Tiny Perfect Worlds by Constance Jane
Tiny Perfect Worlds
Dave has worked the bar at Liminal Lounge for seven long, lusterless years. People always assume bartending is one big party with an exclusive gateway to meaningless sex. The thing is, serving drinks is a lot less fun than drinking drinks. But no-one ever understands this when Dave tries to explain. He hasn't always been a bar man. There was a time when he dreamed of opening his own art gallery showcasing his paintings. When his hands poured paint and oozed optimism. This was back when he’d started to develop a recognizable style and still had the guts to keep his brush strokes consistent.
It’s Friday night and Elysia, a regular, slinks in through a side entrance of the lounge. Dave likes to watch her mingle with strangers whenever she’s in. Sometimes she sits and listens to the false charms of hollowed-out stockbrokers, never interrupting as they flaunt exaggerated elegance with their clean-shaven superhero chins. Other nights she chats with men in too-big, dusty coats, cheeks of bristly many-day growth, and blinded eyes that can't remember seeing sober.
Dave watches Elysia tonight as she moves among the patrons. He wonders what she does for work, that she can come here so often and table hop around the room. She’s always impeccably dressed. Either a red dress that hugs her figure but covers her from knee to neck, or a short floaty black number that reveals no shape or curve, other than a slight rounding of her chest or swell of a thigh if she moves in a certain way. Tonight, she wears a tailored blue suit. Not navy or royal blue, but the color of electricity, if you could look at it without hurting your eyes. Dave has a feeling Elysia knows he’s watching her and she enjoys the attention. He likes that about her.
Elysia is flitting between a group of mid-thirties men and a lady weeping into a gin in the corner booth. A voice reaches Dave.
‘Why does she do that? Why does she talk to everyone?’ A man is leaning casually on the bar, someone Dave hasn't seen before. Blonde hair, blue eyes, and flawless skin. His tall frame wears new clothes bought with old money. He’s the type of guy chicks like, and Dave wants to be like, and he’s watching Elysia move about the bar, transfixed.
‘I asked her the same thing once. She says she wants to know if they ‘deserve the choice’,’ Dave answers.
‘Choice?’
‘I don't know. I think she's a bit...’ Dave spins his finger around up by his ear. ‘You know,’ he shrugs. ‘Here she comes. Good luck!’
The man gives Dave a confused look and turns to Elysia beside him.
‘The usual please, David.’ Her voice is small, affected by some kind of accent that Dave can’t place. He nods and mixes a vodka martini with a sliver of lemon rind placed carefully on top. He watches the rind float to the bottom and places the glass on a white napkin in front of her. She flashes a smile and turns to the man.
Dave feels a pang of jealousy. He knows he isn't ugly, but he isn't clean cut and grown from wealth like this guy. Dave is attractive in a rugged way, as if he's spent years hiking and building fires to keep warm on tall, hard-to-get-to mountain tops. He smells of pine and woodsmoke and has a greasiness to his brown hair that he can't wash out no matter how hard he scrubs. This new guy probably pays people to wash his hair and naturally smells like coconut oil. Dave leaves the two of them talking. Elysia with her pink lip-sticked mouth and the new guy with his perfectly knotted tie. The bar crowds and Dave loses sight of them.
Later, the new guy asks Dave to pass Elysia his business card when he sees her next. He wants to throw the card out. He wants to tell the new guy that Elysia deserves better than him. But who does she deserve? Dave should have asked her out himself by now; another of his failings. He decides not to let his jealousy get the better of him. The new guy is probably alright, just young and born into money; more to offer her than he ever could. Dave pockets the card to give to Elysia and waves him out.
When he closes the door behind the last of the night's revelers, he turns to find Elysia crying in the booth that the gin slosh had occupied earlier. He watches her dab her eyes with the corner of a napkin. He wants to ask her if she’s okay, but he doesn’t want to embarrass her so walks on and busies himself at the bar, polishing glasses that are already polished.
‘Thank you, David.’ She’s at the bar now, her makeup tear-eroded. She sets her napkin down, places the empty martini glass on top.
‘Are you okay?’ Dave asks while avoiding her eyes. Elysia drops her face into her hands. Having never seen her so undone he leans across and touches her arm. When she pulls her hands from her eyes, he can't believe what he is seeing. Trails of dark, inky tears stream from her eyes down the bridge of her nose. Dave rubs his own eyes to remove the impossible vision. When he looks again his mouth moves soundlessly; her tears evidently much more than salty water or even ink. An arrangement of tiny black letters glides slowly down her pale cheeks. Dave looks closer and finds he can read her tears, which form tiny perfect words. Elysia pulls the napkin from under her glass and wipes the words from her face. She looks at Dave and sniffs.
‘I hope you're here next week, darling,’ she says with a brilliant smile. Then she puts the napkin back under her glass and leaves.
Dave grabs the empty glass and places it in the sink. When he picks up the napkin he’s surprised to find it dry and smelling of communal bathrooms in trailer parks and vomit in back alleys. The feel of it in his hand reminds him of his past and the beginning of a merry-go-round of meaningless moments with no way to get off the ride. He scrunches the napkin and throws it in the rubbish can. Watches it slowly unfurl, wedging itself amongst the empty bottles and sticky cocktail garnishes. Dave is about to turn back to cleaning the bar when he sees them again—tiny words printed neatly on the napkin. He lifts it and flattens it on the bar. Stark black letters in sharp relief. A story has formed from Elysia's tears and it begins with a bartender reading a napkin…
Dave looks up to find that he is no longer in the bar. He is standing next to an antique chaise lounge, with curved oak frames inlaid with red velvet. This is not his chair, not his room. The white walls are covered in expensive-looking paintings. Enormous potted palms whisper to him from the corners of the room and a glass coffee table holds several magazines skewed perfectly. Dave's rugged face is plastered across the covers of two of them. He instinctively puts a hand to his chin, to confirm this is real; a version of himself looking at another version of himself. He wrinkles his brow and begins to walk toward the coffee table but stops when a naked woman appears from the door to his right. Somehow, he knows, through that door is the bathroom he had remodeled last summer with black and white subway tiles and industrial, motion-censor tapware.
‘Where would you like me today, David?’ The way she says his name makes him think of Elysia. But the woman doesn't look like Elysia. Or does she? His memory of her is faded.
‘Sorry. I think I'm in the wrong house,’ Dave mumbles. The woman gives a soft smile and lays on the chaise, one hand resting along the back edge and the other above her head.
‘How's this?’ She says. ‘We could start with some poses similar to last week and then see where you take it from there, like you usually do.’ The woman smiles knowingly. Like they’re acting in a scene and she’s prompting his forgotten lines. Dave notices a half-finished canvas on the easel to his left and paints and brushes. The setup is exactly how he used to arrange his workspace, right down to the height of the easel. The doorbell rings and the woman folds her hands in front of her.
‘We'll never get this finished before your opening,’ she pouts, pulling a cigarette and lighter from who knows where. She lights the end as the bell rings again. Dave looks toward the door and takes a moment before deciding to answer. On his way down the extravagant hall toward the door, he walks past a floor-length mirror. Dave barely recognises himself. His hair is dark and greasy, but fashionably so. His shirt is simple, white, collared; he can tell it’s expensive by the way the fabric hangs. His shoulders are large, much bigger than he remembers. Mountains of muscle that he's never seen or felt before. The bell rings again and he abandons his reflection. Standing on the other side of the door is a woman holding a book.
‘Hello David,’ she says.
‘Elysia?’
‘Ah, so you remember me. Delightful!’ She holds the book out to him and he accepts. Dave glances at the cover and reads the title, Choices. His name appears as the author. He opens it and finds a collection of seven stories.
‘A book I know you’ll love,’ Elysia says with a smile. ‘It is your story within other stories, times and alternate endings.’
‘But the bar?’ Dave asks. Elysia frowns, then swishes her hair and giggles.
‘No one ever remembers that part. How beautiful.’ She touches his cheek before glancing to her left and right. ‘Look, I don't usually do this but I like you David, and I know you will make the right decision. So, think of this as a book of wishes. You only get one wish though, and these are your choices.’ Dave looks at the book in his hands.
‘I don't understand.’
‘Well then, you're in the right place!’ Elysia pecks his cheek lightly and walks toward the elevator.
Back inside, the naked woman is dressing when Dave enters; she must leave for another job downtown, but she’ll be back tomorrow. She finishes and walks across the room to leave.
‘Oh darling, you can't paint me like that,’ she says as she stops in front of the painting. ‘No one likes that style. We spoke about this already?’ She looks at him sharply with her hands on her hips. ‘You'll fix it tomorrow.’ Then she kisses his cheek and leaves.
Dave sits on the chaise and reads one of the magazines covered with his face. The article about him is in the middle and full of lies; his love of poetry and growing up in an orphanage. It speaks of his rise to fame after one of his paintings was bought by an actress, how they’d fallen in love and she'd broken his heart but still had the painting. He shakes his head. Another lie. His real big break came after he'd sucked a gallery manager's dick to get a piece displayed. He can still taste the vomit he'd sprayed on the alley wall.
He looks at the half-finished painting on the easel. Remembers the woman's criticism of his style. Dave begins to move the brush with more calculated movements, using color and shadow more conventionally. He finishes the painting and hates it. It looks exactly as the woman wants herself to appear and nothing like she actually looks. He knows she will pay a lot of money for it.
Dave grabs the book Elysia gave him, shrugs into his jacket, takes the elevator to the ground floor and walks into the heavy air of the city. He finds a packet of cigarettes in his pocket along with his wallet and keys and walks across the road to a small deli. As his sweaty palm pushes the glass door open, he feels a strange tickle at the edge of his consciousness. There is another deli a few blocks over and he knows he is supposed to go there; where people like him like to be seen. Dave shrugs and orders a blueberry bagel with cream cheese and sits down at the window table. He reads the book.
It is the same sort of nonsense as the magazine article. One story details his struggle for recognition as an ethnically diverse writer. Another follows his rise to fame singing in a band, marrying, then divorcing the bass guitarist. Each story is a lie, including the one exactly like the magazine article describing how his career as an artist came about after the actress bought his painting. He comes to the last one, which describes his upbringing in the brown double-wide trailer down the coast; his days locked up, alone, while his mother was out, dealing or taking drugs; his days of eating undercooked rice and moldy white bread. It details how, as a 15-year-old, he'd worked three jobs to pay for art school. This version even includes the vomit-inducing dick sucking incident, and how that was the only painting he ever sold before giving it up and working at the Liminal Lounge. The story ends with him standing behind the bar, reading a smelly napkin full of not-wet tears. The last two pages of the book are blank.
Dave looks up and across the street to his apartment building. He watches Sheree from 3C walk her freshly-groomed standard poodle through the sliding doors. She wobbles in her Louboutins, a manifestation of her complete insecurity in this world. Dave feels sorry for her, but realizes she belongs in this version of the story much more than he ever will. He feels a single tear slide from the corner of his eye and another forming behind it. His eyes turn on like faucets and gush tiny perfect words onto the last two pages of Choices. When the tears stop, he reads the decision he has cried…
It’s another Friday night and Elysia, in her electric blue suit, smiles across the bar. Dave rests a hand on the beer taps, steadied by the icy metal. He runs a hand against the edge of the bar, the familiar grains of wood welcoming him back to this world. He turns away from Elysia and runs his fingers over the skin of his face, finds the bumps and prickles where they’ve always been. He pulls his hands away and examines them in the dull light. They’re still his hands. The same hands that had the guts to paint. The same fingers strong enough to hold a brush the way he wanted. He turns back to face Elysia.
‘I knew you'd choose real. I'll have the usual thank you David.’
He smiles and makes her a martini.
