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.
