and she’s lighting up again and now I’ve lost track of how many cigarettes she’s smoked although, really, I wasn’t even counting to begin with, but it seems like she’s had a lot, and she’s telling me again, over and over, this same story. This same series of events that somehow have led her here to this bar and to this table and to this man, who is me, sitting here listening to her tale of woe. Really listening, and she says, this girl, chain smoking her life away right in front of me, she says You’re a really good listener like she’s known me for all of my life instead of the thirty minutes or three hours or however long we’ve been sitting here while I get the long and short of her life. We could be at Club Gnaw. We could be at the Piranha Room, or DV8, or Polly Ester’s, except that we’re not. Or we are. It doesn’t really matter; it’s all the same. She tells me again of how her husband is such a wonderful man and how everything just went wrong and she can’t figure out why because, really, because when you spend as much as they did on a house you really only do it because you’re going to fill it with kids, lots of kids, she tells me, and you need a house of, well, of a certain size. By which, I think, she means of a certain stature. That is to say, socially, culturally, not physically, although if I confronted her with this, if I asked her about the nature of stature, social, cultural or political, she would undoubtedly give me a blank look, a look that would tell me what a complete asshole I am, so of course, I don’t ask her this. I don’t ask her anything, actually, I just listen as she goes on and on and I try to remember her name, but of course, I can’t and of course, it doesn’t really matter anyway. Only that she tells the story because she has to make sense of it all.
Somehow. Make sense. Of it all. She’s slowing down and lighting up another one and I motion to the waitress for two more drinks. I can’t remember what this woman was drinking so I just order a couple of tequila sunrises because I like them and I don’t think she’d notice if I handed her a glass of strychnine right now she’s so into her tale. This tale, whatever she’s talking about, she tells it well, that’s for damn sure. Maybe it’s the alcohol, or her tits, or the way her tongue moves across her mouth every now and again to rewet her lips, whatever it is, I’m in it for the long haul and even though she’s lost me and she talks about her husband, the husband who she’s so attached to there’s no ring on her finger, this husband, I figure, is in the wind as they say, those people who say that sort of thing. I realize that I need to know the end of this story. I have to know. I will ride this out until she makes her point, whatever that may end up being. She’s saying now, swallowing the fresh tequila that’s been set before her without missing a beat, without acknowledging it’s newness, it’s recent arrival, she’s saying how her house is selling for $750,000 and she’s going to make a pile of money but she doesn’t care. She just wants her life to be the way she thought it would be when she signed on. When she took the ring and the I do and the death do us part. Like all of the fairy tales told her it would be like. She tells me that as a man, I have it easy. As a man, I haven’t been brainwashed into believing in Prince Charming and his white horse who doesn’t really exist but you don’t find that out until it’s too late and the Prince is fucking the interns at his office downtown and you’re stuck at home in this supposed castle that you were going to fill with these kids but now it’s just full of nothing and you start drinking to fill the empty space in your house and the space in your heart and the space in your bed that you never thought would be there. She crumples up the empty pack and tosses it on the floor and looks around but I’ve already beat her to it and I hand her one of mine and it’s not her brand but after this long, after this many drinks, you stop caring what you put in your body. You light up. You continue with your story. She pauses, like it’s for dramatic effect but really I think she’s just gasping for air, and she dives back in. She doesn’t thank me for anything and I don’t expect it. I could be anyone, anything, standing here, listening. I am a sounding board, something to echo what she is sending. No comments necessary, warranted or asked for. Her eyes, I think, are blue, but it’s so dark in here I can’t tell and her hair, I’m pretty sure, is dyed and she’s got some lines around her eyes and maybe a couple around her mouth but it’s okay because we’ve all got our mileage. We’ve all got our stories. She’s going on and on about finally not caring about how he worked overtime in the city every night and didn’t come home until after she was asleep. How they played a game, where she pretended not to notice the stains on his shirts and the stains on his pants and the stains on their life and he pretended to care about her. Children were never spoken of anymore. The future was no longer an articulable fact, a location to plot on the compass of her marriage. It was just something that happened to her every day. Each moment passing by without fanfare, just slipping away like her dreams and desires, so many that she’s lost count, even though she was trying, right here in the bar, really trying, to add up all of the things she wanted to do when she was young and all of the things she’d given up on without realizing it until it was too late to do anything about it. She’s burned down to the filter, all ash and smoke and by this time she feels that we’re familiar enough to reach into my shirt and grab my smokes without asking. Without a word. Just grabs one out of the pack and lights up and Here’s to lung cancer she’s saying and I smile without feeling it and she does the same and now there’s a moment where the pauses in her soliloquy become longer. Become more pronounced. Pregnant is how these pauses should be characterized. It’s an opportunity for me to interject, for me to sympathize with what she’s said because all the books on women, these books, they say that’s what women want but I don’t rise to the occasion. I don’t seize the opportunity like I could. I let the silence sit until it takes on a life of its own. Until it breathes. Until it becomes the loudest thing in the world. I could take this moment in my hands and tell her about myself. My life. About how my dad is at my brother’s house tonight and even though I haven’t seen him in years when I got home from work tonight there weren’t any messages on my answering machine. I could talk to her about loneliness and how, after a while, after a long time, it becomes a physical thing, becomes palatable, that is, takes shape and resonance until you forget what it was like to live your life without it. I could go on and on for hours, like she is, revealing my innermost thoughts and dreams and all of the shit that I’m quite certain, really, she would have little or no interest in. She has her own story to tell. Her own knife to twist. What she has come here for, to this place, which could be anywhere but it happens to be here, with me, tonight, she has come here because she doesn’t have an ending. She doesn’t have a way to bring her story to a close. What she doesn’t know, what has obviously never occurred to her, is that there is no ending. No closure. No satisfaction. There is only the story and it goes on and on until you just can’t tell it anymore. Until you no longer care, and all that is left is the telling itself. Two more drinks. Another cigarette. She’s regained her composure, rewet her lips. It’s midnight, it’s one a.m., it’s next week, it doesn’t matter because we all have our needs. She’s here. I’m listening. She puts down the drink, opens her mouth again, and says