Last Call Confessions

The Crimson Oak sits in the lobby of the Wexford Hotel, which is one of those old hotels that costs too much and smells like money trying to remember it used to smell like cigars. I've been behind that bar for two years now. I took the job because my novel wasn't selling and my landlord didn't care. That is the entire economic story, really.

I'm Gabe. I'm twenty-eight. I write fiction that nobody buys and drinks that somebody else pours, which is a funny way to live if you think about it too long. So I don't.

The night shift suits me though. It's quiet, mostly. Businessmen in pairs, a couple on a bad date, occasionally a wedding party that wandered down from the ballroom. I polish glasses, I memorize the wine list, I go home at two in the morning and write three bad pages. It's a living. Barely, but it is one.

The thing about pouring drinks for rich people is you stop seeing them after a while. They blur together. Tan guy, gray suit, orders the Macallan like it's a password. Woman who needs a Manhattan before she can look at her husband. I could mix their drinks in my sleep and sometimes I think I do.

* * *

Cecilia came in on a Tuesday, which should have told me something. Nobody comes to a hotel bar on a Tuesday for fun. You come on a Tuesday because you don't want to be at home and you don't want to be seen wanting to not be at home.

She took the corner seat at the end of the bar, the one with the lamp, and she looked at the back wall of bottles for a full minute before she said anything.

"What do you actually like here?" she asked. Not the menu. Not the wine list. Me.

"Excuse me?"

"The menu. You've worked here. What's real and what's for tourists?"

I laughed before I could stop myself. "The burger's real. Everything with truffle on it is for tourists."

"The burger." She said it like she was writing it down in her head. "I'll have the burger. And the old fashioned, but make it with the rye, not the bourbon. Your bourbon's for tourists too."

I looked at her properly then. Fifty or so, she turned out to be fifty-two, dark hair going gray at the temples and not pretending otherwise. Reading glasses pushed up on her head. She had the look of someone who'd spent a lot of years being right in public.

"You're going to eat a burger in a dress like that," I said, and immediately regretted it, because it came out wrong.

She didn't blink. "I'm going to eat a burger in whatever I please. I've earned it. And you can stop apologizing with your face, I'm not offended, I'm hungry."

So I made her the old fashioned with rye and put the burger in, and she ate it at the bar with her hands as a person would instead of as a critic, and she didn't say one word until it was gone.

"That was better than it had any right to be," she said. "Write down that the kitchen's good on Tuesdays. Different crew, I think. The Tuesday crew actually cares."

"Are you a critic?" I asked. Because it sounded like it.

She paid, left a tip that was too big and too exact, and said, "Occasionally. Goodnight."

* * *

She came back the next Tuesday. Then the one after. By the second month she was coming sometimes twice a week, always off-peak, always the corner seat, always some little correction.

"Your ice is too wet."

"You're out of the good bitters and hoping nobody notices."

"That man at the table by the window is having an affair and it's going badly. Cut him off before the dessert course, you'll thank me."

She was right about the affair guy. She was right about the bitters too, which I'd mentioned to my manager twice and gotten nowhere with.

"What do you do when you're not auditing my bitters?" I asked her one slow night.

"I write about food. Restaurants, mostly. Travel when they'll pay for it. I've eaten in nine countries this year and the best meal I had was in a strip mall in Sacramento, which tells you everything about my profession."

"That's bleak."

"That's Tuesday." She stirred her drink. "What about you? You don't talk like a bartender."

"How do bartenders talk?"

"Like they're waiting for something better to happen. You talk like it already happened and it didn't go well."

I should have been annoyed. I wasn't, which was itself annoying. "I write. Novels. One out, it did about as well as you'd expect, which is to say it's a good doorstop."

"Self-published or real?"

"Real. Small press. Real enough to get rejected by better presses afterward."

She smiled at that, first one I'd seen from her. It changed her whole face. "I'm Cecilia, by the way. Since we're apparently doing this now."

"Gabe."

"Gabe. Short for?"

"Gideon. Don't."

"I would never. It suits you. Miserable old name for a miserable young man."

And that was the shape of it for a while. She'd come in, I'd make her the rye old fashioned without asking, and we'd trade cuts for an hour or two. She was married. I knew that early because she wore a ring and mentioned her husband exactly twice, both times in a tone I recognized from the Manhattan-before-she-can-look-at-her-husband woman. Flat. Closed. A door you don't knock on.

I didn't ask. I'm not an idiot.

* * *

The rain night came in November. Slow shift, bad weather, the lobby empty except for the concierge watching his phone. Cecilia came in around nine, wet to the shoulders, no umbrella, looking like she'd walked here on purpose to be miserable.

"The usual?" I asked.

"The usual, and whatever you're having, and don't argue with me."

"I'm on shift."

"Then pretend. One for you and one for me and you'll drink mine if you don't want yours."

So I made two and we drank them and the rain did its thing against the tall windows. She was quieter than usual. I'd learned her rhythms by then. Loud Cecilia was fine. Quiet Cecilia meant something had happened at home.

"Bad night?" I asked.

"Bad decade," she said, and then waved her hand like she was clearing smoke. "Never mind. He's in Denver. He's always in Denver, that's practically the joke of our marriage. And I sat in the house tonight and realized I was eating dinner standing at the counter as a woman waiting for a phone call in 1954 would. So I put my coat on and came here. To your bar. To your burger."

"There are worse places to defect to."

"There are very few better ones. That's the sad part." She finished her drink and looked at me, and something in the look was different from all the other looks she'd given me over months of Tuesdays. "You're a funny one, Gabe. You never ask me anything real. You just make the drinks and let me talk."

"It's a good system."

"It's a coward's system and it works beautifully." She pushed the glass toward me. "Fix me another and then I want you to tell me one true thing. Anything. About your book, your landlord, your terrible twenties. I'm tired of being the only one doing the confessing around here."

I made the drink. I thought about what one true thing would cost me.

"My novel is about a hotel bar," I said. "I've been stealing all of you for eight months and calling it fiction."

She went still. Then she laughed, a real one, loud enough that the concierge looked over. "Which one am I?"

"You're the one who comes in on Tuesdays and frightens the staff."

"I frighten the staff?"

"You made Aaron rewrite the entire amaro section of the menu. He still talks about it."

"He deserved it. It was a shameful list." She picked up the fresh drink and held it out a little, not quite a toast. "To being stolen. I hope you made me better looking in the fiction."

"You're better looking in person. That's a problem I haven't solved yet."

I heard myself say it before I'd decided to, and a lot of things happened around Cecilia that way. The rain kept going. She didn't laugh this time. She looked at me over the rim of the glass, and the room got very small and very quiet, the way hotel bars do at ten on a rainy Tuesday when the lobby's empty.

"That is also a coward's system," she said softly, "saying things like that and blaming the drink."

"I'm not blaming the drink."

"No," she said. "I don't think you are."

She set the glass down and took her reading glasses off her head, which she did when she was about to say something carefully considered. I'd watched her do it maybe thirty times before, always over a menu or a manuscript she was eviscerating.

"Ask me to walk you home," she said.

"Cecilia."

"No. Listen. I'm fifty-two, I'm married to a man who sends me quarterly emails, and I have spent four months sitting on this stool working out whether you'd say yes. It's undignified. So I'm doing it the direct way, before I lose my nerve. Ask me to walk you home, or tell me no, and either way we drink and it's fine."

The rain filled the pause. I wiped the bar in front of her even though it was already dry.

"I get off at two," I said. "It's pouring, so we'll take the shortcut past the dry cleaner and you'll complain about your shoes. And then, if you still want to, you can come up."

"That's not exactly a sonnet."

"It's what I've got."

"Good," she said. "Sonnets are for people with more time."

* * *

We did take the shortcut. She did complain about her shoes. Her place was a brownstone on the far side of town, which she told me like she was giving me directions out of her life, and mine was a third-floor walkup eleven blocks from the hotel, above a laundromat that smelled like fabric softener at all hours. She stood in my doorway looking at the stack of manuscripts on the kitchen table and the single coffee mug in the sink.

"This is exactly what I pictured," she said.

"Depressing?"

"Honest. It's rare. Come here."

She put her hand flat on my chest first, waiting, and I said yes, and then she kissed me. It was unhurried. Her mouth tasted like rye and she kissed the way she talked, no wasted motion. When she pulled back she was a little out of breath and looked annoyed about it.

"Well," she said. "Four months of deliberation, vindicated."

"I've been thinking about it since about June."

"You could have said."

"So could you."

"I just did. Eleven blocks ago, technically." She took her coat off and hung it on the back of a kitchen chair, very orderly, like she was staying a while. "I should tell you the practical things. I'm tested, I'm careful, and my marriage has been a paperwork arrangement for two years. We agreed, out loud and in writing, that we're each free to see other people, he has his own life in Denver, and nobody in this is being lied to. We just haven't done the forms yet. And this is separate from the bar and from anything I write, I'm not reviewing you. I don't sleep with people casually, which is why it's been four months of looking at you like an idiot."

"I have a box of condoms and I bought them last week, which will embarrass me forever."

"Why would that embarrass you? Optimism is charming." She looked around the room again. "Where's the bedroom?"

"Through there."

"Good. Lead on, Gideon."

* * *

She undressed me slowly, like she was editing. She'd take off a shirt button and then look at my face to see if I'd flinch, and I didn't, and she'd go on to the next one. I got her blouse off her shoulders and stopped at the clasp of her bra.

"Can I?"

"You may," she said, and turned around and lifted her hair so I could work it. Her back was warm against my palms. She had lines around her eyes and gray at her temples and the softest stomach I'd ever put my hands on, and every part of her was better than the version I'd been stealing since March.

We got onto the bed and she pushed me onto my back and worked my jeans off, and then she put her mouth on me, slow at the start, her hand wrapped around the base, taking her time like she had all night. I said her name more than once. She hummed something against me that I felt more than heard.

"Cecilia, I'm not going to last if you keep that up."

She came up grinning. "That's the general idea, sweetheart. It's not a competition." She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. "Although if you want to make it one, I'm not opposed."

"Come here, then."

She climbed up and I eased her back against the pillows and put my mouth between her legs. She was already wet and she made a low sound and grabbed a handful of my hair. I took it slow, tongue and then fingers, finding the rhythm she liked by listening to her, and she talked the whole time, which I hadn't expected, little directions and curses and once, near the end, my actual full name, Gideon, gasped like a password. When she came she pulled a pillow over her face and yelled into it. Then she dropped the pillow and looked at me with her hair everywhere.

"Where did a twenty-eight-year-old learn that?"

"Practice. On other grown women who also yelled into pillows."

"Funny and thorough. God help me!" She reached for my jeans on the floor and came up with the condom. "On, please. I want you