Mel swallowed beer in her mouth, observing the guy sitting three stools away, a professional type with neatly gelled light brown hair and a gray suit. Mid-thirties, she estimated. She’d come down to the pub from her apartment upstairs wearing a navy New Order muscle shirt with maroon leggings and black leather ankle boots. For many years Mel had worn long sleeves in the summer to conceal her scars, before a series of internal changes led to a habit of exposing her arms even in the winter, sometimes brandishing her flesh in the faces of those she discerned were practicing the art of denial. Mel didn’t exactly detect this trait in the suit guy just now but definitely something like an infection that needed urgent care.
“Vodka tonic,” the guy said in a baritone voice, to Nina the bartender.
He threw his jacket on the back of his stool and yanked his tie loose. But for the clunk of his glass on the bar each time he finished gulping, he drank silently and morosely, melting like the ice in his glass. A bit of a cliché.
“Does my skin look like gauze to you?” Mel asked him, presenting her arm. “Because of this pattern, see?” She had tended to cut herself in mini crosshatches, like a weave. A former boyfriend had told her that her scars looked like gauze, which Mel found ironic. Her wounds resembling a cloth used for healing.
The guy barely shrugged. “Hey,” he said, gesturing at Nina with a forefinger. Nina came over, plunged a glass into a basin of ice, poured from a jug and sprayed tonic from a nozzle. The guy swallowed half of it instantly.
“When I saw a therapist some years ago, she wondered if something traumatic had happened to me when I was a kid. Maybe that was why I did this to myself,” Mel said.
The guy belched quietly into his fist.
Mel chortled and finished her beer.
“Top-off,” she said to Nina down the bar.
Nina came over. “Should I tell Hank you want a burger?” she asked.
Mel shook her head. “Irish nachos. Thanks, sweetie.”
Nina poured her a fresh beer, then went to the kitchen to place the food order.
“You a regular here?” the guy finally asked.
“What? You startled me. Didn’t know you could talk. Yeah, I live upstairs. Never seen you before.”
“I’m from out of town. Here on business. Actually, I should’ve left this afternoon, but I’m staying overnight to avoid my family. I do that a lot.”
“Whoa, first you say nothing and then you tell me your life story.”
“I love my wife, but sometimes…” He took out his phone. “That’s her, and my son Ben.”
He showed her a photo of a windswept beach where a thirty-something brunette wearing ivory sunglasses squatted beside a toddler gripping a plastic pail with a shovel inside. They had the same broad smile—as wide as the hull of a cruise liner. In the background, seagulls lilted above the ocean.
“I think I liked you better when you weren’t talking,” Mel said, pushing the phone away.
“Are you married?” the guy asked.
“Pff. Hell no.”
“You’re lucky,” he said, pocketing his phone. “It sucks the life out of you, I’m telling you.”
“Poor bastard,” Mel said. “Drink up.”
He tilted his glass. “It’s nothing but water,” he said.
“Isn’t it always,” Mel said. She got off her stool, went behind the bar and grabbed the jug of Absolut. “Time to man up.” She poured the vodka into his glass, then circled around to sit down again.
“I’m Ben,” he said. “Ben Senior.” He chuckled derisively at himself.
“Uh huh.” She couldn’t decide if the guy’s infection was viral or bacterial. Or if it had a cure.
“My son is Ben Junior,” Ben Senior continued.
Mel rolled her eyes. “That’s usually how it works.”
Ben Senior sucked on an ice cube.
“So you’re enamored with your name,” Mel said. “Had to pass it on to your son.”
“Tasha insisted. I wanted to name him Tiberius, after James T.”
Mel cackled. “You’re a Trekkie?” She sneered at his tie, his dress pants. “Never would’ve guessed.”
“That’s ‘cause Tasha hates science fiction. She only watches rom coms. My inner sci-fi nerd died a long time ago.”
“Ah. Sorry to hear.”
Nina returned from the kitchen and dried a mug with a dishrag behind the bar. Ben Senior ogled her backside, woefully. He dipped his fingers in a bowl of peanuts, scooped the legumes and tossed them in his mouth. Mel eyed him, thinking about how filthy those legumes must be, all the urinal hands that must’ve fondled them throughout the night. Ben Senior chuckled.
He nodded and said, “Skanks neglect to wash their hands in the bathroom and then they paw the nuts, I know. But guess what?” He tossed more legumes into his mouth. “Tonight, for once, I don’t give a damn. About anything!” Peanut bits sailed from his mouth as he spoke.
“Normally you’d give a damn, but not ‘tonight,’” Mel said. “What’s so different about tonight?”
Ben Senior raised his eyes slowly, almost as if they harbored a desperate plot. He snickered like an ogre, spraying peanut bits onto the bar. It escalated into full-on laughter, with the slapping of wood with his palm over and over again, hooting, pink splotches decorating his cheeks, and just as suddenly, plummeted into deep sea whale sobs, moaning and weeping into his hands, his body clamping like a wrench. Nina stood back and curled her lip. She looked at Mel and flicked her hand under her chin to signal that Ben Senior was cut off. Mel sighed.
Should she do it? she wondered. Should she take him upstairs to her apartment?
She had “many dolls to give away,” or whatever.
Upstairs, she let him collapse on a recliner. His face was hot and beady like a boiling pot of water. “Hey, hey,” he muttered, half-opening his heavy eyes. “Be gentle with me, alright? I haven’t been with anyone but my wife in thirteen years.” He laughed at himself.
Mel was starkly sober, a fact she intensely lamented. No matter how much she drank, whether entire bottles of hard liquor or wine, multiple four-packs of double IPAs, glass after glass of syrupy Amaro, she couldn’t feel any effect of alcohol, not even the tiniest buzz. She had no idea why she was like this; she’d become this way two years ago, after meeting the mysterious stranger at Gates of Paradise, a strip club below the Pulaski Bridge she frequented back then just to feel less alone.
She’d passed out on a leather-like couch, lights strobing across her shut eyelids and a bouncer kneeing her in the gut to get up. He was about to lay his manicured mitts on her shoulders to toss her out the front door, even though they were well-acquainted with one another, on a first-name basis they were, Lance and Fiona—that was her birth name, Fiona—but this was all about business, and management couldn’t abide an unconscious girl in the club
—but then the stranger materialized. An anachronism dressed in a beige poet blouse and light tan clownish pants, shoulder-length wavy chestnut hair redolent of the sixties, the essence of kindness in his tender brown eyes deeper than a bat-crawling well. Without a word, he touched Lance’s arm, and Lance stepped away obediently. He knelt before Fiona and said, “Beloved, I’ll take you home now.” Fiona awoke into a pool of inexplicable peace.
She fell asleep again and when she awoke again, she was lying in her own bed, tucked under her blanket that somehow smelled of fresh organic detergent. The stranger was sitting beside her, holding her hand, an apple-scented candle flickering in the darkness, the only other illumination a neon green sign flashing atop a bar across the street called Living Water Pub that was invariably empty.
“Sleep, child, you need to get some rest, ya dig?” the stranger said. He had a weird way of speaking, especially for someone who looked about thirty-three. “In the morning, everything will be groovy.”
“Who are you?” Fiona asked, her mouth seemingly stuffed with cotton.
“The answer to that will blow your mind,” he said. “But for now, I give you a new name: Melodious.”
“Melodious?”
The stranger smiled, knowing her thoughts. She hated the name.
He cupped his hand behind her head and lifted her gingerly so she could sip pumpkin-flavored tea. He tucked her in as a snug caterpillar inside a blanket cocoon. Fiona/Melodious didn’t fight the desire to let it all go, in his presence. It felt so easy. Energy seeped out from her fingertips and toes. For the first time in her self-aware life, she wasn’t at war with herself.
The stranger opened a book and Fiona/Melodious recognized it immediately—her favorite storybook from her childhood, about the girl who owned a collection of glamorous dolls and gifted the prettiest one to a poor classmate from the other part of town. Fiona/Melodious had imagined she was that classmate, and had never stopped longing for the doll in her dreams. Even now she could picture it vividly.
“Sarah invited Jane to her bedroom to play with her dolls,” the stranger read. “Jane’s eyes widened at the sight of the beautiful figures dressed in glittery lacy gowns and shining high-heeled slippers, each adorned with necklaces of pearls, diamonds, and sapphires, their lips perfect little rosy hearts…”
Ah yes, those dolls.
Fiona/Melodious drifted into a deep slumber, full of both contentment and yearning. She couldn’t be certain but she thought the last thing the stranger said was, “Mel, you have many dolls to give away.”
She didn’t have a chance to ask him what he meant. When she opened her eyes, it was morning. She’d been awakened by a pigeon cooing outside on her window ledge. She sat up and looked around the room, but the stranger was gone. She didn’t feel groovy, like he’d promised. Which was why she was surprised when, several weeks later, she began calling herself Mel.
***
The Living Water Pub’s neon sign cast a spotlight on the walls as Mel opened the knot of Ben Senior’s tie and slipped it away from his collar. He uttered gibberish, nearly asleep, a little vulnerable. Mel tucked a blanket under his arms and brushed his hair away from his forehead. When he jerked fitfully, with creased eyebrows and he mumbling, she stroked his forearm and said, “It’s alright now. Everything’s alright.” Mel’s face lit up green in the luminosity of the sign blinking through the window. She was unspeakably beautiful, but didn’t know it.