An Ordinary Night Like No Other

People never ask me, though sometimes it seems that they should: do I remember the night I met her? Ha! Do I remember? How could I ever forget? It would be like forgetting that I was ever alone, ever felt my heart beating, ever believed in magic.

The day of that night started off like almost any other in those days. Buddy Robinson, the owner of Gridlock, opened up the bar at eleven in the morning. By the time I came in at five, a few everyday patrons sat at the bar, their faces already glowing, their eyes already glassy. Buddy left at six, leaving me alone with the ruly mob until closing time. It was not a problem. The regulars quietly drank the night away while the regular weekday irregular trickle of other patrons flowed through. As the hours slipped by, it seemed sure to be just another forgettable night.

Around ten o’clock, however, she came in. I noticed her right away, because I was a young man and my senses were quick to pick a beautiful young girl out of a crowd of middle-aged drunks. She had carefree blonde hair, intelligent blue eyes, and an easy smile. When she came in, she looked around the bar quickly, and I did, too. Whomever she was looking for did not seem to have arrived yet, and she walked over and sat down at the bar, evidently to wait.

“What brings you to a bar called Gridlock?” I asked.

Her eyes came up to mine briefly. “I’m meeting my boyfriend,” she said with a little smile.

With that very first line, she had my heart. Lots of times, girls threw that line up as a shield against me, as though I were hanging out at the bar looking to put the moves on chicks and not working there as the bartender. She said it, though, as if we were old friends, as if all these other people were playing their little games, and she and I were above such pettiness. All that, in that one little line.

“I see,” I said, but inside my heart was doing little backflips. I’d made a friend, a friend with potential.

Her boyfriend joined her later–with another girl in tow. It seemed suspicious to me, but what did I know? Then, shortly before midnight, something happened. I was busy with one of the regulars, and I didn’t see what, exactly, but there was a revelation, or a discovery, or something. When my attention returned to the trio, her boyfriend now had his arm around the new girl, and my new blonde friend was in tears. Though it was clear in her face that she was betrayed and hurt, she held her poise. She stood strong and never showed herself as weak, even when this person who was now evidently her ex-boyfriend left with the new girl, the one with the mousy brown hair and the vapid expression.

For the next hour, I watched her. She sat by herself at the table, staring into space, seeming to retrace things in her mind. Each drink disappeared more quickly than the last. Tears collected at the corners of her eyes, and she wiped them away with the back of her hand, but she never lost her poise. This impressed me.

She was one of three patrons left in the bar when I announced last call. She ordered one more, and I served it to her. A few minutes later, as I was shooing the last of the regulars out of the bar, she looked around, appearing to notice for the first time that the bar was almost closed. Seeing this, she collected her purse, took a step for the door, frowned, and turned back to me. From the look on her face, I could tell the world had gone all unsteady under her. “Would you call me a taxi?” she asked.

“I could give you a ride,” I said, giving her a big smile, “save you a couple bucks.”

I didn’t mean it as sleazy as that, but to say I was not hopeful would be to lie.

A drought ended that night, but another began, one that would prove longer and more dismal than the first, because by the end of the night I found myself completely taken in by this beautiful creature. Much later, lying there in the darkness with the radio playing low, I could imagine myself intertwined with her forever. I could imagine secrets shared and mountains moved. Our lives would not be perfect together, sure, but they could be together perfectly. They could be.

Except for one thing: I had begun my relationship with her by taking advantage of her. She was drunk, and I had been the one to serve her the drinks. I should have walked away. I was sure to be the mistake she’d always wish she’d never made.

I could lie to her. I could lie to everyone. I could say that I had given her a ride home with only the purest intentions, that I had not hoped or planned for this to happen at any stage of the evening. In the darkness of her bedroom, though, it was easy to see how this would turn out: it would all blow up in my face. I would be relegated to the position of standard issue lowlife, olive drab mistake.

So, the thought of playing the innocent never seriously crossed my mind, but another thought whispered quietly to me: I could avoid all that pain by walking away now, by leaving before she woke up. Even better, by side-stepping the rejection and the embarrassment, I could live in the optimistic glow that maybe it would never have come to pass.

In other words, if I tried, the dream would fail, no doubt about it. But if I walked away–if I left the dream untried–it could live on in my heart, with the tiniest glimmer of hope.

This was what was in my mind as I slipped into my clothes and out of her door. And this is what has been on my mind many times since then, in the small hours of the night.

I remember every detail of that night. I remember every whisper, every caress, the sheen of satin and the delicate threads of lace. As much as that, though, I also remember the darkness. I remember realizing I had taken advantage of her. I remember the horror of not knowing her name. I remember the terrible fear that the entire evening, the potential and promise of it, existed only in my own mind.

Sometimes I wish I could forget.

But more often I wish I had died somehow that night on the way home from her apartment, so that the last thing in my life would have been those hours with her. There, the dream could live on, untried, forever.