Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,184

the manager. I’m a bar-back.”

“I’m here for a job,” I said.

“Sure. I’ll get him.” Mike handed me his paper as he passed. It was the New York Times’ crossword puzzle. “Do me a favor. Help me out here. I’m too freaked out to finish.”

I answered as many as I could in the time it took for him to return from the rear of the kitchen with a case of Heineken on one shoulder. In his back pocket was an application. “Fill it out while you’re waiting. Use my pen.”

I marked Thursday through Saturday as my available days and gave the application to the elusive Arthur, a towering, sour-looking man in black leather and tinted glasses who appeared from nowhere and gave the impression of being dead or guilty.

Arthur scanned it impassively. “References?”

“None I feel like listing.” Our eyes met over the sheet. I couldn’t imagine him calling the Lobster Roll, which anyway was closed for the season. Besides, there is a trick to getting a job, which is not really needing it and only half-wanting it.

“Fine,” he said. “Start Thursday. Stick around and have a drink if you want. It’s been a rough night.” Without another word he left as he’d arrived, vanishing into concrete and neon.

I finished the crossword with Mike and had a Beck’s while we listened to Reagan’s acceptance speech. Reagan said he was “not frightened of what lies ahead.”

Mike chucked my empty bottle into a trash can, where it smacked the rim and broke. “Great. In a country of two hundred million, that makes one of us. He’ll reinstitute the draft. He’ll ban abortion. He’ll clear-cut forests. He’ll set us back thirty years. I mean, he’s nostalgic for the 1940s. We were at war in the 1940s! We were dropping atom bombs in the 1940s! I’m getting the hell out,” he confided, and he pulled out an accordion strip of wallet photos. “I’m taking my wife and kids to Australia.”

The club filled considerably after the results were in. I couldn’t imagine where all the people were coming from. Mike dropped me at the deejay booth while he restocked the bar.

A sign on the glass grill barrier said, D.J. JEROME. “Jim Jerome,” he clarified, extending a hand. He sounded Midwestern and sincere, like Mr. Rogers. “The sign is supposed to say ‘D.J. Jim Jerome,’ but they printed it wrong. Now everybody calls me Jerry.”

I introduced myself, and he said my name twice. “Eveline, Eveline,” he mused thoughtfully, as if imagining a place, trying to recall if he’d ever been there.

Mike returned with Aureole. He’d found her locked in the basement bathroom drinking Dewar’s. “I’m sick,” she said, regarding the election. “I don’t know what to do except drink.” Aureole blew her nose hard. Her hair was a swervy bob the color of Darjeeling tea, situated wiggishly over a pair of violet doe eyes ringed red from tears. On her left cheek was a mole. She looked like a young Liz Taylor, only not such an absolute knockout. “Sure, I’ll share a cab with you. I’d leave now, but I don’t feel like being alone.”

Jim pulled a new album and tucked one headphone cup between his ear and shoulder. He engrossed himself in the mix, fingering the album back and forth. Underneath the song that was already playing came the Rolling Stones’ “Beast of Burden.” The absence of interruption in music as he went from one song to the next was nice; it was symbolic of cohesion in rough and fast times. It was as if no one could bear a second of silence.

As soon as the song became recognizable to the crowd, people peeled away from the bar. Their faces were familiar to me; they belonged to people my mother might have befriended, rebels and outcasts. Only I noticed a new lameness about them, an increased lack of relevance. They looked off message. It was as if within a matter of minutes, the avant-garde had become the periphery. The bodies crept to the edge of the dance floor, sitting on tables or standing next to them, swaying, nodding, soothed for the moment by the injection of the Stones’ familiar antiestablishment voices, though, as Jack would have said, The moment was bound to be brief.

“How’d it go?” Phil inquired when I left. He was alone outside, just standing there, staring thoughtfully toward the street.

“Okay, I guess. I start Thursday.”

He nodded. “Work out all right with Aureole?”

“Yeah,” I said. “She’s getting her stuff.”

Phil had bad skin and bulky wrists.