As they jammed themselves into the darkened chamber between Stone Street behind them and the bar’s inner door before them, Madison could already hear all the small noises you sometimes caught in brief shots as you passed the bars on upper Third, just north of the old apartment. That acrid smell she’d learned to identify as she got older, the smell of spilled beer mixed with old sweat. She smelled liquor at home, all the time, but stale beer didn’t smell anything like day-old whiskey, whether on the floor or on someone’s breath. Alcohol was all around her, and always had been, but bars were new.
Zo? surged ahead, her hips liquid through the muggy mass of bodies. There was a redness to the lighting, just as Madison had been led to expect from bars in every movie she’d ever seen. The bartenders were all tall women with sculpted arms, wearing modest black tank tops that still managed to look entirely lascivious on their bodies. The men—and the room was filled almost entirely with men—looked like they had been steadily wilting since 6 A.M. that morning. They all wore their hair parted, slicked back with product. Their combs had left razor-sharp paths along their scalps, so that their hair rebelled only at the napes of their necks. The slight flip to its ends let you know that they’d much prefer letting it flow free, preferably while sitting on the deck of someone’s boat with a cooler of Bud heavy.
Bud heavy, she thought, the memory bobbing unexpectedly to the surface, had been Grandpop’s favorite.
They all had bodies that had clearly been bulked and toned in service of some courtly sport, years earlier, but were beginning slowly to go slack. They all had a softness to their cheeks that was not baby fat but its older twin, the sort of fat that makes its debut about eight years after baby fat has departed for good. Many of them turned at the sudden influx of frozen air to watch the three girls enter the bar.
Madison felt the heat of their gazes on her cheeks, her hair, the exposed part of her collarbone. Miraculously, Zo? had already found an empty bar table at the back of the room.
“There’s no bouncer?”
“I told you,” Zo? said. “I’ve never been carded at a place like this. They don’t care, we’re girls.”
“They’ll probably card us at the bar,” Allie said, smiling apologetically for the correction. “We’re just still on the early side, for a bouncer.”
“Well,” Zo? said. “Yeah. But they don’t have the time to care. Look at this place. Plus, I told you—the IDs belonged to my cousin and her friends. They aren’t even fake.”
Madison perched on a high bar stool, its seat upholstered in blood-colored leather.
“Should we go up to the bar?” she yelled in the general direction of Zo?’s ear.
“We don’t want to lose this table,” Zo? said with a shrug. “If we wait, someone will bring drinks over.”
And for once, she wasn’t glossing over the truth.
The three guys who came over weren’t all the same age; one of them seemed to have some sort of vague supervisory role in relation to the other two. He wore a wedding ring and was much quieter than his friends, periodically scanning his gaze over their heads, looking like he had hopes of levitating his way out of the conversation.
“You three look thirsty.” One man had spoken first, when they slid over. This one was named Jack. He looked strong, his forearms bulbous like bowling pins. She liked the way his broad shoulders seemed to strain his dress shirt to its limit, but the rest of him seemed the wrong shape for a suit, his torso crammed uncomfortably into his pants.
“You also look a bit lost,” said the other young one. His name was Craig. He was thinner, taller, like someone who’d only just graduated from being gangly. Unlike Jack, he still wore his suit jacket. Craig’s hair was longer than Jack’s, parted and tamed with some sort of product, but for the first few minutes he kept brushing it back from his face and sighing.
The married one, Hugh, was the one to take their orders. Madison didn’t want a beer, but when they asked the girls to pick their poisons, Zo? immediately insisted that they’d all have whatever “you boys” were having. Did that even work? Madison wondered. Wouldn’t we seem older if we all had our own drink orders?
As she drank, she told herself stories about them. Craig was the smoother talker, the better banker. Jack wasn’t as smart, came from a more blue-collar background, was relying on becoming a good old boy as soon as possible if he wanted to advance. Her father would take him seriously; Jack was a guy who would get very good at golf, knowing it would help. She imagined that Craig liked Jack’s bluster and Jack liked Craig’s effortless comfort, the way he moved through their world like a knife cutting through cake.
The most noteworthy part of their time at the bar, she would tell herself later, was that she learned how wonderfully easy it was to tell lies if you strung them all together like buttery pearls on a necklace. Letting them fall in line, gain strength from their proximity to one another. You started with a big one and then followed it with several small ones to make the big one feel real, then as soon as it was truly established, added another big one. She could not believe how well it worked, the high you felt when you did it well, the way it filled you with the intoxicating desire to tell another, and another.
“Juniors,” Zo? was saying. “We’re at Yale,” and here she indicated Madison and herself, “and Allison is at Trinity.”
“See,” Jack said, trying and failing to draw Hugh’s focus back to the table. “I told you they were twenty-one.”
Allie tittered over the rim of her pint glass.
“You girls all from Connecticut?”
“Oh, God no,” Zo? said. “Los Angeles.”
Madison couldn’t look away; she had the bizarre sensation, ushered along by the beer, that Zo? was rewriting her own life for her, that when they were done here this would all be true. She would be from Los Angeles, not Greenwich. Her father would run a studio, not an investment bank. She would be whoever other people said she was, but instead of the people who usually performed that function, it would be Zo? and Allie who’d decide for her.
“So what are you doing down here six days before Christmas?” Craig teased. “If I were you I’d fly home as soon as December hit.”
Zo? reached out to rest her fingers on the back of his hand. She told him about their mutual friend, an enormous Christmas bash at her place a few hours north, just over the Connecticut border. How they’d all gone a few years in a row, how when they were up there they had no cell service and it was so amazing, but on Sundays you had to drive over into New York if you wanted to buy alcohol.
“I still can’t believe that’s law over there,” Jack said. “The first time I visited a buddy in Stamford, that blew my mind.”
Jack was from Missouri.
“There’s a law in Connecticut that more than five women living in a house together constitutes a brothel,” Zo? continued. “So there are no actual sorority houses at Yale. Isn’t that sad?”
Madison tried to remember if she’d known there was a law in Connecticut that prohibited buying alcohol on a Sunday. It seemed like something her father would have mentioned, many times.
“Yes,” Craig replied. “That, guys, is tragic.”