Though the great bar was called The Eternal in German, it did close for one hour in the early morning for cleaning. A crew came in with buckets, mops, brooms, sponges and soft cloths and laid everything in sight to siege. They hurried about, speaking fast in Turkish, soaking down and scrubbing the tables and the chairs, and scouring the sinks, faucets, and drains. They wiped away the stains and spills from food and drink and emptied out the ashtrays. They put a good shine to the metal-framed wall mirror behind the bar and the chrome railings around it.
When the crew was done, The Eternal smelled of strong soap and polish, clean and ready for all who needed it at all hours, save that one they worked.
She made her entrance then. Quick and light through the big steel doors of The Eternal, her feet scampered down the concrete steps straight to a small round table at the back wall next to a Wurlitzer jukebox. She was very petite, very slender, and wore a black lace dress that trailed on the floor and black hair in a pageboy cut. Once at her table, she ordered a bottle of Napoleon Brandy that she sipped from a fluted glass throughout her hours in The Eternal. The waiters understood her to rarely order food as the hours passed.
Smoke rose from off her American menthol and Turkish cigarettes and thin cigars like out of the cheap automobiles behind the eastern side of the wall years ago, the bartenders and waitresses joked behind her back; when they talked to her face, she spoke a more precise German than they did and never English, though the regulars could tell from their years of experience with tourists to the bar that she was an American. When at the table, she would sip her brandy and blow her smoke into the pages of the stacks of German and English newspapers and magazines she read from page to page, to front and back, again and again and look solemnly glum or burst out giggling and laughing at them.
But she was particularly well-known at The Eternal as the woman of the jukebox. From time to time, she would rise from her table and walk over to the Wurlitzer jukebox and stand or lean against it, smoking, for hours on end. Everyone left her alone then to make the jukebox her own: They figured it must mean something deep for her to place herself there for such a long time, feeding coins into the slot, playing one smooth crooner after another from years past:
strangers in the smoke of eyes in the love
tramp moon of tears Joe the clown wine that only eyes
can maker me sets up the river home why she
Before a certain October day, only one person had been visiting the woman of the jukebox. A small woman who moved quickly with delicate elegance down the concrete steps of The Eternal, the visitor wore her chestnut-brown hair bobbed, a pullover sweater or athletic sweatshirt, and a narrow black-leather mini-skirt or sweatpants. An antique camera always hung from a strap on her neck. She would go to the woman of the jukebox at her table with a strong and buoyant swing to her hips and legs and stop to hug her warmly. After the visitor sat at the table, she and the woman of the jukebox would start talking with abandoned high spirits. The waiters and regulars of The Eternal would hear them go on about albums of photographs and home movies, black-and-white films they loved from the Thirties and Forties, the skiing and swimming vacations they once enjoyed, and how they liked to visit the city zoo and look at the animals in the early morning after a night partying and dancing at local clubs years ago.
They talked without stopping … except for that one time when the visitor brought up a book she had heard about. The woman of the jukebox frowned deeply, stuck a cigarette in the frown and, smoking, stood up to play her jukebox music:
love is here for the wee small cheek
of moonlight’s pallid blossoms
to cheek to stay for the lonely hours
The visitor turned her round face and blue eyes toward the mirror behind the bar. Sadly, she said she was sorry. The woman of the jukebox shrugged with a brief smile and sat back down at her table. Books were never mentioned again.
Their lively talk, their excited gestures, their fond laughter, their warm hello’s and goodbye hugs lasted throughout the two years the woman of the jukebox had been a regular at The Eternal. Before the certain October day.
For on that day, fifteen minutes after the woman of the jukebox had taken her seat at her table, the visitor came down the concrete steps into The Eternal and halted in the middle of the floor. She was wearing a different look for her: like the native dress of the mountain girls of the south country: a low-cut blouse with a frilly collar and puffed-out sleeves, a swirling full-red skirt and an apron and bodice of black cloth with embroidered pale white roses and red-and-black spurred flowers.
She pulled a white-lace handkerchief from out of the pocket of the apron and blotted a tear off her cheek. Then she smiled and waved the handkerchief at her friend, who answered with a wave of her own with an unlit cigarette in hand.
The visitor walked to the table slowly and sat down heavily. “Why are you all dressed up with nowhere to go, Eva?” asked the woman of the jukebox.
In a grave voice, Eva said: “I want to have fun again for this month and forget everything that has happened.”
“What everything is that, Eva?”
“I want to forget that I told your man that you are here.”
The woman of the jukebox looked down at the top of the table. She drew her fingers that held the unlit cigarette in circles on it.
“I tried not to, Abby,” said Eva, “but it was as if I had to tell him. How do you think he found my number?”
Abby shrugged and looked up at her. “He is a snoop,” she said. In English, she added: “A snoop for a scoop.”
“Scoop? What is that in German?”
“It is the story a newspaper prints after it wins over other newspapers for the news. That is his way. He is a real newspaperman as I played a real newspaperwoman.”
“I am more than sorry, Abby. I know you are here so nobody will bother you. But now … after I told your man, he said he would take the first flight here. But, Abby, the planes are not flying that much these days. Perhaps he will lose his patience and will not fly to you at all?”
“He will ask one of his rich cronies to fly him.”
Eva reached out for a pack of cigarettes on the table.
“But, Eva, you have not smoked for years,” Abby said. “Not since our days and nights before we met him.”
“You know that evil man of mine. He did not like me smoking around him. Well, he and our marriage went up in smoke. Now try to stop me.”
“I will not stop you. I must admit, I should have stopped long ago, especially when I was pregnant.” Abby fidgeted with her unlit cigarette in hand. “But you go ahead,” she said, “you know what they say …” and Abby said it in English “smoke ‘em if you got ‘em. Lock and load.”
Eva puzzled over this remark. Then she said, “Who cares anymore, eh? These damn times of ours.”
She slipped out a cigarette from the pack and stuck it between her lips. Abby did the same with the cigarette she had been holding. She then lifted a silver metal lighter with a tiny, blood-red ruby inlaid at the center, flicked on a flame, and lit up; then she offered the flame to Eva and her cigarette. On the inhale, Eva gasped. Coughing harshly, she said, “My God, Abby they are so strong. How can you smoke them so strong?”
“You chose one with the rare Turkish tobacco,” Abby said. She tapped on her pack of American menthols. “Try one of these,” she said. “Smoother on the throat.”
Eva did so and Abby offered her the flame again. Eva inhaled, nodded, and said: “Better”.
“A good brand,” said Abby. “Salems. Like in the witch trials. The kind Pat Nixon smoked.”
Eva blinked at Abby through the smoke. “I do not know what you mean,” she said. She smoked for a moment. Then she said, “I do not know this Pat Nixon.”
“Do you remember our President Nixon?” said Abby. “She was First Lady under him.”
“I see. Did you like these Nixons?”
“I like her Salems. But he was no Herbert Hoover.” Abby let out a laugh, as if into one of her newspapers.
Eva smiled to join in the joke she did not understand. She took in several deep puffs from off her cigarette and lost herself in thought as smoke swelled around her. Then, she winced and said: “Abby, I must also forget a dream I dreamed last night. It is why I had to smoke now.”
“Tell me your dream to forget it, Eva.”
Eva stabbed out her cigarette in an ashtray on the table. She slipped out another from the Salems pack and snatched up a blue lighter to light the cigarette fluttering between her mouth with pink lipstick. “Those dark dust clouds everyone keeps talking about far away,” said Eva, “turned into a giant black butterfly that covered the sun in my dream. The butterfly killed the sunlight. I felt a nervous twitch go through my shoulders in my sleep when a man who wore a black veil said we all had to go down to a basement because of it. I do not want to go down to the basement, I said, there is something down there. But all of a sudden in my dream, I found I was in the basement. And there was something down there: a scared clown with a creepy white face and sad eyes that cried a streak of black tears. He wore a white costume that had a big round stiff collar with pleats, I remember. He told me he was the Moon Clown and we must hide from the giant black butterfly because the moon was the only light left.”
“My poor Eva.”
“No more sunlight, just this Moon Clown.”
Abby sighed. “Now I am the one who is sorry,” she said.
Eva reached both her hands out to Abby to clutch at a black lace sleeve on a pale white arm. “Do you think the giant black butterfly will pass over us?” she said.
“It is all in the winds, they are saying in the newspapers,” Abby said.
“Gone with the wind,” said Eva. “I do not want to go down to the basement, Abby.”
“Then stay with me upstairs in my room here at The Eternal,” said Abby. “If only for a while. I am only in the room for an hour, for a quick nap. You can have the rest of the day and the night to yourself, if you want.”
Eva began smoothing down the cloth of the skirt along her legs as she thought about the offer. Finally, she said: “I might. But first I must go out and find fun. It is October, Abby. There should be fun out there still.”
“Fun,” said Abby.
“I would like to try for some young fun again. Like we would have. Everybody acts so old these times.”
“So old.”
Eva frowned and took a pull of smoke from off her cigarette. “But I cannot be here when he comes,” she said.
“You mean my man?”
“I do not like the way he tricked me into telling him where you are now. I know how much The Eternal means to you.”
“Do not concern yourself with that,” said Abby. “You can go up to my room and wait. I will nag his head off until he leaves. They always said at the newspaper that I was good at nagging him.”
“No, I do not ever want to see him in The Eternal. In your special place.” Eva frowned and muttered: “Little man with the big mouth.”
“Go outside and look for fun then, Eva,” said Abby. “And if you find it, bring a little back with you.”
Eva smiled away her frown. “I will, dear Abby,” she said.
“My offer is always good for you. Do you want to bring the pack of Salems along with you?”
Eva nodded and picked the menthol pack off the table and put it in a pocket of her apron. “Thank you,” she said. She stood to leave and, with a twirl to her skirt, headed toward the great steel doors. Then, suddenly, she froze. She turned back toward Abby and said: “Did I ever tell you I am sorry?”
“Yes, you did, Eva.”
“No, not about that, but about everything else.”
Abby looked away, toward the jukebox. “Everything else,” she said.
“You know, all of that. It was because I was in love with my evil man. It was bad love.”
“You are sorry for bad love?”
“I am sorry over everything.”
“Goodbye, Eva. Have fun. And do not go down to the basement.”
“He was my husband. If only for …”
“Did I not say goodbye, Eva?”
With a quick nod to Abby, Eva spun away from her toward the great steel doors of The Eternal. A tall elderly man with a waxen face stood at attention there in a battleship gray greatcoat like a sentry for life. He saluted her as he saluted everyone at The Eternal, then opened one of the doors for her.
Abby pondered Eva leaving, the man closing the door behind her. “Oh, wow,” she said.
Then she came out of her thoughts by lifting her glass and swallowing down some Napoleon brandy. Now she felt ready for her jukebox: She lit a Turkish cigarette and arose to go to the Wurlitzer, to feed it with coins, to stand next to it and play the songs that charmed her so:
twirling smoke of leaves a cigarette that bears
the fresh winds of the autumn the foolish telephone
my luckless grieving fantastic ray of light
of stumbling words that hitched and hiked with
people I hate and never bother with wine
With sleepless eyes, she gazed out over the range of the floor of The Eternal. Footlights sunk into the floorboards lent a low-cast aura to the room like a dull greyish white film. Abby sighed and smoked. She was sad, but no longer cared:
beaux arts get no no champagne I missed sitting
the madonna altar of my verses sitting in Chicago
to make more everybody loves wine somebody
“Must it go on?”: The loud voice of a German man startled Abby. She looked over to a figure wearing an ink-black sports hoodie with a portrait on the chest of a grim rapper scowling out at a killer world. The figure eyed a chessboard on a tabletop. Tugging the hood all about his head, he wondered aloud where he should position a queen. Finally, he said, “go here” and slid the piece forward. Then he stood to head to the opposite end of the table and the chessboard where he sagged down into a chair. He planted his elbows on the edge of the table, drew his hands into fists, and pressed his temples between them. He mulled over how he, his opponent, had arranged his side of the game. “No, that could not happen,” he said, tugging at his hood. Then he said, “I have no choice” and thrust a king to a square to its right. Then he stood to go to the opposite end of the table and fell into its chair and studied his side of the board again. Back and forth, forth and back, hour after hour, in The Eternal.
Across the way, two figures sat still face-to-face at their table. They wore wigs of silver tinsel with a fringe that covered their eyes and white vinyl hooded smocks and thigh-high silver boots. In this wear, they looked like robot girl mannequins transported out of the space age sixties to pose on the runway of a time tunnel. The right elbow of one of them was set on the table so that the right finger pointed at a bright gold badge showing the symbol of a star on the chest of the other. The other mirrored this look, except with her left finger pointing at a bright gold badge showing the symbol of a crescent on the chest of the other. Here they stayed as the jukebox played like a loop in her mind:
chances are people dress they dress when they dress as every night I sit here by my window with that old kick in the head watching lovers holding hands with hand upraised in blessing and knees atremble to murder the radiant image that dissolves dissolves like a walk in the park I still can hear the jukebox softly playing naked scimitar
Abby rubbed her right ear with the hand holding her burning cigarette then brought the hand down so she could smoke. She was looking across the floor to a corner table where a very tall, lanky, and thin young man, in a black leather jacket, old jeans ripped at the knees, and white basketball shoes, was obsessing over a blank page in a cheap spiral notebook. She watched him tap the end of a pen on the table and hum in a mutter to himself before quickly scribbling whatever he was thinking into his notebook. The way he hunched his head with its mop of shoulder-length hair and rose-colored round shades hiding his eyes over the notebook had Abby thinking of some giant praying mantis hovering over a plywood city in a low-budget horror film.
Meanwhile:
what kind of candy man separate the fool with rope-long neck keep your eye on the the holy crimson heart and hank of hair something’s gotta give the nothing like a dame blame it on my got to be me sparrow sprinkle it with grace anointed princely rubies
Down to her left, a man with a broad head, hulking shoulders, and a big, doughy body sat a table in front of a laptop computer. A huge pair of wireless headphones were planted over his skull and he was speaking to someone out in the digital beyond as he pecked at the computer keyboard and, from time to time, grumbled as he shook the laptop back and forth and jabbed at the screen with the end of a spoon. “Hello, hello,” he said to the party on the other end. “This connection is getting worse and worse. Are we still on?” He shook the laptop again. “That’s it,” he said. “Now we’re on again.” He adjusted the headphones closer onto his ears and began talking in a precise, measured tone: “All right, let’s get this done. I’m looking for the right flower arrangement. My clients, they want it as perfect as you can get it. We are talking a real nice flower arrangement. Roses, carnations, lilies, they don’t care, just make it something you would want for a bar mitzvah or a bas mitzvah. Do you have those kind of flower arrangements? For a bar mitzvah or bas mitzvah? What do you have for that?”
Abby closed her eyes when she heard those words from the man. She felt them looping in her head instead of the songs she had been playing on the jukebox: “What do you have for that for that have you what do you have for that have you for that?” Without looking, she went to bring the cigarette back to her mouth but found herself pressing two clamped fingers to her lips instead; she must have let the cigarette drop to the floor when she closed her eyes. When she opened her eyes, she saw that her thin, pale hands were heavily smudged with nicotine stains.
“Those arrangements, do you understand them?” the man to her left was saying. “What can you do for a bar or bas mitzvah?”
Even though she had washed them an hour ago, the nicotine stains she had just noticed when lifting the cigarette to her lips demanded another washing. But first, she had to make sure that there was enough money in the jukebox to keep it playing while she was gone. Better make it a double, she thought, and fumbled inside her black dress for the coins that she slid into the machine before hurrying off to the women’s washroom.
She walked into a back hall of The Eternal and flung open the metal door into the washroom. She went to the stainless steel sink where she removed, from within her black dress, a golden tin box and clicked it open to take out a bar of her special hand soap: pure white, a lemon-lime fragrance that she savored as she smelled the bar. Then, she carefully placed the soap on the edge of the sink so as not to disturb it and turned to regarding her face in the sharply bright mirror with the fluorescent tubes on either side. She thought: she really looked much better these days in the page-boy cut of her hair: she simply could not see herself in that thinning long hair that faked the forever-maternal look: the page boy cut gave her a touch of youth, especially with the midnight black coloring: she no longer felt as bothered by the creasing in her face, the shadows beneath her eyes: she did not care about those signs of outdating anymore now that she could lather her face with lush soapsuds instead of those gobs of makeup she once had to wear for her appearances: the slash of red lipstick, the past-on eyelashes, the powder to bring down the shine for the severe eye of the television studio lights, the cameras. In city after city after another city.
Thank whatever they were calling god this year that she was finally back in this city and The Eternal. Where she did not have to worry about tailored outfits to look good for potential buyers. Where black is black day after day and she could speak her second language again without that feeling of losing it in the United States of America.
Yes, the face in the mirror felt much better when she patted the soapsuds after rubbing her hands over the bar. Scrub her hands up good under the cold water. Scrub so that the washroom was suffused with the lemon-lime fragrance. Work the soap harder into her hands with the rising lather until it felt like a second skin on her hands as bubbles and foam frothed the sink.
She could never forget how “her man” had always told her that, when she wrote “on the one hand”, she should never just leave it alone like that. The rule was: “on the other hand” must come next.
On the one hand, the soap went.
On the other hand, the soap went.
On the one hand, the soap went.
Then, the other.
As Abby was still soaping down her hands, her man was thrusting open the big steel doors. If he had been a taller sort, he would have entered in bold strides: Instead, he came in a blunt advance, like a small bull in a little china shop. He showed he meant business in his crisply pressed three-piece suit, his red-white-blue striped tie, and his dress felt hat straight out of a haberdasher of the fifties. He went right to the bar and its bartender, a thickset man with a large brush crewcut head and bristle mustache who wore a starch-white server jacket with golden epaulets and brass buttons.
To the bartender, her man reached out his right hand for a firm handshake. “Mine hare,” he said. “Saul Shimsky”.
The bartender continued to wipe a wine glass cleaning cloth around the rim of a beer stein. “I am sorry,” he answered in English, “but we are not shaking hands at The Eternal.”
Saul lowered his hand. “Why wouldn’t you?” he said.
“These times,” said the bartender. “Now, what can I make for you?”
“It’s my wife. See …”
The bartender shrugged. “I do not know this drink,” he said.
“Okay, let’s get to the point. I don’t have the time to be standing around in here talking with you. I’m on a deadline.”
“She has been without you here?”
Saul fidgeted, impatiently. “What does that have to do with the price of rice in Communist China?” he said.
The bartender, still wiping out the beer stein without regarding Saul Shimsky, shrugged again. “Then I would know her for sure, sir,” he said. “But I may still help. What does she look like?”
“Okay, mine hare, let me paint you a picture.” Saul lifted his right hand to his side to measure out her size to the bartender. “Five foot three. Sharp dresser, always in a woman’s business suit, always on when she goes out, cause she has to look her best for people. Has long hair, blonde-like. Big rock on her wedding finger.”
“A rock, you say.”
“Jewelry, a ring.”
“What is her name?”
“Abby. Her name is Abby.”
“I have heard of several women of that name. Many people come and go in The Eternal. I know some, I do not know others.”
“Now look, I just got done describing her to you. Am I right?”
“Your Abby, I do not think I know.”
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