Billy pays the bill and heads north toward union Square, and jumps on the L, heading toward Williamsburg.
The reading’s not supposed to happen until seven, and the train will put him at Bedford just before five. From there it’s like a ten-minute walk to Barometer, so he’ll be early. But that’s okay. He figures he’ll sit at the bar, have a shot or two to keep the courage going, center himself, and do a little more preliminary thinking on his plan. Like: Will he tell a real-life anecdote or try to make up something fictional?
He surfaces at Bedford. It’s not yet five but it’s cold and dark already: fucking November. He pulls his army jacket tighter around him, but it’s too thin to do much.
He hurries to the bar, and when he gets there he is greeted by an impassive rolling gate, corrugated metal, pulled all the way down.
“You gotta be kidding me,” he says, out loud.
“I think they open at six,” says a young woman who is standing off to the side. Billy looks over but can’t really see her face, as it is hidden by wild coils of long black hair springing out from under the constraint of a fur-lined aviator hat.
“Six?” Billy says. “What about people who want a drink right after they get off from work?”
“I think this place makes their money more off the nightlife kind of crowd,” says the woman. She taps a cigarette out of her pack and lights it off of one that she’s already got going.
“Nightlife!” Billy says, mock-contemptuous. “What about people who need a drink in the middle of the day? Someone needs to think about the high-functioning alcoholics.”
The woman releases breath in a way that’s almost a laugh. He gives another look over as she leans her head back to take another drag. It’s the lips that grab him: they’re full without being cartoonish, and she’s got a little rhinestone punched right where a beauty spot might normally be. A piece of flash, designed to draw attention—in his heart, Billy knows this, but he’s never seen the harm in letting himself be drawn wherever women want to lead him. She catches him looking, though, and shoots him an impatient glare. He admires her sleepy eyes, smearily made up, before he looks away, flustered. He stares at his shoes for a second and then something clicks. He actually snaps his fingers.
“You’re the poet,” he says. “Mastic. Elisa Mastic.”
She looks at him again, less impatient this time. Takes a three-second drag on her cigarette, holds it, exhales. “Oh my God,” she says, a little drily. “I just got street-recognized. That’s the first time that’s ever happened to me.”
“Yeah, I saw—” Billy begins. He wants to say your author site but then he realizes it might sound a little stalkery. He doesn’t want her to know that he looked her up online, even if he could pass it off as being in a strictly professional capacity. “I’m Billy Ridgeway,” he says, extending his hand. “I’m the, uh, the fiction writer of the evening.”
“Well,” she says, “okay.” She gives his hand a squeeze, meets his eyes, and smiles. Something stirs in Billy for a second, and then she lets go and it’s gone.
“I like being street-recognized,” she says. “It feels good! As a poet, you know, you’re not sure that you’re ever going to get that.”
“You know what they say,” Billy says, absently, still spinning a bit. “In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.”
“That’s good,” Elisa says. “I like that. Anyway, you made me feel better about the—the thing.” She turns her hand in the air.
“The thing?”
“You know,” Elisa says. “The fuckwit.”
“The Bladed Hyacinth—”
“Yes,” she says. “Don’t even say it. I can’t even stand the name of the thing.”
“So you saw it.”
“Yeah,” she says. “I saw it. I didn’t feel great about it—”
“No,” Billy says. “Me either.” Neither?
“Well, anyway,” she says. “Point is: you helped me to feel better.”
“Glad to be of service,” Billy says, and for a minute they stand there in the cold, wind snapping around them, neither one of them looking at the other or saying anything. Billy doesn’t want to let the conversation die, though. He wants to be daring and bold. By this point, conveniently, he’s forgotten that Flaubert was talking about the work.
“I read one of your poems, you know,” he hazards. “On—your author site.”
“Which poem?” Elisa asks. Her eyes are on him, suspicion awakened in them.