Free Twice Told Tales by Daniel Stern

gestures I loved.
    I had money put aside for maybe one year, and after Italy it was going to be France, partly because on a quick trip to Paris I met a woman at the bar at the Pont Royal, where you walk downstairs and it’s all somehow terribly serious and formal though it’s a long time since someone like Camus drank there. (You don’t stay at the hotel upstairs because the hotel people are cold and rude, but the bar is merely cool and there are times when detachment is desirable even essential.) Meeting this woman there—the only time I have ever “picked up” someone at a bar—colored what happened after that. She was just the kind of woman you meet, if luck holds, when the nada arrives and feels as if it will stay. It worked out well until one day she accused me of being disappointed; not such a terrible thing to say on the face of it, but not such a good thing either if you felt the way I was feeling.
    She told me, too, that I was only concerned with the appearance of things, that I had lost all sense of place in the world, and I thought My God does everyone know that song now, and she told me that the insomnia I was developing was an affectation and we broke up. She had told me, as well, that I spent too much time in bars and that I was not really trying to learn to make stories, only trying to give the appearance of making stories but by that time it was true and she was not to blame for saying it.
    Bars are, finally, places of appearance, which means illusion and perhaps that is why so much business is transacted in them; theaters in which the unbilled character is alcohol, sometimes a small character part, sometimes a main role—and that is trouble. But I am getting older and have fears that the drinking, which was never what those places were about for me, might be getting more important and I think with some nostalgia of the foolishly old-fashioned bustle of the bar at 21, if bars were people it would be someone living beyond their means; I think of the Ritz in Madrid, gloomy, hushed, poised with a sense of secret sorrow, and I think of the bright and proper bar at the Connaught in London, where one would not dare have a thought which was too personal.
    I think, too, of bars in Hollywood on sunny sad exposed streets, Fountain Avenue or LaBrea, bars with names like the Hopalong or the Tarpit, places in which, even at night, the interior light suggests a depressing late afternoon in which disappointment fills the lines on every face, bars in which miserable men and women sit in stiff and stately failure until drink loosens bones and tongues and evenings end in violence, though sometimes only verbal violence; evenings so many years ago, long before I’d met Noah or myself, when I had lost nothing yet because I’d gained nothing yet, except what I’d brought with me; all that hope.
    And the public spaces in which we encounter each other, glasses in hand like magic talismans, cannot help or harm if what Noah said is true—if we have lost our places and are drifting about, unmoored, in time. And finally it is possible to be quite alone in the busiest of bars and sometimes we return home to sleep or lie awake in beds full of uninvited guests.
    It ended up in one of the bars neither of us cared for, which doubled as a hotel lobby. At one of those unsatisfactory hybrids I learned that Noah had died. Sitting at a table at the Anglo-Americano in Florence, a small bar in that small city, in a hotel which used to be sweet and awkwardly eager to please and is now smooth and plays host to business conventions, I was told by a German producer who had invited me to discuss returning to the making of money via a lovely movie deal. In the middle of the conversation he’d remembered that I knew Noah and he told me.
    To cover my confusion at hearing this from a stranger I said, “Yes, all the men in his family died young.”
    “What do you mean,” the German producer said over his metal-rimmed glasses, “I met his