A lonely an unemployed man fixates on a waitress in his local bar.
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| Image generated with OpenAI |
There is always a long wait for the booths and you’re alone all the time, but you never sit at the bar. For one, you don’t like the way the bartender squints at you with his hooded eyes. Besides, the waitress you like, the girl you’re here for, works on the floor. And the way the bartender looks at you might indeed have something to do with the way you look at the waitress. There’s a certain playfulness in how she takes orders that leads some patrons to believe she has a thing for them.
Not you. You don’t easily get fooled by a couple of elusive dimples, a deluge of loose long hair, and a dress that reveals too much. Yet, you’ve made it a habit to eat at this pub every night. To make sure she doesn’t have a thing for you. Or, if she does.
You two make conversation.
“Would you like to hear about our specials?”
You always say yes, even though you know them by heart. In fact, you don’t really care about the food; you often end up with “whatever is popular.” You only want to watch her animated recitation of the specials. This performance is not on the menu.
“Busy night, eh?” you’ll ask when the number of customers exceeds the fingers on your hands.
“Yeah, but we’ll manage,” she says, and you stare at the roll of her brown pupils. Manage is her favorite word. “How large is your pasta?” “Hmm, I think you’ll manage,” she would say in an explosion of dimples and teeth.
The restaurant is walking distance from your bachelor condo – quite convenient. You’ve been coming here almost every night since the day you got fired from your accountant job, when in your lonesome wanderings you landed here, and she took your order with a smile – the first smile you saw on that shitty day. Now, you wonder if she recognizes you. A loner among parties of two, three, four and more should be conspicuous enough, but she never acknowledges it. Never an oh-it’s-you. Well, you aren’t the type to be noticed. Or perhaps she does that on purpose, to save you the embarrassment. As a token of gratitude, you leave generous tips, hoping she won’t have to share the money with the suspicious bartender.
Recently, you stay longer to discover when she heads out for the night. Once you get to know her schedule, you can ask her what she’ll be up to after work. You don’t mind indulging well into the night. No job means no worries about the morning hangover, about filing numbers under the debit-credit columns. One sleepy night, you learn the exact time she escapes her job, when she sneaks out in her jeans and top at one in the morning. What to do now? You probably shouldn’t ask a lady what she’s up to after midnight.
Alternatively, you can ask what her plans are for the next morning. That’d be a bolder move as it requires a firmer commitment. You’re perfecting your lines, rearranging and replacing words, when you see her chatting with two guys at the bar. The drowsy-eyed bartender is also engaged, crafting his big mouth into a full grin. You fail at reading her lips, but you can tell her body language is different. And the guys. They could be her acquaintances or relatives, cousins. It’s almost one and she disappears into a door with an Employees Only sign. The two guys laugh at something one says to the other. There’s a certain crudeness in the laughter that makes you sit tight, your muscles tense. They leave cash and scram. You have your credit card ready but when you see her appear in her jeans and top, slinging a small purse, you decide to do the same and empty your wallet of the little cash you have.
Outside, the moon is full and bright. People huddle here and there smoking and laughing. Your girl is there, sharing a cigarette with those men. She stretches her arm to point at something in the distance. They wrap up their conversation and begin to stroll. Together. As they turn at an intersection, you follow them.
Two blocks later, you’re still in the entertainment district with the music blaring from nearby restaurants. But an eerie quiet settles when you turn onto a leafy street lined with low-rise apartments. You can hear the rhythmic tick-tock of her steps, counting down whatever lays ahead. You’re not sure why you’re following them. To protect her perhaps, though she doesn’t come across as someone in need of protection. They reach a squat building and she unlocks the main door. They enter. You’re left alone in a deserted street with broken lamplights. After a few seconds of indecision, you reach the door and look through its semi-transparent glass. No one’s inside. Just an empty foyer and a row of closed doors.
You turn and lean on the wall outside. A dark alley lurks on the other side of the street. From where you are, it’s more like a gaping hole. You skulk into it and examine the building from this vantage point. The façade is grey concrete. Ugly and inconspicuous with three storeys. Only a few scattered lights are on. Some silhouettes move around behind a curtained window in the south-eastern corner of the second floor. You wonder if that’s hers.
You idle about for a bit longer until the two men emerge from the glassed door. You can’t tell much from the changes in their appearances. Maybe the taller guy’s hair is ruffled now. That observation you can dismiss. But you can’t ignore the sight of the shorter man zipping up his pants. The rage that tears at your lungs, the nausea that turns your stomach, they ring familiar, echoing the times you were bullied at school, at home, at work. You’re trembling with a sense of fury, of fear and shame, curling your fingers into fists, hurling them nowhere.
They saunter back toward the main street singing some song in a language you can’t recognize. You’re left alone watching a light that soon turns off. At least, now you know her unit. The silver-lining.
You stick around a bit longer as if time will undo what you’ve witnessed. It doesn’t, and you have to breathe the stench coming from the garbage cans. You only leave when it gets unbearable.
In the nights that follow you get used to the odour, it becomes part of the experience. Even at your own home, discarding your own trash, the smell takes you to the girl and her visitors, every night a new one, occasionally more. You survey them from the discomfort of your shelter. All walks of men. Short, tall, thin, bulky, old, young, rough, suave, all races and colors. Women too. Sometimes, when your imagination goes wild, you touch yourself, adjusting your time of release with theirs, supposedly. Every night, watching her take people home, you ask yourself how she can even find the energy after eight hours of labor. I can manage, her voice, tired and sultry, echoes in your head.
It’s been weeks since you dropped by the pub. In her dumpster, you’ve found a chair with a broken back to sit on and you use a cardboard box as a makeshift table. On your way, every evening, you grab a hotdog from a food truck. The back-alley across her home is your first and only destination. A ritual, a party to attend, a vigil to maintain.
It’s always nights, after dusk before dawn, an unspoken pact. During the day, you do the minimum required to keep your unemployment insurance, which is enough to pay for your spartan life. You attend job interviews, occasionally. When they ask why you were let go, you share your version of the truth: you weren’t popular, you had enemies, you didn’t tell jokes. And the interviewers don’t call again. They want an accountant who tells jokes. You don’t wait for their calls. You wait for the night.
Some nights she walks home by herself. You attach some sort of ethereal beauty to her unaccompanied gait. She has a faraway look when alone, hands deep in her pockets, and a slight hunch in her back. Those are the nights you want to jump out of your habitat, startle her and ask what she’s up to the next morning. On those nights, you don’t dwell on the other nights. You redefine her as the innocent waitress you used to know. The image wouldn’t last long. A night or two at most.
The urge to punish the visitors doesn’t subside. You even carry a switchblade. Alone at home, you practice in front of the mirror, gashing the phantom enemy. Every time the men push the door open to exit her apartment, you stand guard. You know you have the upper hand, the element of surprise. They’ve just gotten laid. For them the night is over. A whore’s jealous lover charging from a dumpster isn’t even a possibility.
But you stay put. Night after night you keep your watch like a loyal soldier at his post. Then, one wintry night it happens. You don’t know what makes you do it when the man struts out of the building. Maybe the cold has disabled your brain, or the man is too ugly. Or maybe you’re encouraged by his build: short and bony, just like you. Whatever it is, with your hoodie up and the scarf covering most of your face, you step out of the dark onto the street. The man is buttoning up his coat, illuminated by the yellow light as the heavy door squeals behind him. You clutch the switchblade inside your pocket, thumb on the lever. He’s breathing into his cupped hands and when he notices your determined steps, he brings them down. You tighten your grip. He takes one step back.
And you brush past him.
There’s barely enough time for you to insert your hand through the crack. You enter and push the door shut behind you. Through the murky glass, you observe the man’s silhouette as he disappears into the night. The lobby smells of mold and age. You glance at the surroundings and climb the carpeted staircase, knowing where it leads. The last door on the right is your destination. With the tip of your fingers you slide your hoodie down. You knock on the door and wait. Knock again and wait. Then, you notice the sound of running water. She’s taking a shower.
You lean on the wall. Your heart beats faster as your consciousness prevails. Then, when it’s all quiet, you knock. Gently.
She swings the door open. “What…” she stops when her eyes fall on you. A moment of silence and recognition. Then, “Oh, it’s you!”
The lilt in her voice! It’s you as in, Finally it’s you, or in, Oh no it’s you? Either way, you cherish the fact that she remembers your face after so many weeks, despite the beard you’ve cultivated.
She doesn’t invite you in; neither do you impose yourself. This stalemate deepens, and the awkwardness grows. Eventually, she pulls the door back and steps aside, her silence bespeaking her reluctance.
You enter the apartment whose dull exterior has been under your surveillance for months. To your surprise, the decoration is too plain, IKEA furniture and off-white curtains – no sensuality in the air. As if seeking an explanation, you turn to her. One thigh jutting out through the crack of her bathrobe, she’s leaning on the wall next to a framed reproduction of a ballet dancer.
She paces across the room and sits on a stool behind a kitchen island. “I haven’t seen you at the restaurant for a while.”
“I came to the restaurant every night. Forty-four days. Why didn’t you make me an offer?”
“You weren’t like them.”
Them! You inspect the interior, full of empty corners, peopled by the crudest of men your imagination conjures up. Then you ask her what makes you different.
“All that time you were too shy to get past small talk. You didn’t strike us as someone looking for such services.”
Us is the word that throws you off most. You cringe at the thought of the bartender being involved, that pimp. Your expression must melt into utter hatred as she shifts her tone into an affectionate register. “You’re the type that counts the number of days he sees a girl. You’re the type that can gaze at a strange girl’s dimples for an eternity and write poetry.”
You blush as your infatuation with her dimples is exposed, the discordance of such an innocent obsession in such a vulgar place. Your eyes travel to her cleavage, where the two ends of her cotton robe diverge. With her hands, she pulls them together. Then she grins, offering you the dents in her cheek.
You don’t want them anymore, not now, not here. They don’t belong in this altar of carnal excess. Neither does your old desire. What you do want is to discredit her, to get back at her and at that sleazy bastard behind the bar. In the past, when she was just a waitress to you, beside the visions of flowers and gifts and kisses, your imagination summoned the image of you in bed, making love. But making love is not the same as fucking. And now, you want the latter, in transaction. You just don’t know how to formulate it.
“I want to receive your services.”
For a second, you think you see the flash of disappointment in the way she weighs your sentence. Maybe not.
“Got money on you?”
You yank out your wallet and open it with your thumb and forefinger. A few bills stick out. Her eyes are trained to count. “Alright, ninety-five will do.”
You ease out of your jacket. “What’d it buy me?” you ask in a mock tone, mimicking vulgar characters in neon-red scenes.
Then she becomes the waitress, going through the specials. She offers her services, starting with massage and ending with what you’re ashamed even to visualize. Each act has its own price, the cheapest higher than the most expensive food on the pub menu.
She takes your silence as bewilderment over the cost. “I won’t cap it on your cash. We’ll stop when you’re done.”
You follow her steps to the bedroom. A bed with no headboard lays in a corner and a desk is next to it, a few books leaning against the wall, a Vogue. No family pictures hang from the walls here, you notice, and nor were any in the living room. In that, you are alike. Then, you see a familiar object: the lattice window in the corner, the same square one you’ve been staring at from outside. You don’t get much of a chance to deliberate on it as she lets the robe slide off her shoulders. Her bare back – and her front, as she turns to lie – fills your field of vision, kills your breadth of imagination. You undress, and as you mount her, while you struggle to make sense of the pleasure, at the same time you get as far from the window as possible. The unsettling thought that someone is spying on you from the dumpster across the street, someone jerking off to your pumps.
When you finish, you wonder if you even used up the ninety-five, whether you took any advantage of the bonus. You can’t read much from her exhausted face, her closed eyes. She’s motionless, except for the heaving of her chest, the only sign of life.
“Close the door when you leave,” she mumbles.
According to the movies, this is the opportune time to make conversation, to ask her why she does what she does, to solve her mystery. But you’ve tried hard to prove you’re not that type, that you’re one of those cousins. You should act like one: leave the money and go.
You toss the bills on her knees and watch as they slide down her stationary body and only then do you step out of her apartment. Inside the sweltering hallway, the buzzing of lights is the only noise disturbing the silence. You dart past the neighboring doors and scramble down the stairs and out the building. Engulfed by the chill of the night, you stand under the light buttoning up your jacket. You cup your hands around your mouth and breathe into them. You glance across the street, at the darkened alley. You wonder if you’ll ever go there again. If there’s any point.
Some shadow shifts in the dark. Your eyes narrow, trying to see if it’s a cat or a dog scavenging in the trash, your occasional companions in the past. A figure emerges, darting towards you. His face hidden behind layers of scarf, his head buried under a black hoodie. His hands are in his pockets and by the time you realize he’s gripping a switchblade it’s too late. You barely have time to raise your arms in surrender. He stabs you in the belly first, and pain spreads across your body. You look down to assess the damage and the second and the third stabs puncture underneath your ribs. You lose count, the next blows and their whereabouts. You’re on the ground and he’s doubling over you. His eyes, in the slit between the scarf and the hoodie, examine the injuries. Satisfied, he sprints away.
You have no strength left to cry for help, no means to move. You crane your neck to see the building from this ant’s angle. All the lights are out, except the one on the corner of the second floor. You rest your head in the crook of your arm and fix your gaze on its glow until it turns dark and, then, you shut your eyes.
