It’s another Saturday night alone in a bar.
I know the staff . . . the owner and the bartender and the manager, so I’m not really alone. They’re more pleasand company than most people. I know.
People have plans, people are tired, people have agendas. The ones I’m waiting for now—I triple-booked the evening, because I knew someone would cancel—are as unlikely to show up as I am to let the bottle of Venezuelan rum directly in my eye line go unopened. The bartender would probably let us help myself if I wanted to and get my fingerprints all over the bottle. He’d wipe them off with his towel, like he does with his own fingerprints. Santa Teresa, one of the best rums in Venezuela. It almost tastes like bourbon.
Plan A is younger than I am, handsome, a student. He likes talking about soccer, which I know enough about from my Argentine roommate—well, I know about Boca Juniors. And I can entertain him talking about more ridiculous sports that he thinks aren’t actual sports, like cricket or polo. He won’t take Britons at their word on the legitimacy of either of those, really. He has nice biceps, maybe a little too big for him as he isn’t so tall, but his skin looks smooth and I can fixate on how the muscles move around under the t-shirt. It’s pleasant just to watch the edges of the shirtsleeves sort of wither down his shoulder to reveal a modeled triceps each time he reaches for a bottle in front of him. Equally thrilling, not kidding, is watching the shirt slide down to cover it back up.
It’s been an hour and a half now. None of them were firm plans, unless you count someone telling me to call him later at an appointed time to see about making plans as a kind of contract. Most people do not see it that way, and this is why: this addition of a step rather than making the plans explicit on the first go around, implies that one of the parties is still allowed to fake having never received the second phone call, or more likely, the text. Plausible deniability frees up one party to take on better plans, or no plans at all in case tiredness sets in, without seeming like the initial contract was breached. This happened literally thousands of times to me. It goes like this:
Call me at nine
That sounds good. I’ll give you a call then. Do you know what you want to do?
We’ll talk about it then.
Okay, I’ll call you then.
Great, see you.
See you soon.
Click.
Needless to say, the phone then later either fails to find a hand that can pick it up at the moment that it calls out, or the other party finds out that exhaustion has become a major factor in his or her disposition in the interim and just outright tells you so. These ditch-efforts used to be accompanied by exculpatory remarks—promises for a new appointment, inevitably—but nowadays it’s usually offered without that sort of patronizing bullshit.
The bar owner offers me a glass of chardonnay he just opened. It’s a plateau for the senses. You stick your nose in it and it smells pretty good, but that’s as far as your enjoyment is every going to go. The taste lacks the nice, sharp fruitiness of a more satisfying chardonnay, although it does at least maintain some interest. So it rides its good odors and holds your interest no higher and no lower than you initial impression of it. I can’t even say that much for this night so far. My social life is worse than a mediocre chardonnay.
I date not get out the book I brought with me. The entire bar is filled with people there in groups mostly in couples. It’s a popular place to bring a date. It’s a tick book, too, so it could easily look like I’m just completely lost sitting crushed up against the bar trying to ignore people pushing past me while I pore over an eight-hundred page book in low lighting.
The owner actually bought a clip on book light a few weeks ago because he noticed me doing this. Now he just walks over and clips it onto the book while I read. I’d like to wish it’s not just because I’m one of the most frequent customers but also because he likes me. I know he likes me. There were some awkward incidents a few months back when I had stayed long after the doors were shut while they were all closing down the bar, and would you imagine that, there were open wine bottles. But I see those kinds of things as, well, basically as strengthening exercises. You only really like people with whom you have awkward and embarrassing evenings where maybe the conversation just turned into drunken handling in the dark and then you walk in the next day, see those same people and find them part of the self-satirizing past already like all that wine under the bridge. It builds trust in a way you can’t fine with most people, even your friends.
I have no awkward memories with the Plan A who was supposed to pick up the phone at nine o’clock. It’s all been strictly above board, genteel conversations in lovely bourgeois settings. There’s nothing wrong with it, and he’s an admirable intellectual sort with a deep longing for some meaning in existence. He’s a good listener, too. What should I call him? That’s Colin; that seems about right. We listen to the same kinds of music. And of course his biceps. We’ve traveled to a handful of the same places, and so we can often locate far-off places in our mutual geographic memories, distant though they are from one another yet they can track down generic places like pins stuck in a map and list off those things that create a sense of a shared experience where one never actually existed.
I love that little cart that cuts up and sells coconuts right in the main plaza. The guy there—the guy with the pet monkey—he sold me one every morning the next week I was there.
I remember that guy. He’s still there. So is the monkey. He said he captured her when he used to live in the jungle. Poor thing.
She wasn’t a very happy looking monkey, no. You’re right.
We both work a lot, so mostly we go out and talk about things we remember. This is a fairly prominent feature of adulthood.
Your past is the only way of making friends now, because you just go ahead and relive it a lot of the time in order to make yourself seem interesting or good at conversation. If only I had realized back then how much more I needed to squeeze out of those carefree exciting days in order to generate currency for the future lives that would spend them during nights so distant in form and function to those very days that made me the person of whom I am now the mediocre chardonnay version. Colin helped me to remember who I once was. I did the same for him. Together we lived our way through memories that had gone unexamined during long stretches. I was delighted to find I had new ways of articulating stories that had once seemed completely beyond words in the bright, hot pool of sensations that made up those days at the time.
For a while I took comfort that time had brought me new opportunities for describing them and thus assuring they weren’t forgotten. And then inevitably I grew resentful that they had been reduced to a representation in words, words having a pretty ambivalent utility when it comes to remembering things that in their very essence to that young heart were special because they were inexpressible. So spending time with Colin made me cynical as well
He is also passive aggressive. I know better than to call him more than once to ask where he is, because he’ll grow instantly annoyed that I hadn’t realized what was meant by having my first call go unanswered. It’s perfectly clear; I can hear him saying to himself if the phone rings a second time.
The Plan B I am waiting for: it is a group, and ostensibly they have the most legitimate excuse. I only called them around eight to say hello, and they were already busy. They are polite; they say if I want to check in later, well then perhaps they might be closer to my location in the city. I hold out little hope on this front. Not a message from them in hours. I suppose I could be rather unhappy that it never occurred to them to call me before they left to go out. It isn’t their fault if they don’t think of me when they want to plan activities. It’s understandable. They don’t know me that well, and I think I may have been an ass to one of their boyfriends last time I was out with them.
He was pompous. The stood there at the party with a glass of a noxious scotch blend and was taller than everyone else. Lucky for him because he had a bald patch at the back, but I suppose no one could see it unless he bent down. I managed to see it once when he got down his hands and knees to pull a box of whiskey bottles out from under the liquor table.
He happened to touch on a topic about which I am at least moderately well versed: how to haggle in a food market in Quito. He had been once and gotten a talk it sounded like from a local guide who took him to a nice market, and there of course the guide just tells you what sounds pretty or shocking to a tourist, same as in any third world country. But I have been there several times, which is more than him at any rate, and I have haggled extensively over tomatoes and cinnamon and plantains. Friends who live there have described to me the meat-haggling process (mostly the same if not exactly the same), so I felt comfortable appropriating that knowledge. I told him at length that he was mistaken in most everything he knew about the process, and possibly about Ecuador altogether, which in retrospect was not a tremendously gracious way to behave. I did allow him a couple statements that I didn’t correct, but I was being generous given his patronizing and I’d say colonialist attitude about shopping. Fucking rich kids. I can’t stand know-it-alls who travel everywhere, principally because I am one and I don’t like competition. Takes away the authenticity. So if Plan B doesn’t want me around, that’s fair, and I can accept it. I am not always the best.
The last one I am awaiting for, Plan C, who just as well I suspect will not show up, is really just evidence of mental deficiency on my part. Stephen has contact me so many times to have a drink that I have lost track, yet he has followed through on this exactly two times. This is the kind of person who finds you intensely fascinating and who at least mildly attracts you from the moment you meet. Some kind of immediate reciprocal affinity leads to a series of exchanges in the days and even weeks following your first meeting, usually via some kind of passive medium like text messages or online emails where the entire email is written in the subject line. But for a time it seems thrilling just to have those little snippets from someone who seems so interested. We met through some mutual friends at a dinner party one night, and I’ll be damned if he wasn’t hanging on every word of mine for three hours. He said, more than once, how knowledgeable I was about antique photographic cameras. I don’t think that I have more than an average aficionado awareness, but then again most people have no interest at all in them. People in general have very little interest in anything besides office politics. That was all he could really talk about with any passion. Stephen is a magazine editor of a small online-only publication. He usually talks about rejecting manuscripts, even sometimes ones that he likes. It’s true most people are functionally illiterate when it comes to expressing themselves. I only count myself somewhere along the middle of the road. I make grammar mistakes in my emails all the time and no longer bother to proofread them since no one else does and you seem like a pompous ass if you do that. He bored me most of the night until he complimented me.
In retrospect, it’s rather marvelous to reflect that this single compliment was likely the basis for my tolerance for what is . . . going on three months now. Was it such a noteworthy compliment? He complimented my knowledge of antique cameras. I think what this ultimately points to is my weakness for being perceived as knowledgeable. After the compliment, I remember, I wasn’t so offended when he reiterated that most people are idiots. I almost kind of agreed with him. And who wouldn’t? The contrarian spirit, I have discovered, is mostly found in someone waiting for a compliment.
He texted me yesterday to say we should make plans for tonight. So here I am.
I am here. The bartender is starting to sweat from dealing with the crowd. I start to debate in mind whether this Plan C was really as hairy as I remembered him. The bartender has quite smooth, very lovely skin with no signs of excessive foliage coming out over the collar or making like to free itself from under the tight shirt. He has a nice smile too. Plan C . . . I don’t remember. I haven’t seen him in a month. I don’t know why he asked to meet up tonight.
A drunken guy wanders up to me and asks me if I want to go to a party with him and his less attractive friend. I pull out a pen to give him my number and say I am waiting for someone, but he walks off before I can give him my number. He was tall, too.
I finally get a phone call at one a.m. It’s Plan A. He is tired. I have had some Venezuelan rum, so I told him that he’s an asshole and I hang up on him. This will either make him realize he’s hurt my feelings, or we will never hang out every again. I am willing to bet now on the latter. It’s a passive aggressive sort of era we live in. Confrontation is never healthy or cathartic, and you have to be cool even to people you don’t like. I have to pretend that someone I don’t’ really like isn’t really bothering me so that we can someday pretend that there’s no resentment and just go on talking to one another about the past, a past where feelings were real and you felt something and you couldn’t even express how you felt. I can express how I feel right now.
Fuck off, man.
That’s all there is to it. I thank the bar owner for being a good sport. He always is. I kiss the bartender on the cheek and wave goodbye to the manager, who says I haven’t had nearly enough to drink. Lie. He’s a good salesman.
I get home, to the dark house, the dark house that smells like a stale, dry dish sponge. I should stop doing dishes. I get into bed angry. Thirty minutes later, I wake up to a dinging sound coming from beneath my pillow.
Plan C texts: cu 2morrow for dinner?
No.
I went back to sleep.
K. Boyd Johnson is a freelance video journalist based in Mexico City where she covers international news including the Haiti earthquake, the Mexican swine flu outbreak and the drug war. This is her first foray into fiction.
Rings so true. Glad the Venezuelan rum told Plan A to fuck off. Good for the rum.