5
“AFTER WORK,” she said, “most of the time, a few of us, the younger workers from Captain White’s, would go down the street, to a bar—”
“Corinne’s.”
“Right.”
CORINNE’S was in the warehouse area of town that stretched itself sloppily along the western edge of the mouth of the Bolotomy River. The bar had been around for at least a couple of generations. Its full name, at the time when Ariane and her coevals frequented it, was Corinne’s Fabulous Fruits of the Sea. Once upon a time, it had been called Corinne’s Bordello, but that had never enjoyed the status of an official name; it was something whispered, like Tootsie Koochikov. Later, when I entered my thirties and Babbington began to turn cute in the warmth of a fragile prosperity based on the tourist trade, the same bar was officially called Corinne’s Dockside Bordello, the name blazoned on a sign that stretched the length of the building, lettered in a style meant to evoke the Gay Nineties in a place something like New Orleans.
Corinne’s was, in Ariane’s time—and mine—about the only place in Babbington where young people could hang out and drink, the only place where they felt halfway welcome. Throughout the day and early in the evening, it was a workingman’s bar, but toward ten or eleven the kids began coming in, and the whole atmosphere changed.
“I FIGURED that I’d try to get Denny to go over there,” she said, “so I made plans with one of the other girls to meet at Corinne’s later, and I made sure that Denny could hear me.”
“He did hear you, of course, and he wondered whether he was intended to hear what you were saying, wondered whether he could be that lucky, if he dared to hope that you might be urging him to meet you at Corinne’s.”
“So I gave him reason for hope—”
“You brushed against him, winked at him, that sort of thing.”
“And it worked. When Denny and the girls he was with were leaving the clam bar, he said to them, loudly enough so that you would be sure to hear him, ‘Listen, kids, I’m going to drop you at home and then go over to Corinne’s and see if I run into some of my buddies, you know?’
“I rushed out of work and right over to Corinne’s, but when I got there I stopped a minute outside the door, to compose myself. This is important. I took that moment to get myself under control. I didn’t want to go barging in, looking for Denny, making everything obvious, so I took a moment to get myself under control, and then I walked in, cool, calm, collected. I couldn’t trust myself not to look around for Denny, though, so I walked right to the end of the bar nearest to the door—”
“—where Panama Red, the bartender, was chewing a toothpick and wiping a glass.”
“I got quite a reception—whistles, hoots, applause.”
“That doesn’t surprise me. I’ve spent some time at Corinne’s, and I’ve seen the habitués perk up when a pretty girl blunders in. I’m sure they were delighted to see you.”
“I have to admit that I was always well received upon my arrival at Corinne’s, but this seemed excessive, and it should have tipped me off that something was amiss. I acknowledged the applause with a smile. Surreptitiously, I looked around.”
“There was only a small crowd, a weeknight crowd, and in the corner of your eye you spotted Denny, at a table in the back of the room, where he could watch the door and be sure of catching sight of you when you walked in.”
“I knew that everyone was watching me. I had an audience; I put on a show. I walked the whole length of the room, all the way to the table in the back where he was sitting, and I could feel the eyes on me. When I got to Denny’s table, I said, ‘Look who’s here.’
“He didn’t get up, just held out a hand, grinned, and said, ‘Denny.’”
“ ‘You can call me Tootsie,’ I said with what I intended to be the weary air of a girl who has seen it all, or at least as much of it as a girl can see in Babbington. ‘Everybody does. How about buying me a beer?’
“ ‘Anything you like,’ he said, still wearing that grin.”
“I felt fine, just fine. I felt in control. I was very pleased with myself. And then I spun around and called out to Red, ‘Red, an LL, okay?’ and I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror over the bar all the way down at the other end of the room and I saw that I was still wearing that stupid clam hat from Captain White’s.”
[to be continued]
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