Early Work_A Novel Read online

  “Can I have a drag?” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Hell yeah. You can finish it if you want.”

  “Nah, just a drag,” I said, and took one. “Or two. Man, smoking.”

  “I’d really quit,” she said, taking the cigarette back. “And then the second I got to Virginia I found myself walking into a gas station and buying a pack. Just, like, total autopilot.”

  “Yeah, I hate when I notice that I’m addicted to things. Like, oh, why do I feel so weird today? Oh right, because I’m drunk and stoned from the alcohol I drank and the pot I smoked.”

  She cast her eyes over me with a new kind of attention.

  “Is that really your situation?” she said.

  “Oh, I mean, I’m trying to seem cooler than I am,” I said. “But there’ve been some not-great decisions.”

  “Believe me, I’m with you. I would even go so far as to say I’ve made some not-great decisions. How’s that for taking personal responsibility?”

  “On that note,” I said.

  She took a final nubby drag and ground the butt out on the sidewalk. Inside, I nodded to the girl at the hostess desk whose name I could never remember, then went down the stairs into the bar, a narrow, dimly lit cave of unfinished wood. Kate, resplendent in giant glasses, presided. Two tables were occupied by pairs of people, one by an English PhD couple I sort of knew, the other by two old, rich-looking men. There was a fit guy in a polo shirt drinking alone at the bar, a few seats over from a splayed, face-up paperback of The Beginning of Spring. Leslie took the seat behind the book and I sat down next to her.

  “He-ey, Pete,” Kate said. She tossed a coaster down in front of me. “What’s happening?”

  “Just showing this newbie the coolest bar in town,” I said.

  “Only when I’m here,” Kate said. “What you drinking?”

  “I’ll start with a special. What the heck, we made it to Wednesday.”

  “Good thinking. You good for now, hon?” she said to Leslie.

  “I want a special,” Leslie said. “Does it go with this beer I have to finish?”

  “Oh, it goes with everything,” Kate said. “Two specials. I’ll have one, too, actually. So that’s three specials.”

  Leslie looked, I thought, more fully like herself tonight than the first time I met her. She wore no detectable makeup, a plaid, pearl snap-button shirt, jeans. She had her elbows on the bar, like a shift worker kicking back after a day of manual labor, rather than whatever she really was.

  Kate returned from the end of the bar with our drinks.

  “Are we putting this down in one or what?” she said. There looked to be nearly three shots’ worth of booze in each glass.

  “I think this might be more of a sipping occasion,” I said. “Cheers.”

  I touched glasses with Kate and Leslie and took a sip; the other two locked eyes and competitively drained their drinks.

  “Fuck yeah,” Kate said.

  “What is that?” Leslie said.

  “Mostly tequila and lime juice. There’s a couple other things I can’t tell you about. ’Cause then it wouldn’t be special.”

  “It’s a tough little drink,” Leslie said.

  “Yeah, it does what it does,” Kate said. “You want another one?”

  “Careful,” I said.

  Leslie raised her eyebrow and cocked her head at me like a sea captain.

  “I’m always careful,” she said, rasping for effect. “Let me finish this beer and then we’ll see,” she said to Kate.

  “So, are you liking Virginia?” I said.

  “That’s a big question,” she said. “You know, like, are you liking the world?”

  I let that stand without comment.

  “It’s been kind of a rough few weeks, even if my perfect skin belies it,” she continued. “I’ve spent way too much time sitting around worrying about my, uh, conjugal future. Dark rooms and my computer screen are the same pretty much everywhere.”

  “I realize that must be hard,” I said.

  “Every time I think about something besides him—us—I realize I need to be thinking about that, and it bums me out all over again.”

  We were, apparently, getting right to it.

  “It’s not like you’re suddenly going to discover some big coherent answer, though, right?”

  “No, but I can’t tell if I’m having big revelations or if I’m just spending too much time alone. Maybe it’s bad that I’m not sure how much I miss him?”

  “How much, like, quantitatively, or at all?”

  She shrugged the slightest bit with just her shoulder blades, more like a twitch.

  “At all is a number, too, right?”

  The conversation was making me feel more stoned than I’d thought I was, which made me wonder if maybe she was stoned, too, since that would account for the level of intimacy and abstraction we were working at. But maybe this was just exactly how a regular conversation went.

  “I think, respectfully, that you should probably get out of the house more,” I said. “It’s better to make decisions when your baseline emotion isn’t misery.”

  “Right, that leaves, like, an hour a week.”

  “Whoa, what are you doing for that hour? Share your secret.”

  She narrowed her eyes. We were flirting.

  “Reading,” she said.

  She excused herself to use the bathroom and I ordered us each another beer.

  “Where’s your, uh, usual lady, pal?” Kate said as she pulled the tap.

  “Working,” I said. “Unfortunately.”

  “Okay, Prof,” she said. “Just be cool. That’s all I’m sayin’.”

  “I’ll not make ye a secret-keeping wench, I swear it.”

  “Oh, please,” she said. “Your secrets are super not safe with me.”

  I tapped vacantly at my phone until Leslie settled back down on the stool next to me.

  “Anyway, thanks for listening about my life bullshit. At the end of the day, it is what it is, right?”

  “When you come to a fork in the road, eat it,” I said.

  “Okay, but do you like living in Virginia?” she said pointedly. “Is living in Virginia lowering or heightening your sense of existential dread?”

  “My basic status is medium-happy,” I said. “We’ll have to move when Julia gets the next thing, so it’s not useful to analyze it too much. Do I need to have a position? I’m not running for office. I’m not trying to be the president of selfhood.”

  “Are you kind of fucked-up?” she said.

  “Naw,” I said, though I was.

  “I’m the littlest bit,” she said.

  “You wanna get some food? The real menu is crazy expensive, but they have good appetizers.”

  “No no, I’m straight. Unless Kate decided to drug me.”

  “You ne-ver kno-ow,” Kate said in a singsong voice.

  “Okay, but seriously,” she said, turning on her stool to face me. “What do you actually care about?”

  “People,” I said.

  “All right, E. M. Forster.”

  I’d been trying to be sincere, but I’d done it so randomly and inexpertly that it had come across as a continuation of banter, an inability to be serious.

  “I care about doing good work,” I said.

  “That’s good. I can get behind that.”

  We sat in silence for a little bit and I felt a sexual current between us, even if it was mostly coming from me. I felt a sharp urge toward possession, something that wasn’t usually prominent in my taxonomy of desire, and a quality that didn’t factor much into what I thought of as my egalitarian relationship with Julia. Right now, sitting with Leslie, I felt bereft over the fact that she wasn’t mine, that she was going to go back to the place where she lived and stay there until a mutually agreed-upon date, to take place only after a socially acceptable amount of time had passed. It was devastating. Unacceptable.

  “I’m just really glad you’re here,” I said.

&
nbsp; “I think I am, too,” she said. “You’re probably right about being more in the world. Maybe you and Julia can teach me how to live again or something.”

  “Only by teaching ourselves to live can we something something.”

  “Hey, don’t count yourself out of that election yet.”

  She tipped her chair, steadying herself by gripping the underside of the bar, and rocked back and forth.

  “Is there anywhere to even dance in this town?” she said.

  “Can you dance to bluegrass?”

  “I’ll make some friends, and then I’ll have everybody over to dance to Dirty Sprite 2,” she said. “And whoever wants to go to trivia or something can go do that wherever.”

  “DS2 is definitely the Terminator 2 of the Dirty Sprite saga. Does Dirty Sprite 1 even exist?”

  “Yeah, I’m pretty into monotonous drug rap right now,” she said. “I mean, like everybody. I guess it’s the usual racist thing, where white people like it because it takes their worst suspicions about minorities and confirms them in lurid and entertaining ways?”

  “Yeah, that’s why I like it,” I said. “Racist reasons mostly. I’m not thrilled about the misogyny, though. In my experience, you don’t really want to be the guy bringing up the genius of Yeezus in a room full of women. Even if someone loves it she’ll probably wonder what your problem with women is.”

  “Girls are going to wonder that no matter what kind of music you say you like. Because guess what: everyone has a problem with women. Because to men? We’re a fucking problem.”

  I wasn’t sure exactly where we’d gotten to, but I decided to assume we were on the same page.

  “Fuck it,” she said suddenly, clomping the barstool back down on all four legs. “You want to walk down this, uh, so-called mall and have another drink or something? You busy?”

  “Naw, Julia’s not home till midnight,” I said. “And it’s, what? Like practically still daytime.”

  “Oh, good,” she said. “I was worried you were going to be one of those adults who, like, checks their watch at ten and is like, ‘Well, time to go home and let the dog out, gotta get a good night’s sleep for the big day tomorrow!’”

  “The dog can go a good long time without us,” I said, though in truth I spent most of my waking hours worrying about that. “Can we settle up, Kate?”

  “So soon?” she said. I could tell she was miffed that we hadn’t included her in more of the conversation. We’d treated the queen of Charlottesville like she was some bartender.

  “Leslie needs to see the full range of what our fair town has to offer,” I said.

  “Oh god, you’re going to Malone’s?” she said.

  “We’ll see what catches our fancy.”

  When Kate delivered the bill, Leslie and I huddled over it shoulder to shoulder. She’d only charged us for one drink each.

  “On me,” Leslie said. “You can get the next ones.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Make sure to leave a good tip.”

  “Are you serious? I’ve been a waitress, man. Don’t even start with that shit.”

  It was the first real anger I’d seen from her. I made a mental note not to tell her what to do.

  Leslie paid and we walked down to the claustrophobic pedestrian mall that represented the apex of culture in our underimagined city. With all of the college students gone for the summer, things were pretty quiet. The afternoon’s warm air lingered, trapped by the brick ground and the corridor of shops. Scattered representatives of the bourgeoisie finished dinner or sipped drinks at outdoor tables. A loose knot of black teenagers flowed around us, one girl blasting that song about Versace from her phone. Homeless bearded white men sat on blankets with their dogs behind cardboard signs reading VETERAN PLEASE HELP and EVERY LITTLE BIT COUNTS. On rare occasions, I followed the example set by my friend Kenny, who used to work at the day shelter, and chatted with the guys about what was going on, asked if they knew about the Haven, gave them a dollar. Usually, like now, I just avoided looking in their eyes and kept walking.

  “This isn’t so bad,” Leslie said. “It’s fairly active, I guess, for a Wednesday.”

  “You know they had to bulldoze an entire black neighborhood to build it,” I said pointlessly. We walked past an empty restaurant whose walls seemed to be made entirely of glowing televisions.

  We walked in silence until we reached Malone’s. We stepped through the scrum of smokers to the inside, where a loud band was playing “Guitars, Cadillacs” on the small stage next to the door. A beat-up middle-aged couple danced expressively two feet in front of the band; the guys at the bar and the people drinking at tables seemed to be ignoring the music entirely. I shouted drink orders at the bartender—two tequila shots and two Pacíficos? Modelos? Fine, two Coronas. We took our shots and leaned against the bar, sipping our beers and watching the band. They played “Mind Your Own Business,” then an original song I’d heard many times about chickens getting killed by foxes, then “The Race Is On.” Leslie grooved a little bit and bobbed her head, but I wasn’t getting the sense that she wanted to dance for real, so I didn’t try for it.

  When they moved, fairly inexplicably given their earlier selections, into a vaguely down-home version of “Cocaine” by Eric Clapton, I waved Leslie over to the stairs at the back of the room.

  “Up here’s where the magic really happens,” I said. We climbed two narrow, increasingly smoky flights of stairs, until we reached a wooden door with a white piece of printer paper attached to it, across which THE 3RD FLOOR was scrawled in Sharpie. I pushed open the door and we stepped into the only smoking bar left in town, grandfathered in by some obscure ordinance that exempted rooms with pool tables that are at least three stories above the ground or something. This was the premier spot for dudes scrounging together the money for one last beer. There was a guy with unapologetic metal hair and a leather vest playing pool by himself, and a fat, angry-faced couple smoking silently over Budweisers at a table in the back. That was it. There didn’t even seem to be a bartender.

  “Paradise regained,” Leslie said. She lit a cigarette and exhaled happily. “Now if there was only some way to get a drink…”

  We walked over to the bar and stood there, staring at ourselves in the back mirror, willing someone to materialize and serve us. I wondered if Leslie was studying our joint portrait the way I was, whether she was thinking about how good we looked stoic and drunk together, patiently awaiting the agent of our next, important drink. Leslie reached over and grabbed my hand, then held it gently like we were about to recite the Our Father.

  “My face is gigantic,” she said, still facing forward.

  “Good thing it’s so pretty,” I said.

  She turned to me, unsmiling.

  “That was a test, you know.”

  “And?”

  She turned back to the mirror. A moment later we heard stomping on the stairs, then watched a tiny bleached-blonde bartender push the door open with her butt and stagger toward the bar with a giant box in her arms.

  “Just a minute, guys,” she said raspily. She dropped the box on the bar, then ducked through the service area to the other side.

  “What is that?” Leslie said.

  “What?” the bartender said. “Oh, napkins. I don’t know why I thought that was necessary just now. Well, now we got ’em. Whaddya guys need?”

  “This seems like the whiskey floor,” Leslie said.

  The bartender poured us generous drinks and we sipped them at a low circular table with a good view of the pool action, of which there wasn’t currently much. Vest guy was down to the eight ball but couldn’t get it to drop. As I watched his cue ball carom off the rails, it occurred to me that he might have been failing to sink it on purpose. Leslie lit a cigarette and offered it to me, then went back to smoking her own before I could hand mine back. So now I was smoking a cigarette, with my main concern being that Julia would not be happy if I came home smelling like smoke, even though choosing to sit for even five minutes i
n the smokiest bar in Virginia would make that inevitable anyway. You lose some, you lose some.

  “What are you brooding about?” Leslie said.

  “What’s your fiancé like?” I said. I didn’t think I was thinking about that.

  “Ummmm,” she said. “Well. Brian. He’s very into sustainability and food sourcing and all that. He works for this group called Local Food Hub that’s all about trying to get organic and ethically grown food into urban areas. Believe me that in Texas this has not been easy. Well, it’s not so bad in Austin. But he goes to Dallas and they think he’s like, some hippie queer. Which of course is a label he’d happily accept, if it were true, but he’s really pretty square—in a good way—considering his interests. I mean, I don’t think he’s gayer than the average guy of his age and cultural sphere. How gay would you say you are?”

  “Not especially,” I said. “How gay are you?”

  “I’ve dated women, like everybody, but I never really embraced it as, like, an identity. Which can kind of be an issue, or feelings hurting, when you’re with someone who’s really committed. The old tourist thing. Which I think is a pretty legit criticism. Because, yeah, my life has been a lot easier for not having to actually come out to my parents, you know?”

  I became aware that I was rubbing the back of my neck excessively, something I do when I’m anxious or drunk, or, as is often the case, both.

  “Everybody’s life is difficult in a different way,” I said.

  “Right, and the very rich have more money than we do. Anyway, Brian … he’s a really great guy, and I don’t mean that in the dismissive, somewhat pejorative way that some people use it. I mean I really love his goodness. He’s, like, the least obnoxious good person I know. He cares about shit, and he gets it done.”

  “But does that put pressure on you somehow?” I said.

  “I thought about that,” she said. She swallowed the rest of her drink, along with a couple of pieces of ice, and coughed. “I think the answer is basically no? He makes me more aware of the possibility of decency than I might be otherwise, so I guess that’s something. That has to be a good thing, right?”