sell it if things got really bad. Then, keeping her gait as steady as she could—she’d primed herself with one or two gin and tonics before she left home—she headed down the narrow corridor toward the bar.
It hit her as she paused in the jaundiced light over the inner door. The cigarette smoke and the stale odor of spilled drinks and the urgent murmur of voices, the sidelong glances and equally circumspect feelings that accompanied them. A miasma of frustrated, sexually charged emotions swirled around her as palpably as the bolts of smoke, and against its press all she could do was fasten her eyes on the bar and forge ahead. Fifteen steps, she told herself, that’s all she had to take. Then she could center herself around a tall, cold glass of gin.
Her form-fitting pearl gray suit directed the men’s eyes to her hips,her waist, her breasts, the single open button of décolletage in her white silk blouse. But it was her face that held them. Her mouth, its fullness made even more striking by deep red lipstick that picked up the color of the ruby on her right hand, her eyes, as dark and shiny as polished stone, but slightly blurred, too—anthracite rather than obsidian. And of course her hair, a mass of inky black waves that sucked up what little light there was and radiated it back in oil-slick rainbows. A hundred times she’d had it straightened with the fumy chemicals Boston’s blanched housewives used to relax their hair, a hundred times it had sprung back to curl, and so, in lieu of the elaborately sculpted coifs that helmeted the rangy blondes and brunettes in the room, Naz’s hair was piled against her skull in a thick mass that framed her face in a dark rippling halo. There was too much of it for her to wear one of the pillbox hats that Mrs. Kennedy had made all the rage, so she wore a bandeau instead, perched precariously forward on her head and held in place with a half dozen pins that pricked at her skull.
The girls noticed her too, of course. Their stares were as hard as the men’s, if significantly less sympathetic. It was a Sunday, after all. Business was slow.
“Beefeater and tonic , easy on the tonic,” Naz said to the bartender, who was already setting a chilled Collins glass on the bar. “A splash of Rose’s lime, please. I haven’t eaten anything all day.”
She tried not to gulp her drink as she perched herself on the bar stool, not quite facing the room—that would read as too obvious, too desperate—but not quite facing the bar either. The perfect angle to be looked at, yet not seem to look back. There was the mirror over the bar for that.
She brought her glass to her lips, was surprised to find it empty. That was quick, even for her.
That’s when she noticed him. He’d stationed himself at the darkest corner of the bar, faced his drink like a defendant before a judge. Both hands were wrapped around the stem of his martini and his gaze was aimed directly at the olive at the bottom of the shallow pool. There was a sober expression on his face—
ha!
—as if he regarded what the drink was telling him very, very seriously.
Naz shifted her gaze to the mirror to study him more openly, tried to sort his vibe from the general miasma in the room. A new word, vibe. Part of the hipsters’ jargon, which was creeping into the language like uncracked peppercorns that popped between your teeth. But you didn’t need a special vocabulary to see that something was bothering this guy. A bitter olive that only a river of gin could keep below the surface. The sharpness of his eyes, the broad plain of his forehead below his dark hair, the delicate movement of his fingers all said that he was an intelligent man, but this wasn’t a problem he could solve with his mind. His shoulders were broad, his waist narrow, and, though he hunched over his martini like a dog guarding a bone, his spine was supple, not bowed. So he was athletic, too. But there were some things you couldn’t run away from. Some