The Girl at the Bar    2 of 3

The Girl at the Bar  2 of 3

was like noticing something new in an old photograph.
Uh… have we met? I asked.
She laughed.
She said her name was Mary.
We talked about music, and drinks, and life in general. We rode a conversation down a river of whiskey and gin tonics, and let silences fill with the talk of others — old men with their books, old women with their heartbreak — until it was just the two of us and a lonely piano, sifting its way through a mist of cigarette smoke and hazy memories.
When I asked about James, Mary shook her head.
It’s like he vanished, she said, and now I can’t paint.
The comment felt heavy, like an anchor for emotions hidden in the darkness. I wanted to ask more — to understand — but before I could, Mary finished her drink, and she left.
I sat by myself for a time, alone with a half-finished glass of whiskey, and The Bill Evans Trio playing Waltz for Debby.
She grew up in Spain, the bartender said. “She moved here to study painting.
Oh?
He nodded.
But her talent is her curse. Her skills aren’t appreciated in the country, but her heart can’t settle in the city. She’s trapped between who she is and where she’s going.”
The bartender said Mary couldn’t get used to studying her art. She didn’t want to analyze or understand it, and she didn’t want others to dig into it for deeper meaning. She was most comfortable lost in the act of creation; lost in the act of capturing people and their lives in splashes of blended color.
These days, he said, Mary worked part-time at a convenience store in mid town, and painted in her free time.
She is a regular here, the bartender said. Another lost soul in search of a home.
The bartender’s words echoed in my head.
His bar struck me as a gathering place for the lonely and the lost — where nostalgia hung in the air with the smoke and the music. It was a world of grey, but that was the comfort of it — a shared sense of despair.
By contrast, Mary brought to mind gentle, flowing arcs of color, thrown against paper — rambling and aimless, but beautiful, too.
I spent my mornings reading at James apartment, and my nights talking at the bar.
With Mary and I talked about music, art, and living as in a shadow in a city of a million faces.
And with the bartender, I talked about Mary.
She doesn’t like the taste of whiskey, he said, and she never drinks it. But something about it makes her happy.
I’d noticed it, too. It was a look in her eyes when she saw it; a sliver in time where she saw something the rest of us didn’t.
Do you know why?
The bartender shook his head.
No I don’t.
You know, I don’t even like whiskey, I said. I ordered it the first time because it felt right, but when I saw the way she looked at it, I couldn’t order anything else. I still can’t.
The bartender nodded.
I know,” he said.
One night, I asked Mary why she painted.
Sometimes, she said, when I’m out, I see things in people and places. Something it’s like an essence, or a spirit, or a feeling. I don’t quite have the words for it. The closest I ever get to it is when I paint.
You told James the same thing, didn’t you?
She paused for a moment.
How did you know?
Because that’s why he fell in love with you, I said.
And I realized in that moment, it was why I had, too.
In Mary was something I always wanted; a simple, beautiful, purity of expression.
I felt it when she talked about her work, and how it suddenly felt lost to her. I felt it the first time I’d seen it, standing in an empty apartment staring at a painting of a house in the countryside, wondering where my friend had gone.
I imagined James had felt that, too.
How did you start painting? I asked.
Mary thought a moment. She glanced at my glass of whiskey. She looked like a little girl standing before a door with a very old key in her hand.
By nutbuster