“How?” the man on her left asked.
“How do you think?” said Alison.
“Face mask,” said the bartender.
“Turn it up.”
Alison heard the amplified thwock of football helmets hitting together. “Good coverage,” the bartender said. “No protection,” said the man on Alison’s right.
Alison turned to look at him. He was dressed in a blue sweater with the sleeves pushed up. He had dark eyes and was drinking a dark beer. “I asked him to wear a condom,” she said quietly. “I even brought one. He couldn’t.”
“He couldn’t?”
“I really don’t want to discuss it.” Alison sipped her wine. It had the flat, bitter taste of house white. She realized the bartender hadn’t asked her what she wanted. But then, if he had, house white was what she would have requested. “It just doesn’t seem fair.” She spoke over her glass, unsure that anyone was listening, not really caring if they weren’t. “All I did was fall in love. All I did was believe someone who said he loved me. He was the liar. But nothing happens to him.”
“Unfair is the way things are,” the man on her right told her. Three months ago Alison would have been trying to decide if she were attracted to him. Not that she would necessarily have wanted to do anything about it. It was just a question she’d always asked herself, dealing with men, interested in the answer, interested in those times when the answer changed abruptly, one way or another. But it was no longer an issue. Alison was a dead woman these days. Alison was attracted to no one.
Two men at the end of the bar began to clap suddenly. “He hasn’t missed from thirty-six yards yet this season,” the bartender said.
Alison watched the kickoff and the return. Nothing. No room at all. “Men handle this stuff so much better than women. You don’t know what heartbreak is,” she said confrontationally. No one responded. She backed off anyway. “Well, that’s how it looks.” She drank and watched an advertisement for trucks. A man bought his wife the truck she’d always wanted. Alison was afraid she might cry. “What would you do,” she asked the man on her right, “if you were me?”
“Drink, I guess. Unless I was pregnant.”
“Watch the game,” said the man on her left.
“Focus on your work,” said the bartender.
“Join the Foreign Legion.” The voice came from behind Alison. She swiveled around to locate it. At a table near a shuttered window a very tall woman sat by herself. Her face was shadowed by an Indiana Jones — type hat, but the candle on the table lit up the area below her neck. She was wearing a black T-shirt with a picture on it that Alison couldn’t make out. She spoke again. “Make new friends. See distant places.” She gestured for Alison to join her. “Save two galaxies from the destruction of the alien armada.”
Alison stood up on the little ledge that ran beneath the bar, reached over the counter, and took an olive, sucking the pimiento out first, then eating the rest. She picked up her drink, stepped down, and walked over to the woman’s table. Elvis. That was Elvis’s face on the T-shirt right between the woman’s breasts. ARE YOU LONESOME TONIGHT? the T-shirt asked.
“That sounds good.” Alison sat down across from the woman. She could see her face better now; her skin was pale and a bit rough. Her hair was long, straight, and brown. “I’d rather time travel, though. Back just two months. Maybe three months. Practically walking distance.”
“You could get rid of the baby.”
“Yes,” said Alison. “I could.”
The woman’s glass sat on the table in front of her. She had finished whatever she had been drinking; the maraschino cherry was all that remained. The woman picked it up and ate it, dropping the stem onto the napkin under her glass. “Maybe he’ll come back to you. You trusted him. You must have seen something decent in him.”
Alison’s throat closed so that she couldn’t talk. She picked up her drink, but she couldn’t swallow either. She set it down again, shaking her head. Some of the wine splashed over the lip and onto her hand.
“He’s already married,” the woman said.
Alison nodded, wiping her hand on her pant leg. “God.”
She searched in her pockets for a Kleenex. The woman handed her the napkin from beneath the empty glass. Alison wiped her nose with it and the cherry stem fell out. She did not dare look up. She kept her eyes focused on the napkin in her hand, which she folded into four small squares.
“When I was growing up,” she said, “I lived on a block with lots of boys. Sometimes I’d come home and my knees were all scraped up because I’d fallen or I’d taken a ball in the face or I’d gotten kicked or punched, and I’d be crying and my mother would always say the same thing. ‘You play with the big boys and you’re going to get hurt,’ she’d say. Exasperated.” Alison unfolded the napkin, folded it diagonally instead. Her voice shrank. “I’ve been so stupid.”
“The universe is shaped by the struggle between two great forces,” the woman told her. It was not really responsive. It was not particularly supportive. Alison felt just a little bit angry at this woman who now knew so much about her.
“Good and evil?” Alison asked, slightly nastily. She wouldn’t meet the woman’s eyes. “The Elvis and the anti-Elvis?”
“Male and female. Minute by minute, the balance tips one way or the other. Not just here. In every universe. There are places”—the woman leaned forward—“where men are not allowed to gather and drink. Places where football is absolutely illegal.”
“England?” Alison suggested and then didn’t want to hear the woman’s answer. “I like football,” she added quickly. “I like games with rules. You can be stupid playing football and it can cost you the game, but there are penalties for fouls, too. I like games with rules.”
“You’re playing one now, aren’t you?” the woman said. “You haven’t hurt this man, even though you could. Even though he’s hurt you. He’s not playing by the rules. So why are you?”
“It doesn’t have anything to do with rules,” Alison said. “It only has to do with me, with the kind of person I think I am. Which is not the kind of person he is.” She thought for a moment. “It doesn’t mean I wouldn’t like to see him get hurt,” she added. “Something karmic. Justice.”
“‘We must storm and hold Cape Turk before we talk of social justice.’” The woman folded her arms under her breasts and leaned back in her chair. “Did Sylvia Townsend Warner say that?”
“Not to me.”
Alison heard more clapping at the bar behind her. She looked over her shoulder. The man in the blue sweater slapped his hand on the wooden bar. “Good call. Excellent call. They won’t get another play in before the half.”
“Where I come from she did.” Alison turned back as the woman spoke. “And she was talking about women. No one gets justice just by deserving it. No one ever has.”
Alison finished off her wine. “No.” She wondered if she should go home now. She knew when she got there that the apartment would be unbearably lonely and that the phone wouldn’t ring and that she would need immediately to be somewhere else. No activity in the world could be more awful than listening to a phone not ring. But she didn’t really want to stay here and have a conversation that was at worst too strange and at best too late. Women usually supported you more when they talked to you. They didn’t usually make you defensive or act as if they had something to teach you, the way this woman did. And anyhow, justice was a little peripheral now, wasn’t it? What good would it really do her? What would it change?
She might have gone back and joined the men at the bar during the half. They were talking quietly among themselves. They were ordering fresh drinks and eating beer nuts. But she didn’t want to risk seeing cheerleaders. She didn’t want to risk the ads with the party dog and all his women, even though she’d read in a magazine that the dog was a bitch. Anywhere she went, there she’d be. Just like she was. Heartbroken.