He lifted his drink and rattled the cubes softly from one side of the glass to the other. The playfulness left his face and was replaced by something sad and bewildered though not bitter. She liked that lack of bitterness immediately. She’d grown up in a house of bitterness and then, when she was sure it would never touch her again, she married it. She’d had her fill.
Brian said, “You know when you’re a kid and you don’t get picked for the team, or someone you like doesn’t like you back, or your parents reject or marginalize you not because of something you did but because they were fucked up and toxic?”
“Yes and yes and yes. I can’t wait to see where you’re going with this.”
Now he took a drink. “I think of those times—and there are lots of them in a childhood; they accrue—and I realize that I always believed to my core that they were right. I wasn’t worthy of the team, I wasn’t fit to be liked back, my family rejected me because I deserved to be rejected.” He put his glass on the bar. “What I don’t like about myself is that sometimes I don’t really like myself.”
“And no matter how much good you do,” she said, “no matter how great a friend you are, how great a wife or husband, how great a humanitarian, nothing, I mean, nothing—”
“Nothing,” he said.
“—will ever make up for what a piece of shit you really are.”
He gave her a broad and beautiful smile. “I see you’ve spent time in my head.”
“Ha.” She shook her head. “Just mine.”
They said nothing for a minute. They finished their drinks, ordered two more.
“And yet,” she said, “you project confidence amazingly well. You handled that d-bag in the bar like you were his hypnotist.”
“He was an idiot. Idiots are easy to outwit. That’s why they’re idiots.”
“How do I know you weren’t in on it together?”
“In on what?”
“You know,” she said, “he makes me feel scared, you come to my rescue.”
“But I got you out of there and I stayed behind.”
“If he was in on it with you, you could have been out that door five seconds after me and followed me.”
He opened his mouth and then closed it. He nodded. “That’s a good point. Are you often approached this elaborately?”
“Not that I know of.”
“It would take an awful lot of work on my part. Wasn’t that guy with a girlfriend at one point? They were fighting?”
She nodded.
“So I would have had to—let me order this correctly—known you were coming to the bar tonight, hired a friend to pretend he was there with a girlfriend, start a fight with her, get her to leave, then approach you and be belligerent, all so I could step in and buy you the time you needed to leave so I could then—”
“Okay, okay.”
“—run across the bar the moment you left it, slip out the door behind you, and follow you through the city on empty, quiet streets in hard-heeled shoes.”
“Okay, I said. Okay.” She gestured at his suit, his white shirt, his handsome raincoat. “You’re just very put together so I’m trying to wrap my head around the part where you don’t really like yourself. Because you, my friend, exude confidence.”
“In a dickish way?”
“Actually, no.” She shook her head.
“Most times I am confident,” he said. “The rational adult me? He’s got his shit squared away. There’s just this tiny splinter-me that can be accessed at midnight in a dark bar by a woman who asks what I don’t like about myself.” He turned fully toward her again and waited. “Speaking of which . . .”
She cleared her throat because for a moment she feared she’d tear up. She could feel it threatening, and it was embarrassing. She’d covered a 7.0 magnitude earthquake on an island already racked by poverty beyond most humans’ ability to imagine. She’d spent a month in a housing project walking solely on her knees in order to duplicate the perspective of a child in the same circumstances. She once climbed to the canopy of a tree, two hundred feet above the ground in the Brazilian rain forest, and slept there overnight. And today, she’d barely managed to drive thirty miles from the suburbs to the city without cracking up.
“I got divorced today,” she said. “I lost my job—no, correct that, my career—six months ago, as you well know, because I had a panic attack on the air. I’ve grown terrified of people, not particular people, but in general, which is worse. I’ve spent the last few months a virtual shut-in. And honestly? I can’t wait to get back to it. Brian, there’s nothing I like about myself.”
He said nothing for a minute. Just looked at her. It wasn’t an intense stare, didn’t feel like a come-on or a challenge. It was an open look, forgiving, uncolored by judgment. It was impossible for her to characterize until she realized it was the look of a friend.
She noticed the song then. It had been playing for maybe half a minute. Lenny Welch, one of the earliest but most enduring one-hit wonders, singing “Since I Fell for You.”
Brian’s head was cocked to it, his gaze gone to another place. “This played on the radio once when I was a kid at this lake we’d go to. All the adults were funny that day, a blast to be around. Took me years to realize they were all high. I couldn’t understand why they kept sharing the same cigarette. Anyway, they danced by the lake to this, a bunch of stoned Canucks in nylon bathing suits.”
Where did it come from, what she said next? Could that impulse be traced? Or was it simply chemical? Neurons firing away, biology trumping intellect.
“Wanna dance?”
“Love to.” He took her hand and they found the small dance floor just past the bar itself in a dark room lit only by the glow of the jukebox.
Their first dance then. The first time their palms and chests touched. The first time she was close enough to smell what she would always identify as Brian’s essential smell—a hint of smoke entwined with the smell of his unscented shampoo and a vaguely woodsy musk to his flesh.
“I sent you the drink because I didn’t want you to leave the bar.”
“Because you had to go to the bathroom, I know.”
“No, I went to the bathroom because right after I sent the drink, I freaked out. I just, I dunno, whew, I just didn’t want to see you look at me like some fucking stalker. So I went to the bathroom to, I dunno, cringe? I just went in there and stood with my back against the wall and called myself stupid about ten times.”
“You did not.”
“I did. I swear. When I used to watch you on the news, you were honest. You didn’t editorialize, you didn’t wink at the camera or wear your biases on your sleeve. I trusted what you said. You did your job with integrity. And that came through.”