Michael Hemmingson: Seven Women: An Erotic Private Investigation

I’ve been sitting at the counter of this bar for almost an hour, now on my third drink, when I notice one of the women, in a group of women, saunter in and sit in a booth. There are five of them, all in their mid-twenties to early thirties. I don’t want to seem too conspicuous. I try to verify my suspicion from the mirror at the bar. There are too many bottles in the way. I turn around and look. Yes, it’s her — my ex-wife. She sees me looking, no expression on her face, quickly goes back to her four friends — smiling and laughing, as if I don’t exist.

The best thing to do — get up and leave, go home or to another bar. I thought this would be an uncomplicated day — come in and have a few drinks, go home and maybe watch some television. Now she enters the narrative, much in the same way she originally came in: without preamble.

I haven’t seen my ex-wife in five months. She wears a gray blazer, white blouse, dark skirt. She’s just off work, I assume; she’s an associate editor at a mass-market paperback publisher. Her friends don’t look as if they’re in publishing; they don’t have that fatigued demeanor many of her colleagues have. I wonder who they are.

I get another drink. I hear them laughing and talking, and I feel small. I can see her face in the mirror now: long black hair, fair skin. I remember things. I hate it when you drink and remember. Drinking alone isn’t a good thing sometimes. These women have the right idea: come in as a group. You get less melancholy. I don’t have any drinking buddies.

I get up and go to the bathroom. I feel her looking at me, although she’d never admit it. One of her friends, a blonde, glances my way; she whispers something to the woman next to her. Short dark hair. I don’t believe I know any of them. I never knew her friends that well. We had an isolated-from-the-world kind of marriage — eight months in all.

In the men’s room, I decide I’m going to do it. What the hell. It would be uncivilized, after all, not to say hello.

I go to the bar first, freshen my drink, and make my way over to the booth and the five women. My ex-wife is at one end, the blonde who looked at me at the other. My ex-wife sees me coming and flips the hair out of her eyes, trying to ignore me. The other women look my way; one giggles. They’re expectant. Maybe they think I have a line, that I want to come on to them all. How the hell do I know what women think?

“Hello, Tasha.”

My ex-wife looks up. “Hi.”

“Tasha,” one of the women — a redhead — says, “Is this someone we should know about?”

“This is Leonard, my ex-husband,” she tells them.

“Oh,” one of them says, “the mysterious ex-hubby.”

I feel sweaty all of the sudden.

“Hello,” they say to me.

“Hello,” I say back.

“Hey,” says the blonde, “why don’t you join us?”

Tasha starts to say something, but two others say, “Hey, that’d be fun. We should have a guy here, get his impressions.”

“I’m sure Leonard has things to do,” my ex-wife says.

“I was just sitting over there drinking,” I say. “Just wanted to say — hello.”

“We’re drinking, too,” the blonde says. “That’s what you do in a bar. Drink and talk and bullshit. Why don’t you join us? There’s plenty of room, and I don’t think Tasha would really mind — would you, Tasha?”

My ex-wife brushes the hair from her eyes again, glares at me as the hair falls back. “No, I wouldn’t mind. What the hell.”

Yeah, what the hell. Our favorite phrase from a failed union. Tasha moves into the booth, next to the redhead. The blonde nods. I sit next to my ex-wife and feel fucked. She’s trying to prove something to them, to me, maybe to herself, I don’t know. That she can keep calm and cool in my presence? That the marriage is behind her now? Or does she want to show her friends what an asshole I was, a memento mori of her past?

I’m a little drunk and a little lonely and I don’t care, so I sit next to my ex-wife and look at these women and wait for anything.

“We’re kind of like a club,” the blonde says.

“We’re not a club,” the redhead says.

Tasha is observing me with one eye. I want to ask her how she’s been. They’re all drinking wine, except for the blonde, who’s having a beer.

The blonde, I find out, is Amelia; she’s an elementary school teacher. The redhead is Sheila, a hostess in a restaurant uptown. The woman with short dark hair is Cara, a jazz musician; and the last woman, rather quiet, Lisa, who has brown hair — she’s a writer.

I smile. “You all have names that end with ‘A’.”

“Except Holly,” Amelia says. “Holly isn’t here yet.”

“Holly’s always late,” Sheila says.

“That’s the charm of Holly,” Cara says. “Fashionably late.”

“She’s a nerd,” Amelia says to me. “She’s into computers.”

“Nerd doesn’t fit," Lisa finally talks. “She dresses better than a nerd. But she is very smart,” she adds, looking at me. “She programs things.”

“Computers,” Amelia says, taking a long pull from her beer bottle.

“So,” Sheila says to me, “what do you do, Leonard?” She seems tipsy.

“Well,” I say.

“He works at a private investigation agency,” Tasha says as if she were tasting something bad. Maybe it’s the wine. “Or at least he used to. Do you still work at Grape and Manor, Len?”

I drink my drink. “Yeah.”

“A private eye?” Lisa says, sitting up.

“Something like that,” I say.

“Didn’t you write a private-eye novel?” Sheila asks Lisa.

“I tried writing one,” Lisa says, shrugging. “They’re popular, and I was going to have a woman dick, because that’s real in right now, but the book didn’t work. That’s not the kind of stuff I write.”

“What do you write?” I ask.

“Books,” she says.

“Is that how you know Tasha?”

“Yes,” Tasha answers for her.

“You don’t look like a private eyeball,” Amelia tells me. “Aren’t you supposed to have one of those hats — a fedora? And a trench coat or something? Aren’t you supposed to talk like that one guy — the guy in the old black-and-white movies, you know?”

“Actually, dear, I do own a fedora and a long trench,” I say in my best Bogart impersonation, “When I’m out chasing the bad guys.”

“Oh!” Amelia kicks me with her leg. “That gives me goose bumps!”

“Huh,” from my ex-wife, shaking her head.

“Everything gives you goose bumps,” Sheila says, and then adds, to me: “We were thinking of nicknaming her ‘Goose bump.’”

“The only nickname I have is ‘Amnesia,’” Amelia says.

Lisa leans forward. “You never told us the story behind that nickname.”

“I know.”

“Maybe she will tonight,” Cara says.

Amelia sips her beer, sees that it’s empty, and says, “Maybe I will.” She waves for the waitress.

“So do you really go after bad guys?” Sheila asks me. “Do you follow people around? Do you carry a gun? Do you peep on husbands cheating on their wives?”

“Or even vice versa,” Lisa says.

“No,” Tasha says, “he doesn’t do those things.”

“I don’t usually carry a gun,” I say. “It’s not necessary. Most of my work involves doing background checks on people applying for certain jobs, and serving court papers on people.”