Joe exhaled, and the smoke curled lazily above his head and dispersed out over the chrome railing as the wind took it down and away. He thought about Luna, about her long black hair and the way she talked about the place where she was from: Matapalo, Nicaragua. He liked the way the words felt in his mouth, the exotic lilt of the rounded vowels and trailing end. Joe remembered the way Luna had rolled the r, and he finished his cigar and practiced until he could say it right.
* * *
Two weeks after Luna met Joe, Donny started coming around the bar, trying to talk to Luna as she worked. They had dated for six months, maybe a little longer, but that had been over a year ago, during a period she recalled only as a hazy muddle. The details she had chosen to forget.
But now Donny on a barstool, talking to her, drumming his thick fingers along the side of a brown bottle, brought it all back. Hyped-up nights, the highs shorter and shorter, the want more and more. Donny was good like that: he pushed things through, always had money, knew who to call. She’d only smoked crack the one time; it tasted dirty, and afterward her hands wouldn’t stop shaking.
That night Luna had imagined her younger sister, Mariana. Five years ago Mariana had run away from home, disappeared, gone. Where are you? Luna had asked into the darkness of Donny’s bedroom. Are you here? But Mariana hadn’t answered; she’d smiled her smile with two dimples and thrown back her head and laughed.
One morning Luna woke up beside Donny and wanted it over. Your eyes follow other women. I can’t trust you, she told him, but she was thinking of the plain fact that there was nothing real between them, only the fleeting rush of skin against skin, only a cheap companionship founded on weakness.
Now, at the bar, Donny talked as though Luna had wronged him. “You broke my heart,” he said after two beers. “I miss you so much.”
At first she acted as though he was joking. “Cut it out Donny,” Luna said. “Go bother your real girlfriend.” But he kept coming back. Every shift there he was, slumped on the same corner barstool. Drink after drink until she wondered how he could stay upright. Once he grabbed her wrist as she cleared an empty glass. She pulled away, but he held tight, a smile carving up his cheeks, and then he released her. A tattooed bat circled his wrist; it must be new, she’d never noticed it before.
He usually came on a weeknight when the bar was slow. Luna tried to stay light with him, answer his questions with few words, laugh as she walked away, but the sight of him made her pulse surge. She knew he watched her as she delivered drinks to other customers, bent to retrieve the ice, unloaded clean glasses into careful rows. His eyes were a muddy brown, and Luna wondered why she hadn’t been more careful. Why she hadn’t seen him for what he was.
* * *
On their third date, Joe told Luna this story about Sandrine:
Joe sits on his couch watching the Knicks game, a collection of empty Beck’s bottles at his feet. He was fired three weeks ago and, in that time, has left the apartment only once. He is waiting for Sandrine to come home, and he is drinking beer after beer in solidarity with his boys getting lashed by the Celtics and with all men everywhere in love with their absent women, wondering who they might be fucking, wondering why love isn’t as soothing and life-affirming as they had always thought it would be.
Finally the game ends, the Knicks have lost, Joe has another beer and another. It is past midnight, 2:00 a.m., 3:30. The key turns in the door, and Sandrine’s heels click across the kitchen floor, her keys and bag hit the countertop with a jangle and a thud, a moment of silence as she removes her shoes, and then she steps, small and stocking-footed, into the living room.
“My God, you’re still up?” She is drunk, even Joe can see that, and he is drunk, probably drunker than she is, but still he can gauge the alcohol in her voice, the slight sway in her movements.
“I was waiting for you,” Joe says. “Were you with Anna?”
“No, just some people from work.” They’ve been busy recently with resort wear, or was that last month? It’s hard for Joe to keep track—Sandrine doesn’t talk about it much.
The TV plays an ER rerun, a doctor is breaking down on-screen, there are tears from a young woman in green scrubs.
“I can’t do this anymore, you know, Joe,” says Sandrine. She speaks in one great breath, staring at the screen. Her eyes are unblinking, and she folds her hands across her stomach like she is ill or trying to hold something inside. She has such small hands, such delicate fingers, Joe thinks. Sandrine’s collarbone juts out sharply from the neck of her blouse, and Joe wants to kiss it, kiss this hard, angular part of her.
“Joe, I just don’t want to do this!” and Sandrine’s voice is suddenly raised, as though he has said something to dispute her, convince her. “I don’t want to have your children. I don’t want to go on vacation with you. I don’t want to have dinner with you. I don’t want to watch you brush your teeth. I don’t want us to get all old and stupid and jiggly together.” She raises her arms now and shakes them, and the small fillet of flesh on the back of each arm shakes.
Joe remains in his chair in front of the television. He does not say a word. He cannot think of a single thing to say.
“I don’t think you’re a bad guy, it’s not that.” She is definitely slurring her words now, Joe notes mechanically. “I think you’re sad, and I think you’re boring,” and she drags out the word: booooooring. “Look at you—watching the Knicks, drinking beer. This is not what I signed up for.” She pauses. There is a large shuddering intake of breath. “I’ve had it, Joe, really, this is it. You’re not who I thought you were. I’m sorry, but it’s true.” Sandrine looks out the window where the sound of the early-morning garbagemen can be heard, the drag of metal cans across pavement. “I deserve someone more . . . more . . . more . . .” Joe is waiting for her to finish her sentence—what more does he need to be?—but she turns away from him, walks to their bedroom, and slams the door.
Joe can hear her pushing something—is it the dresser? the TV table?—in front of the door and then the flinging of various things against the wall, the run of water in the sink, then the shower, and again more banging and flinging, drawers opening and closing, their closet door slamming repeatedly. Joe remains seated and stares at the TV screen: the ER bustles now with some medical emergency; electric paddles are placed on a man’s hairy chest, and his body lurches with the jolt.
Joe sleeps that night on the couch, and the next morning he leaves the apartment early. He goes to the gym, where he lifts weights and runs on a treadmill until he is light-headed and drenched in sweat. His muscles shaking, breath on fire. He showers at the gym and returns to find Sandrine gone, her clothes and shoes, knickknacks and DVDs cleared out, the apartment as empty and clean as a sand-polished shell washed up with the tide.
“So that was it,” Joe said, looking at Luna across the table. “Sandrine wanted more. More what? I didn’t know there was a scorecard. Like a point system or something.”
“Fifteen for flowers,” said Luna. “Fifty at least for jewelry.” She was on her third margarita, the salt heavy along the rim. This woman Sandrine seemed to Luna an exotic animal, one rarely sighted in the wild but the subject of much study and anxious calculation. The last man Luna slept with had been married, with two young children at home, and he liked to drip hot wax onto her back. He’d seen it in a movie, he told her, and the small, bright burn on her skin transformed almost immediately to warmth.