Good evening, my name is Huford. I don’t believe we’ve met before. I’ve worked here for some time now and I know faces but I don’t know yours, and that leads me to think that tonight is your first night at the Bonne Nuit. And of course I would remember a face as distinguished as yours. We’ve had a lot of distinguished faces in this place, between the vases and the building stages, but yours is the kind I’m sure I’ll remember. Distinguished faces have a way of returning here.
And I don’t care if you think it’s pronounced vawwwwzze. A decidedly Greek woman who came here on a rainy evening (what a Greek is doing in a French lounge I haven’t a clue, she must’ve tried everything else already) and she herself, born on an olive orchard—as her story went— said it was pronounced v-A-s, and all the people who said it the other way were self-important Americans who should really be calling them urns if they’d like. “It rhymes with face,” she said. And then she kept talking until three in the morning and the only thing she ordered was a taxi. I have a thousand stories like these.
You see, I’m something of a permanent fixture in the Chateau. Been here for ages. Part of the walls. And I’ve been part of the walls through all the different paint jobs, the remodels, removing the awful floral wallpaper, putting in that glass window you see on the front, the terrible first three weeks it read Chateau Bonne Oui, which a lot of people said wasn’t a completely awful name but you can only imagine the owners disgust at it. Benjamin Yerczek—a Hungarian who spent a little time defending French borders and then fled to America and decided to open a French restaurant. His story is all very kitsch but I suppose he’s kept me in electricity all these years, and light conversation with a couple of transient, distinguished faced people such as yourself. Some might think it’s torturous but really I think it’s quite wonderful, something that comes quite naturally, likely built into me most likely.
I must say you remind me of someone but I can’t put my finger on it. When you walked in the door and Julienne seated you I swore I had seen you before, but I could hardly think of where. And even now, in moments when you tilt your head in this light I get these flashes and I don’t quite know what to think. I’m sure it will come to me. Memories come as the brain relaxes: the next time you forget something, think about something entirely different. You’d be surprised how quickly the thing you want to remember comes back to you. I use this trick all the time. People come in here wanting a story and I have so many that sometimes they get jumbled together. (And between you and me, some stories are just more interesting that way. But of course I wouldn’t do that to you, distinguished looker that you are. I save those tricks for the men that come here with loose ties who reek of apertif and who could give a damn about a good story, they just want to wallow in something. And the female equivalent of a loose tie is a loose tongue, and I quite frankly can’t be bothered to fight trying to tell a story.)
. . . I forgot what we were talking about . . . Well as I say, forget it and it shall return to you. It’s a trick I use. But how to forget it, that’s the question . . . one of my favourite topics actually are the dings that you see around this place—hardly noticeable, Benjamin does a fantastic job of looking after everything here, but there are a few noticeables that have been dinged or scraped by a good story.
For instance, the stain in the corner—if you look past the beam in your way you can see it—well, let’s just say that it involved a sailor and his wife and that it isn’t wine, if you catch my meaning. And there’s a divot caught in the wood along the window sill over along the edge which has been here for ages which Benjamin won’t fix because it was made by a saxophinist by the name of Illinois Jacquet back in the late 50’s. I can’t be bothered with things like music so I had heard of him until he walked through the door to play one Valentine’s evening here. In the throws of a particularly active solo—saxaphones are likely to take solo’s such solos—he turned and knocked his little horn right into the wall there, right along the edge of the window. Two inches to the left and he would’ve taken out the glass. Three weeks after the show he came back and thanked Benjamin because somehow the knock changed the sound of the horn and Mr. Jacquet was quite fond of it, so Benjamin never fixed the ding in the wood. His wife even had to talk him out of putting a commemorative plaque alongside it. She found it slightly gauche, and I quite frankly would have told him the same, but these things take a wife. And then of course there’s the dent in the front doorframe–
That’s it. I remember what we were talking about now. But I was wrong. I’m sorry, let me include you: I was saying you remind me of someone. But you don’t remind me of someone, you remind me of a story, and it’s that story, the dented doorframe. And it’s your hair, something about how it’s parted, you might want to go to the bathroom and look at it because this is one of my favourite stories of this place and I love telling it so go take a break or whatever you need because it would be absolutely horrendous to stop me in the midst of it.
You see what I mean about forgetting it and it coming back to you? I could patent it, sell it to old-folks homes and late-night doctor’s offices and make a fortune.
This was some time ago, though I couldn’t give you an exact year. You see, back in the days of Golden Cinema, and I mean the real Golden years, when the actresses were all dying their hair as close to white so it would look emphatically blonde on screen, the Bonne Nuit was quite the hotspot for several of those years. And you’d see everybody here: writers, agents, directors, producers, actors. That was the death of the whole thing, really, because word got out and then no one could show up without being harrassed by someone pushing a pen for an autograph or worse. I mentioned gauche before, but I’d see every kind of social and cultural abondonement from these people. But this was later on. Initially, it was more like what painters went through in the 60’s, that sort of refined graceful period where they could walk around and talk to their fans, before the hysteria of fame set in and they were just worshipped for their work instead of admired for it.
So this night I’m talking about was dark. Unusually dark, you could see the lights from downtown clear through these front windows, and cars headlights would streak pass the front window and stain the glass and the eye for a few seconds after passing. There was some kind of anniversary happening for the Grauman’s Chinese theater, and even though we’re no where near the thing Benjamin had the idea to put up these awful red Chinese lamps around the store. A way to ingratiate the film industry types I suppose.
It was tastefully done at the very least, so the walls and the tablecloths were all dressed in a tender red light that let the men look distinguished and the women much more dramatic and less cosmopolitan. The Bonne Nuit was relatively empty as I remember it, there was a couple in the far corner of the restaurant, another along the wall, and a man at the bar. Whatever conversation was going on was light, and it looked like it was going to rain. It was that kind of darkness she walked in from at a quarter to midnight.
I’d hardly expect you to have ever heard of her, so I feel mentioning her name would hardly be eloquent and I’d hate to appear like someone who drops names. Suffice it to say that at the time she had been having some small success, and the word around the Bonne Nuit was that she was sure to become the next major star alongside Hepburn and Garbo, but she never did. She walked into the lounge sometime before or after midnight, dressed in a simple cream dress, wearing the mink scarf that must have been passed around the studio because everyone seemed to be wearing the same one, and a hat to match her dress that she’d tipped slightly to show her blonde hair that curled around her neck and came around the right shoulder down to her breast. She couldn’t have walked more than ten-steps that day in the shoes she was wearing, and I now imagine she had gotten her driver to wait for her outside, five steps away, waiting for her to finish her errand for the night because to expect her to walk anywhere more than five feet in those shoes would be analogous to . . . well the sidewalk would hurt her feet.
Anyway, the server boy asked if she would like a table and she waved him off, saying something about the bar, walked into the middle of the lounge and stopped. The two couples, the one in the corner and the other along the wall, stopped talking and watched her. She seemed to be preparing something, going over it in her head, like script lines or instructions for washing her mink scarf. She was meditative. But then her face relaxed, she applied a smile as elaborately coiffed as her hair, and she walked to the bar and stood beside the man who had been drinking alone for the last two hours, leaning her arm along the bar and waving to the bartender. She ordered a gin fizz, a single, and while the bartender busied his hands, she turned to the barfly who kept looking at his reflection in the counter.
“I had my first gin fizz with you. Do you remember?” He kept staring at his reflection. “I remember. It was at Eddie’s downtown and you had to carry me out at the end of the night.” The bartender’s vigorous throttling of the cocktail shaker cut her off, and she took it like she would’ve taken any interruption, with a perfectly disguised disdain that noted to everyone how obviously rude they were being and how adroitly polite she was. The bartender poured the glass, placed it in front of the madame, and went to the far end of the bar to polish the already well-lacqured counter.
“What are you drinking tonight Bernie? I can’t say I’ve ever seen you drinking that before.” The barfly, Bernie, said something only she could hear, though the two couples and myself included were all ears across the lounge. “And how many Singapore Slings have you had tonight?” She watied for his answer and got none. “It strikes me as a comfort drink. I’d never known you to have a need to be comfortable. But I guess there are several things I didn’t know about you. And several things you didn’t know about me.” She took a moment to purse her lips at the edge of the glass, took in not enough to fill the space between her molars, and swallowed the liquor along with the ruse. She kept the cup in her hand, tapping her fingers lightly to keept each from getting too cold.
“I don’t like to admit this to people, but I prefer it when I have large amounts of ice in my drinks, but that’s not the bartenders preference here. But I discovered a trick. When a bartender wants to slow down a man’s drinking, he’ll start putting more and more ice until there’s hardly any alcohol left at all. Just a cup of ice. And who would want to drink something like that?” Again she lifted the cup to her lips, drank a teaspoon, and placed the glass back on the counter, tapping once for good luck on the counter top and then placed it on the coaster. “Does that sound familiar Bernie?”
It was difficult to tell if Bernie said anything or remained silent, both from the quiet and from the absence of a reaction from the actress.
“You see, when I look in your glass, that big ol’ ice cube is floating, but just barely. It’s an artform, I mean a real talent to for a bartender to know how to get the balance just right so the drink is just the right amount of alcohol and just the right amount of cool. Of course, you’re probably good and zingered by now so what would you care.” She tipped her glass back, tapped it on the counter, placed it on the coaster. “But for the good people out there, it’s important Bernie. They don’t want a drink with a lot of ice. They want their liquor. They feel cheated otherwise.”
Bernie the barfly didn’t move.
“And being cheated is an awful thing. I think we both have an understanding of that feeling now.”
Everyone, from the bartender to the couples, probably to the wallpaper to the carpet, was expecting the barfly’s head to snap toward her and to either spit alcohol or fire in her face. It was the tension in the room. But he sat there, staring at the counter, waiting for the last line of dialogue so he could do what he always did, decide what to cut and what to keep, and given the nature of the situation most would end up on the floor anyway.
“I’m wondering if you’ve figured out while you’ve been sitting here floating around in your glass that people didn’t come for you, they came for me. And they got a taste and they’ve haven’t been able to get enough of it. And there ain’t a drink out there where anyone gives a shit about the ice.” She leaned in next to his cheek, her blond curls rubbing the side of his face. “So while all these people have been coming around and lapping me up, I’m wondering if you ever put any thought into how little of me would there have to be left until you couldn’t float around anymore.”
She paused. Slowly pulled back. She kept her eyes on the barfly while she took her drink in hand, took another sip, tap, and placed it on the counter half-empty. She placed a tip worth fifty times the drink beside the coaster and closed her purse, staring, waiting for a response.
She turned towards the door.“Keep cool, Bernie.” And started walking.
The couples watched her walk to the doorway, her smile gone, her face stiff as plaster and porcelain. Three feet from stepping into the street, a block of ice smashed into the doorframe and shattered in the tender light of the chinese paper lamps. The actress turned and found the barfly sitting in the same position he had been in for two hours, his glass empty, his hands dripping. She turned back towards the door, and the shards of ice snapped beneath her shoes. When she opened the door it smelled like rain, but it was as dry outside as the bottom of an umbrella.
She did her best to make it in the film industry but I suppose it just wasn’t enough, and the barfly kept working in the directors chair until he drank himself clear to a coma. That’s the joy of serving people in the film indusry, everything’s so dramatic. I hope you don’t take offense to my comparing you to that story, now that I look at you I’m not sure what made me think of the comparison in the first place. Your hair’s perfectly fine the way it was, in fact I liked it better than that what you went and did with it now.
Looking at the time, I must apologize. You came here for a night alone and I’ve gone and talked all the way through your cocktail. Allow me to give you a reprieve from my babbling, at least for tonight. As I said before, faces such as yours have a way of showing up here again. And if you didn’t like that one, I have more stories of all shapes and colours.
And before I leave you, remember the forgetting trick.
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