Absent Friends

Though Tom did, Tom sometimes did. She wished he had, on this occasion as so many times when they all were young, read hers. They might have met at the chrome-wrapped little diner, or they might have sat together in the Hilltop Café, finally somewhere to go in Pleasant Hills for a latte and a croissant. But it was as it had always been: what Tom offered sounded right, and without even considering another possibility (and in truth this was what most unnerved her: not that she had compromised, for Marian had built her life around her belief in the value of compromise; but that she had assumed without question that what he wanted was what she wanted also), she had agreed.

Impatient with herself, she pulled the door open into a room so startlingly unfamiliar that at first she was afraid she had somehow come to the wrong place; and then, for a brief time, she wanted the old Flanagan's back.

Dark, that tavern had been. Its linoleum floor stuck to your shoes, and its ancient jukebox throbbed with music from the days before your parents were old enough to drink. What had covered the walls? Stories clipped from newspapers, photographs behind glass. Horses, now she remembered, horses in the photos, trotting with sulkies behind. (Marian had always thought sulky races eerie and graceful, a little frightening. A trotter was expected to win, was cajoled and lashed by the man in the carriage behind, but could not run. How must that feel for the horses, she worried, what must it be like trying to do your best, having your best demanded of you, while forced to hold back?) There had been mirrors on the walls then, too, “Schlitz” or “Miller” scrawled across them in chipped gold leaf. Seeing in her mind the places where the mirrors had been, Marian realized that they had been set on the walls in such a way that from every part of Flanagan's, a customer could see the door.

She wondered whether she had always known that.

The mirrors were gone. The dark furniture and the sticky linoleum and the jukebox, the trotting horses locked behind glass, all had been replaced. Bentwood chairs, light and cheaply elegant, sat on a patterned tile floor beneath glass lamps that glowed seductively. Two television sets above the bar and three more by the green vinyl booths broadcast college football (one team a local one, their helmets bearing FDNY and NYPD logos alongside their tiger mascot's image), stock car racing (each car painted with its sponsor's name and colors and a large Stars and Stripes), and a sports interview show (tiny flag pins in everyone's lapel). You could swivel your head and take your choice. (Did they ever tune in Yonkers Raceway or the Meadowlands now, Marian wondered, where the trotters ran?)

Marian strained to hear the music. Over a lifelessly exact electronic beat a sad and sexy woman warned her man that he'd hurt her too often, and one day soon he'd find her gone. The rhythm and the melody were new, the sentiment the same as in Marian's youth, and her parents', and forever before. The raucous voices of the young crowd slammed the music down. A table or two, a booth here and there, were occupied by people Marian's age or older, resolutely eating burgers or plates of linguini, drinking their beers and watching the game. They sat in the date-night crowd like stolid old trees in a tangle of wild new growth. It was the kind of landscape, it occurred to Marian, that springs up after a forest fire. Most of Flanagan's patrons were kids, kids the age she and Jimmy had been when, finally legally permitted to drink—meaning, able to drink in public, not just in the woods or in the parking lot at Eisenhower or on the rocks under the bridge—they had only rarely chosen to come in here.

Tom, of course, had come here often; and he was here now. It was like Tom to be early, to be waiting so that she would not feel uneasy, alone in what had always been foreign territory and was now a numbingly unfamiliar country.

He stood when he saw her, and eyes in the crowd lifted to him as he rose. The plaintive woman quavering from the jukebox could be heard more clearly as conversation faltered and people glanced at one another. Tom walked to where Marian stood, just inside the door. He kissed her cheek and led her through the room.

He was no longer what he had been in days of old, the crown prince; and the kingdom he was to have inherited, he had dissolved. The young people in this new Flanagan's might not even know his name, not know what it was about him that drew and held their glances. But the older ones surely knew. They nodded to him as they had nodded to his father, smiled back when he smiled at them as though they shared a secret.

Tom led her to his table. Nothing in the new Flanagan's was familiar to Marian except this table of Tom's. Set for two and holding a half-drained pilsner of beer, it breathed an inch or two easier than the crowded tables around it and stood in precisely the spot on the floor where his father's table had always been.