I snapped my cell phone closed with a satisfying bang that I hoped would give my husband the desired "I'm hanging up on you, you bastard!" message, and turned the phone off. I had no desire right then to deal with the attempts I knew my husband would make to call me back and apologize pathetically. I tossed the phone into my purse angrily, and looked up and down the street for one of those neon signs that advertise popular beer brands. I needed to be on a stool somewhere, and quickly, a stool with something alcoholic in front of it.
I was not emotionally fit to operate heavy machinery at that moment, so I left my car parked right where it was. As I walked away, I clicked the remote door lock button which triggers a momentary honk of my car's horn, annoying everyone within earshot and seriously startling an elderly couple who happened to be strolling past my car at that very moment. I headed off on foot toward what looked like a promising neighborhood watering hole. It was one of those pseudo-Tudor half-timbered stucco-front pubs with an equally pseudo-English pub sign partially overhanging the sidewalk. It might do.
Its front door was wide open on this hot summer day, but a small entrance vestibule made it impossible to see into the place. I paused for a moment in the doorway and listened carefully. No sound came from inside. Good. No canned music of questionable Celtic origin. Very good. No television chatter. Bonus! I went in.
It was mid-afternoon on a weekday. The lunchtime crowd, if there had been one, had long ago left to go back to work. The few customers there now were obviously regulars, men who could keep a straight face when they gave this place as their home address to the cops. The dart boards were merely wall decorations now. There were the ubiquitous television sets bracketed from the walls, turned on but with their sound turned off, the way television should usually be viewed. I counted three customers in three separate booths along one wall, and two more on stools at the long bar. I was the only female in the place, but I wasn't about to be hit on. Not by this group.
I picked a spot at the bar which was sufficiently distant from the two other occupied stools so I wouldn't be drawn into unwanted conversation or forced friendliness. I needn't have worried about that. My two bar mates, retired tradesmen I guessed, were staring blankly into pints of some dark and evil-looking brew. Stout, probably. Or maybe bitters, whatever they are. Served at room temperature, probably. It has always puzzled me that at one time an Empire that favored warm beer extended to much of the civilized world. And to several far less manageable places, too.
I ordered a double brandy, the most expensive bottle I could see from where I sat. I slapped my husband's credit card down on the bar, to show my good faith and my willingness to spend the family fortune recklessly.
The brandy arrived. I swirled the snifter around for a long moment under my nose, breathing in the aroma of decades in dark oaken vats tended by some monastic order whose holy mission seemed to be the rapid intoxication of those less disciplined than themselves.
No one spoke. Not one word. Ordering another drink required nothing more than holding up a nearly empty glass, neatly bypassing the usual inconvenience of having to make eye contact with the bartender. I was afraid that if I attempted to engage the bartender in small talk every ear in the place would be offended by my violation of the blessed silence.
I sat, quietly. I sipped, as quietly as I could. I felt sorry for myself.
I'm pretty sure I love Alex, my husband, but today was one of those days when it was very hard to like him. Alex had forgotten our wedding anniversary. Again.
I don't need expensive gifts as symbolic gestures of important occasions. A quiet romantic dinner at some place where someone else does the cooking and washes up afterwards does it for me. If there's a candle and flowers on the table, and some gentle reminder from Hallmark falls out of the menu as I open it, I'm happy. I know this, because in some past years Alex has done this sort of thing perfectly. But this year he simply blew it. And he deserved to be punished for it. It's a shame I'm no good at the revenge thing.
Just then a man strode purposefully into the place and hit it like a tornado.
He brought the place a much-needed breath of fresh air, but one that threatened to do some serious damage. The bartender and I were probably the only two people in the place who looked up as the man's imposing shadow preceded him along the entry vestibule wall. No one else seemed to notice, much less to care. Their apathy lasted about three seconds.
The man was barely through the entrance doorway when he shouted (Yes! SHOUTED!) in an unmistakably English accent, "Who the hell would have thought that Arsenal would be such bloody pussies yesterday!"
Every head in the room snapped up either in shock or in fear. One of my bar mates spilled a goodly portion of his drink over the hand which held his glass, an event which seemed to concern him not at all. Maybe that kind of thing happened to him a lot.
The newcomer's shout wasn't a question. It was apparently an irrefutable statement of fact, and it meant about as much to me as would an astronomy lecture on the gaseous nature of some distant feature of the cosmos. I had no idea who or what Arsenal or Arsenals might be, but I was pretty sure that the 'bloody pussies' he spoke of weren't directly related to menstruation.
The man was almost a stereotypical English gentleman of middle age, well-dressed and already showing signs of that uniquely male phenomenon where aging is accompanied by a look of growing distinction and noble character. He would have been stunningly handsome if not for his very bushy and meticulously (if bizarrely) sculpted mustache, which looked like the work of a crazed topiarist. He was smiling broadly, which under the circumstances was reassuring even though it caused his mustache to move in a truly odd way.
I actually laughed aloud at the sight and behavior of his strange mustache, and was immediately ashamed of myself for having done so. But the man apparently mistook my amusement as an appropriate response to his entrance line and joined me in a hearty laugh. He sat down on the stool next to mine as if I must have just invited him to join me, something I certainly didn't remember doing.
"I hope you hadn't bet on the buggers," he said to me. "I lost almost a week's pay yesterday!" He went on to denounce several individuals whom he held personally responsible for what was apparently a disaster of some sort, in a nonstop diatribe that left me no room for rebuttal or even verbal assent. Eventually he had to pause to catch a breath, of course, at which point he signaled to the bartender for a draft pint and looked at me expectantly, obviously awaiting my input into the heretofore one-sided discussion.
"I haven't the slightest idea what you're talking about," I said.
He threw his head back and laughed again. His sheer exuberance in dealing with calamity was contagious. I found myself laughing along with him, albeit somewhat nervously as I had no way of judging his mood from moment to moment. He then explained the matter to me, at considerable length, as if educating a sadly ignorant student. There was no condescension in his tone, thank goodness. It was clearly a subject he loved to talk about. I guess I'm a sucker for the more cultured British accents. I loved listening to him talk.
I learned that he was talking about a sporting event, that Arsenal was a team of considerable renown in the UK, and that his occasional mention of 'football' referred to what we Americans call soccer. He made it clear that Arsenal's poor performance of the previous day was more than just a disappointment to him. It had apparently dealt a serious blow to the Natural Order Of Things.
We introduced ourselves. He turned out to be Henry, and of course I'm Janice. Our conversation moved on to subjects we found we actually had in common. He was married, and his excuse for being in this place was that a business trip was keeping him far from wife and home. He sensed that I had no such straightforward excuse. He wanted to know what a woman like me, with a wedding ring very much in view on my left hand, was doing alone in a pub. I told him that yes, I too was married, and that in fact today was my wedding anniversary. Something in my tone must have hinted that this was not quite the happy occasion it ought to be. Henry picked up both of our drinks, without asking my permission to do so, and rose from his bar stool. He indicated with a movement of his head that he was going to find a table and that I should follow him. I scooped up my husband's credit card from the bar top, which brought a nod of acceptance and understanding from the bartender. Henry led the way to a quiet booth way at the back of the room, where we could talk privately and not be observed by any of the other customers.
Henry waited until I was seated on one of the bench seats before he put the drinks down onto the table and sat on the same side of the table that I was on, very close beside me. His confident assumption that I wouldn't object to this sort of intimate gesture impressed me.
"I'm going to make you feel better about Life," he said, a bit overstating his abilities I thought.
I readied myself to tell him that I was pretty sure I loved my husband and that I wasn't interested in being picked up for quickie sex by a stranger. But before I could do that Henry got me talking about my current disappointment with Alex. Soon Henry was in Full Flirtation Mode, and I hadn't gotten around to discouraging him when I had my best chance to do so. On the other hand, I was enjoying his attentions too much to want to do that, anyway. I definitely planned to tell my husband about how I spent my afternoon, and I thought that maybe some harmless pub dalliance with a desirable other man would get the message across to him. And there was something so delicious about it being on our anniversary. It wasn't revenge, of course. As I said, I'm no good at the revenge thing.
Henry stepped out of the booth to get the attention of the bartender, and signaled a request for another round of our drinks. When they arrived, Henry slipped the man a bill and told him that we wouldn't need his services again for awhile. The bartender nodded in understanding, took our empty glasses, wiped the tabletop briskly with his bar towel, and left us alone.
It was only after the bartender had departed that I realized that Henry's hand was resting lightly on my leg, well above the hem of my skirt. I didn't remove it. We spent awhile talking about nothing in particular but looking into one another's eyes as if that's where the very secret of Life lay. I hadn't had this kind of adult fun apart from Alex for a very long time. Henry removed his hand from my thigh just along enough to pick up his glass and hold it in the usual position for proposing a toast. I got the hint and lifted my glass too. Henry's other hand moved around me to grip my far shoulder protectively. Or was it possessively?
