Don't you think that's sexy?

It was an ugly scene, the place that had been our favorite restaurant, turned into a more than half-empty bar at 2a.m. on a Saturday night.  Just being part of it hurt, but I felt that anything else would hurt more and it was the only bar in the neighborhood that was still open and not packed with twenty-something men drinking bottles of Miller Light.  And I needed a martini.  That much I had been sure of since I got off the subway.  I found martinis lovely and comforting and this time I planned on using one or two to wash my lips after a particular bad kiss, bad date, and all-around bad idea that I had thought would be a good idea because I thought that the person who dates first after a break-up must be the person who wins the heartbreak-resilience competition. 

The only other woman at the bar was a slightly chubby, blonde woman in her late-twenties.  Her red tank top was too short and too tight and her mascara was already smeared.  She hung on the arm of man seated to my right.  I heard her ask him if he was going to take her back to his place as I sipped my martini.  And I noticed the man’s friend eyeing me, so I looked into the rippling gin of my martini.  Then my gaze drifted down to my feet and I noticed that the heels of one of my shoes had broken.  I adjusted my feet beneath the barstool to hide my foot with the broken heel.

The bartender asked me what brought me there.  “Bad date,” I replied.  He was blonde and looked about forty.  “Can I ask what made it bad?” he inquired, leaning towards me over the bar.

It was a good question and he was the only person was going to ask me that night anyways, so I tried to think of an answer.  Really, it had been a fine date.  My date and I had a decent amount of things in common and I could tell he had found me quite charming.  That had been part of the problem.  I didn’t like how easily he fell for my practiced brand of quirky intellectual flirting that I trusted to be appealing when combined with my particular looks.  My former boyfriend had told me once that I had a body that was “built for sex,” which was an awful thing to say but I knew what he meant.  So there was all of that.  And there was also my date’s badly fitting blue jeans and the fact that he didn’t understand why I wasn’t happy with my job.  In fact, my corporate unhappiness seemed to conflict with his worldview, which in turn conflicted greatly with my own. 

“His lips were too small,” I told the bartender. 

The bartender looked surprised.

“They were thin and pukery.  And his hands were too boney when he touched me,” I continued.  “It was awful and he just kept kissing me.  He didn’t even notice that I wasn’t kissing him back.” 

“So there was no chemistry,” the bartender surmised.

I nodded but I felt it was worse than that.  And I should have known all along that it would be.  The night I had first met my date, I had still had a boyfriend, the man who would later be my bad date told me then that he thought I was sexy.  I don’t know precisely why, but I’ve always preferred to be thought of as interesting or beautiful, maybe.  Sexy doesn’t seem like a real compliment, it it’s left at just that.  To me, it just means, “You’re someone I’d like to have sex with,” which really says more about the person bestowing the faux-compliment than it does about the person receiving it.

I sipped my martini.  The blonde woman at the bar squealed as a new song came through the speakers overhead.  She began pulling on the arm of the man beside her, trying to get him to dance.  I took another sip.

The same night I had met him, the man who would later still become my bad date, had sat down beside me at another bar and told me it been a year since he had last had sex.  He had looked at me expectantly.  I didn’t say anything.  Then he added, “I hope you didn’t think I was being too forward when I told you I thought you were sexy.  You just looked like you wanted me to talk to you.”

I hadn’t.  I had been texting my boyfriend and half-wishing he had joined me on that evening out with my friends.  But I had looked across the shared group table at this man from time to time over the course of the evening because he seemed left out of the conversation and I had felt bad for him, so I had decided to flash him a smile to be nice – and also because I knew that my hair looked particularly good that night.

The man who had been with the blonde left the bar and she drifted over to the seat beside me as if hoping to commiserate.  Her heavy make-up looked even more smeared up close and she seemed inherently lonely.  I moved over so that an extra seat separated me from her.  Soon a bulging, balding, older man sat down on the other side of her.  She immediately wrapped her arms around his neck and then turned towards me, pointing at my martini.  “Don’t you think that’s sexy?” she asked him.  He looked at me and nodded.  I stared into my martini.  I wanted to leave or, better yet, to be someone who would not have ended up alone in a place like that on a Saturday night.

“Will you buy me one?” she asked him, stroking his cheek.

He leaned into her and I heard them discussing in just slightly lowered tones what she would give him in return.  She giggled.

I finished my drink and immediately a fresh one was placed in front of me.  “It’s from the Irish gentleman,” the bartender told me, gesturing with a slight nod of his head to the only other person left at the bar. 

The Irish man came toward me and slid into the seat beside me.  He looked middle-aged the way men who work with their hands all day in the sun look middle-aged.  He looked like my father.  His skin was wrinkled and weather worn.  Yet time and hard work seemed to have just made him tougher and more sure of himself.  He introduced himself as Raymond and I obliged the small talk the ensued because he had bought me the drink -- and mainly because I probably been about to order another one anyways. 

The bulging man asked the bartender to make the blonde woman whatever I was drinking, but with extra olives.  The blonde woman careened her body over the bar, her breasts nearly escaping her tank top.  “Can I have like a whole bowl of olives? Do you have bowls?”  The bartender didn’t respond but I watched him pull a small bowl out from under the counter.  He then poured half a jar of olives into it.

Her request for olives endeared her to me.  I too love olives.  When I was little I used to eat whole jars of them at a time.  People used to say it was cute.

The bartender handed her the martini and the bowl of olives and she exclaimed happily as she slid onto the bulging man’s lap.

“What are you doing tomorrow?” Raymond asked me. 

I was too depressed to make something up. “Nothing,” I replied.

Raymond leaned his tanned, hardened face towards mine, “Not if you wake up with me in your bed.”

I swallowed the tight knot of sickness and despair that had formed in the back of my throat.  Then I smiled at him politely as I said, “I’m going to be waking up alone tomorrow.  I have a lot of writing to do.”

He nodded and insisted that I take his phone number.  I watched the blonde woman kiss the bulging man and I assured myself that I was okay because at least I wasn’t that bad. 

I was finishing my drink when they left the bar together.  I waited the amount of time I estimated it would take the two of them to walk a couple blocks before I left the bar as well.

I made it up three of the four flights of stairs to my apartment before I sat down on the steps and cried.

But that was July.