Somebody's Someone Special

I sat down at the bar. It was Friday night and the end of a long week. Still the place was overall pretty quiet. The bar tender tore herself away from a halfway conversation with a patron and the ball game on TV to take my order for a draft beer. It was just another smoky neighborhood tavern in another metropolitan backwash on another Friday night; midlife Americana through the bottom of a beer glass. 1

“From the lady.” Said the bartender as he refilled my glass and nodded towards a woman sitting at a table against the wall. 2

I looked over my shoulder and nodded a smile at the seemingly familiar lady sitting by herself. She was late thirtyish, early fortyish, Miss Clairol chestnut brown hair with the obligatory coppery sheen, slightly overdressed, neatly made up and likely just barely intoxicated enough to buy a stranger a drink. I turned back to the bar and picked up my pack of smokes and withdrew the next cigarette in a long line of smoke signals of things I wasn’t at all sure about doing. Still, it was Friday night again, and I didn’t really have anything pressing to talk to myself about, so I raised up from my comfy barstool stuffed my smokes, lighter and money into their appropriate pockets and sauntered over to the table against the wall, beer in hand. 3

“May I join you?” I asked offering an inquisitive smile in the face of a foregone conclusion.4

“Please.” She motioned to the empty chair across from her.5

“Thank you,” I said nodding towards the beer in my hand. To which she grinned shyly, as though she had never bought a man a drink before. 6

“So tell me what fine fortune brings us together this evening?” I asked with a well-rehearsed smile; the ball game announcer talking over a sad melody playing on the jukebox in the background.7

As all too customary, she was just slightly taken aback by the formality of my inquiry but smiled and began to tell her story with the obligatory “I was just sitting at home…” As she talked I observed the occasional smile, slightly nervous, slightly inquisitive, framed by full red lips, sometimes breaking into an almost girlish giggle at some marginally charming comment on my part, sometimes becoming sly and all-knowing as her voice lowered to share something private and personal she had already confided to everyone else. Overall she talked and I listened, cigarette butts accumulated in the ashtray, cold drinks came and went and there was the ex-husband’s specter that found himself resurrected in her conversation. Somehow fallen from his throne of favor and love and discarded due to faults and failings entirely of his own, as the story is told or perhaps never really loved at all, but no one would ever be entirely certain one way or the other. And I noticed she had an angel’s face with hazel eyes that flashed alternate anger and regret when she spoke of him, and softened when she talked about her children and saddened when she talked about the man she loved and left her husband for and who apparently didn’t love her back. The faint lines that ornamented her face told the story of sleepless nights rocking her newborns, and worrying about their childhood conflicts and boo boos. There were nearly invisible tracks of tears from years of fights, some won, some lost and all futile. She could have stood to lose the few pounds she had tried so hard no to gain when she was eating out of grief and distress. But she was still a very attractive mature woman. And truth be told, I looked better years back with thicker hair and a less grey mustache. So I told a couple of lighthearted tales from my past to keep her sadness at bay, and she laughed politely and went on with her story and I listened and drank another beer and smoked another cigarette and occasionally joined her in one or a few tequila shooters with salt and lime; a beverage concoction served by the ounce and a half and renowned for the fortification of courage. 8

I’d heard her story before, often enough to recite from memory, on other Friday or Saturday nights told by other attractive Miss Clairol copperheads or drugstore brand sunshine-straw-blonds that used to be other fellow’s dream girls and then their nightmares and were wives and mommies and housewives and working girls and lonely and buying me a drink in some corner crossroad tavern and were putting up with too much smoking, knowing they would likely wake up, hair reeking of the night before and still hoping for something more from their lives. But she had been somebody's someone special, sensitive, creative, charming, loving and kind, actually they all were once. Funny the things a man can hear when he listens or see when he looks.9

The story retold, last call passed into history again and the tavern lit bright once more, I walked her home, she pretending to be more intoxicated than she really was and holding me about the waste and I pretending to help her balance on heels customarily worn with well practiced grace, my arm around her shoulders, we meandered the two blocks to her doorstep. 10

“I have a bottle of wine, but we’ll have to be very quiet…” she whispered looking up at me with longing eyes and a nervous smile. 11

And a better man would have gone in and made her dreams come true and a smarter man would have gone in and made his own dreams come true, but being neither, I made up a marginally plausible excuse, thanked her for a lovely evening, kissed her hand and watched her eyes grow dim and moist as she closed the door and heard it lock from the inside. 12


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