Don't worry kids - it's short.
I had watched this woman now for going on three months and though I suppose I could have asked her name, doing so seemed as if it would take all the fun out of it. She was an interesting women to observe and I had wondered many times just what a woman like that might be named. If I knew, then, I would have one less thing to wonder about.
Tonight I called her Chloe, not because she looked like a Chloe but because it was the scent she was wearing. She had to walk right by me as she went to her usual table at the back of the lounge, and her simple black heels went click click click across the gouged wooden floors. She had the calves of a dancer, and not just any dancer but one of those Latin dancers with their fiery red sequined dresses and their Eiffel Tower heels. She didn't walk like a dancer, though; more like a businesswoman who was fully aware that she was better than any man at what she did. Her hips swayed gently from side to side and her arms swung loosely by her hips, her fingers occasionally brushing the black satin that was the skirt of her dress, which was embroidered along the bottom with little roses in silver thread. The fingernails that grazed the fabric were of a ladylike length, painted a ladylike red. Her lips were painted the same color and her eyes were deep and dark and calculating through the grace of nature rather than by the brush of a mascara wand or the etchings of an eyeliner pencil. Her hair appeared soft, rolling in waves to the curves of her exposed shoulders, the left side pinned back from her face with an elegant clip of red rhinestones in the shape of a rose. She didn't carry a purse but a pocketbook, which isn't something you see much of anymore.
Then again, you don't really see women like Chloe anymore either.
I'm not sure if she comes here every night because I don't come here every night, though I come enough to be considered a regular. Still, every time I've been here, she's been here, always seated at the round wooden bar table tucked away in the corner underneath a sketch of Charlie Parker doing what he did best. She would order either a Manhattan or an extra dirty gin martini and never drank more than three drinks total over a period of perhaps four hours. When she rose from the barstool to exit the lounge, she never wavered from the straight line she confidently walked, never tripped, stumbled, or emanated anything other than pure feminine grace.
She never spoke to anyone but the person who served her and this struck me as odd. Chloe was undoubtedly a very beautiful woman and yet I had never seen anyone approach her with the intention of striking up a conversation that would lead to the exchange of phone numbers. She was young, but not too young - definitely under thirty, but over the age of twenty-five - and although she was quite stunning, she didn't put off the air of being an insufferable wretch. I didn't see any type of ring on her left hand or any other indication that she might be spoken for. All the same, the gentlemen walked past her with little more than a nod or smile of acknowledgment, which she always returned.
Chloe seemed to be very polite to the waitresses, smiling and saying thank you when the drink was set before her. A Manhattan here is $7.00; I watched her order two of these one evening, pay with a twenty, and refused change, which amounts to nearly a 50% tip. Either she's very generous or the Manhattans were particularly strong that night. I like to think that she's generous.
A couple of weeks ago, on a night that I had named her Lily for the flower of the same name she had tucked behind her ear, she was the most animated I had ever seen her. There was a live band that night, a local jazz quartet called Major Lift, and as they played their set her eyes remained fixed on the stage, her martini three quarters full and forgotten. They put on a phenomenal show - I had come there that night solely to see them - and she clapped wildly, smiled so broadly that her big brown eyes crinkled shut and you could actually see her pearly whites.
There was a live band tonight as well, but Chloe only watched with a small smile, one hand around the stem of her glass and the other nestled in the satin folds across her lap.
Chloe smoked. Her choice of cigarette was a shocking one; one would almost expect her to pull out one of those long French cigarette holders made of black ivory, but Chloe smoked Camel Wides. She pulled her cigarettes from the original pack, not a sleek, stylish case, and she lit them with a pink Bic, not a sleek, stylish Zippo. This somehow made her even classier.
She was very obviously a woman of routine, and it was the night I named her Jessica (for her Jessica Rabbit-like red dress) that I pieced this together about her. Aside from sitting at the same table on the same stool on the same side of the table, she also would not smoke a cigarette until her first drink arrived. When her drink of choice was set down, she would lift the glass off of the napkin and set it on the table, then salt the napkin and replace the drink back on top of it. (I watched her do this for a couple of weeks before I realized that it was to keep the napkin from sticking to the bottom of the glass.) Then she would light her cigarette, which she ashed after every four puffs.
I never saw her fix her makeup, toy with her hair, or adjust her dress. She never needed to. Chloe was a living sculpture, fixedly beautiful, timeless.
Chloe was left-handed. She wore her watch on her right wrist. This was the very first thing I noticed about her, other than what she looked like of course.
She had a cell phone, and although I had seen it, I had never seen her use it. She would occasionally look down at it, sometimes pressed a couple of buttons, but she never took a call or sent a text. I wondered if her friends knew that she came here and sat alone every night for a few hours, sipping drinks and smoking cigarettes in a dark corner, thinking about whatever it was she thought about. There was also a part of me that wondered if someone who did this every night really had any friends. It made me sad to think of sweet little Chloe spending her days in as much solitude as she spent her nights and the logical side of me begged to know just why and how that could possibly be.
It was impossible to discern anything about her besides the superficial facts. I had no idea what she might do for a living, what car she might drive, if she had children or siblings or parents. She was just the mysterious smoking woman in the corner of the room, a 1950s throwback seated primly on a barstool, enjoying the jazz and, presumably, the pleasure of her own company.
Maybe I was wrong to think that she didn't have any friends. Maybe she was surrounded by friends all day, maybe she was one of those people that others always leaned on and depended on and needed in one way or another and this was her nightly escape. And maybe those times she had pressed the keys on her cell phone had been to ignore a call or a text message so she could fully take some time for herself.
But I didn't really believe that. When you watch someone long enough, when you see them several times a week, you notice the little things they do that they don't think anyone else is noticing. There were some songs that seemed to disturb her, upset her even, and if she was leaning in to the wall sconce at just the right angle, you could see her face fall just a bit and then she would look down at her lap. The first time I saw her do this was the night that she was Amber (for the necklace and the earrings that she wore), and the song was 'Paper Moon.' It wasn't a song that you heard very often anymore as Miss Fitzgerald is one hell of a woman to try to imitate, but the young lady on stage, Diana Banks, did a fabulous job of it.
I at first mistook the look on her face as surprise at hearing this particular number but then her lower lip quivered just the slightest bit and her eyes sparkled wetly and she hung her head. I had never, ever seen her hang her head - women with the sort of confidence that she seemed to possess weren't often the head-hanging type. But sure enough, her chin dropped to her chest and I watched as she took several deep breaths before she looked up again, fully composed. Still, she drained her drink with the speed of a seasoned frat boy and left when the song was over.
She also glanced at the main door that opened out on the street often, shifting her eyes slightly to the other side of the room, then shifting them back. When someone came in to the lounge, she would do the same, but she never seemed to see who she was looking for. I didn't get the feeling that she glanced toward the entrance out of idle human curiosity. She did it because she was looking for someone who never seemed to come and I wondered to myself...who in the hell wouldn't come for this girl?
I'm not sure why I was so fascinated by her. It didn't have anything to do with sexual attraction - I definitely know what that feels like, and this wasn't it. She was intriguing. She was elusive. And because of that, I guess, I had this unshakable urge to unravel her and figure out just what she was made of.
There was one night that I'd named her Kate because she looked very much like the textbook proper English lady that evening and Kate has always been a very British name to me. I'm not sure why. Anyway, she was dressed all in white and she had one of those wide brimmed hats with a ribbon around it. I'd had a couple - fine, five - gin and tonics already and at one point she turned her head away from the wall sconce and it lit up her hat, which made it look very much like a halo. I convinced myself that night that she was an angel, or at the very least some kind of ghost, and that's why no one every spoke to her and she was always alone. I'm not sure how I managed to explain away the fact that the waitresses could see her and interact with her and that other patrons had in fact acknowledged her existence, but when you've got six G&Ts in you (I had another as I pondered over the possibility of her ghostitude, to assist me in my logic), the supernatural sometimes makes more sense than reality. Or maybe I should say that the ridiculous is preferable to the rational because the ridiculous is, quite simply, more fun to think about.
The next morning I was sane/sober enough to realize that I hadn't unraveled her and figured out what she was made of, and that she most certainly was not dead. I do, however, still assert that when she turned her head in the way that she did, she really did look angelic.
The musician tonight was a theatrical vocalist and trumpet player named Benny Kurtz and he was accompanied by a startlingly talented young pianist named David McCleary. Every pair of eyes in the room were fixated on the two men on stage, and the applause was thunderous. I glanced at Chloe, and she looked as she did on the night that she was Lily, bright and vibrant and overjoyed as she clapped rapidly and grinned so widely it made my own cheeks hurt just to see it. I liked to see her that way. It made it easier for me to believe that she really was a happy woman.
Tonight is the last night that I will see her, though I won't know that for a few days and I won't mention anything to the bartender regarding her absence for a couple of weeks. But when I do, he will tell me that her name is May Lewis and that she used to be a jazz singer herself. He'll tell me that she and David McCleary used to play together here all the time and that they eventually wound up dating, then engaged. He'll tell me that they were the golden couple of the local jazz scene and their unbelievable chemistry on-stage was only heightened when they fell in love.
Then he'll tell me the sad part: that May wanted to get out of the business in a couple of years when they were ready to start a family. David protested, and strongly. He wanted to be famous, really famous, and not just locally. He wasn't going to stop performing. May was. It became a huge point of contention between them and eventually, it led to their parting of ways.
The staff, he'll say, is divided between those who think she came here to work up the nerve to sing with him again but never could and those who think she came here waiting for him to notice her, maybe to ask her to sing “Baby, It's Cold Outside” like they used to once the first snow had fallen over the city.
Whatever the case, she had been coming here every night for a year. If he ever did see her there, tucked away in the corner with Charlie Parker and the golden glow of the wall sconce, then he ignored her.
The bartender would tell me that the last night she was here, after I had gone home for the evening, David announced that he'd like to dedicate the next song to his new fiance, who was seated in the front row. He watched her, he said, and her face was so expressionless she could have been a porcelain doll. This time she did not wait for the end of the song to depart. She left the money on the table beside her twice-sipped drink and left. And when she did, David did not notice, since his eyes were still on his future wife as he crooned 'The Way You Look Tonight.'
There was nothing to come back for, to look for, to hope for. So she didn't.
I knew she had cried that night, all alone, perhaps with a drink she had mixed herself. In my mind, I saw her on an ivory couch holding a crystal rock glass filled with bourbon and nothing else, with giant Alice in Wonderland tears pouring down her face, wondering how it was possible to be this heartbroken and still alive, wondering why fate had denied her the happy ending she had been waiting patiently on a barstool for.
But that's not how I'll remember May. I'll remember her standing, clapping, exuding a beauty that was almost surreal and a sense of bliss that seemed to intoxicate her more than the liquid in the glass beside her. I'll remember her in that moment, when she still had something to come back for, look for, and hope for.
I'll remember her as Chloe.