Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,185

I suspected that he was self-conscious about that, that he was sort of a lost gentleman, so when he offered a cigarette, I took it. I didn’t smoke, but Phil didn’t deserve a no, and sometimes that’s all a yes needs to be. We stood there for a while—actually, I leaned. Cigarettes make me dizzy.

“So, Reagan won,” I said.

“Yeah.” Phil evacuated the smoke from his lungs and flicked his butt to the curb. “The actor.”

Heartbreak was not a great club, it was an okay club, a dive actually, but an enduring sort of dive popular among idiosyncratic losers and peripheral celebrities, iffy brokers and borderline musicians, those haggard, nicotine-types in creased leather and reedy denim who sleep all day but somehow manage to earn livings. I worked three nights, eleven to four, earning shift plus tips. I did more dancing than drink-serving, but no one seemed to care.

The atmosphere was remarkably wholesome. Dad and Marilyn stopped by sometimes to see me. Like everyone working there—gentlemanly bouncers, family-minded bar-backs, timid deejays, law school waitresses—I was in it for the money. And like everyone else, I had a complicated past that made me insusceptible to entanglements and indifferent to wild times. If only the loneliness there could have alleviated the loneliness in me, if only a nightclub were not such an institute of longing, maybe I would have gotten better.

At two-thirty in the morning one Friday in December, Mark came in. I hadn’t seen him since the procedure in October. Every week I mailed him a money order for twenty-five dollars, which he always acknowledged with a phone call, and when he called, we would speak at length. I didn’t have to force myself—I liked talking to him. It was like a window open, small as a needle’s eye. But I never called him, no matter how reckless I felt.

“I can’t stay,” he reported. “I have a car waiting.”

I was holding a freshly loaded tray. “Okay. Let me get rid of this.”

I crossed the suddenly packed dance floor to deliver drinks to the guy who’d ordered them. He wiggled his blubbery ass and sang along as he fished leisurely through his pocket for a wallet.

He kept trying to dance with me, and I almost spilled the drinks before he finally handed me a twenty. It wasn’t good to think of where his hands had been, such as shaking himself over a urinal. When people say, Don’t put that money in your mouth, they basically mean someone like him had been holding it. Denny was always telling me to be careful because guys masturbate in bathroom stalls. And worse. The guy waited until I got the change together, then just told me to keep it. Six bucks, which was a lot, but somehow still inadequate compensation for having to deal with him. Good tippers are frequently the most despicable citizens—they pay you for tolerating them.

It’d been a nice night before Mark had arrived. Maybe it wasn’t fair to blame him, but nightclubs are places of explicit laws. It takes just one body to transform a benign gathering into an intolerable mob.

“Who’s the suit?” Mike shouted, meaning Mark. I was waiting for an opening to cross the floor.

“Just a guy I know,” I shouted back.

Aureole joined us. “He’s cute. Like, totally undone. It looks like he ran here.”

It was true. Mark’s tie was loose and his jacket unbuttoned and his hair made Caesar bangs on his brow. He’d obviously been drinking.

Mike leaned forward. “What the fuck’s he doing?”

“Is he busing tables?” Aureole asked, leaning as well, squinting. “Oh, my God, he is.”

Mark was emptying ashtrays into a gray plastic bucket, wiping them with cocktail napkins. All the tables around him had been cleared.

When I got over to him, I said, “What are you doing?”

He said, “I hate to have you touch filth.”

“We have a busboy,” I informed him.

“Obviously not a competent one. There’s shit everywhere.”

“Anyway,” I yelled. “What’s up?”

“I want to borrow you. For New Year’s Eve.”

“I’m working New Year’s Eve.”

“Take off,” he declared emphatically. “How much will you make?”

I didn’t know. I’d never worked on New Year’s before.

“Take a guess—a hundred, a hundred fifty?”

I shrugged. I’d never made more than fifty a night. “I don’t know, maybe.”

“I’ll double it,” he proposed. “I’ll give you three hundred.”

“That’s prostitution.”

“It’s not if we don’t have sex.” He kissed me and ran out.

36

The dorm on New Year’s Eve had a cinematic emptiness that called to my mind the evacuated ministries in European wartime movies or the hospital