Drinking With Men : A Memoir (9781101603123) (18 page)

Beyond the bar, I put my ministerial credentials to work officiating at weddings and same-sex unions to raise money for my favorite charities, and preaching from time to time at liberal churches with open pulpits. I wasn't sure what else I'd do now that I was legit, but my Red Cross experience showed me that you didn't need a house of worship in order to minister; that faith, if you were inclined to seek it out, or even just feel it, was everywhere in this city—even if it, too, answered few questions.

•   •   •

T
he Fish Bar is still around, still thriving, if a recent visit is any indicator. Since it opened in 2000, it became a beloved neighborhood fixture. I still stop by, maybe once or twice a year, when I have time to kill in the East Village. But my days as a solid regular there ended in 2003. Once again, I found myself drifting from a place that had mattered to me, that had been my local. That bar had helped me to weather—and to celebrate—significant hardships and milestones. My father's illness. 9/11. A good portion of the guests at my wedding in 2002 were people I knew from the Fish Bar. I had not always been successful in my search for meaning during those years, but I knew exactly what the Fish Bar meant: comfort and stability. It was never a platform for drunken excess or otherwise bad behavior. It was the only bar I'd ever shared fully with another person. It wasn't just
my
bar. It was my bar with Frank. It was our bar.

What made me drift away? In this case, the law. In March 2003, smoking was banned, by city ordinance, at bars in all five boroughs. But there was a loophole: Bars in which the staff consisted entirely of the owner-operators could continue to permit smoking. Knowing that much, if not most, of their clientele were smokers, John and Paul made the difficult decision to be the bar's exclusive keepers. This made it, for a short time—until the state law came down a few months later and prohibited smoking in
all
bars, whether the owners were the sole employees or not—one of the few places where people could still smoke and drink in tandem to their hearts' content, and they did. And it wasn't just the regulars. This special, if short-lived, status drew in lots of new customers, smokers one and all. I am a smoker, but still, this was too much. I could no longer invite nonsmoking friends to join me there for a drink. And inevitably, it changed the character of the place—even when the Fish Bar had to capitulate to the tougher state laws and ban smoking like everyone else.

In time, Paul left the bar business so he could go back to school. Much as we loved John and many others who we knew from the Fish Bar, it was Paul who had drawn us there in the first place, whose presence and personality and friends and family had done so much to set the companionable tone of the place. Even if it would retain its sweetness and intimacy, some things were bound to change with him out of the picture. Maybe, too, I was starting to accept the possibility that a bar might not always be central to the way I lived my life, nor to the ways in which I expressed my faith. That seemed possible. Possible, but not very likely. And a little scary.

9.

HEY, THAT'S NO WAY TO SAY GOOD-BYE

Else's, Montreal

E
arly one morning in June 2006, I boarded an Amtrak train in New York City bound for Montreal. The long ride, more than ten hours up the Hudson Valley, along the Adirondacks and Lake Champlain, offered spectacular scenery—and gave me plenty of time to think. I had been invited to the wedding of a friend I hadn't seen in more than a decade. A musician and poet, he and I had been very close during my freshman year of college. When he abruptly left school—as I remember it, it was in the middle of the night, in the middle of the semester, and he never came back—I was blindsided, and my heart hurt. For nearly a year (and a year's an awfully long time when you're twenty) we'd been practically inseparable, and then, without so much as a good-bye, he was gone.

Frank had often heard me speak of this friend; he had some idea of how important he'd been to me, how much I missed him, and how frustrated I'd been in my unsuccessful efforts to reconnect. A brief e-mail exchange in 1999 or so just trailed off. So I was overjoyed to hear from him after so long, and touched that he wanted me to go to his wedding in Montreal, where he had lived for many years, where his fiancé grew up, and where gay marriage is not only legal but, refreshingly, regarded as no big deal.

Frank opted not to accompany me to the wedding. Money was tight, but it wasn't just about that: he understood how important this reunion was to me and felt that it would be best for me to go this one on my own, emotionally wound up as I was by the prospect of seeing my old friend after so many years. The wedding reception would hardly be the best time to catch up, but it might be my only chance.

There had been some big changes in the past year. Frank had started teaching at a college in rural Pennsylvania the previous fall, giving me more time by myself than I'd had in years. We both felt fortunate that he'd landed a tenure-track job that was a three-hour car or train ride from New York, because stable jobs in academia, especially in the humanities, weren't easy to come by. We knew other couples whose careers had forced them much farther apart than that: one partner in San Francisco, the other in New Orleans; one in New York, the other in a small town in Texas.

By comparison, our situation didn't seem so bad. As for me, burned out after nearly five years of antipoverty nonprofit work, I'd taken a job at a magazine less than a year before Frank started his new teaching position and didn't want to give it up too soon; my résumé was a messy jumble of nonprofit and publishing stints, none of which I'd stayed at more than two years. I was thirty-five, and, professionally, it was time to pull my act together. Besides, I wasn't ready to leave New York for Amish country just yet. I figured I'd give it another year at the magazine, then take the plunge and set up house in Pennsylvania. We even looked at property out there, including a sprawling old brick farmhouse set in a lush vineyard. I started to think maybe I could live in the countryside, learn to garden and maybe even to make wine. I told myself that I could learn to love that life—but not just yet.

My experiences in California and Vermont had revealed that, as much as I love the woods and the mountains, I am a city person—more precisely, a New Yorker. I tried to envision myself in the country—not visiting, not spending weekends there, really
living
there—and couldn't quite conjure a credible picture of it. And sitting in the café car of the Amtrak train en route to Montreal, I was surprised by how excited I was to be on my way to a big city that wasn't New York, on my own for the first time since Frank and I had started dating. I made a long weekend of it, arriving in Montreal on Thursday night, two days before the wedding. I'd head home the Monday after the wedding. I'd only been to the sophisticated Canadian city once before, and that had been a long time ago, for a weekend in my twenties. I remembered thinking it felt almost like being in a European city, but also familiar and comfortable. I remembered the small mountain after which the city is named, and wishing I'd had time to climb it. Predictably my first visit had been taken up with tourist stuff: museums and sightseeing and a dinner of poutine, the beloved if grotesque local specialty consisting of French fries and cheese curds and gravy.

But on this visit, aside from detailed directions to the wedding venue and a list of restaurants recommended by a friend, I had little to guide me and nothing planned save the wedding itself. I hastily brushed up on my French, which was never very good to begin with, though I knew it wouldn't be difficult to get by with just English. Still, I wanted at least to try to speak to francophone Montrealers in something that resembled their own language. Rather than behaving like a tourist, I hoped to be a respectful guest in the city, mindful of linguistic preferences and local customs. Checking in to my hotel was no problem. Ordering dinner at a café down the street that night went smoothly. But as I sat at the bar eating my
bavette aux échalotes
and drinking a couple of glasses of Corbières, I couldn't catch on to the Quebecois conversation around me, much less join in. Still, I eavesdropped, picking up on little bits of information and gossip, enjoying the way the French was occasionally broken up by familiar English phrases. Full of steak and wine, I returned to my hotel, vowing that the next time I came to Montreal—and already I was certain there would be a next time, and that I wouldn't wait too long—I'd do a better job of practicing my French before I arrived.

The next morning I arose early to walk up Mount Royal, and then back down the mountain, through the heart of the city and into Old Montreal. Like New York, Montreal is a superb walkers' town, with vibrant pedestrian life at all hours. But its scale is more intimate and its pace slower; no one I saw seemed to be in any rush at all. I lingered through the warm, bright afternoon in the old city, walking its cobbled streets, stopping for a delicious lunch, sitting on a bench in a small square, watching the citizens of this seductive place going about their everyday business. Already, I had started to fantasize about what it might be like to live there.

That evening, after a quick nap, I freshened up and walked from the city center, where I was staying, past McGill University and through its student ghetto to the Plateau District to have dinner at a restaurant that a well-traveled friend had recommended. I had a map but hardly glanced at it, and instead of taking the shortest, straightest path, I zigzagged down small streets and across wide boulevards with only a vague idea of which way to go. I wound up on Rue Roy, eastbound, and when I looked at my watch and saw it was not yet six, I realized that I had grossly overestimated the distance between my hotel and the restaurant, allowing myself nearly an hour for a walk that takes about twenty minutes. The Plateau neighborhood, with its tree-lined streets and stone and brick row houses and small mom-and-pop shops, looked and felt much like my own in Brooklyn—but with a lot more French spoken.

The still-bright evening summer sun lit up the bright red geraniums in the wooden window boxes lining the royal blue façade of a bar at the next corner. Regulars—you can always tell who they are—were smoking and talking out front, and they looked like my kind of regulars. A wooden sign adorned with a sinewy troll and the word
ELSE'S
hung above the door. I could hear Lou Reed playing from the speakers inside—“Perfect Day”—and I knew right away that I had found my Montreal bar, though I had never heard of Else's. Instead, I had been drawn to it, as if by a magnet.

The smokers and I acknowledged each other with a nod and I entered the bar. It's not an especially small room, but a cozy one nonetheless, with green walls and wooden tables, an abundance of well-tended plants, and a piano in the back. I took a seat at the end of the bar nearest the door and ordered a glass of wine.

“Where am I?” I asked a guy sitting to my left.

“You're at Else's,” he answered, as if to say,
Where else could you possibly be?

“I know that! I saw the sign over the door. I mean, where? What are the cross streets?”

He pointed out the window to the street signs. I was at the corner of Roy and de Bullion. And then more questions came. Where was I from? What was I doing in Montreal? Did I like it? How did I find Else's?

I was from Brooklyn. I was in Montreal for an old friend's wedding. Yes, so far I liked Montreal very much.

And Else's, well, I just stumbled upon it. And I felt so lucky that I had.

Most of the conversation at Else's was in English, though French phrases wove in and out, and occasionally French overtook English and then was overtaken in turn, the two languages mingling easily and naturally. The bartender, a no-nonsense dark-haired beauty, was a filmmaker who had studied world religions at university. I had another glass of wine. More people came in. I mentioned to my new friends where I was going for dinner, and they nodded approvingly and recommended favorite dishes. One more glass. More than two hours after I had chanced upon this perfect place, I finally made it to the restaurant, where I took their suggestions.

Happily, the bar was on my route back to my hotel, so I stopped in for what was to be a cognac nightcap. It didn't work out that way. I stayed until late, drinking more cognac, meeting more regulars. It was easy to imagine being one of them: coming here after work—whatever that might be if I lived in Montreal—every day, living in the neighborhood, knowing all of them by name. The charm of the city, its energy and mix of people, had quickly made me a fan. But Else's sealed the deal: As long as there was a place where I knew I could be a regular—a bar I loved instantly—it really wasn't so hard to believe that I could live somewhere that wasn't New York. Maybe not small-town Pennsylvania. But Montreal? I could do this.

On my visit to the bar earlier that evening, I'd overlooked the story of Else's that was printed on the menu. But later that night, I read it closely:

One day in 1993, a six-foot blond Norwegian named Else hailed a taxi in Toronto; five hours later, she arrived in Montreal. After years of living the quiet suburban life, Else was ready to return to her aquavit drinking, Rothmans smoking, Scandinavian fun-loving roots. At 50, she covered herself in tattoos, donned a pair of Doc Martens, unpacked her Norwegian trolls, and set up a shop in what is now the famous Else's on Roy.

There it was: evidence, a brief fable that confirmed my powerful hunch that Montreal was exactly the kind of place that lent itself to grand gestures of self-reinvention. If Else could do it at fifty, couldn't I do it at thirty-five? I turned to the guy next to me, the same one who had been there earlier. “Is Else here?”

He nodded across the room to a portrait of her.

“In spirit,” he said. She had died, he told me, not so many years before I had happened upon her namesake bar. But her image, and memory, still animated the place. I wanted to know more about her, about how she lived and how she died, but I did not ask him any more questions. Even without knowing the details, her premature death did not fit easily into the brand-new-life narrative I'd started constructing, both for Else and for myself. I had the uneasy, even chilling sense that, like all fables, maybe Else's had a moral, too—and I didn't particularly want to hear it.

I turned my attention back to my cognac and to my drinking companions. Our discussion of Else was over, and we resumed our lighter talk about differences between Americans and Canadians. It was getting late, and I had a wedding—and not just any wedding—to get to earlyish the next day. I said good night to the regulars and the bartenders. When one of the guys offered to walk me back to my hotel, I declined. But I couldn't deny that it felt good to have been asked.

I almost felt sorry that the wedding was the next day.
Almost.

I probably wouldn't be able to fit in a visit to Else's.

•   •   •

S
aturday's weather wasn't ideal for a wedding—muggy, overcast, a little rainy—but it turned out to be a beautiful event nonetheless. The location was an old stone house in a nature preserve at the edge of the city. The atmosphere was intimate and warm. A handful of far-flung college friends was there—Sam from Boston, Matthew from Boulder, Mark from Los Angeles—and I did get my chance to spend at least a few quiet minutes in conversation with the man I'd gone to see, my long-lost friend, one of the two handsome grooms.

After the ceremony, but before the reception was in full swing, he pulled me away and swept me off into a side room. “I know we'll barely have a chance to talk,” he said, “but I'm so glad you're here.” For a few moments we just kind of looked at each other and smiled. He looked great: less hair, sure, but otherwise he'd hardly changed.

“So tell me. About you,” he continued. “Quickly.”

Quickly! I knew he was being funny, and that he had other guests and a brand-new husband to attend to, but how could I fill him in quickly on the events of more than a decade? I hastily covered the essentials: my marriage, my new job, my volunteering, updates on college friends I still saw in New York . . .

Laughing, he cut me off and said, “Look at you. A married woman. With an office job.” And then, raising his eyebrows dramatically, with something like comic horror, he added, “And an expensive haircut. You have become a
bourgeoise
.”

Again, he was being funny. There was no malice in his tone, no harm intended, just honest surprise. Still, it stung. I didn't know how to respond; it was just as well that he had to go talk to other people. To be fair, the last time he had seen me I was a disheveled if not unkempt vegetarian college freshman with unruly hair, wearing frayed green Converse high-tops and too many layers of long colorful skirts and no makeup, a self-proclaimed revolutionary and enemy of The Man in his many insidious guises. And there I was, a thirty-something in a sober black dress and, yes, my friend was right, a good haircut, mascara and lipstick touched up, working a stable job, married for nearly four years to an English professor.