Karen Fowler - Black Glass

They went to Dutchman, a movie in which a white female seduces and destroys a black male. It made for an uncomfortable evening. Yes?

Well, the Joey Heatherton choice would have been problematical, too. No, I understand your interest. We’ll look at Lauren more later. I promise.

Nobody has a clue as to what the lyrics to “The Weight” mean. I doubt that the man who wrote it could answer this question. He was probably just making it rhyme.

Are there any more questions?

Anything at all?

Then I’m ready to dismiss you. Be thinking about what you’ve absorbed. Next time we’ll begin to look for common themes and for differences. It should be enlightening. The course is Comparative Romance. The point of view is female. We’ll start next time with questions. When you’ve thought about it some more, I’m sure you’ll have questions.

Alison called all over the city trying to find a restaurant that served blowfish, but there wasn’t one. She settled for Chinese. She would court an MSG attack. And if none came, then she’d been craving red bean sauce anyway. On the way to the restaurant, Alison chose not to wear her seat belt.

Alison had been abandoned by her lover, who was so quick about it she hadn’t even known she was pregnant yet. She couldn’t ever tell him now. She sat pitifully alone, near the kitchen, at a table for four.

YOU’VE REALLY SCREWED UP THIS TIME, her fortune cookie told her. GIVE UP. And, in small print: CHIN’S ORIENTAL PALACE.

The door from the kitchen swung open, so the air around her was hot for a moment, then cold when the door closed. Alison drank her tea and looked at the tea leaves in the bottom of her cup. They were easy to read. He doesn’t love you, they said. She tipped them out onto the napkin and tried to rearrange them, YOU FOOL. She covered the message with the one remaining wonton, left the cookie for the kitchen god, and decided to walk all by herself in the dark, three blocks up Hillside Drive, past two alleyways, to have a drink at the Fox and Goose. No one stopped her.

Alison had forgotten it was Monday night. Sometimes there was music in the Fox and Goose. Sometimes you could sit in a corner by yourself listening to someone with an acoustic guitar singing “Killing Me Softly.” On Monday nights the television was on and the bar was rather crowded. Mostly men. Alison swung one leg over the only empty bar stool and slid forward. The bar was made of wood, very upscale.

“What can I get the pretty lady?” the bartender asked, without taking his eyes off the television screen. He wore glasses, low on his nose. Alison was not a pretty lady and didn’t feel like pretending she was. “I’ve been used and discarded,” she told the bartender. “And I’m pregnant. I’d like a glass of wine.”

“You really shouldn’t drink if you’re pregnant,” the man sitting to Alison’s left said. “Two more downs and they’re already in field goal range again.”

The bartender set the wine in front of Alison. He was shaking his head. “Pregnant women aren’t supposed to drink much,” he warned her.

“How?” the man on her left asked.

“How do you think?” said Alison.

“Face mask,” said the bartender.

“Turn it up.”

Alison heard the amplified thwock of football helmets hitting together. “Good coverage,” the bartender said. “No protection,” said the man on Alison’s right.

Alison turned to look at him. He was dressed in a blue sweater with the sleeves pushed up. He had dark eyes and was drinking a dark beer. “I asked him to wear a condom,” she said quietly. “I even brought one. He couldn’t.”

“He couldn’t?”

“I really don’t want to discuss it.” Alison sipped her wine. It had the flat, bitter taste of house white. She realized the bartender hadn’t asked her what she wanted. But then, if he had, house white was what she would have requested. “It just doesn’t seem fair.” She spoke over her glass, unsure that anyone was listening, not really caring if they weren’t. “All I did was fall in love. All I did was believe someone who said he loved me. He was the liar. But nothing happens to him.”

“Unfair is the way things are,” the man on her right told her. Three months ago Alison would have been trying to decide if she were attracted to him. Not that she would necessarily have wanted to do anything about it. It was just a question she’d always asked herself, dealing with men, interested in the answer, interested in those times when the answer changed abruptly, one way or another. But it was no longer an issue. Alison was a dead woman these days. Alison was attracted to no one.

Two men at the end of the bar began to clap suddenly. “He hasn’t missed from thirty-six yards yet this season,” the bartender said.

Alison watched the kickoff and the return. Nothing. No room at all. “Men handle this stuff so much better than women. You don’t know what heartbreak is,” she said confrontationally. No one responded. She backed off anyway. “Well, that’s how it looks.” She drank and watched an advertisement for trucks. A man bought his wife the truck she’d always wanted. Alison was afraid she might cry. “What would you do,” she asked the man on her right, “if you were me?”

“Drink, I guess. Unless I was pregnant.”

“Watch the game,” said the man on her left.

“Focus on your work,” said the bartender.

“Join the Foreign Legion.” The voice came from behind Alison. She swiveled around to locate it. At a table near a shuttered window a very tall woman sat by herself. Her face was shadowed by an Indiana Jones — type hat, but the candle on the table lit up the area below her neck. She was wearing a black T-shirt with a picture on it that Alison couldn’t make out. She spoke again. “Make new friends. See distant places.” She gestured for Alison to join her. “Save two galaxies from the destruction of the alien armada.”

Alison stood up on the little ledge that ran beneath the bar, reached over the counter, and took an olive, sucking the pimiento out first, then eating the rest. She picked up her drink, stepped down, and walked over to the woman’s table. Elvis. That was Elvis’s face on the T-shirt right between the woman’s breasts. ARE YOU LONESOME TONIGHT? the T-shirt asked.

“That sounds good.” Alison sat down across from the woman. She could see her face better now; her skin was pale and a bit rough. Her hair was long, straight, and brown. “I’d rather time travel, though. Back just two months. Maybe three months. Practically walking distance.”

“You could get rid of the baby.”

“Yes,” said Alison. “I could.”

The woman’s glass sat on the table in front of her. She had finished whatever she had been drinking; the maraschino cherry was all that remained. The woman picked it up and ate it, dropping the stem onto the napkin under her glass. “Maybe he’ll come back to you. You trusted him. You must have seen something decent in him.”

Alison’s throat closed so that she couldn’t talk. She picked up her drink, but she couldn’t swallow either. She set it down again, shaking her head. Some of the wine splashed over the lip and onto her hand.

“He’s already married,” the woman said.

Alison nodded, wiping her hand on her pant leg. “God.”

She searched in her pockets for a Kleenex. The woman handed her the napkin from beneath the empty glass. Alison wiped her nose with it and the cherry stem fell out. She did not dare look up. She kept her eyes focused on the napkin in her hand, which she folded into four small squares.