After the reading and dinner with an old college friend, she retired, as had become the custom, to the hotel bar. Here her company was a boyish bartender who seemed to be desperately trying to think up something witty every time he passed by her but was never quite able to get it out. He'd pause, concentrate really hard, and then move on. Men and woman of various ages were scattered at tables behind her, one guy on the phone, sighing and giving an angry "all right" every few minutes.
The bar proper was otherwise hers. She seemed destined to never achieve the kind of fame where she'd be recognized without a signpost. At a reading—at this afternoon's, in fact—fans could be effusive, even obsessive. They'd tell you how they'd been changed, how grateful they were. Odder things, too, like the woman this evening who told her a story about an aunt who had created recipes using hamster meat in the years after her husband died. Eloise patiently took note, in that vampiric way writers do, unable after years of practice to summon up true sympathy, always on the hunt for details that could fill out a future character, hang a plot device on.
She favored martinis, vodka, twist, but with the Pacific air this seemed a liquid faux-pas, so she was immersed in a passable margarita. It had come with a twee umbrella—the bartender trying to get into her good graces, and perhaps elsewhere—which she had promptly removed, but not after favoring him with a smile. He gave her a thumbs-up, a rather bizarre gesture. Or maybe it made sense among the youth today. Kids do weird things.
She continued her sketching, which was, at this point in life, as vital as any other toilet procedure. Beneath a few fleshings of the hamster lady written in her always calligraphic cursive, she added some lines about a dream she'd had on the flight this morning, then a couplet that would serve as the nucleus to something undetermined. The bartender brought her another drink without being requested, and asked what she was writing.
"Trying to sort the day's ideas. Sift out the 5% that are worthwhile." She smiled. "I'm a writer."
"What's your name? Maybe I've read something of yours."
She laughed, a surprisingly deep and buttery sound she developed at puberty. "You're not a sexually-repressed housewife, and you're not a teenage girl who's yet to be fucked properly, so decidedly unlikely."
He didn't know what to say, so she added, "Eloise," and shook his hand. Not that Southern Belle limp at the wrist offering, but a break-my-wrist or I'll-break-yours exchange.
"Do you have another name?" he managed, miming soothing his hand.
"You don't like the one I gave you?"
"No, I meant, do you have a... writing..."
"A pen name?"
"That! Yes."
"No."
An agent had once suggested "E. N. Henderson" to tactfully hide her sex. For flexibility in genre. As if one could only write a spy novel by dipping one's bell-end in ink. Her Montblanc would do.
She brazenly scanned the bartender's entire body. Long, swimmer's build, probably surfs. She had one use for young men, never had had any other. It was possible to overlook the clumsiness and the neediness when you could spider your hands down a ripple of abs, or you had them revved up to a good jack-hammering. Otherwise, they were simply silly.
Still, to be perfectly honest, it did feel good to have someone's glance still drifting towards her cleavage. It felt better with every passing year, in fact.
"How long they keep you here?" she said.
He looked up. "Another hour."
She cradled her chin in her palms and tiptoed her fingernails up his chest. "You never know. Maybe you keep the drinks coming, leave me alone so I can work until then... maybe my room number will show up on a napkin somehow. Could happen."
He didn't quite take the hint, so she gently waved him away.
It's nice to be wanted. It'll always be nice to be wanted. Her thoughts drifted to a familiar place, the nugget of memory behind a story in her most recent book, one that had benignly agitated for the last twenty odd years, like the princess and the pea. There her attention perched for a few moments as she sipped her drink. The great wheels of time creaked.
You take the joys you can reach. Someone had taught her that long ago, and for the sake of karma, she'd tried to teach it to who she could.
She returned to her notebook, the familiar waters of the life she'd made.
Someone sat down next to her, but she didn't notice.
"It's a waste of time to state the obvious, but nonetheless, you are still every bit as beautiful."
The pen stopped. She stared at the page for a minute, then carefully closed the book and placed it on the bar. She looked straight ahead as she reached for her drink.
"Hi, Joe," she finally said. She took a deep breath, and a deep swig, and put her hand on her chest.
"Hi, Eloise. Glenlivet neat." The bartender obliged, again seeming like he had something to say, but withdrew as he sensed the magnitude of his intrusion.
"You always had good taste, Joe," she said.
"Rather self-serving comment, don't you think?"
"I was never one for false modesty. Come to think of it, all modesty is false modesty."
"You haven't changed."
"Oh please, cliches are so fucking easy, and besides, that one's simply ridiculous. Everyone's changing, always. Some things are the same, of course. Some aren't. For example, the girls ain't what they used to be." She looked down at her chest.
He laughed. "It's the blight man was born for."
"You and your fucking Hopkins, man. Do you remember making me memorize
the Windhover
?"
"I think if there was any evidence of the efficacy of my teaching style, it's you. And apropos of nothing, your tits look amazing."
She turned. The picture she had in her mind of him softly merged with what she saw. Reality pushed and bled through the memory. So the old photograph's hair grayed, whitened. The face developed a few wrinkles. The eyes were still powerful, but they started to sink. All in all, he'd aged well.
"What are you doing here?"
"You know damn well what I'm doing here." He laced his fingers with hers. Same big hands, same sense of her own elegance as their digits folded.
"You read the book."
"I read the book."