The Last Light bar was doing its usual impression of a coffin with optics. Brown walls, brown carpet, nicotine-stained clientele — where everything is pickled in its own failure. The jukebox hadn’t been updated since Bush Jnr., the stools listing like derelict ships, and the smell — dear Christ, the smell — a cocktail of chlorine and despair. This is where you went to go for a good time in Ashford Hollow.
And them, over there. My couple. Him: the kind of beef-faced Midwestern everyman who thinks his knuckles are an adequate résumé. He had the posture of a man permanently braced for insult — which, judging by the state of his shirt, he probably deserved. She: thirty going on fifty, with that lacquered hair-helmet you only get from box dye and bad faith. Pretty once, in the way a Chevrolet was once futuristic. Now she was all nerves and cheap vodka, her smile operating on a time delay.
They weren’t talking. Which is to say they were talking volumes. The silent, radioactive language of a marriage that’s been marinating too long. He tapped his tumbler with a finger stubby as a cigar butt; she stared at the exit with eyes that had rehearsed leaving a hundred times, never quite making curtain. Two actors in a play called Resentment, one drink away from a brawl or a reconciliation — not that anyone cared which.
I knew more than the booth was telling me tonight. I knew she takes her vodka with lime, never lemon. I knew he calls her “darlin’” in public, “bitch” in private, though never above a hiss. I knew she leaves the porch light on even when they’re home, superstition dressed up as hospitality. I knew which nights they came here, which nights they stayed in, and which nights she sat alone on that lopsided sofa, staring at a screen while he drank himself senseless elsewhere. That they slept in separate bedrooms. Call it homework. Call it curiosity. Call it a man making sure his story has the right cast before opening night.
And me, watching. Always watching. Because you can smell it, can’t you? The sour tang of marital entropy, the kind that seeps out of their pores, clings to their clothes. It’s practically a pheromone, this hopelessness.
So I sat there, grinning into my beer like a lunatic at a punchline only he hears. Thinking: well, maybe I’ll do him a solid. See her off. Tip her gently into oblivion, like dropping a cigarette butt in a puddle.