The bar where I used to get drunk has changed its name. I discover this when I head down the canal road expecting blacked-out windows and the faint glow of tired neon and find a cherry-red sign instead, the word SING picked out in bulbs. The smell of treated wood, formaldehyde and benzene, wafts from the open door. Beside it, a woman with a bouffant grinds out a cigarette beneath a cowboy boot and smiles at me as if we’re friends.
“I don’t really smoke,” the woman, who turns out to be Ruby, says. She’s got small, ugly teeth, but she doesn’t seem to know it.
“Sure,” I say. “Me neither.”
“Are you here for karaoke?” Ruby says. “There’re rooms available.”
“I don’t sing,” I say. There used to be a liquor store near here. I wonder if it’s still open.
Ruby flicks a lighter low, by her hip. “Fine then. How ’bout a drink on me?”
*
The bar’s transformation continues inside. Someone has open-concepted the hell out of it so that the barroom is as big as a bowling alley and as bright as a surgery. There isn’t a single booth, and while it’s early yet, I’m surprised by how empty it is.
Leading me across the floor, Ruby clicks her boot heels into the rung of a stool and propels her body across the bar, fishing out a plastic cup overloaded with ice. This cup is not bar-issue, I know, but personal. Opaque, to hide the level of the liquid and its color. I’m familiar with this trick. I’ve deployed it myself during 7 A.M. Grand Rounds, when it takes more than coffee to keep me upright.
Ruby sucks from a wide-gauge straw and settles onto her stool, appraising me. I’m in my conference uniform of khakis, nice blouse, sensible flats, and I know I’m too old for this detoxed version of my old dive bar. Ruby looks like a relic, too, only it seems purposeful on her, more vintage than aged.
I’m so ready for my drink that I’m tempted to ask for a sip of hers, despite the sparkly coral lipstick that clings to the top two inches of the straw. Instead, I ask, “Is anybody working here?”
“Maxine,” Ruby says. I follow her pointing finger to the far edge of the bar, where a dark-haired girl is hunched over a fat textbook.
“Undergrad?”
“Yep,” Ruby says proudly. “She’s got her moral philosophy final in a week, which is why she can’t talk to me right now. She’s so smart, though. She can quote Socrates from memory.”
The girl must feel our attention because she looks up, the lenses of her broad black eyeglasses flashing the green of an anti-reflective coating. Rather than hurrying over to serve me, her head dips back into her book. The fact that I’m used to being ignored doesn’t make this less irritating, but Ruby puts a cool hand on my arm and says, “Don’t let’s bother her. I’ll get you one myself.”
Ruby fills a glass with whiskey and a dewdrop of soda. “So. What’s your story?”
The whiskey is good, poured from a bottle backlit behind the bar, and the first sips warm my chest and loosen my jawbones. No one’s ever asked me if I have a story. I guess I do.
I start with college. Miserable, lonely years spent right here at Georgetown, followed by a summer as an idealistic intern in Appalachia, then med school, remembered now in flares of feeling: humiliation, fear, sweet but isolating vindication. I tell her about my work as an administrator at a hospital in Charlotte, the many promotions that rescued me from patients and their messy needs. The job that has purchased my house, which has four bedrooms and a pool.
We’re into our second round – heavy pours from Ruby, who has come back to her stool and scooted close to me – when she tells me hers.
Ruby’s story is from a country song. There’s a double-wide, a beautiful but gullible mama, a favorite puppy. There’s a little girl with a big dream, Nashville or bust.
“Ever since I left school I’ve been heading for Nashville, where there are producers waiting for talent like mine,” Ruby says, without a trace of humility. She’s gotten as far as Virginia, just across the bridge from this bar, well, more like two miles, which is fine, her boots are made for walking, only this pair pinches her pinky toes and might be bringing her bad luck. Ever since she bought them, she’s been stuck in a rut. She can’t afford to fix her truck, she can’t get the guy from the collection agency to stop calling.
“But I can’t complain,” Ruby says, as if she hasn’t been. “I’m really doing it, I’m out here chasing my dream, using the gift God gave me. How many people can say that?”
“Not many,” I say, and we toast. Listening to Ruby’s life is like watching somebody spill their drink. Messy, but not my problem.
Two boys in Hoya jerseys wander in and plant themselves in view of a muted television showing the basketball game. They look underage to me, but Maxine tears herself away from moral philosophy long enough to pull beers for them.
When she stands opposite us to ring them up, I open my wallet and take out a credit card to pay for my drinks. Ruby swats it away. The card bounces on the bar, hitting on three corners before falling flat. Do, re, mi.
“Your money’s no good here,” Ruby declares. “Put it on my tab, Maxine.”
Maxine grabs Ruby’s empty cup and splashes more brown liquor into it and Ruby rewards her with that unselfconscious grin. She takes a long sip from the straw and smacks her lips, naked now of all color.
*
In a private karaoke room with Ruby, lounging on a sticky couch. I should pack it in for the night, should go back to the hotel. I should stop drinking, or at least stop drinking here. Instead, I’m closing my eyes as Ruby flicks through the binder of songs. She’s wondering aloud which folk song from the ’70s – the only era I know well enough – is within my range. The crinkle of turning pages and Ruby’s mumbles lull me into a cat nap.
I am dreaming about a sandwich when Ruby startles me awake by tracing the outline of my ankle tattoo. The years have faded and stretched the range. It pains me to look at it.
“Did it hurt?” she asks.
“A little,” I say. “I got it when I thought I’d go back. That health clinic, where I interned, that was the reason I went to medical school in the first place. But it’s harder than I thought. Dealing with patients, I mean.”
“You could go back.”
“I can’t. It’s been twenty-five years. I can’t go back now.” Even if I wanted to.
“You can,” Ruby insists. The binder of karaoke offerings has fallen from her lap and landed between us, its stiff plastic edge digging into my thigh. “Take it from me, it’s never too late. I’m two months shy of forty and I refuse to give up.”
Forty. I had put Ruby at twenty-eight, thirty, tops. An age that harmonized her exuberance, her can-do spunkiness, with the mischievous way she slipped behind the bar, giggling as she helped herself to the top shelf. I squint at her in an effort to see below the thick deposits of makeup, but she blurs.
“Do you ever think that if it was going to happen, it would have by now?” I ask.
Ruby crosses her arms over her belly and shakes her head. “I don’t let myself think that way. You have to keep on keepin’ on.”
When Ruby starts up the song, a Carole King hit that brings me right back to elementary school, I drink until ice hits my teeth then find the stage, squinting at the scrolling words.
I might be off-key, but I keep time, I sound decent. Not earth-moving, but a solid, respectable B-plus.
Ruby? She gives me higher.
She dances in place like a groupie and claps hard, calling my name, not stopping until I remind her that it’s her turn, and that she’s got to help me queue up her song on the corner TV. When we find it, credits roll over a smudgy image of a woman staring out of a rain-streaked window. I press play, and Ruby skips onto the stage. She stands wide-legged, owning the room, taking air into her nose like a pony preparing to run.
The first verses of Ruby’s song are conversational, demure, nearly spoken, so the comparison doesn’t hit me until the chorus, when Ruby really belts it out, proclaiming that she, that she, will always love me.
She sounds like Linda.
Linda was my plump white New Zealand rabbit, a present from my parents for my ninth birthday. I loved that rabbit so much, I wanted her with me all the time. I wanted her to sleep in my room, to cuddle me at night so that I could feel her whiskers as they twitched along the inside of my wrist.
My parents said rabbits belonged outside, so as a compromise, my dad built a hutch that was easy for me to open on my own. That easy opening made Linda quick prey for the suburban carnivore that slunk through our backyard a few nights later. Linda’s high-pitched, toneless scream as the raccoon buried its teeth into her throat was so piercing that it jolted me awake, despite my closed bedroom windows.
Have you ever heard a rabbit die? They sound like miserable banshees, like out-of-tune castrati. They sound, in fact, like Ruby, butchering Dolly.
As Ruby finishes the song, I try to keep the grimace from my face, but I don’t clap when it’s over. I wait until she’s sitting next to me to put on my best I’m sorry this isn’t working out but you don’t have the required skills for this position and say, “Ruby, I don’t think you hit one note in that entire song. Now, maybe this wasn’t your best –”
Ruby rears from me as if I’d clawed her. “But ‘I Will Always Love You’ is my best. Everybody says so.”
“Sweetie. Everybody’s lying.”
“But Maxine says –”
And then Maxine herself is opening the door to the private room, announcing last call. She stops when she sees Ruby, wilting into the couch like a plucked dandelion.
“Ruby?” Maxine takes a step into the room, though she hesitates before coming closer to her friend, as if she might be contagious. “What happened?”
“Do I sound awful, Maxine? Do I have a terrible singing voice?” She is nearing that dying-rabbit register again, so I cut her off.
“Somebody had to tell her.”
Maxine rounds on me. “Did you really just come in here and crush her dreams?”
“Pardon me? I didn’t crush anything. I told her the truth, which is more than I can say for you.”
“Yeah, because I’m not heartless. I don’t go around crapping on people’s dreams, not when they’re giving it their all. Ruby tries her best, that’s what matters.”
“You’re wrong about that,” I say. I feel suddenly sober, old and tired, a boss reprimanding a baby-faced intern. “It matters if you want to be a famous country singer.”
Maxine tries to give me some bull about only needing to dream it to be it, and I want to stop arguing but I have to correct her, there’s a lot more to being than dreaming, until Ruby springs back to life and jumps from the couch. She’s more carnivore than wounded rabbit as she roughly shoulder-checks Maxine on her way through the door.
“Thanks for nothing,” she spits, her blonde extensions lashing the doorframe like the mane of the last unicorn.
*
I sit at the bar and watch Maxine as she cleans up with a vengeance, not once looking at me.
Finally, I say, “How much is it?”
Maxine is fisting a pint glass with such ferocity that she’s liable to break it.
“Hello? How much is Ruby’s tab?”
“Why do you care?”
I’d been about to order a car back to my hotel, but I put down my phone and say, “Because she’s never coming back in here, and you’ll be on the hook for it.”
This seems to sink in. Maxine takes the rag out of the glass and trudges to the screen above the register, jabbing at it with a finger. She is close to tears when she says, “Thirty-three hundred, give or take.”
I wonder what Socrates would have to say about that. “Why’d you let her run up a tab you knew she couldn’t pay?”
Maxine scrubs at a spot on the bar with the rag. She won’t look at me. “Because Ruby was the only person who didn’t laugh when I switched majors, who didn’t say, ‘What kind of job will you get with a philosophy degree?’ Because she was so nice. She kept me company.”
“Didn’t it occur to you that she was using you? Free drinks and free private karaoke, night after night?”
Maxine glares at the surface of the bar, snuffling softly, hand curled around the rag like it’s a sick animal.
Some people would hold that hand, stroke it and tell her that everything will be okay, that her boss will understand about Ruby’s tab, that Maxine will graduate summa and be a terrific grown-up philosopher.
Not me. Bedside manner amounts to nothing but brutality, in the end.
Ruby’s tab is so long that the receipt curls in on itself and threatens to roll off the bar. I stretch it out while Maxine watches. There are all of the Long Island Iced Teas that filled Ruby’s cup, the whiskeys poured for strangers, the cost of all those nice lies told in the private karaoke room.
I hand over my credit card and tell her to close it out. This time, Ruby isn’t there to stop me.