The Last Dare Wins

I finished my last walk-through of the hotel at eleven fifteen and texted Bess that the bar was still open. She texted back a thumbs up and a martini glass, which meant she was already sitting in it. Twenty-five years of marriage and she still beats me to the good seats.

I clocked out, changed my shirt in the manager's office because the old one smelled like the kitchen, and went down. The lobby bar at the Grandview is nothing special. Polished wood, dim lights, a bartender who actually knows what a Manhattan is. But it's where Bess and I met, back when we were young and stupid at a hotel conference, and we still drink there like it's church.

She was on the third stool from the end, fifty years old, silver starting in her hair and not hiding one gray of it, working on something with an olive in it.

"You're late," she said without looking up.

"I work here, remember? Somebody has to keep the place running."

"Somebody has to keep you humble, too, and that job's mine." She sipped and finally looked at me. "The new bartender's kind of a knockout, by the way."

That's how it always starts with us. It started the night we met, when she bet me five dollars that the conference speaker would go over his time limit. He did. She won. I've been paying for that five dollars ever since, one way or another.

The new bartender was a young woman, twenty-eight maybe, dark hair pulled back, filling a glass with ice while she listened to something on the tap system. Her name tag said Hana.

"Very nice," I admitted. "What's your point?"

"My point is, you've been telling everybody at your staff meetings that you've still got it. That men your age have experience and that's worth more than a six-pack." Bess turned on her stool to face me, which is her negotiating posture. "So here's your chance to prove it. Go get her number."

I laughed. "Get her number. At my own hotel. Where she works. For me."

"Scared?"

"Of course not. But if I'm doing that, then you're doing something too. Fair is fair." I looked around the bar. There were maybe six people in it. At the corner table by the window sat a guy in a tweed jacket, forty-fiveish, reading a paperback and drinking what looked like bourbon. I'd checked him in that afternoon. Visiting professor, conference on something old, divorced, polite. "Him. Alexander. Room four-twelve. You go work your legendary charm on him and get him to buy you a drink."

"He's already got a drink."

"Then get him to buy you a second one. On his tab, not the house's. That's the win condition."

Bess squinted at me. She does that when she's deciding whether I've outsmarted her or not. "And what's your win condition? A phone number is weak. What did she write it on, a napkin? Give me more."

"Fine. Her actual number, said out loud, with a suggestion of a day attached. Like, 'call me Thursday.' That's a real win. A napkin number is a polite no."

"Deal." She stuck out her hand and we shook on it, which is the dumbest thing we do and we do it constantly. "But no cheating. You can't pull rank and say you're the manager."

"I would never."

"You absolutely would. You gave Doreen in housekeeping a Tuesday off because you lost a bet about the weather."

"That was a kindness, not a loss." I stood up and straightened my shirt. "Watch and learn, old woman."

"Twenty-five years you've called me that. It stopped being cute in year two."

It had not stopped being cute. She keeps a list.

I walked around the bar to the service end, which felt absurd, and Hana looked up at me with the neutral face bartenders give managers.

"Evening, Mr. Callahan," she said. "Something wrong with the taps?"

"Nothing's wrong with the taps. And it's Pete, we've been over this." I sat on the far end stool, out of her work lane, which took some doing. "Actually, there is one complaint. You've been here three weeks and the regulars already like you better than they liked the last guy. It's bad for morale."

She grinned at that. She has a good grin, quick and crooked. "The last guy watered down the tonics and called everyone 'chief.' Low bar."

"Still. It reflects on me. I hired you."

"You did not hire me. Sandra hired me. You signed the paperwork and asked if I liked it here."

"I signed the paperwork very impressively," I said. She laughed and kept making drinks, and I will admit the truth, which is that I was enjoying myself. This is the part Bess doesn't understand about our game. The game isn't really about winning. It's about giving each other an excuse to talk to strangers, which is a thing you stop doing at some point in a marriage and then miss.

"So what's the grad program?" I asked.

She stopped mid-pour. "How did you know I'm a grad student?"

"The backpack behind the bar with the university bookstore tag on it, and the flashcards sticking out of your jacket pocket, and Sandra said you asked for shifts that end by nine so you could study. I notice things. It's the job."

"Art history. PhD. Everyone assumes I'll quit the bar when I finish and I keep telling them I might not, because people talk to you here." She set a drink in front of the guy two stools down and came back to me. "What's your complaint this time, Pete? You've been standing there for five minutes without ordering anything."

"That's the complaint. Nobody should be this easy to talk to on a Tuesday. It's disruptive to the workplace."

Hana laughed again, a real one this time, and leaned her elbows on the bar. "You're flirting with me. Your wife is sitting right there."

I looked over my shoulder. Bess raised her glass maybe an inch, the picture of innocence. "That's my wife," I said. "She's the one who dared me to ask for your number, if you want the whole ugly truth. We've got this stupid contest going since before you were old enough to drink, probably."

"How old do you think I am?" Hana asked, and I felt the floor tilt a little.

"Twenty-eight," I said. "Sandra told me. I checked the file when you were hired because I check everything, it's the job."

"Smooth recovery. Twenty-eight, yes. And you're what, fifty?"

"Fifty-two. And married to that woman for twenty-five years, and not actually trying to sleep with you, but she bet me I couldn't get your number with a day attached to it, and I hate losing to her more than I hate most things."

Hana wiped the bar in front of her, thinking it over. She looked entertained, not pressured, and that matters to me. "So your marriage has survived this long on dares?"

"Twenty-five years of dares. She won the first one. I'm still sore about it."

"And what did she bet you?"

I told her point blank: Bess had to get the professor in the corner to buy her a drink. Hana glanced down the bar at Alexander, who was at that exact moment closing his book, then glanced at Bess, who was already sliding off her stool.

"Oh, this is going to be good," Hana said. "Fine. My number is five-five-five, oh-one-six-seven. And I'm at the coffee shop on Fourth Street most Thursday mornings before my seminar, if you and your terrifying wife want to come tell me how the rest of the contest went. That's my day attached. Thursday."

"That's a win," I said, standing. "You didn't have to give a real one."

"I know. But your wife looks like she's about to do something dangerous and I want the story." She went back to her taps, already smiling at the next customer.

I walked over to Bess, who was two steps from the professor's table and stalling with fake confidence.

"You got the number," she said. "I can tell by your face."

"Thursday. She invited us both to coffee."

"Of course she did, because you told her everything. You always tell them everything. You have no game, you just have honesty, and it works on people, which I find deeply unfair." She straightened her cardigan. "Watch this."

"You need him to buy it. Not you."

"I know the rules. I wrote better rules than you ever did."

She walked over to Alexander's table, and I swear to God she picked up his paperback first and said something about the cover. He looked up, surprised, then pleased. I went back to my stool at the bar and ordered another Manhattan, because if I was going to watch my wife of twenty-five years work a divorced professor in my own lobby, I was going to need it.

Hana set the glass down in front of me. "You're not worried?"

"About Bess? No. I'm worried about the professor. He has no idea what he's in for."

I watched her from the bar while I nursed the Manhattan. Bess sat down across from Alexander without asking, which I figured was either going to work or get her thrown out of the conversation in under a minute. She held up the paperback like evidence at a trial.

I couldn't hear everything over the bar noise, but I caught pieces. Something about the cover art. Something about how the publisher had used the wrong painting on that edition, and how the actual painting was in a museum in Vienna and was smaller than everybody assumed. Alexander put his bourbon down and stopped pretending to read. That was the tell. When a man stops pretending to read, you've got him.

Bess did freelance graphic design for thirty years, and somewhere in there she picked up art history like other people pick up podcasts. She can talk about the Vienna school for twenty minutes without taking a breath. I've sat through dinner parties where I just ate bread and watched her work a room. She's fifty years old and she's never once lost an argument about a painting.

Alexander said something and she laughed. Then she said something else and he laughed. Then he reached for the little menu on the table, the one with the drinks on it, and pointed at it and said a thing that made her smile down at her empty glass.

"He's ordering her one," Hana said. She'd drifted down the bar to my end, pretending to restock napkins. "That was fast."

"Twenty-five minutes of art history. Nobody survives it without buying something."

"You two are weird," Hana said. "You know that, right? Most married couples don't run bets on each other."

"Most married couples get bored. We don't have time for bored."

Hana shook her head and went back to the other end, and I finished the Manhattan and watched Bess