When Ana said good night, the comic mood broke. “Good night,” they chorused, soberly.
The night was warm. Ana decided to walk home. When she arrived in front of the bar, she didn’t bother to feign surprise at herself. She had known all along, then, where she was going.
It was a place she had first gone to when she was still a kid. Her mother had dragged her to poetry readings there. Ana had been too short to see through the crowds. She’d sipped ginger ale and kept her head below the adult currents, eyes watering from the smoke. Her mother had looked so happy, cigarette in one hand, white wine in the other, her uncut hair moving in all directions as she laughed. Men watched her and listened to her. She talked and talked and cheered at the dirty words. Ana leaned against her, warm and smiling. It was, Ana decided, a happy memory. She cut it off at the drunken edges.
Inside, the room was half full. A young woman in cowboy boots and a dress stood on stage with a guitar, tuning it. When she turned to the side, fiddling with an amplifier, Ana saw that her guitar was resting on a pregnant stomach.
A clatter of glasses and low conversation filled the space. One table was flanked by beer-drinking guys in plaid shirts, murmuring to one another through their facial hair, art students assuming the look of lumberjacks. Another table held an older couple: a man with electrocuted thin gray hair; a woman in granny glasses.
Ana found a small table near the back. She kept her jacket on until her beer arrived. She sipped and warmed herself. She no longer felt nervous alone in public; it was an advantage of reaching forty-one and becoming less visible. She reveled in the peace, anticipating the singer.
The singer leaned into her microphone and tapped away a blast of feedback. She adjusted it to the right height and strummed. “This one’s about what’s going to happen to me in about three months,” she said, pointing at her stomach. A few laughs.
The song was silly to Ana’s ears, filled with wishes and half-lullabies. But the woman had a strong voice. It climbed around the words with confidence, put them in their place. Ana stared at her. Her eyes closed, then closed harder, as if she were squinting her way to the high notes. One leg buckled and straightened at the knee.
“Hey,” said a voice. Charlie crouched down next to her. Ana was startled, she had almost forgotten about him.
“You came,” he said. “Can I sit?”
He did, pulling the chair close to Ana, speaking in a low voice, something James always did in bars, too, out of respect for the musician.
“Guess what?” he said. “You missed me. I already went on.” She saw now that his black T-shirt was wet with sweat around the collar. Part of her was relieved; she did not feel like playing the fan tonight.
“I’m sorry to hear that. How did it go?”
Charlie grinned, put his hands together in prayer, and looked up at the ceiling. “Terrible,” he said, laughing. “But it doesn’t matter. I lived through it.”
A beer arrived. Charlie thanked the waitress with familiarity. She squeezed his shoulder as she left. Ana was surprised to see him drinking, the foam caught on his upper lip. She could not associate religion and pleasure; they were back to back in her mind, walking away from each other, like dueling gunfighters.
Why had she come here? The smell of the place, years of watery beer and old smoke, seemed to be rising up from between the spaces in the wood floors, seeping out of the old, cracked chairs.
“This is a cover,” said the woman on stage. She strummed a few chords, and Charlie exclaimed: “Oh, this is a great song. She does this—yeah, it’s—she does this beautifully.”
The woman on stage closed her eyes and began:
“You are the light in my dark world. You are the fire that will always burn.…”
Ana watched her. The woman strummed, her voice swelling: “When I can’t stand on my own …”
Ana wanted to turn away from the woman, the guitar on her absurd belly. She was rocking, her eyes closed, in what could only be described as rapture. But Ana felt a kind of heat, and sadness, too. She glanced at Charlie. If he was moved, he didn’t show it.
The singer repeated the line, and dove down inside it: “You are the light”—until she came back around the other side quietly—“in my dark world.” And then she opened her eyes. Shook her hair. Exhaled. It struck Ana as obscene all of a sudden, that they should be all together for this moment. It would be better to experience it alone, with the blinds drawn. People clapped. Ana felt her cheeks redden.
“I should go,” said Ana.
“Really?” said Charlie. But Ana had her coat on already.
“Okay, I’ll walk you.”
“No, no. You don’t have to—”
“I know.”
They walked past the bars, the restaurants, through the bodies going in all directions. Charlie was carrying his guitar in a padded case on his back, turning at an angle to avoid hitting people with it. Ana was aware of how tall he was next to her compared to James.
When they turned south, onto a residential street, Charlie said: “I always liked these windows.” He pointed to an old mansion, a huge house with colored glass leaves curling in a vine around the doors. It had been divided into apartments; a row of ugly silver mailboxes, things found in a skyscraper, stacked up by the doorframe.
Ana tried to imagine going home right now, tried to picture herself in the living room, surrounded by toys and sippy cups. “Where do you live?” she asked.
“Not far,” said Charlie.
“Can I see it?” He glanced at her quickly, flickering, and nodded.
They had to turn around, retrace their steps.
“I like those windows, too,” said Ana as they went past the house again.
Charlie’s house was only two doors down from College. The noise of the street spilled over onto his lawn. Two front seats of a car were on his porch in the place where a nice café set should go.
Seeing Ana’s glance lingering upon the seats, he said: “That’s not mine.” Charlie unlocked the door. “Those guys have the front apartment. We have the top.”
“We”? thought Ana.
Half of the hallway, large and smelling of rotten food, was taken up by a pile of men’s sneakers and boots.
Ana walked up the creaky stairs. The banister wobbled.
As soon as the apartment door opened, Ana saw the “we.” A man played a video game on a couch, connected by a long wire to a console in the center of the room. The TV blared gunshots and “Incoming! Incoming!”
“Hey, dude,” he said, his voice coated in gumminess.
When Ana could separate the hallway and the sticky little gamer from the space, she saw that the apartment was actually warm and clean. The furniture was cheap but minimalist, and shelves of books tidily arranged lined the walls. Art books. Philosophy. Several different editions of the Bible.
“Ana, this is Russell. Russell, Ana,” said Charlie.
Russell nodded. “I’d get up. I’m not usually this bad, but I’m killing here …,”he said.
“Don’t bother, really,” said Ana. “Nice to meet you.”
Charlie led her into the kitchen. He shut the door behind them, muffling the sound of missiles.
“Ambush!” screamed Russell. “Die! Die!”
Charlie said loudly: “Tea? Wine?”
Ana found a place for herself at the kitchen table. It was white and empty but for a stack of newspapers and a bowl of oranges.