The Bartender: Chapter 12
(Re)Making Love: a serial memoir
Come in the middle? Here’re links to ➡️ Chapter One, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 6, Chapter 7, Chapter 8, Chapter 9 , Chapter 10 Chapter 11
The Bartender
Nietzsche says, as he weighs the world in the last dream of the morning, Sex: only for the wilted, a sweet poison; for the lion-willed, however, the great invigoration of the heart and the reverently reserved wine of wines.
As I learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance—one cannot fly into flying—I search.
And yes, there was a bartender.
The bartender doesn’t drink. He knows good wine and orders me good wine I usually pay for. I’m better able to pay than he or so I think. He’s short with big hands. He polishes his finger nails with clear polish, beautiful hands that are larger than they should be for his frame. His hands draw me. He walks with a limp that also draws me—this last he doesn’t know.
When I dream asleep—I say this because I dream awake—I dream my father, more often since my husband left me, more often since I began Internet dating. Here’s a weird glimpse: I see in front of me my father’s fingers curling up behind the towel rack in my bathroom, his disembodied fingers. I’m not frightened. I’m comforted. His hand. Not my husband’s hand. My father’s hand that reaches out of the cosmos, out of the unconscious mind to me.
It was May and my separated-over-two-years-then husband sends me this e-mail, breaking my heart:
“Tony Soter is the philosopher-winemaker we talked with on the patio of that great little B&B in Napa (the one run by the guys who knew my uncle in their hometown of Denison, Iowa).”
I don’t know why he’s writing except to tell me about good wines and indeed he includes an article about Tony Soter’s wines. But his e-mail is followed by an odd postscript:
“P.S. You don’t have to comment about breakfast. I’ve thought it for you.”
What did he mean?
And then I realize he’s referring in the postscript to the fact that he wouldn’t make love in the morning: didn’t want to miss that great breakfast at the B&B. You and I (and he) know that a big refrigerator, not the one holding the eggs, milk, syrup, not the cornucopia Napa refrigerator but the metaphorical one (Oh, sure, call it the elephant, if you like) sits inside the P.S.
What I mean: When your girlfriend yells at you when you come home on the anniversary of the day you met, the day she expects you’ll have flowers or will take her out for dinner, and she says, “You left the top off the milk again!” There’s a refrigerator in the room that has nothing to do with milk.
Sex and D. are my problem.
The bartender helps me see the scope and size of that problem—in today’s psychobabble vernacular—that I own.
The bartender took the free class I taught when I returned from Missouri after my stint as a visiting author—my time out-of-town. I taught that class in the fall at the Martin Luther King Library that sits across the street from my condo. When the class was over, we met by chance at the Dana Gioia reading there. I’d told the class about it. The bartender wanted to chat when he arrived, the way he’d often seemed to want to chat when I’d seen him where he used to tend bar—a tony restaurant full of people from the Hill though it is not on the proverbial Hill.
Dana Gioia read and I bought Interrogations at Noon. I was struck throughout the reading how many times he mentioned his wife who was not present. She is a presence. I don’t recall if he read these lines that evening, but the poem “Voyeur” lies next to the title poem in the book. I read it now:
. . . and watching her undress across the room.
oblivious of him, watching as her slip
falls soundlessly and disappears in the shadow.
The opening ellipsis is his. The ellipsis that follows, as I take you to the last stanza, is mine:
But what he watches here is his own life.
He is the missing man, the loyal husband.
sitting in the room he craves to enter . . .
After the reading, I suggested to the bartender that we go over to Zaytinya for a drink and he managed to get me a free glass of wine (bartenders do this sort of thing for each other).
A little alcohol and I told him about my heart.
My husband didn’t watch me undress. He had not wanted to make love to me for the last decade of our marriage. He’d kissed two women over two years in front of me. I don’t mean a quick kiss. I mean the proverbial “making out.” I did not, as I now know he wished, hit him over the head with the also proverbial frying pan.
Yes, I’m stuck in the kitchen of metaphors for absence of sex.
But I did finally have to ask what was going on. And he did finally have to tell me that he wanted to live by himself. I had little other information. And I don’t feel betrayed by the disloyalty for, after all, it was more about humiliation than about sex for me, the watcher, the voyeur.
When I read Dana Gioia, I wanted to give the understanding in that last stanza to my husband. Perhaps he craved to enter. I think I know he did, but I shall never know why he could not.
I don’t recall how much of this I told the bartender, but I do recall that it was more than I should have. And, in telling whatever I told, my heart ached with the betrayal I committed and that I commit here with shameful impunity. I live in the shame of the betrayal that sets me free: I write it.
The bartender is kind.
There’s an edge of anger underneath that I now know comes out of a privileged and brutal childhood. His father beat him. He was the oldest and he got beaten the most. He doesn’t drink for good reason. I don’t know exactly the reason, but I know he’s seen a troubled world, saved a woman and her child only to end up in jail falsely accused of abusing her. He got out but not because his wealthy mother bailed him. He was in jail longer than was fair: innocent and jailed. What can make up for that?
The bartender limps because he has had one hip replaced. The other hip must wait for his strength to build. He is strong: a beautiful upper body even if the whole body is not in proportion. I’m attracted to the flawed body—not the yellowed teeth (cigars and who knows what), those teeth, too big for the handsome face. He’s a mixed bag.
My father was an ugly man. His nose and his ears were way too big for his face and his thinness when young made both flaws more prominent. Plastic surgery after he married my beautiful mother and had me and my sister, made him not handsome but close.
The bartender writes me:
“I sat on the train tonight amongst the post New Year’s Eve revelers. The air was redolent with alcohol and the intermittent sounds of slurred conversations. I caught a couple of glances and realize I appeared a sad case stoically reading my book alone while multiple groups and couples were continuing their festivities and going to places where, no doubt, with the lubrication of alcohol and the enhancement of narcotics, astronomically bad decisions would be made. I did not look like a guy who had spent an evening full of joy, stimulation, great food and sex—albeit in a censored form but no less erotic for that—and tenderness with a beautiful woman who really wanted me in her bed. How appearances can deceive. A quick inventory of the car: More than a few of my fellow travelers’ evenings would end badly—breakups and brawls, lost keys and wallets, ‘You have the right to remain silent,’ strange beds and ER rooms in the offing; but yours truly was going home to savor the memory of your body, the taste of your lips, the down of your sex in my hand, and the look in your eyes that told me you were, once again, better than okay. My evening was priceless and perfect; and I knew in my heart I would feel great about it in the morning.”
Yes, he touched me, the bartender who will write his own book. Oh, let me live to see that.
I reject him, ultimately, because (do I know for sure?) because I fear the anger inside him, because he doesn’t handle dating with panache and shamefully that is important to me, or more likely, the closer he got, the more I wanted my husband and my father. He is neither.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material in chapter 12:
Dana Gioia: Excerpt of "Voyeur," from Interrogations at Noon, 2001 Graywolf Press, by permission of the author.
Coming next, Chapter 13: “Broken Glass” Table of Contents
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Love,
This installment carries a greater weight of sadness with it, I think, than earlier installments. It hurts. If readers want to experience a writer vulnerably traveling through the pain of her loss to reach her destination, this is a series to read. What is the destination? I don't see it yet. Do you know it, Mary? Are you there? If so, how well you withhold it. (Shh. Don't tell.)
You pull me in deeper with every chapter, Mary. In this post I've loved getting to know so many people through your encounter with the bartender - not just him but you, your husband and your father. You're weaving your words with the important threads of so many people and experiences. Wonderful!