It wasn’t long after the drunk girls joined their table that Joel felt things getting out of hand. The waif—he would have carded her in his own place—had settled onto his knee and was pretending there was nothing strange about using a guy’s leg for a chair in a crowded bar. Across the table, the girl angling to be Derek’s was telling one of those long, anecdotal jokes, a string of implausible coincidences about a woman whose boyfriend drives them into a muddy ditch and must use her clothes as traction to get the car out of the mud. Derek was laughing like it was the funniest story he’d ever heard, his arm around the booth behind her. Jay, too, was listening to Derek’s girl’s story, turning every few seconds to laugh with the girl who had been assigned him. As her story built to its improbable climax, Derek’s girl slid out of the booth, stood, and removed her shoes. “So she walks up to the farmhouse and knocks on the door, buck naked.” The girl held her shoes over her crotch. “‘My boyfriend’s stuck. Can you help get him out?’”
Joel laughed politely while the girl on his knee laughed harder, shifting her weight, catching his eye and smiling.
“God, Sandy. That is disgusting,” said Jay’s girl, the only one of the three with dark hair. Jay put his hand on her leg.
“That is so funny,” Derek said. “That is really funny.”
“Hilarious,” Jay said. “Really hilarious.”
They were crowded in this booth at the tail end of McCool’s, a long, narrow pub with predictable Irish decor—green walls and clovers and Irish flags and maps of the island and Notre Dame banners and the rest.
“Really funny,” Derek said again.
“Great,” said Jay. “My boyfriend’s stuck.”
The laughter trailed into hums and smiles and then, like a football huddle that breaks to reveal the formation, the three girls turned separately to the guys they were sitting near and engaged in single conversations.
“What do you do?” asked the girl on Joel’s knee.
“Bartender.”
“Really?”
“No, I just say it to impress people.”
“That’s cool.” She nodded at the leg she sat on. “You’re not married?”
“No, but I’m seeing someone.”
“Where’s she?”
“Out of town.” Joel wondered why he’d told her that. Why not She’s at home, or, We’re meeting her later? He felt transparent. Why did there have to be this gap between who you are and who you want to be? He finished his drink and moved the girl off his leg so he could stand. “I’m gonna get a drink,” he said. “You want something?”
“A Manhattan?”
Of course. These days, everyone drank martinis and martini derivations. Three years ago, Joel’s job had consisted of jerking beer taps, but now every college student wanted to drink like a salesman. Booze had come back because things just naturally come back, and so now you had frat boys lecturing you on what kind of gin they wanted and clear-eyed twenty-one-year-old girls ordering Manhattans. It was funny. That had been the thing about Caroline that first caught his attention, when she ordered a Gibson, one of the few booze drinks that hadn’t come back. When Joel mixed her a vodka Gibson, she spoke to him like he was a ten-year-old, instructing him on the proper mix of a Gibson, right down to the number of cocktail onions. So, when she asked for a refill, he brought a pint of gin in a beer pitcher with fifteen cocktail onions strung in a necklace, looped around the rim of the pitcher, like booze-soaked pearls.
At the bar, Joel pulled his money roll from his pocket and peeled off a couple of bills. He watched the bartender, a bald guy with decent concentration, if not the best technique, fill a row of glasses with ice. He could tell from the moment the ice went in that this place short-poured, filled the glasses mostly with ice and mixer and went light on whatever booze they were serving up. He looked up at the better bottles, stacked along the bar like guys in bleacher seats. Usually if a place short-poured, it practiced other kinds of cheapness, too—watering down the booze or mixing the cheap brands with the good bottles, blending the plastic-bottled gin with the Bombay or the cheap whiskey with the Glenfiddich. Hell, some twenty-two-year-old kid ordering eighteen-year-old scotch isn’t going to know the difference. Maybe people get what they deserve.
“What can I get you?”
“A Manhattan, a shot of Knob Creek, and a glass of ice on the side.” Joel was going to make sure he got his entire shot of whiskey. “That is Knob Creek in that bottle, right? Or should I order something else?”
The bartender considered him briefly. “No, that’s a good choice.”
The drinks ordered, Joel turned his back and surveyed the bar, the same thing every other guy in the world did when he ordered a drink. More disappointment. As he turned to the left he saw a man at a small table staring at him and it took a minute to recognize Caroline’s friend Alan Dupree sitting by himself with a drink in front of him. Dupree raised his drink in a short salute.
“Hey.” Joel walked over. Dupree likely had seen that girl sitting on his lap and Joel felt a moment of panic. “How’s it goin’?”
“Good,” Dupree said. “How about you?”
“You know. Buddies are gettin’ a little wild.”
He looked back at the bar, but the bartender was still fussing with the limes in a couple of G-and-Ts. “I don’t know if you saw, you know, that girl, I mean…”
“Yeah, I saw her. She’s cute.”
“I didn’t do anything, she just sat on my knee.”
Dupree nodded and Joel detected in the movement a kind of disappointment, as if he wished he’d seen Joel hitting on the girl. “Heard anything from Caroline?”
“She’s not big on calling.” Joel looked over at the table, then back at Dupree. “Hey, do you want to join us?”
Dupree looked over at the girls, and Joel thought he saw the older man sigh. “That’s nice. But I have kind of an important meeting in the morning. Thanks anyway. But if you talk to Caroline…” He stared at the empty drink in front of him. “Go on back to your friends. I’ll talk to her when she gets back.”
Joel began to edge away. “Okay,” he said. “Well…take it easy.”
Joel got his drinks and left a buck tip on the bar. On his way back to the table, he snagged a chair, disappointing the waif, who fanned a couple of singles in his direction. He shook her off and sat down on the new chair at the end of the table.
When he looked back down the length of the bar, Joel saw Dupree edging through a crowd of people. The wiry detective reached the door, went outside, and stood beneath the streetlight, staring at the sidewalk. And in that moment, Joel pictured himself on that sidewalk, at forty-five, balding and losing his form. Suddenly the very struggle of Joel’s life seemed both predetermined and petty, like a lab mouse in blind pursuit of one of two paths, solitude or settlement. As he watched, Joel couldn’t imagine a way out and felt a chill inevitability, the claustrophobia of age.
The door swung closed and Dupree was gone. Joel drank his shot of whiskey and turned back to the table, where Derek’s girl was starting another joke: “There was this girl who had fish for tits…”