I stare far too long at the woman’s image reflecting in the mirror behind the bar. Even though she’s checking her phone, perhaps monitoring impatiently for updates on someone’s delayed arrival, her torso contracts ever so slightly—unseen arms hugging herself, forcing her shoulders to rise. An unconscious defense, perhaps. But not overt enough to make me avert my gaze. I suppose I’ve become something of an expert on male gazing, my own at least, and how much lingering is allowable. And since there are five stools (all empty) between us, my calculations allow me to extend the duration. If the Pistons game was projected on the tv screen instead of muted CNN pundits and the dizzying scroll underlying them, I probably could carry on for hours.

She’s wearing workout clothes, at least above her waist, but she looks like a serious practitioner of yoga or one of the newer, more trendy fitness crusades. Perhaps an instructor, a trainer. Something post-Pilates but not so recent as barre. I’m hoping it’s some version of a stripper pole workout. In any case, it looks like she’s just come from class. Her face is flushed and her pale hair disheveled and dented from where it had been held back by a rubber band or scrunchie. She should be sipping a banana-spinach smoothie at some juice bar instead of the Maumee Bay IPA the bartender sloshes down in front of her. But I understand why she might have chosen that drink when she reaches across the bar to hand him her credit card. Previously hidden, she sports an extravagant floral tattoo that decorates her arm, burgeoning from bicep to elbow.

To investigate further, I walk over to the bathroom, though I don’t need to take a piss, and after flushing twice, in case it can be heard outside the stall (and if so, then if it wasn’t heard the first time), I veer close to her as I return to my stool and check out what I’m sure she calls her “ink cover.” I can’t decipher the design, which is mostly blue with a few red highlights, but it looks idiosyncratic enough to have some sort of private symbology. Or perhaps it’s public and known by a certain group of fellow tattoo enthusiasts. I do notice, however, a roundish disk the size of a quarter between the deltoid and biceps brachii. It seems to be convoluted, like a tiny mouse brain—something to show off the skill of the tattoo artist, I wonder? 

I only find out that it’s a peach pit when I strike up a conversation with her. She looks less than half my age, so this is a tricky maneuver—one I have not had much experience with, much less success, enacting. I don’t offer to buy her a drink, which I think is the expected next step; she’s casually taking tiny sips of her draft. Almost licking the cold condensation from the flare of the glass and, oddly I think, letting the bubbles on the cold foam burst across her cheeks. As she leans in, I notice some short, glossy dark-brown hairs stuck to her leotard and I figure they must have come from a pet dog or cat. I reject cat because of her physicality. Nothing dainty or girly about her, no thick-lensed glasses stashed in a handbag, no exotic and expensive lotions, no emergency curling iron either. Her nails are green, the polish chipped in places, and more telling, no hint of scratch marks on her forearm. She has to have a dog, most likely large and playful. “Is that your pooch tied to the lamppost out front?” I ask, when I catch her scanning the room, beginning with my direction. I’m pretty sure there’s no dog outside, but who’ll bother to check, and if someone does, they’ll probably think its owner has simply halted momentarily to light a cigarette or re-tie a shoelace. But I’m right—it is a smart move.

“My dog’s at home,” she says, not seeming to want to prolong what’s not yet

a conversation. 

“Yeah, mine, too,” I say, though I own no dog and never have. Then, to my surprise, she glances over at me. A blond forelock falls across her eyes and she forcefully rakes it back with splayed fingers. I can see a few curly black lines from the tattoo—she’s adjusted her position ever so slightly. “Probably trashing the place as we speak,” she says, in a tone lacking concern or urgency. I don’t expect this and respond with something completely improvised and made up.

“When I leave my Major at home in the evening, I put on a Ravi Shankar CD, letting it repeat over and over. Usually soothes the wild beast in him.”

“Really,” she says, relaxing and rotating a few degrees toward me. “Maybe I should try that. But you’d have to lend me the CD.” 

“He loves those ragas,” I add, unsure if I’m pushing things too far. She might only be pretending to know what I’m talking about. Either way, it seems to be working for the moment. She straightens her posture, arching her back as she turns to the bartender and signals for another draft. I don’t think I’m only wishfully imagining this, but I am getting confused—her playing-along-response and then pre-empting my chance to buy her drink. They seem at odds, one canceling out the other.

“What your’s name,” I soldier on, mangling the possessive pronoun, pronouncing it something like your-zis. I don’t feel safe enough to ask her name and want to make sure it clear that I’m talking about her dog. Now it’s my turn to contract a little, recalling a ballet class I took decades ago, when the teacher, Mircea, exhorted me in his heavily accented Romanian-English, not to scrimp my shoulders. Now in this bar (and not at the barre) I am truly scrimping my shoulders.

Miraculously, she mirrors my vocal awkwardness. “Min-ziz is named Beanie. Her mispronunciation though, unlike mine, seems natural and unselfconscious. With a generous smile and another raking back of her hair, she says, “He’s my beanie-baby.”

At first, I let this pass, unsure what she’s talking about, beyond revealing a treacly side of herself, which is not uncommon among people, especially women, when talking about their dogs. I imagine him rising up on hind legs and thrusting his muzzle into her breasts. And she, leaning in, grasping onto his front paws as if she were about to maneuver him through a tango. Beanie-baby slobbering on her leotard, which is okay, because it’s already sweat-soaked and, moreover, his saliva is not disgusting. 

Then I remember—Beanie Babies! Those tiny cloth dolls filled with those plastic pellets called beans. The fad from more than twenty years ago—somewhere after Cabbage Patch Kids and before Tamagotchies, those tiny Japanese digital pets that required constant care and feeding. I know all about Beanie Babies because my daughter had a few of them. At least I think I remember them. Maybe I should quickly text my ex for verification. But she’d somehow intuit the situation and take up too much valuable time mocking me. Then there’s my daughter, but I don’t generally get in touch with her regarding non-essential (read financial) matters. Besides, she’s been decidedly non-nostalgic lately, at least since she’s moved to Brooklyn. As I recall, there must have been hundreds of different ones, and after a while, adults as well as kids went about furiously collecting them. My daughter was obsessed with them, but we couldn’t afford the one she really wanted. For her, it was the Royal Blue Elephant Beany Baby or nothing! For weeks that’s all she could talk about and refused to eat dinner for three days when I suggested that perhaps we could buy one of the counterfeit ones that had recently flooded the market—five bucks instead of five hundred. Therefore, I figure that this woman is probably around my daughter’s age, since the fad only lasted a few years. I determine that my more than second-knowledge of Beanie Babies could provide a real opportunity to make inroads with her, but I save it for later. The same goes for dogs—and her dog specifically—to revive any pause in conversation immediately. So, I cast that easy path aside too, at least for the moment and go straight for the tattoo. She’s already explained, to the bartender at least, after admiring each other’s upper arm ink, that the red object in the center of her floral display is a peach pit. He seems to understand its significance immediately and nods. More likely, he simply doesn’t care about meanings and doesn’t feel the need to go further. I feel that the ambiguity of the moment provides an opening for me. By now, it’s almost become a three-way conversation, two guys and one girl, and whatever erotic undercurrents have been damming the conversation, now float to the surface. Reticent, I jump in, trying to create as little splash as I could.

“Peach pit,” I say, stressing the alliteration.

“That’s right,” she says. “You know it, like in eat a peach.”

I do not know but don’t admit it. The bartender keeps nodding as before, so it’s impossible to tell if he also doesn’t have a clue what she’s referring to, or if he just doesn’t care. Our lack of recognition or excitement seems to irk her, and she says more forcefully, “Eat a peach.” And as she says this, she sticks out her jaw and twists her mouth, making some sort of gesture that I can only identify and rock and roll-ish. As if her face by itself reiterates the sign of the horns. “The Allman Brothers, you dipshidiots!” The bartender backs off, presumably to maintain his indifference. 

“Shit,” I say, realizing I probably should imitate her intensity by adding a “yeah,” making it “shit yeah!” But I can’t, I hate the Allman Brothers and their ball-busting jams. The peach reference sounds familiar, but I can’t conjure up the song and I’m relieved that bars no longer have jukeboxes. That would involve a prolonged search for quarters and since I rarely carry cash, and never weigh down my pockets with change, it might seem too futile. And ultimately disappointing. The peach pit discussion, though, does provide access to her name, Johna, when the bartender, who seems to already know her, asks, “who the fuck are the Allman brothers, Johna?” I suspect her parents were hoping for a boy, intending to name him John, and this is what they ended up with. Here in the Midwest, this isn’t uncommon—both the wish for a boy as well as the feminization of a popular boy’s name: Justina, Michaela, even Kevina are all names that I recall from my daughter’s kindergarten class. I can’t be sure this is actually the case with Johna, though, as I look at the way she rests her elbows on the bar. I’m pretty certain that while I was driving my daughter to ballet class, her father was driving her to gymnastics or soccer.

“Greg Allman best damn blues guitarist ever—in my humble opinion, even better than Jeff Beck or Eric Clapton,” she says, pausing, and then adding, “Well maybe B.B. King or Buddy Guy’s better.”

“Hell, yeah,” I declare, getting into the mood. Before I stop myself and realize how everything I’ve been thinking about Johna seems off the mark. These guys were popular forty years ago and the only way I know about them was from following the lead of one of my college English profs, who claimed that when he was taking a semester off, he discovered Skip James (or was it T-Bone Walker?) playing in a roadhouse in in some Mississippi back bayou and hooked him up with Jac Holzman at Electra Records. So how is it possible that Johna, this twenty-something fitness instructor from my small Midwest town, would know about Muddy Waters, B.B. King, Buddy Guy? At this point, I won’t be surprised if she also has a collection of Electra L.P.s. or a signed copy of Leroi Jones’ Blues People. I’m reluctant to take this discussion beyond eating peaches and the peach pit; I fear that any further revelations might be even more piercing. The immediate and perhaps obvious explanation is that she inherited her father’s tastes and predilections. But even that theory has its weaknesses: the tattoo for one. 

I’m not sure how to proceed, but then again, I don’t have a plan or a strategy or even a clear goal and outcome in the first place. I’ve done this before and I usually end up leaving after downing a single beer. I know I should do the same now, but something roots me to the stool, which in turn, seems rooted in the floor. Maybe bolted is a better term, since that at least contains its opposite—bolt, what I know I should do but can’t. I only dropped by the bar because I was walking through my neighborhood and thought that it might be nice to sit for a few minutes, sip some craft beer or other (which I would never do at home) and catch a few minutes of political posturing on CNN. Or MSNBC. Even Fox, for that matter. a way of checking on–and checking—my limited tolerance for right-wing blather. Knowing full well that anyone else at the bar will be cheering on, even if it’s only internally, whoever is promoting their despicable agenda. I would of course appear to remain neutral or at least mildly sympathetic, a survival stance I’ve been adopting for the past year, ever since the big lay-off and the occasional panic attack, which I’m terrified might grip me any moment. Continuing on, however, seems to be staving it off…for now.

She slides down from her stool and heads for the bathroom. Instead of following what I’m positive will be the sight of her firm ass, I keep my eyes focused straight ahead—not even trying to catch the final steps of her short trek in the bar mirror. I ponder the age gap between us, realizing that I’m putting the cart of desire ahead of the horse of mutual attraction. (Though it might make more sense to switch around the vehicle and the tenor, quickly recognizing that I’m  actually doing nothing more unliterary than messing around with an idiom—I’m that discombobulated.) The aforementioned gap translates to something like me being twice her age: her twenty-five to my fifty. And that gap, like the gap in a sparkplug –what my father called me once when I was in Little League and hit a home run, which should only have been a double, but I distinctly remember him shouting from the stands: “Way to be a sparkplug,” to which my older brother responded, “Yeah, but it still doesn’t close the scoring gap.” Now, even if I do adjust the gap—the age gap—by using micrometers and grinding wheels, the most generous adjustment might be her being thirty, and me passing for forty-five, but that still seems to be a gap too monumental to bridge. By the time she returns to her seat, mounting it from the back by placing her two hands at the front and effortlessly hoisting her ass onto the stool, as if it were a pommel horse, I regain most of my composure.

I figure it’s time to bring up Beanie Babies again. “So, your pooch is really named after Beanie Babies,” I say. “You know, my daughter had scores of them. I never understood the appeal. Then again, I collected baseball cards when I was a kid.”

“Oh, yeah,” she says, “I still have about a hundred of them. Most in my parent’s attic, but I still have a few in my apartment.”

“Prominently displayed, I assume.” I’m thrilled to have directed the heretofore halting and meagre conversation in this direction. My chest tingles and at the same time I’m relieved that she’s now undoubtedly aware of the age difference between us and the fact that I have a daughter around her age. There’s no subterfuge on my part; it’s all out in the open, at least these aspects. I push things further. Somehow if I’ve been displaying some sort of inappropriate knowledge about or familiarity to dolls or articles of child’s clothing, I might be entering the cordoned off realms of perversity. But Beanie Babies, no way!

“My dad almost scored Iggy the Iguana for me. I think he got involved in some kind of bidding war. He lost out to a collector at the last minute, he claims.”

“I’m sure he felt terrible about that.”

“I know he did, because he spent the next week building a house for my Beanie Babies. Only I had so many they couldn’t fit. I still have it. Now I keep…you know…other things in it.”

I can’t help but be intrigued. I sense a certain self-conscious coyness in the way she pauses slightly before softening and lowering her voice for “other things,” I’m feeling pulled into some inchoate interplay in which she seems as activated as I am. 

“What could possibly cohabit with all those Beanies.” I ask, unaware until the word cohabit has inadvertently slipped into a space originally meant for co-exist. I expect this to go unnoticed, although I suspect that cohabit has long ceased to carry suggestive implications. More like a term from the census or government bureaucracy. A term as de-sexed now as bachelor. 

“Oh, they cohabit alright, “she says, “I bet they’re cohabiting right now, while I’m sitting here.” I’m still unconvinced convinced that our banter is leading anywhere. I figure it’s probably close to running its course, but I try one more maneuver.

“Do you think you need to check on them? Intervene before something untoward happens?” I ‘m still cautious (too cautious, I think) to keep things within the compass of ambiguity. I need this escape hatch.

“Yeah,” she says, facing me for the first time, her face flushed and her peach pit in full view. “I think we should go check on them.” I jolt in my seat, though I’m sure it only registers as a slight twitch. I’m certain that I used you in terms of her checking, and it’s her doing—swapping it out for we. “Besides,” she adds, dryly, “my dog needs to be walked.” 

“Yes,” I say, thinking, after a pause. After all, this is what I want…this is what I want to want.

Her apartment is only two doors down from the bar. A third-floor walkup—her bounding up, barely touching the banister, and me, struggling to keep up. Inside, I wait by the door, on the outside of the threshold. Her dog goes crazy, barking, spinning in circles, leaping up to lick her offered face. “Get in here and shut the door,” Johna barks at me and then in the same voice she tells her dog, “I’ll get to you in a minute, so calm down.” Of course, he doesn’t, but I’m impressed, having recently read that talking to your dog like it’s a person is a sign of high intelligence. This helps, since I’m still unsure, not only about Johna’s intellectual capabilities but also about my own mental and physical resolve to persevere. I enter her living space cautiously, happy that the dog hasn’t noticed me yet, still consumed with greeting its owner. Just when I think this wild display is about to turn into a wrestling match between them, Beanie notices me. I panic, because I’m not really uncomfortable around dogs, and yet, I’ve already represented myself as a dog-owner and a dog-lover. I’m only saved from having to turn away from Beanie’s onslaught when Johna slips in between his upraised paw and my outstretched protecting hands to fasten his leash. “That was a close collar,” I say, hoping that my pun will mask my feelings toward dogs. Without commenting, Johna wraps the leash-leather around her wrist and for a moment, I imagine her winding Tefillin around her forearm. I also glance across the room and immediately spot the Beanie Baby house her father constructed for her some twenty years ago. There isn’t a single Beanie Baby in it or on top of it. Instead, there are candles, a whole stockpile of them, all different sizes and colors. I tell her I’ll wait for her outside—wanting a few seconds, at least, to process this information. I realize that she might be playing along just as much as I am, substituting facts and information as a way of prolonging the momentum of our encounter—approaching the hour mark by now. I’m okay with my own machinations but somehow her willingness to respond with her own gambits distresses me. I don’t expect authenticity from myself; I do, however unfair and hypocritical, expect it from her.

All this changes, or has the potential to change, when Johna pushes against me, maneuvering Beanie in place between us. Since he’s a large dog—I have no idea what breed, though I’m pretty sure he’s neither a German Shepherd like Rin Tin Tin nor a collie like Lassie—he provides a gentle cushion from our ankles to our waists. And surprisingly, he seems to find the placement pleasing, breathing deeply in a way that a cat might purr. Johna pushes up against both of us, giving me (at least) the weird sensation of grinding against the side of the dog, while leaning in so that I can feel the strain of her breasts against my chest. We seem to be about the same height, though I’m pretty sure she’s perched on toes, her head titled a few degrees back to allow me to kiss her from what feels like a position of dominance. I do—or we both do simultaneously. But she kisses back, less gently, then harder, and pushes open my mouth with her tongue. When I pull away, she seems startled. Her eyes dart around for a moment, and then settle on my throat. Beanie remains still; he’s either enjoying his comfy place between us or as confused as I am. I gaze down at the flesh-line of her crooked part, almost an intentional zigzag, with the quarter inch strip of unbleached dark hair on either side of this dividing line. It looks to me like a road set up as an obstacle course.  

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