The Half Moon: a Novel, page 2
Since Cobie told him Jess was in Gillam, he’d been picturing her against the backdrop of her mother’s floral wallpaper, the two of them settling in to watch Dateline. He imagined her mulling over how to approach him, how to apologize. He remembered the first time he drove her home. She was not quite twenty-four and he was twenty-eight. They hadn’t done anything yet, though he decided at some point that night that he had to kiss her, and didn’t understand why he hadn’t already. They were four grades apart, just enough to have missed each other in high school. He’d overlapped with her older brother, Mickey, but Mickey was two years younger than Malcolm and played soccer and took all honors classes. Only the name rang a bell. Jess was beautiful and funny and a little different from the other girls. When she stood near the bar, something inside of him wobbled; he became clumsy and self-conscious when normally he felt graceful and fluid, like his movements had been choreographed to precisely fit the narrow space of his workplace, his stage. He couldn’t remember ever feeling self-conscious before meeting her.
She told him she had an apartment in Manhattan but came to Gillam every few weeks, to see her parents and go out with her high school friends. On the night when he drove her home for the first time, she sat at the bar and they talked. When her group went to leave, he suggested she stay, keep him company.
The thing he remembered most about dropping her off at her parents’ at four in the morning was not the kiss, whatever that had been like, but that she hopped out of the car and ran to the front door like a little kid. She took the concrete steps two at a time, pumping her arms like a high hurdler. When she got to the door, she turned and waved at him before disappearing inside. Not a flirtatious wave. Not a demure Miss America wave. It was a dorky wave: palm wide, vigorous back and forth. Alone in his car, the stink of the bar on his skin as always, he laughed. What a weirdo.
She’d probably been driving by their house every day since she came back, looking for his car, trying to think of a way to approach him. Well, let her sweat, he thought. I’m not going knocking. No way.
The music was catchy. More people were starting to sway. He made his way over to Patrick and Siobhán.
“Look at his place,” Patrick said as Siobhán gave Malcolm a long, tender hug, the kind he imagined she gave her children when they woke from bad dreams. “Packed to the gills.”
Malcolm ignored that, hoping to imply that the bar was full all the time, but then remembered that Patrick knew, of course. His oldest friend, he could read Malcolm easily and knew almost from the start that things were not going as Malcolm expected them to. He and Siobhán had their six-year-old’s birthday party there a few months earlier, hired a magician, told Malcolm it was because Eamon loved the mozzarella sticks at the Half Moon and so would his little buddies. They invited parents, too, no doubt so the bar bill would be substantial. Malcolm wouldn’t take Patrick’s money, but then he found it in an envelope in his car, in the compartment where he kept his nicotine lozenges.
He looked around at the table where Billy had been sitting, and noted it was empty. He just wanted to be seen, Malcolm knew. He just wanted Malcolm to know that he was keeping close tabs.
“Date night?” Malcolm asked, flagging down Bridget, the waitress, to bring his friends another round.
Siobhán glanced at Patrick, and Malcolm caught a whiff of panic.
“Yeah, sort of,” Siobhán said, but when Malcolm looked at Patrick, Patrick wouldn’t meet his eyes. Malcolm gestured toward the empties in front of them. “Sorry about that,” he said as he plucked them up, said he’d send someone to wipe down the table.
“Oh, don’t worry,” Siobhán said.
“Yeah, don’t worry about it, Mal.”
“I’m usually here earlier. My mother came by with food.”
“Do whatever you have to do,” Patrick said. “We can hang out later. When you get a minute.”
“Yeah? Okay good.”
* * *
It had been over four months since Jess left. Seventeen weeks to be exact. Thanksgiving with his mother, his sister, his brother-in-law who was on the wagon, his three near-feral nephews. He got completely hammered, and his mother, who’d normally give him a little reminder about genetics and his line of work, only guided him upstairs to his high school bed and tucked him in. She had a pot of coffee and a plate of eggs ready for him in the morning and didn’t say a word.
Christmas he spent with Patrick and Siobhán because his mother went to his sister’s in Boston. New Year’s at the bar. In his own house, he kept the TV on nonstop for company. When his friends came by, they let themselves in through the back slider, something they would never do if Jess were around. It was a shock at first. With adulthood and marriage came a turning in toward one’s own unit, but now, it seemed, he was everyone’s worry, and part of him suspected these friends, grown men, all in their mid-forties, loved the excuse to leave their families on a Saturday afternoon and claim they were checking on Malcolm.
* * *
“Malcolm,” Roddy said now as Malcolm approached the bar. “Hey.”
The whole place was full from end to end, and from one group came a sudden swell of people singing. Others joined in from all the way across the room, and it became a call-and-response, a song everyone knew. You might not know how you felt about the song if you were alone in your car, but sung in a local pub? With a drink in your hand? Alongside strangers? Pure magic. The problem was that if Malcolm wanted the same thing to happen the next night, and the next, just having the thought in his mind and looking for the right moment would make it impossible. The warmth, the feeling of camaraderie, even the night sky swollen with snow—it was like chemistry between people—surprising, impossible to predict—but once the charge was in the air, there was no force more powerful.
He wanted to take a video and text it to Jess. See? he’d write. Didn’t I tell you?
Roddy’s expression seemed worried, but Malcolm refused to let him ruin the moment. Back in January, someone unscrewed one of the urinals from its mount and tossed it out the kitchen exit, where it broke into a dozen pieces. In Malcolm’s history tending bar, it was the third time someone had ripped a urinal out of a wall. This time, at least, the person had turned off the water. Malcolm still couldn’t figure out who’d done it. Someone who knew his way around a stop valve and who carried a wrench in his pocket. That night, when Roddy had come up behind him and told him the urinal was gone, just gone, he looked so upset that Malcolm knew if he said the wrong thing, Roddy would cry. He was certain of it.
“Why would they do that?” Roddy asked, following Malcolm to the men’s room. “I don’t get it.”
“What do you mean? There’s nothing to get,” Malcolm said. He turned to study the kid. “Drunk people do stupid shit. You need to calm down.”
But the urinal incident seemed to make Roddy even more anxious, more on edge during his shifts. Now, as Roddy tried again to flag him down, to get him to stop and listen, Malcolm turned and gave him a look of total faith, of confidence.
“That guy is here. Was here.”
“I saw him.”
“And also—”
“Roddy, I need a minute,” Malcolm said, and then he looked around as if to say, I don’t see anything happening here that you can’t handle for one minute. He opened the door to the basement storage room and felt his way down the stairs in the dark. It was musty down there, low ceilinged, a row of kegs on one side, towers of boxes screaming brand logos against the opposite wall. He pulled the string that turned on the light, and raised his hands to the crossbeam above his head. He listened and felt relief bloom and grow inside his body. It would all be fine, he told himself. Heels clicked on hardwood, chairs scraped the floor. He ran his hands over a stack of tablecloths enclosed in plastic, looked at the jars of cherries, olives, vac-sealed drums of mixed nuts that wouldn’t expire for another two years. A full bar. He wanted one minute to soak it in, to remember.
He’d been working at the Half Moon for twenty-four years when he bought the place, knew it better than even his childhood home. He knew the smell of it, the way the light looked at different times of year, in different weather. It was at the Half Moon that he learned how to fix a running toilet, how to solder a pipe. He got strong at the bar, bringing case after case of Bud Light and Ultra up from the basement because Hugh wouldn’t add a light beer to the draft options. He learned about cash there, how to accept it, how to turn it away. He learned how to handle the sales reps, which ones would fork over free branded glasses and napkins and throw a few packs of cocktail straws on top, just because they liked shooting the shit for ten minutes. He learned that though he could drink for free at any bar in town, he’d drop more in tips in those places than he’d ever have paid had he come in as a regular customer. He learned how to talk to anyone, how to find common ground. He learned how to be a vessel for people’s worries, their complaints, and he learned that he’d better not have any worries or complaints of his own. He learned how to be friendly to women without crossing a line, he knew how to make them feel beautiful without being a sleaze, and he learned how to walk those same women back when they crossed the line, without insulting them, without embarrassing them. He learned to hide his shock at some of the things they said to him, these perfectly normal-seeming women, these women in their nearly identical faux leather jackets and their wedges, their hair in banana curls like they were all heading to some pageant for middle-aged women, the things that came out of their mouths when they had too much to drink or if they’d been wronged by their boyfriends or husbands. He learned it was possible to appear to the world as an average, ho-hum person but to actually harbor thoughts that human strangers didn’t normally share with one another, until they sat at a bar for too long on a Friday night and encountered a bartender they considered attractive.
“I mean, these are mothers, most of them,” he reported to Jess after. “They have little kids at home.” He saved all his judgments for later, for her.
But Jess never wanted him thinking badly of these women. She insisted that they shouldn’t be judged for reaching back to their youth for a moment, chasing a temporary high. When she took this position, he felt baffled. Did she want to say these things to a near stranger? That wasn’t the point, she said; the point was to try to understand wanting some of that intoxicating energy in their lives again for thirty seconds, what harm, because the truth was that most of them would wake up to a pile of dirty laundry and kids demanding a snack. Jess had seen it crush their female friends in a way that Malcolm had mostly been shielded from. She had a friend who, when Jess asked how she did it all—the kids, the house, a job, the cloth napkins at holidays, and so on—lifted a finger to her lips and pulled open a drawer in her bedroom dresser to show Jess where she’d been stockpiling Percocet, collecting it from friends who’d had C-sections but were afraid to finish their prescriptions.
“But you still want a baby,” Malcolm asked. “Even knowing that.”
“Yes,” she said, without hesitation. “Very much so.”
What had he said in response? He couldn’t remember.
* * *
The snow was really coming. The air outside was heavy and still.
He thought, she might text if she’s worried. She didn’t like weather.
He heard the creak of the storeroom door opening, a hesitant step down.
“Malcolm?” Emma’s voice. He looked up at her from the bottom of the stairs. She was in her usual work uniform: black jeans, a black shirt, black boots that reached to mid-shin.
“Yeah?” he said.
“Just come,” she said.
Emma filled Malcolm in as they crossed the short distance between the storeroom door and the knot of energy by the window. “It’s Tripp,” Emma said. “I’ve never seen him like this.” Tripp was around sixty, Malcolm guessed. He was on the short side but broad. He’d been coming in for years, always paid cash, never ran a tab. He always sat by the window, put a few twenties on the bar, and left as soon as the twenties were gone. But tonight was different. Once he drank through his pile of cash, he added more. As they approached, he was waving his arms as he ranted about something, and Malcolm could see in the heaviness of his movements that he was very drunk.
Emma told Malcolm that she overheard him asking Roddy how often the draft lines were cleaned. He asked what detergent they used on the glasses. He said to no one in particular that he might call the board of health, that he knew a guy, that it didn’t take much to pull a liquor license. When Emma heard him ask Roddy for a Jameson, she put a pint glass of ice water in front of him instead.
Then she sighed, and Malcolm knew they were about to arrive at the more immediate problem. “I don’t know what they were talking about, but next thing he called the tall guy over there a ‘smug little shit.’ ”
Part of Malcolm wanted to laugh—every twenty-five-year-old male was a smug little shit—until the crowd parted and Malcolm saw how angry the guy was.
“Guys,” Malcolm said. “Hey.” He made his way to the center of the knot. But it was too late. A surge of raw energy raced through the air. He could smell it as clear as the coming storm: someone was about to get punched.
Malcolm put his hand on Tripp’s arm to stay him. He was way too old for this nonsense. Tripp used to take a car service straight from work to the bar on Friday afternoons and as soon as he ordered, he’d take off his tie and drape it over his knee. But it had been a while since he’d come in, now that Malcolm thought about it. He was not usually one to pick fights. The worst he ever did when he had a few drinks was go on about how one day he was going to buy fifty acres in Peru and move there, land was cheap and beautiful. He was going to step out of his life and into another. He’d be off the grid and closer to nature. He’d get healthier, more balanced—a state that was impossible to achieve in the New York metro area. He said most of the parcels near the Sacred Valley had mature fruit trees—fig, guava, apple. The melt running off the Andes brought potable water. He’d put up solar panels and get his exercise doing real work, on the earth.
A lot of people had a go-to subject when drinking, a touchstone—an ex-wife, a failed music career—and moving off the grid was Tripp’s.
“If it were that easy, everyone would do it,” Malcolm remembered saying one time, when Tripp had launched into his favorite topic.
“You would do it?”
Malcolm laughed. “No, not me. What am I going to do with fifty acres of guava trees? I’m just saying a lot of people feel exactly like you do.”
He couldn’t remember what Tripp had said in reply. He glanced over at Patrick and Siobhán, to see if they were watching. Just like that, the magical bubble had burst.
The young guy widened his stance, screwed his face into a grimace, and drew his elbow back. “Hang on,” Malcolm said, but then the kid released, and next came the unmistakable sound of meat on meat. The wave of energy surged forward, tickled the back of Malcolm’s neck. Tripp slumped.
Nick, the bouncer, caught the young man’s second punch mid-flight, as Malcolm tried to get Tripp out of there. But Tripp wouldn’t move.
“Roddy,” Malcolm said. “Help.” Nick was dealing with the young people, telling them to gather their things and go.
Together Malcolm and Roddy marched Tripp through the swinging door to the kitchen, where they sat him on a folding chair. André was lowering a fry basket into oil. Scotty was breaking down boxes in the corner. “No way,” André said, taking one look. “Have Nick toss him.”
Malcolm checked his watch. “It’s only nine thirty. I’ll get him a cab but I want him to sober up a bit. God, I hope no one calls the cops.”
“I’m not babysitting,” Scotty said. “I need to get out of here before we’re snowed in.”
“Me too,” André said.
Emma, watching from the door, said nothing.
“Hey, Tripp,” Malcolm said loudly, right near the man’s face. “Where do you live?” He ran his own company, implied he had a lot of money. Malcolm was almost certain he lived in the big Victorian at the end of Acorn Drive, but he wanted Tripp to confirm before he packed him into a cab and sent him there.
But Tripp only pressed his cheek against the cool stainless steel of the walk-in. He closed his eyes.
“Roddy,” Malcolm said, feeling a headache coming on. “You see a guy getting this banged up, you can’t just pour whatever he asks for.”
“I was trying to tell you.”
“Tell me what? That there’s a drunk guy at the bar? Dealing with the drunk people who come in here is the whole job.” Malcolm sighed. “What about his tab?”
“Cash as he went, like always.”
“And the others? That younger group?” He could tell by Roddy’s face that they’d not paid. He looked at Emma and didn’t even need to say anything. She immediately pushed through the swinging door that led back to the bar to catch them before they left.
Roddy was silent for a moment. “I didn’t know you were going to kick them out.”
“Just go,” Malcolm said. “Start busing.”
Out front, the night’s momentum had come to a halt. Some new faces had arrived, but it was as if they could sense they were out of the loop, and they didn’t settle in like the earlier crowd had. People were closing tabs, shrugging on their coats. There’d be no more singing. No more dancing. The night was skewed early. Everything that would have normally happened between 8:00 p.m. and 4:00 a.m. was being compressed into a much shorter period, because of the storm. After another forty-five minutes, the only patrons left were Patrick and Siobhán. Malcolm turned the music way down.
