out his empty glass. John took it, fixed the drink, and set it on the table before Mr. Wilson.

  “There you go, Doug.”

  “Thanks, John. What would I do without you?” He reached for the glass, missed it, reached again, and grabbed it. He raised it to his mouth, took a noisy gulp, and leaned back. His mouth relaxed into a crooked line.

  John looked at the painting of Mrs. Wilson. He thought it a shame that she and Mr. Wilson didn’t get along.

  “Aren’t you married, John?”

  “I’m a widower. My wife passed away five years ago.”

  “Oh yes, I remember now. Did she give you very much trouble?”

  “Hardly any. She was a wonderful person. She had a heart of gold.”

  “You were a lucky man.”

  “I certainly was, but I don’t suppose I realized it then.”

  “I thought I was lucky when I married Agnes,” Mr. Wilson said. “Little did I know. We married when she was twenty, and she was the sweetest, most dainty thing you’d ever want to see. On our wedding day, everything was so perfect I thought we were characters in a romantic novel. I was fresh out of college and had just joined a Wall Street law firm; she was pure, beautiful, and from an old, socially prominent family. It was the happiest day of my life—it really was. Everything was fine until the next year when she had Robert, and then the honeymoon was over. My devoted shy young wife became a fanatic who wanted to become the queen mother of a family of geniuses. She insisted on having more children immediately and began reading the most progressive books on child-rearing. I became her stud and the source of funds for her obsession. In the next seven years we had five children, three boys and two girls. They grew up and took music lessons, fencing lessons, tennis lessons, riding lessons—you name it and they took it. They went to the best schools, they had the best friends, they read the best books, and what happened? Do you want to know what happened?” Mr. Wilson looked expectantly at John.