TWELFTH NIGHT 2004
THE FRENCH QUARTER
Deadman’s Cove rose to meet me as I entered, dark and dingy, like a hug with a whiff of body odor. It had been nautical themed once long ago, but years of dereliction had covered everything in a coating of sticky dust and familiarity, and it all just blended together into a sort of generic “Bar.” There was a scuffed black-and-white-checkered floor and a pool table in the back. Posters for long past punk shows and cracked tiki mugs and souvenir hula girls so coated in muck that they looked like gargoyles filled the shelves behind the bar. A sickly blue light illuminated the booze from underneath. A vanity license plate that read WAIKIKI and a broken ship’s wheel hung from the ceiling. But the decor didn’t really matter. Deadman’s Cove distinguished itself just by surviving. It had always been here, and it always would, the last to close and first to open. It was the bar where other nights came to die in the blaze of morning. I actually couldn’t imagine what it must feel like to work the day shift. You had to have a hard stomach to minister to the types that drank their days away here, but I guessed the bright light of the afternoon never penetrated the blacked-out windows, so maybe it was fine, just never-ending night. Perfect for vampires, I’d heard Jonah say before with a smile.
André Williams was playing on the stereo. Some garage rockers had rediscovered him and now his music was always playing, everyplace. Or at least the places I went, and his raw, magnetic voice was wailing vulgar hymns to pussy and marijuana, and I couldn’t tell if he was making fun of me or himself or where my abasement ended and his began. But this music, as it always did, filled me with rough, thumping exhilaration and I was glad I had chosen to come here. I threw my bag onto an empty seat at the bar. A poorly duct-taped rip in the fake leather scratched me through my jeans when I sat down, and I hoped it wouldn’t leave a mark that could be seen later on stage.
I hadn’t even had time to look for him before Jonah materialized across the bar in front of me. “Well, hello there. This is an unexpected pleasure.” I smiled at him, but in a bored way and certainly not in a way that let on that I was suddenly so fucking glad to see him I wanted to throw my arms around his neck. Jesus Christ, Rosemary, get a hold of yourself.
Still, this greeting seemed a good sign, an indication he was in an expansive mood. I had been right to stay away for a while—scarcity sharpened Jonah’s appetites. Nothing made him more disdainful than a woman’s interest. He could ferret it out with an almost uncanny accuracy. Luckily, I was almost as good at hiding it. “I was worried we had lost you to the path of virtue.” He set an empty glass on the bar in front of me. “I’ve been waiting for an adult to show up so I can have an honest to God conversation. Just see what you have left me with.” He looked pointedly down the bar where two girls in poorly fitting black latex were watching us, uneasily sizing me up as competition.
I smiled again, still with reserve. Right. He always did this, the setting up of the hierarchy of customers to make you feel special, but also let you know that you weren’t, there were others in line for his attention.
I had seen it before and I didn’t trust it, but my stomach still got warm. That’s the thing about guys like this; it didn’t matter. I was glad he was here now. The bar towel hung at his waist, a strip of gray against the black of his clothes. The forward tilt of his hip, the way his narrow chest seemed to slide down, all flat planes of geometry toward his heavy brass belt buckle. All of it made me embarrassed by my desire and I looked away. Jonah had pale skinny fingers and the careless haircut and well-chosen shirts of someone in a band, but a slightly greater hopelessness hung around him, marking him always and forever a bartender. He was young looking for thirty, so older than me, but also old in the way long nights and alcohol will suck the shine right out of anyone and replace it with a clammy sheen that is somehow even more inviting. Perhaps a bartender is just a metonymy for the seductive obliteration of his wares.
“If I’m following any path, I think we both know it’s not the path of virtue,” I said.
“So, where have you been? What have you been up to, mysterious lady?”
“Oh, this and that, hexing the living, raising the dead. You know how it goes.”
“God, I love it when you’re witchy.” He smiled and a spray of club soda shot into my glass and then stopped with a little gasp of the nozzle sealing off again. He remembered. I always drank a lot of club soda. I pulled it toward me and took a sip feeling a kind of glow.
We had hooked up quite a few times, nights when alcohol and cocaine had turned me into a hard, shining creature of sexual nonchalance. Black underwear and smudged eye makeup, I enacted the woman of his teenage fantasies, dark and troublesome, laughing and unconcerned. Sex was easy. He spanked me, hard, while I admired a row of Day of the Dead figurines on a shelf above his bed and wondered who was the more revealed, he in his fetish or me with blue handprints across my flesh. It had happened again, easy, cold. I didn’t have his phone number, but I remembered the smell of his hair.
He poured me a shot of Jameson unasked and I nodded my thanks. I paused for a quick moment as I held the glass to my lips. The smell seared my nose. I knew that the wonderful hammer of whiskey could blunt all these exposed nerves, all these cilia that tingled with emotions I had no words for. This is what I should have been moving toward all day. How had I gotten so distracted? I drank it all in one gulp. All at once I went hard, like I had gone from being water sloshing and surging and overtopping my boundaries to smooth, contained, delicious ice. I stretched my arms and flexed my claws savoring the transformative power of alcohol so similar to looking at the world from under the slant of fake lashes. My inner terror retreated, and I became that other girl I sometimes was, cooler and in control. What a relief. Now I could be the girl on the cover of a pulp novel with a tight dress and a smoking gun. I was fishnets and rhinestones, safe in the armor of femininity gone just a little bad. I was going to be okay. Everything was going to be okay. I tapped the glass so he could refill it, which he did with a promptness that made me know almost for certain that he wanted to fuck me tonight.
He put the bottle down and leaned on the bar. “I’ve been thinking of you...” he paused to let this rare acknowledgment settle “...because after our last—” he cleared his throat suggestively “—evening together. I went out and got this. I’ve been waiting for you to show up again so we can chat about it, but you disappeared.” He reached under the bar and held up a torn paperback, All Quiet on the Western Front. I went all hot inside. “It’s a pretty good book,” he continued, oblivious to my embarrassment. “I never met a girl who was into trench warfare before.” He was smiling, but he held the book carelessly as though it might just slide out of his fingers, the gesture inviting a response and yet also somehow distancing. It was always surprising to me how men actually liked to talk about the things that interested them, never thinking of the ways it might only serve to set them apart. Jonah wanted me to know all the books he had read. I confessed the ones I had, drop by drop, breath held, afraid to scare him away.
I tried to think back. Had we been talking about that book? I had a vague memory of him in his underwear describing a season of Black Adder to me in monotonous detail. I must have been really drunk.
That book had been a favorite of mine in high school. It was assigned, but for some reason Gaby and I got super into it, crying and crying and crying when poor little Paul dies at the end. We had decided he was very cute, and took it all very hard, and then after it was just sort of connected in my mind with the idea that maybe I wanted to study history in college. Then I fucked that up so badly and all these things felt somehow connected and tied up in this book that Jonah was now flipping through with a quick whir of pages. It was like he was holding my hair while I puked. The experience was mortifying, but also intimate. But still I needed some veil of protection between me and the sudden pounding of my heart. I worried about my thick careful black eyeliner wings against the abrupt watering of my eyes. “Oh man, I must have been smashed if I was bringing that up. What a fucking nerd I am sometimes.” I almost wanted to apologize to the book as I talked, like I was trampling the feelings of a precious friend.
Jonah looked hurt, just for a heartbeat. He yawned and tossed the book onto a shelf under the bar and shrugged. “I wouldn’t know, I slept through most of high school. But Motörhead has a song called ‘1916,’ do you know it?” I didn’t, but this was safer. We had retreated. I trusted the masculine delight in his own interests to pull him further from the uncomfortable vulnerability of mine. I managed to subtly wipe the corner of my eye and took a deep breath. A wet black streak came away on my finger. I was a mess. I remembered talking about this book with Gaby, the deep safety of a female friend, that communion of shared language and silent compassion, a world of feeling that men would never experience, could never understand. “Speaking of Motörhead,” he went on. “Did I ever tell you Lemmy came in here once? Sat two seats down from where you are now, drinking pint glasses of Jack and Coke. That guy’s got a constitution. He’s like sixty years old or something...” His voice trailed off as the girls at the end of the bar called to him again, and I was glad to have a minute to recover.
I weighed my options and tried to watch him surreptitiously. He was listening as one of the girls explained something to him, and I could tell by the tilt of his head, the way he leaned his arm on the bar, that he was being called to settle something. Some debate or question that required his expertise and I commended them for having already learned how to stroke a man like that; you could practically see him rearing up at the question like a cat arching its back toward a caress. Men in bars loved nothing more than explaining things to you. I’d almost come to believe there was no question more infallibly seductive than, So who was Jack Kirby again? At least at the bars I frequented. Questions about bands, Quentin Tarantino or Trotsky also seemed to do the trick.
But he kept looking over at me with a knowing smile, almost a wink, that bound the two of us in a shared superiority and it felt so good. Such comfort, like we stood together against all the dumber, less well-initiated travelers through our world. He would be coming back soon. I tried to gather my thoughts. The book thing had been a definite invitation. He wouldn’t have done something like that unless he felt something for me. For a minute I was furious at myself for avoiding him, when he had clearly been ready to make these feelings known. Was it possible there was more to Jonah than all this dumb flirting? Could I trust him?
Eventually he came back. “What I was going to say,” he continued as if our conversation had actually been interrupted by the demands of his job, and not a power move, “at the risk of sounding unchivalrous, is that you kind of look like shit. I mean, as much as anyone as hot as you possibly can. Is everything okay, Rosie?”
He had never called me that. The affectionate diminutive canceling out the insult. He always used my full name, drawling the Rosemary into almost three syllables, the formality of it somehow a kind of gentle mockery. But now, the hint of concern in his voice felt like he had just reached out and caressed my cheek, a tone and touch too gentle, too disarming. “Why are you always such a dick?” I said with a laugh, purposefully misunderstanding him. A confident, bantering tone was vital. I knew him. Despite all these marks of regard, the slightest quiver from me and he would turn away forever.
“No, but seriously, you have a look tonight.” He was watching me with that unexpected candor that made all my nerves tingle. If he was going to be this nice, I didn’t know how to play it. If I started to weep big snotty wailing tears right here at the bar while a song called “Pussy Stan” thrummed through the room and he watched me with those cool, appraising eyes, I would be lost. But then, the book, the unexpected friendliness, maybe I could trust him with more than a place to crash for a few hours tonight.
Almost before I could stop myself, I found I was speaking this terrible weight off my chest. “My dog died.” I shrugged. “She was pretty ancient though.”
He thought about this for a minute. “I’m more of a cat man, myself. I always felt dogs were just too obvious, I mean, where’s the challenge in something that feels affection for rocks?” he said, dropping into the more caustic tone with which he liked to expound his theories on things, but then, as if catching himself, he stopped. “But that sucks, I’m sorry to hear about it. I’m down to help if you want to try and Frankenweenie him. Sew him up and bring him back from the dead.”
“Yeah, no thanks.” This was all very exciting, but I still wasn’t ready for jokes. I looked away and drank my soda.
But then as if he could hear the something in my voice that I hadn’t been able to completely disguise, had noticed the tiniest tremor of the electrical current in my response to him, he let his friendliness slide from him, disavowed. “It’s a great short,” he said. “The best of Burton’s early work.” And he moved back toward the pair of girls still hungrily watching us at the other end of the bar. “Another round?” I heard him ask followed by the fluttering sounds of their assent, and I tried not to feel it like a wound.
This was fine. This was our thing. We were both good at it and I wouldn’t choose to be nineteen like those poor girls for anything in the world. I could wait. He and I were both so adept at the parry and deflection of romantic intent that once we were fully in it, what we did almost ceased to be flirting and sometimes just verged on rudeness. I still had a lingering advantage because I hadn’t tried to see him in a while, and so even though I had told him something unbearably personal, the fresh aura of ambivalence still shone around me, I was pretty sure. I could still play this in his language. I wondered sometimes what he would do if he knew I had dreams about him, ridiculous dreams where we were laughing and holding hands, and I was wrapped in the penetrating warmth of his regard. I felt that hard knot in my chest shift at the memory.
For now, he had won because I was stuck on this stool with no one to talk to, trying to look relaxed while my heart still raced in the memory of his recent presence. I picked at a sequin accidentally hot glued to the sole of my sneaker and rehearsed my choreography for the thousandth time in my head, realizing he had never actually seen me perform.
A peal of laughter came from the other end of the bar and I purposefully didn’t look over. It was so important not to provide him with confirmation that any girl coming to the bar was doing so just to flirt with him. He had a whole coterie of fans, young women that clustered under his supercilious gaze, baby chicks in dark lipstick and dyed hair, blinking in the fresh dazzle of burnout New Orleans nightlife and preening for his attention. But he and I were different, right? We had an understanding. And I suddenly knew he would know it too, he would feel it incontrovertibly in his bones once he had seen me dance. We were always meeting at places like this, where he had the advantage, but once he saw me onstage, I was sure his last reserve would fall. I was that good, and my new act tonight was so especially to his taste, he wouldn’t be able to help getting knocked sideways by it. I was basically pretending to be everything he had ever wanted from a girl. He would only see the reflection of his vanity. He would only think it was cool.
“It seems to me if you’re going to walk around town in a cloak, you should really be familiar with ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead,’” he said when he returned with a roll of his eyes. “Please do not come to my bar and talk to me about Marilyn Manson.”
This gesture of inclusion, this moment of shared condescension made me feel reckless and I made my move. “Speaking of our black hearts and shared interests,” I said.
He raised his eyebrows in curiosity. “As I usually am.”
“I’m doing a pretty goth act tonight. Want to come see me strip off a bunch of black crepe and ostrich feathers like a Victorian catafalque come to life?”
“Did you just say ‘catafalque’ instead of ‘hearse’?” he laughed. “My God, Rosemary, where have you been all my life? A vocabulary like that and you’re easy on the eyes. Say it again.”
I obliged. Guys were so easy once you knew their buttons. My hair was dyed black and I had enough of a spooky aesthetic that when I wanted to, I could certainly play it up. Men’s desires were so conveniently set into caricatures already, it made it easy to slide in and out of whatever their pinup fancy was. If you cared to. The light of possibility shone in his eyes and a kind of acceleration took over me. I was racing toward the place where I would be warmed in the fire of his interest. I needed this. I needed him. “I’ll give you my plus-one if you come to our show tonight. You get off soon.”
“Will I?” The heat in his look flared higher and he poured me another tumbler of Jameson and one for himself. “You girls are at the Sugarlick, right? You dance with Elsa?”
I nodded. Elsa had, in fact, been the one to give me a ride out to Carnival Time, the strange store so far upriver that Uptown became the suburbs. There the roads were filled in with gravelly oyster shells and the levee wall rose high above low ranch houses, where you could buy ostrich feathers in any shade and fringe in any length, and the wildest, silliest of flights of imagination became tactile and possible. It was the pilgrimage we all made when putting together a new act. I went again when the end started coming for Ida, and I knew I needed to put myself in mourning. All I knew how to sew was the half-made and flimsy bits of a burlesque costume, so that was what I did.
He sighed loudly. “Well, for you, maybe I will make the sacrifice and go to yet another burlesque show. Although God knows I’ve seen enough tits in this town to last a lifetime.”
“Liar.” This line was common in our circles where so many of the women worked in the industry that all of the guys affected to be bored by it. No one wanted to look like a john.
“You’re right, I am lying.”
“And anyway, I think by chance you have never seen mine. Onstage,” I clarified. I smiled and took out a cigarette, waiting for him to light it for me, which he did with the flick of a tarnished Zippo. The last of my nerves settled in the rush of smoke. “You promise to come?” My voice sounded different, softer.
“Scout’s honor.”
“You were never a Boy Scout.” I stood up and shifted my bag onto my shoulder.
“True. They’re all a bunch of fascists.”
I laughed. “Okay, see you later, then.” As I left, I heard him return to the girls at the bar, but now it didn’t matter. They could enjoy his attention all they wanted; he was at work. But after, his night, his trajectory arced back to me. The graffiti-covered door of the bar slammed and for just a moment my knees got weak with relief. I didn’t have to go back to my apartment. I could go home with Jonah. Especially once he saw my act. I mean, he had a big poster portrait of Death herself all punked up from the Sandman comics up on his wall. Who else would I end up with tonight? The synchronicity was perfect, a gift from the evening. I felt lost in a wave that could only be described as love and gratitude. I pulled my hoodie carefully up over my hair and fled out into the night. I wanted another drink. I wanted to see the girls. I wanted to put on my pasties and fishnets and hear those first few bars of music that called me to the stage. I felt like myself again. I was ready. I almost tripped over the legs of a man passed out in the next doorway.