Free Until the Real Thing Comes Along by Elizabeth Berg Page B

“More.”
    “Okay. I’ve never had one.”
    “You’re kidding!” Muriel says. And then, to Artie, “Can you believe it? She’s never had a martini!”
    “Come on down to my bar,” Artie says, “I’ll fix you right up.”
    I follow him through the dining room, where our places are set with china, with flowered cloth napkins. Two forks! Then through the warm kitchen to the basement door. “Come right back up,” Muriel tells us, manning her position in front of the stove. “I’m starting the gravy right now. And I don’t want things to get cold.”
    Gravy! My spirits lift like a dog’s head when he hears the word
out
. Gravy is something single people don’t make. It’s something my mother never makes anymore, either, because of my father’s severely restricted diet. If there’s gravy, surely the potatoes will be browned and crisp at the edges, the carrots curled, the onions softened into a yellow sweetness that can be spread on bread like butter.
    “Ta-da!” Artie says, turning on a light switch that bathes a corner of the basement—his bar—with a pinkish neon light. This must have been his paradise, at one time. Perhaps it still is. The bar is huge, a burgundy Naugahyde with diamond-shaped tufting accented by round gold studs. There are six stools, their padded seats also burgundy Naugahyde, rips in two of them inexpertly repaired with silver duct tape. Next to the bar is a wooden clothes rack draped with Muriel’s flag-sized underpants and industrial-strength bras. Artie moves it to the other side of thebasement. I wonder why she air-dries her lingerie; it looks as though it could withstand being laundered on rocks at the river.
    “Now!” Artie rubs his hands together briskly, then goes behind the bar. “Used to be the hot spot of the neighborhood,” he says. “ ‘Artie’s place,’ we called it. We had parties down here almost every weekend.”
    Along the back wall of the bar a smoke-colored mirror veined with gold reflects a bit of fringe on the back of Artie’s head; his baldness shines above it. He turns on a phonograph, puts on an album, and Sinatra begins singing, “The Lady Is a Tramp.” Artie sings along under his breath so wildly off-key I think maybe he’s joking, but when I look at him closely I see he is not. He reaches under the bar for glasses, raises his eyebrows up and down at me. It is the fifties; he is Hugh Heffner. Then, looking at the dust on the glasses, he says, “Well. Let me just wash these off first.” It is the nineties; he is Artie Berkenheimer, who carries two bottles of pills in his front shirt pocket. Sometimes they click together, making a sound like ill-fitting dentures.
    “Two MINutes!” Muriel screams down the stairs.
    “Oy.” Artie turns his back to me to pull down bottles of liquor from the shelf above the mirror. He nudges the phonograph so Frank stops skipping, then opens the little refrigerator for ice, dumps some into a tall silver shaker. “Been a long time since I drank anything but seltzer down here,” he says. But his movements are smooth and practiced; it’s like watching a real bartender.
    I look around a little, see a weight bench and some barbells in another dim corner of the basement.
    “Do you work out?” I ask.
    He looks across the room, smiles. “Years ago,” he says. “I had a little book, charts and everything. Jack La Lanne. You measured yourself once a week—biceps, abdomen. Thighs.” He shrugs. “I don’t know what happened, why I stopped. Maybe I hurt myself. I don’t remember, it was a long time ago.” He goes back to making drinks. I settle back on the bar stool, cross my legs. “So,” I say.
    “So.” He doesn’t turn around.
    “So you really want to buy that cottage, huh?”
    He sets two glasses and the shaker on the counter before me. “This is how you do it, Patty. You want to use the best gin around. That’s Bombay Sapphire—expensive, but well worth the price. And you use some dry vermouth.