The Drunken Spelunker's Guide to Plato (9 page)

So when two college girls from uptown poked their golden heads through the Cave's door in the early evening and squinted uncertainly into the gloom and the more diaphanous of the two said to her friend, “This is the place he comes,” I knew right away who
he
was. I could tell she was looking for Danny just by the way she sat at the bar, posed on the barstool like a bright and delicate bird, reminding me of my cousin Belle. I thought of how Belle had once shown me how to pull my shoulder blades together when I sat. “Makes your belly smaller and your boobs bigger,” she said, posing. I'd tried later to re-create her stance in the mirror, with little success.

Standing there in the gloom of the Cave, I lit a cigarette even though I already had one going. Sometimes it is practically impossible to smoke as much as you need to.

“Hi,” they chirped at me, smiling wide smiles and shaking their sunshine-colored hair off their shoulders. “What imported beers do you have?”

I pointed sullenly to the list on the wall. They studied it intently, biting their lower lips in pretty indecision and twirling identical strands of hair around identical forefingers in unconscious unison. Then they both ordered the Mexican beer we all called
Orinada
(Spanish for “puddle of piss”) for obvious reasons and asked me if we had any limes. We didn't.

I got their beers and opened them and then made change from their new twenty-dollar bills, feeling suddenly like a brunette troll in the world of blond fairies. I noticed how grubby my own hands looked, with the telltale beer-opening callus
on my right forefinger, compared to their clean white skin and discreet manicures. I moved to the other end of the bar to be out of range of both their Love's Fresh Lemon perfume and their bubbly conversation. I didn't want to hear them say his name.
Danny.
I turned the TV on and
Jeopardy!
sprang to life. I turned up the volume, but even that couldn't erase the glowing expectation they had carried in with them and the consequent gloom that engulfed me. I picked up someone's coverless copy of
Mythology
from where it had been abandoned by the tip jar and tried to concentrate on the story of Hera's jealousy causing her rival, Io, to be turned into a heifer, seeing the justice of this more clearly than I ever had in the past.

It was a slow evening, and they stayed a long time, looking up every time the door opened, their bright expectancy dwindling slowly through uncomplaining patience into restlessness and then boredom to end, finally, in peevish snapping. It was perhaps unbecoming to them but was less grating on my nerves, at least, than the initial self-assured giggling had been. Finally, after a whispered conversation involving clearly mimed exasperation and much glancing and suppressed gesticulating in my direction, the more pert of the two leaned across the bar and rather peremptorily called me over from my glum little lair at the very farthest end of the bar.

“Look,” she said without any pretty lip-biting at all, “there's this guy I met, and I heard he comes in here all the time.” I steeled myself, hardened my face so I wouldn't betray anything at the sound of Danny's name. “Do you know a guy,” she asked, “named Billy Joe?”

I felt my knees go a little bit weak, and it occurred to me then that she wasn't actually such a bad sort of girl after all. I frowned deeply and tried to look like I was thinking hard. “Never heard of him,” I said.

“Come back soon!” I called cheerily after them as they disappeared out the door, waspishly bickering at each other.

Danny himself turned up much later that night with Jake, Charlie Blue, a black eye, and the laughing-eyed smile he always had after the tequila started to kick in.

“Hey, pretty girl,” he laughed at me. “I sure am glad to see you. Where've you been hiding at lately?”

“
I've
been right here,” I said, feeling petulant.

“Well, now, that's a shame,” he said, “because you should've been with me. We've been having a pretty good time. You could've been having a good time, too. Don't you have any sense?” He grinned all lopsided at me across the bar.

“Some of us have to work,” I said.

“It's a shame,” he said again, shaking his head. “That's what it is—a crying shame. I mean, what with you being so pretty and all.”

He sighed a big fake horse-sigh and tried to look sorrowful and failed, and I laughed.

“There were two girls in here earlier,” I ventured as casually as I could, “and I thought they might have been looking for you.”

“
Pretty
girls?” he asked, leaning closer across the bar.

“Maybe,” I said.

“And there were two of them together, you say?”

“They looked like girls from the college—like maybe cheerleaders or something.”

He leaned even closer. “Mercy! Two pretty cheerleader girls roaming around together looking for someone.”

I was watching his face. “I thought they might be looking for you,” I said again. “Couple of pretty blond girls out on the town.”

He was so close to me now that he could whisper. “My, my. That
is
a shame, too, because to tell you the truth, I find that just at the moment here, I can't stop thinking about this one brown-haired girl.”

Then he tugged a lock of my hair and pinched me on the arm and took away my cigarette to smoke himself.

Danny tended bar at a café uptown. It was clean and well lighted and as such seemed an alien land to the Cave dwellers, who all felt that we appeared to our best advantage in subdued lighting and standing in contrast to outrageous background filth. The café was not without its charms, though, such as drinkable coffee and a fully stocked bar open at 8
A.M.
Also, the patrons seemed extremely unlikely to vomit on you or even near you. Even though the waitresses were all beautiful and friendly, Hank and Stinky never came around.

Neither did Vera or Rafi or even Pancho. I felt like a spy and maybe a traitor when I first went to see Danny, skulking in the door sideways and scuttling to a seat at the far end of the bar, hidden from sight by the gleaming chrome cappuccino machine. Jake sat with me. Jake often hung around when Danny was working, not talking much, sometimes reading a coverless book from Tom, sometimes just nursing a beer. I was happy to see him at the café because, among all the well-dressed, intimidating customers there, at least he was a face I knew, someone who wasn't a stranger.

Danny's bartending was a performance to be envied. He teased everybody, flirted with everybody, and made everybody feel like they were the only one, special to him and lucky.

I was driving down a two-lane highway once when I saw a man changing a tire by the side of the road, and in the five seconds he was in my sight, it was clear that he needed no help—he knew exactly what he was doing, exactly how to change a tire. And just as I passed him, he finished tightening the bolts and,
without looking at it, twirled the lug wrench once in his hand—like a bored baton twirler—without even noticing what he was doing. In those five seconds, I fell in love with that man. I told this to Rafi and he understood what I was talking about right away.

“Oh, God, yes,” he said. “Competence is so sexy.”

Danny at work was like that—making conversation and drinks with casual grace. As a consequence, there were always one or two women sitting at the bar wearing too much perfume and leaning too far forward, intent on him, eager. I watched him slipping between their fingers, and he would catch my eye and wink at me. I wondered how many women he winked at in the course of a night.

I never, from the very first, intended to fall in love with him.

But I couldn't help it—I watched him mix a drink without ever looking at the bottle he was pouring from and I completely lost my mind.

5

SUMMER

IN
MENO,
PLATO DISCUSSES
the myth of Persephone's return. The goddess Demeter had a daughter named Persephone who was of such rare loveliness and charm that Hades, the god of the underworld, fell in love with her. One day while Persephone was out gathering flowers in a field, Hades rose up out of a dark chasm in the earth and captured her and carried her away to his kingdom of the dead. Demeter, the goddess of grain and the harvest, was heartbroken. Bereft of her daughter, she mourned for a whole year, and during that time nothing grew on the earth—no fruit or grain or grapes for wine.

Finally the great god Zeus, fearful that all humanity would perish unless the grief of Demeter was assuaged, compelled Hades to relinquish his bride and return Persephone to her mother. Thus ended the year of cold and famine. Demeter's joy at seeing her daughter once again caused the flowers to blossom, the trees to put out their leaves, and the fields to grow green and lush in the warm summer sun.

Alas for Demeter, her happiness could not last. During the time of her captivity in the kingdom of the dead, Persephone had refused all food and drink—save, on the last day, one pomegranate seed. But eating that seed was her undoing. By the inexplicable rules of the gods, it meant that Persephone must always return to Hades. For one-third of each year, she must return to the underworld and reign there for a time as queen. So each winter, Demeter mourns again the loss of her daughter, and the earth mourns with her, brown and sere and lifeless. But with the return of Persephone every spring, Demeter brings back the golden sunlight, the lush fields, the abundant fruitfulness of life.

If the Greeks are to be believed, we are not happy because it is summer—it is summer because we are happy.

Danny didn't usually operate on a regular schedule, and the lengths of his days and nights were erratic at best. Sometimes the phone rang at two o'clock in the morning or three o'clock or four.

“Hey, sugar. What took you so long to answer?”

“Um, I was asleep.”

“Asleep? You don't want to be asleep now, sugar—you should see the moon tonight. It looks close enough to touch.”

“But I'm trying to sleep!”

“Well, couldn't you come out with me to see the moon for just a little while, and then you could go to sleep later and I would go with you?”

Long pause.

And then Danny said, “We shouldn't waste the moon, you know. There may not be one when we get to hell.”

From my bedroom window, we could still see the moon as it
set at dawn, translucent white in the colorless sky. Summer was just beginning then. The birds were stirring on the branches of the mimosa trees on Thornapple Street. Long shadows still lay across the grass, and the tiny pink and white daisies hadn't opened yet but just showed their tight little buds reaching above the grass from their thread-thin stems. The sun rose slowly over the hedges and the japonica bushes and came through the open bedroom windows in long, slanted streaks, and the air was getting warmer already. The birds became a full-fledged riot outside.

After a while, we slept. And then later on, when the afternoon air was still and heavy like wet silk and the birds were silent in the summer heat and only the heartbeat pulse of the katydids let us know the whole rest of the world hadn't vanished—then Danny kissed me goodbye, his face rough now with beard and the smell of him mixed with the smell of me. He kissed me and left, and I was alone in the heavy air and the katydids' song.