The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims (157 page)

“He likes us.”

“You and your sisters?”

“Yes.”

“Does he like Amber the junkie?”

Sandy laughed.

“Don’t laugh at Amber. She’s a sweetheart. She’s from Florida, poor kid . . . It’s hard to say,” Ellen said. “I used to have this bartender, Catherine, who had this walk. People used to come to my bar on her shifts just to watch her walk back and forth. Not your father. He never liked my bar.”

“Do you like his bar?” Sandy asked, and she smiled as she asked this.

“See, Sandy. It’s like this,” Ellen said. “Not really. You know?”

“Sure,” Sandy said. “I think I’ll go in there now.” She pointed to the bathroom, and Ellen moved out of her way.

“Sure,” Ellen said.

Ellen made her way back to Al and ordered more Scotch for both of them. Wide Dennis was still there, and James in his car-seat coat was there, too, talking to Amber the junkie.

“I don’t like this place,” Ellen said to Al. “Who’s going to come to a place like this?”

“Me, neither,” Amber said. She was eating a sandwich out of one of those small coolers people use for carrying around six-packs or organs fresh for transplants. She was drinking what could have been a rum and Coke. “This place is the worst.”

“Nobody loves anyone here,” Ellen said, and Al took her hand and squeezed it. She kissed his neck.

“He’s the sweetest boy,” Amber said.

“Remember that bartender you used to have over there? Victoria?” James asked Ellen. “She was a sassy thing, that girl.”

“She worked Wednesday nights,” Al said.

“She worked Tuesday nights, baby,” James said. “Trust me please on this one.”

“You’re right.” Al nodded. “It was Tuesday.”

“My God, I do miss that girl.”

“She was a good bartender,” Ellen said.

“Those were good, good times. We used to call that the Victorian Era, didn’t we? When Victoria was still working.”

“That’s right, James.”

“Get that girl back again. That’s what we all need.”

“Can’t do it.”

“Tall Folks was holy back then. We used to drink out of that damn girl’s hands.”

“She has kids in grammar school now,” Ellen said.

“They don’t make girls like that anymore. That’s the truth.”

“They’re always making girls like that,” Ellen said. “They just
keep on making them, and there’s one of them across the street at my bar right now, if you’re craving a great girl.”

“Who?” Al asked. “Maddy? Not Maddy. Hardly.”

“I don’t drink like this all the time,” Amber the junkie said suddenly. “You know that? Some days I don’t drink for two weeks.”

Then they were all quiet, looking at Amber.

“Okay, sweetie,” Ellen said. “That’s great. Good girl.”

“Sure,” Amber said. “No problem.”

Behind the bar, Walter was changing the cassette again, and a new dancer stepped up onto the stage.

“Wow,” Al said.

“I know, baby,” James said. “You don’t have to tell me.”

She was blond but not a born blond, with dark eyebrows and short hair, combed down straight against a round, round face. She wore fishnet stockings and garters, big clunky 1940s high heels, and a short antique pink dressing gown that tied in the front. She was chewing gum, and as the music started, she looked down at Al and blew a bubble.

“Jesus Christ,” he said.

“That girl is a pin-up,” Wide Dennis said.

She danced for a while with her robe on, then slid it off and coyly folded it at her feet. She stood up to face the bar with naked breasts, and her nipples were perfect and tiny, like some kind of cake decoration.

“She’s beautiful,” Ellen whispered to Al.

“Ellen,” he said, “I would eat that girl up with a spoon. I really would.”

“She’s a steamed dumpling, isn’t she?” Ellen said.

The dumpling had an actual act. She worked the bubble gum and the stockings and her flushed little arms. She worked the big clunky shoes and the belly and thighs. She held every available attention.

“You know what I feel like?” Ellen asked Al. “I feel like I’m looking at a pastry, you know? In a bakery window?”

“Yum,” Al said gravely. “Yum.”

“You could melt cheese on that girl.”

“You know those tubes of biscuit dough you can buy in the dairy case?” Al asked. “You know how you smack them on the counter and they go
pop
and all the dough pops out?”

“Yeah.”

“She came out of one of those tubes.”

The dumpling was dancing in front of the mirror, looking at herself. She put her hands against the reflection of her own hands and kissed the reflection of her own mouth.

“That’s what strip joints are all about,” Wide Dennis said. “Greasy mirrors.”

“You know what she’s leaving on that mirror?” Al said. “Butter.”

“That’s not lipstick she has on,” Ellen said. “That’s frosting.”

Al laughed and pulled Ellen tight, and she put her arm around his shoulders.

“You should give her some money,” he said.

“No way.”

“It’ll be cute. I’ll go with you. She’ll like it. She’ll think we’re a married couple and our therapist told us to come here so we could have better sex.”

“She’ll wonder how I tricked a twenty-year-old into marrying me.”

Ellen put her face against Al’s neck, which was warm and salty. Wide Dennis went up to the stage and leaned his huge self against the rail, as if he were on a veranda or a cruise ship, as if the scenery were delightful and vast, as if he were a man of great leisure. He pulled dollar bills out of his pocket one at a time and held them up suavely between his second and third fingers. The dumpling accepted the money somehow within her choreography,
and managed to tuck each dollar bill into her garter as though it were a slip of paper with a phone number on it that she thoroughly intended to call later. Against Wide Dennis, she looked slightly miniaturized, a perfect scale model of herself.

“He’ll stand there as long as he has money, won’t he?” Ellen asked.

“She’s the sweetest girl,” Amber the junkie said. “I love her.”

The dumpling leaned down and took Wide Dennis’s huge head in her hands. She kissed him once over each eyebrow.

“I love that girl,” James said.

“Me, too,” Al said.

“I love her,” Ellen said. “I love her, too.”

Ellen drank the last of her Scotch and said, “This is bad news for me. This place is really bad news, isn’t it?” She smiled at Al, and he kissed her with his boozy, pretty mouth. It was more of a kiss than aunts usually get. He kissed her as if he had been planning the kiss for some time, and Ellen called up all of the lessons of her considerable history to accept and return it with grace. She let him hold the back of her head in one reassuring hand, as if she were a weak-necked baby, feeding. To Ellen, his mouth tasted like her own fine Scotch, nicely warmed.

When Ellen and Al finally crossed back over to the Tall Folks Tavern, it was closing time, and Maddy the mean bartender was kicking out her last drunks.

“Go home!” she was yelling. “Go home and apologize to your wives!”

Ellen did not ask Maddy how the night had been and she did not greet any of her customers, but walked behind the bar and picked up the lost-and-found box. Then she and Al went together to the back room. Ellen spread the lost-and-found coats over the pool table. Al turned off the low overhead light, and the two of them climbed up onto the pool table, with its thin mattress of other people’s clothes. Ellen stretched out on her
back with a damp jacket pillow and Al settled his head on her chest. She kissed his smoky hair. In the dark of the back room, without a window or a fan, the air smelled like cigarette ashes and the dust of chalk. It smelled something like a school.

Much later, more than an hour later, Al did roll carefully on top of Ellen, and she did lace her fingers snugly against his back, but before this they rested for a long time, still in the dark, holding hands like old people. They listened to Maddy the mean bartender throw the last drunks out of the Tall Folks Tavern, and they listened to her clean up and shut down the bar. On the best nights, Ellen used to dance on that same bar with her arms spread open wide, saying, “My people! My people!” while the men crowded at her feet like dogs or students. They used to beg her not to close. It would be daylight and they would still be coming in from across the street, begging her not to close. She told this to Al, and he nodded. In the dark of that big back room, she felt his little nod.

I
LIVED
in San Francisco for three months and only slept with one person, a redneck from Tennessee. I could have done that back home and saved myself a lot of rent money. A city full of educated, successful men, and I went after the first guy I saw wearing a John Deere hat.

I noticed him at the bar because he looked out of context among all the businessmen, sitting there in his plaid shirt and white socks. He was drinking a beer and I saw a can of chewing tobacco beside the bottle. If there’s one thing I hate, it’s a man who chews tobacco. I sat down next to him.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“You sure made a beeline for me,” he said.

“That’s a hell of a long name,” I said. I ordered a beer and settled onto the bar stool. He told me that he was Dean.

“I’m Julie,” I said. “What are you doing in San Francisco, Dean?”

“Uncle Sam stationed me here.”

I thought, I didn’t come all the way to California to pick up some enlisted guy in a bar. I thought, I didn’t come all the way out to California to pick up some good old boy with a cheap
watch and a crewcut, some yokel from a town probably smaller than my own.

“So, what is it exactly that you do in the army, Dean?”

“I jump out of airplanes.” Something about his drawl made the comment sound drenched with innuendo. He looked at me appraisingly; there was a long pause.

“Well,” I said, finally. “That must be fun.”

Dean kept his eyes on mine for a moment. He unfolded the paper napkin in front of me, held it over my head, and let it go: a tiny parachute with “Pierce Street Bar” printed on a corner. The napkin fluttered down and settled on my pack of cigarettes.

“You fall and fall,” he said. “And then you land.”

I took a long drink and put the bottle down evenly on its own damp ring. I had started feeling that magnet pull at the back of my knees and the gentle tug just under my stomach.

“Do you have cowboy boots?” I asked him.

“Why?”

“Because I’m not crazy about those shoes you’re wearing. You look stupid with white socks and dress shoes. I think you’d look a whole lot better with cowboy boots coming out from those jeans.”

Dean laughed. “Sure, I got cowboy boots. Come back to the Presidio with me tonight, I’ll put them on for you.”

“You don’t throw away much time buttering up a girl with conversation, do you?” I asked, and wrapped my hand around my beer bottle. Dean covered my hand with his.

“You sure got nice hands,” he said.

“I was just going to take a drink,” I said, and I thought my voice sounded a little bit too low and shaky. I cleared my throat.

We looked at his hand on mine and at my hand on the bottle, and I said, “You’ve got nice hands, too. Big, but nice.” I could feel his calluses against my knuckles. “You know what they say about men with big hands,” I continued, and Dean grinned.

“What’s that?”

“Big gloves.”

It was easy to find Dean’s truck. It was the only pickup with Tennessee plates on Pierce Street, and it was right across from the bar.

“You drove this thing all the way to California?”

“Yup. Only took me two days.”

There was an empty doughnut box on the front seat, and the passenger side window was stuck at half-mast. Plastic six-pack rings, fast food bags, and empty cassette boxes covered the floor, and I felt something crack under my foot as I got in.

“What was that?” Dean asked, and I read the label on the box.

“Hank Williams Junior’s Greatest Hits Volume Two. You’re kidding me.”

“What’s the matter, never heard country music before?”

“I wish.”

Dean started up the truck and pulled off Pierce Street.

“Where’d you say you were from, Julie?”

“Main Street,” I said. “USA.”

“You got some South in your voice.”

“Maybe.”

“Scoot over here,” Dean said, patting a spot next to him. I slid over, close as I could get. “I want to put my arm around you,” he said, “but I have to shift.”

I took his hand off the chipped black ball on top of the gear shift and put his arm around me.

“We driving all the way to the army base in second?” he asked.

“I’ll shift,” I said, and that’s how we drove: me shifting, my other hand on his left thigh so I could tell when he was pushing the clutch, my face near his chest so I could feel him breathing
and see the snaps on his shirt. Dean drove with his hand on my shoulder and then under my arm against my ribs, and finally at my breast.

We were quiet for some time, and then Dean said, “Talk to me. Tell me something.”

I put my mouth against his ear and slid my hand up his thigh. He shut his eyes.

“Keep your eyes on the road,” I whispered, and he smiled and opened them. I could see the pulse in his neck.