Helen and one of the other waitresses — Adele-something — were sitting at the bar, the stereo was cranked and we were having a celebratory nightcap at the time. It didn’t faze Jimmy. He was the owner, only thirty-two years old, and he’d really stepped in it with this place, the first West Coast-style steak-and-salad-bar restaurant in the area. He drove a new Triumph, British racing green, and he drank martinis, straight up with a twist. “How’d it go tonight, Lester?” he asked, settling his lean frame on a barstool even as Ski set a martini, new-born and gleaming with condensation, before him.
I gave the waitresses a look. They were in their skimpy waitress outfits, long bare perfect legs crossed at the knee, cigarettes propped between the elegantly bunched knuckles that in turn propped up their weary silken heads. I was a man among men — and women — and I feared no evil and felt no pain. “Fine,” I said, but I was already amending what seemed a much-too-modest assessment. “No, better than fine: great. Stupendous. Magnificent.”
Jimmy Brennan wore glasses, the thin silver-framed discs made popular two years earlier by John Lennon. His eyes were bright behind them and I attributed that brightness to the keenness of mind and Darwinian fortitude that had made him rich at thirty-two, but I was wrong. That gleam was the gleam of alcohol, nothing more. Jimmy Brennan was, as I would discover, an alcoholic, though at the time that seemed just fine to me — anything that altered your consciousness and heightened your perceptions was cool in the extreme, as far as I was concerned.
Jimmy Brennan bought us a round, and then another. Helen gave me a look out of her silver-foil eyes — a look of lust, complicity, warning? — picked up her bag and left with Adele. It was three-thirty in the morning. Ski, who at twenty-seven was married and a father, pleaded his wife. The door closed behind him and I remember vividly the sound of the latch clicking into place as he turned his key from the outside. “Well,” Jimmy said, slapping my back, “I guess it’s just us, huh?”
I don’t remember much of the rest of it, except this: I was in my car when I woke up, there was a weak pale sun draped over everything like a crust of vomit, and it was very, very hot. And more: there was a stranger in a yellow slicker beating out the glass of the driver’s side window and I was trying to fight him off till the flames licking away at my calves began to make their point more emphatically than he could ever have. As I later reconstructed it, or as it was reconstructed for me, I’d apparently left the bar in the cold glow of dawn, fired up the engine of my car and then passed out with my foot to the floor. But as Jimmy said when he saw me behind the bar the next night, “It could have been worse — think what would’ve happened if the thing had been in gear.”
MY FATHER SEEMED TO THINK the whole affair was pretty idiotic, but he didn’t deliver any lectures. It was idiotic, but by some convoluted way of thinking, it was manly too. And funny. Deeply, richly, skin-of-the-teeth and laughing-in-the-face-of-Mr.-D. funny. He rubbed his balding head with his nail-bucket hands and said he guessed I could take my mother’s car to work until I could find myself another heap of bolts, but he hoped I’d show a little more restraint and maybe pour a drop or two of coffee into my brandy before trying to make it home on all that glare ice.
Helen — the new and exciting Helen with the silver-foil eyes — didn’t seem particularly impressed with my first-night exploits, which had already entered the realm of legend by the time I got to work at four the following afternoon, but she didn’t seem offended or put off in any way either. We worked together through the cocktail-hour rush and into the depths of a very busy evening, exchanging the thousand small quips and intimacies that pass between bartender and cocktail waitress in the course of an eight-hour shift, and then it was closing time and there was Jimmy Brennan, at the very hub of the same unfolding scenario that had played itself out so disastrously the night before. Had I learned my lesson? Had the two-paragraph story in the local paper crediting Fireman Samuel L. Calabrese with saving my sorry life had any effect? Or the loss of my car and the humiliation of having to drive my mother’s? Not a whit. Jimmy Brennan bought and I poured, and he went off on a long soliloquy about beef suppliers and how they weren’t competent to do a thing about the quality of the frozen lobster tails for Surf ‘n’ Turf, and I probably would have gone out and wrecked my mother’s car if it wasn’t for Helen.
She was sitting down at the end of the bar with Adele, Ski, another cocktail waitress and two waiters who’d stayed on to drink deep after we shut down the kitchen. What she was doing was smoking a cigarette and drinking a Black Russian and watching me out of those freakish eyes as if I were some kind of wonder of nature. I liked that look. I liked it a lot. And when she got up to whisper something in my ear, hot breath and expressive lips and an invitation that electrified me from my scalp to my groin, I cut Jimmy Brennan off in the middle of an aside about what he was paying per case for well-vodka and said, “Sorry, gotta go. Helen’s having car trouble and she needs a ride, isn’t that right, Helen?”
She already had her coat on, a complicated thing full of pleats and buckles that drove right down to the toes of her boots, and she shook out her hair with a sideways flip of her head before clapping a knit hat over it. “Yeah,” she said. “That’s right.”
There were no wrecks that night. We left my mother’s car in the lot out front of Brennan’s and Helen drove me to the apartment she and Adele shared on the second floor of an old frame house in Yorktown. It was dark — intensely, preternaturally dark (or maybe it was just the crust of salt, sand and frozen slush on the windshield that made it seem that way) — and when we swung into a narrow drive hemmed in by long-legged pines, the house suddenly loomed up out of nowhere like the prow of a boat anchored in the night. “This is it?” I said, just to hear the sound of my own voice, and she said something like “Home sweet home” as she cut the engine and the lights died.
The next thing I knew we were on the porch, bathed in the dull yellow glow of a superfluous bug light, locked out and freezing; she gave me a ghostly smile, dug through her purse, dropped her keys twice, then her gloves and compact, and finally announced that the house key was missing. In response, I drew her to me and kissed her, my mind skewed by vodka and the joint we’d shared in the car, our breath steaming, heavy winter coats keeping our bodies apart — and then, with a growing sense of urgency, I tried the door. It was locked, all right. But I was feeling heroic and reckless, and I put my shoulder to it — just once, but with real feeling — and the bolt gave and we were in.
Upstairs, at the end of the hallway, was Helen’s superheated lair, a place that looked pretty much the way our mutual place would look, but which was a revelation to me at the time. There was order here, femininity, floors that gave back the light, books and records arranged alphabetically on brick-and-board shelves, prints on the walls, a clean sink and a clean toilet. And there was a smell connected to and interwoven with it all, sweet and astringent at the same time. It might have been patchouli, but I didn’t know what patchouli was or how it was supposed to smell, just that it was exotic, and that was enough for me. There were cats — two of them, Siamese or some close approximation — but you can’t have everything. I was hooked. “Nice place,” I said, working at the buttons of my coat while the cats yowled for food or attention or both, and Helen fluttered around the living room, lighting candles and slipping a record on the stereo.