Fucking Daphne (17 page)

In the caterwaul, we vocalize and we reenact all that we bear for our humans, our friends. We carry the burden of witness: their transgressions, recklessness, unforgivables, inexcusables, every ugly pore and vile gash. And still we are ever faithful, unwavering in our tender hooks. We see each one of them for who they can be, who they might be, who they should be. But still, we adore each of them for who they are.

And in our caterwaul, we purge what we see of them that no one else sees, not even God, who's always truant, or too busy cooing over newborns in their bassinets, or tending to his legend.

We bear witness to each angle of indiscretion, every shade of shame, the spiraling despair and the leaping joys. We share the burden even when we don't understand the spectrum of human shortcomings that come into play.

I can see the caterwaul coming already.

My aria is prepared and performed in fine form. At the coda, Lately joins me and we lie side to side, curl to curl, the bitter smoke and prickly haze of our exorcism replaced by the fragrant jasmine and night-blooming lilies of back gardens. Soon, all that will be left is the sniff of dander, the hum of the earth.

Lately and I remember differently this transgression we're attempting to un-noose, and working together will give us the full picture, or at least some picture.

We are holding on to each other; no, we're pushing away, not pushing away, trying to feel something outside our skin, to find the point of connection, the crickling synapses of all the nervy bits firing and misfiring, aligning and relapsing. We are simply trying to touch another without spreading our decay or contracting any of theirs. The act of leaving fingerprints. Seems idiot-easy, but how our humans fail. But what can we do?

For who are they but ours, so imperfect and damaged, so ripe with pride and decency, naive as lamb chops? And what more can we do but stubbornly protect them, and simply love them, in all their bullying fragility?

“Fucking Daphne.” I barely mumble it under my breath, then turn to serve someone at the other end of the bar. I can see from fifteen feet that she's already a mess. Martini Monday's been over for an hour and her friends are all gone, so that makes her
my
mess. I don't know how she could've heard me, but when I turn back around to her at the bar, she's taken off her coat and is sitting on her stool, giving me the stink-eye. “Look, Jamie, you don't have to be thrilled to see me; just pour, baby.” Now I see the shiner, and that both her eyes are red and puffy from crying. She's dressed in girl drag, a Daphne I've never seen: a tube top, a miniskirt, fuck-me pumps, pink frosted lips; Daphne as one of those cigarette-swilling heartbreakers who strides in and gets things going. She pulls a blond wig out of her coat pocket, makes a weak attempt to put it on, but then just tosses it on the bar. I reach for the Stoli. She tells me her story.

Daphne turns into a tree in Greek mythology, but everybody knows that. Daphne shifts shapes, appeals to gods. Fucking Daphne can be a tricky proposition.
Sometimes these stories were even true.

There are a million versions of the joke: I like my women like I like my coffee—warm and rich. Well, most people don't realize it, but they like their martinis like they would never like their sexual partners: ice-cold and a little weak (although lately, I get a lot of requests for dirty and salty as well).

The regulars christened it Martini Monday, a small off-night indulgence amid the decadence of the dot-com boom, and it became a tradition. The crowd was queer, mostly female, and loud. One was a lawyer, another a programmer; others edited tech magazines or wrote lesbian theory and porn, BDSM manifestos, and cyberpunk novels. They loved my martinis because they were easy to drink: cold and a little weak. They drank vodka, so I could throttle the shaker until tiny ice crystals snuck through the strainer into the chilled glasses. Vermouth was but an imagined voice. I'd swish it around in the glass, then shake it all out, then pour in the cold, clear, water-mellowed booze. My martinis tasted like martinis taste to William Powell in
Thin Man
movies, like the loveliest thing on earth, like a soothing mountain stream. They were martinis that made you feel as if you were an adult who'd learned to really love martinis. But what you were actually liking was the cold and the easy. Maybe that's how I like my women: oxymoronic: cold, and easy. Daphne was neither cold nor easy, and who wants a hot and complicated martini?

Daphne was ruled out from the day I first served her in '95. The reasons for that are vague, beyond her being with a woman and my being married. But I classified her as “friend” from day one. Mine was a classification system as unconscious as it was trained, a convolution of Mom's feminism, and its rules were simple: One has sex with women for love, women one might partner with forever. Women not loved are not to be lusted after, or flirted with. They are to be thought of as no different from male friends, utterly platonic. If I someday found myself attracted to men, new rules would have tobe written.

Who was I that Monday night in 1998, three years after I first met her, when Daphne showed up trashed, beat-up, looking for trouble, for me? And who was Daphne? Time, of course, confuses shit all to hell.

I was someone who never learned how to have fun in bed. Daphne was someone who'd never learned how to have fun in a
relationship. That's one way to look at it. But then, who was I to talk? Sarah, my wife of eight years, had left me three months earlier. Daphne and I spent many a Monday like this, talking over the bar—her telling me the misery of her long-term relationship; I, half-there, racked with self-pity, mourning my lost love and a lifetime of wrong priorities, of always making earnest love to one potential life mate after another and never fucking. What a pair we were.

Daphne always told me how she and her girlfriend, Amy, fought, what they fought about. Not with fists—they beat each other up just fine with words—but that drama came in a distant second that night. The shiner was from a stranger on the street who mistook Daphne for a guy and fag-bashed her. When he realized she was a real-life girl, he told her he was
so so sorry, I thought you were a guy,
and took off in his car real fast.

As I digested this information, it occurred to me that I really was a bartender now—all atrocities were predictable and almost bland. All couples were miserable, and their miseries were generic. I made a note to myself to quit bartending before it was too late, if it wasn't too late already.

A Daphne walks into a bar. It's not the Daphne you know, or the Daphne I know now or knew then, it's some part of both and a lot of other Daphnes and not-Daphnes. A fucking Daphne walks into a fucking bar. Does she even have dreads back then, or all that ink? I don't think so, but that's the only way I know how to see her now, to see us then: It's eight-thirty, it's 1998, it's San Francisco; the Martini Monday crowd has wobbled on home. There's nothing going on tonight, just me and D holding court in some dark corner bar for our respective sadnesses, which, come to think of it, fill the place quite nicely. Daphne falls in love with me when she's sad and drunk. I'm a bartender. And she's a regular. And she's nearly always sad. So Daphne loves me. Her eyes, red and swollen.

She tells me about the black eye, about how good a day she was having up until then, about sitting on the sidewalk afterward with a steak she'd just bought slapped on her eye, tells me, again, to “just pour, just keep pouring.” Take away all our fancy education, and we're a regular Jim Thompson novel, a Bukowski poem. I give her medicine, listen, talk a little, give myself medicine—we get medicated. Here, I'm pharmacist, therapist, not customer or client, so I listen more than I talk. But eventually I talk, too. I get drunk and vulnerable, which makes D love me all the more, and I love her for that, for listening and loving, as much as I hate my wretchedness and hers.

After two martinis, we switch to Jäger shots with Stella chasers. This is before the frat boys completely took over Jäger, but still, it's not our usual. This is a special occasion. And the Jäger does its speedy, crazy, almost hallucinogenic job. I start to sneak my usual peeks to where the ink meets the edge of her stretchy knit. I've always loved a tube top. The trashiness of it, the boobness of it. Daphne leans in just a little to give me a better view.

A couple comes in, sits at the end of the bar. Their body language is undoubtedly first date, maybe even one of those new Internet first dates from
Salon.com
; they're too upscale for a Craigslist hookup. He has a beer, she a glass of merlot—it's not starting off well. Watching them and interpreting their gestures lightens our load. They have a second round but don't grow more at ease with the alcohol. In fact, they seem more tense, he gesturing more broadly, laughing too loudly, slipping into the hard-up hard sell, she sitting more and more upright. They're done forever after round two. He pays, leaves me a buck, thinking,
I've already wasted enough on this tight-ass bitch.

One o'clock in the morning. It's just the two of us, the Marilyn wig, which, in our newfound wisdom, we've decided suits me quite well, and the juke. We've been feeding it all night. Al Green, the Cure, AC/DC, Foo Fighters; so long as it's sappy or angry, it's on our list. Then she finally says it.

“I don't want you so bad, you know, Jamie. I don't want you forever or anything. I don't want to be your fucking girlfriend. I just
want to know that part of you, the part of you that gets naked and has sex and loses control. I want to know the fucking Jamie.”

I say nothing at first, pour us another drink, turn out the sign, lock the doors, and sit down on her side of the bar. I take my shot, chase it down, watch the room shiver.

I say, “I'd like that, too,” and I reach over and trace the patterns down her chest, reach under her top, cup a breast. We kiss and we kiss some more and then we look at each other and laugh. I glance over at the pool table, raise an eyebrow, and we laugh again. We've both seen it in movies, both the rape scene and the fantasy, the porn of sex on a pool table, the gangbang video of sex on a pool table, guy after guy taking his turn, the woman, the “slut,” voracious, unquenchable, soaked.
How did they clean up that table?
I find myself ruining porn with thoughts like this all the time.
Do they just throw the table away after? You don't make enough cash on a twenty-minute gangbang video to just trash a pool table, do you?

Women I'm with ask me if I've ever slept with a prostitute. I usually lie and say no, not because of shame or because I want to make some kind of impression, but because I don't remember the details. If I say yes, then they'll ask me about it, and I don't want to make stuff up and I don't want to be abrupt and say, “I don't want to talk about it.” But what I really don't want to say is that I just don't remember. I remember the circumstances, the anticipation, but not the incidents; the talking in the alley, but not the blow job; the seedy reception room, but not the sex. I can't remember a lot about a lot of things,
sex especially. It's not just that it was with a prostitute and I block it out because I have shame, so forget that interpretation. It's sex in general, and I don't think I'm loaded with shame about sex in general, at least not anymore.