The Tender Bar: A Memoir by J. R. Moehringer

Author:J. R. Moehringer
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3, epub
Tags: Publishers, Arizona, Journalists, J. R, Social Aspects, Moehringer, Editors, Fiction, Literary, Connecticut, Bars (Drinking establishments), Personal Memoirs, Journalists - United States, Manhasset (N.Y.), General, Biography & Autobiography, New York (State), United States, Manhasset, Biography, Bars (Drinking establishments) - Social aspects - New York (State) - Manhasset
ISBN: 9780786888764
Publisher: Hyperion
Published: 2006-08-01T10:00:00+00:00

twenty-four | FATHER AMTRAK

^

SIDNEY’S AGITA PASSED AND I LEARNED MY LESSON. I ADOPTED A policy of speaking less, listening more. I went on loving her uncontrollably, desperately, but I tried to be quieter about it.

I also tried to attack my schoolwork, but it was harder than ever, because of Sidney. I couldn’t concentrate. In lectures and seminars, while the professor nattered on about Berkeley and Hume, I’d stare into the distance, picturing Sidney’s face. When I heard applause I knew that the lecture was over and it was time to go back to my room and sit on the window seat and think about Sidney.

She created a tricky paradox. If I could win her love, then I could become the man I’d hoped to become when I’d first applied to Yale. But I couldn’t hope to win her love unless I graduated, and to do that I’d have to stop obsessing about her and do my schoolwork, which didn’t seem remotely possible. Sitting in the library, trying with all my might to focus on Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, I looked up and saw Jedd Redux. We hadn’t met since he’d witnessed Bayard catch me at shirt poaching. He offered me a Vantage.

“Was that you and Sidney walking down York Street the other day?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Are you two—?”

“Yes.”

He threw back his head and opened his mouth, as if he were going to scream, but he made no sound.

“You’re one lucky son of a bitch.”

He lit my cigarette with a silver lighter that looked as if his great-grandfather had carried it in the trenches of World War I. We smoked. “Seriously,” he said. “Lucky.” Pause. “Lucky lucky lucky.”

We looked at the book-lined walls. He blew a smoke ring that dangled over my head like a noose.

“Lucky,” he said.

At the end of sophomore year my luck was holding. I passed all my classes, barely, and Sidney and I were still together. Better than together. She told me she’d broken things off with all the men in her life and she was seeing only me.

I went to Arizona to spend the summer, and Sidney went to Los Angeles to attend a program for aspiring filmmakers. I wrote her long love letters. Her replies were neither long nor loving. Quick roundups of her social schedule. She was attending cocktail parties with movie stars, working out with the USC men’s swim team, tooling around Hollywood in a convertible Mercedes. She did visit me one weekend, and managed to bewitch my mother. The first time Sidney left the room my mother stared into her dinner plate.

“That,” she said, smiling as if she knew a secret, “is the most beautiful girl I’ve ever set eyes on.”

“I know,” I said glumly. “I know.”

I brought Sidney to my other home when we returned to Yale that fall. I made sure it was a Saturday night, mid-November, the most festive time of year at Publicans. Standing just inside the door I gave Sidney a quick primer on the major players, pointing out Uncle Charlie, Joey D, Cager, Colt, Tommy, Fast Eddy, Smelly.

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