Bear Cat

She came in at half-past midnight with two girls in her wake, the way weather comes in — without asking, and changing what was already in the room. The bartender, who had loved three women and married none of them, stopped pouring the drink he was pouring. He poured hers instead. Vanilla. Peach. A small cruelty of passionfruit at the back. The bubbles went up the side of the glass like something trying to escape.

“She’ll bite,” he said, and slid it across.

The two girls did not laugh. They knew already. They had been her girls for the better part of a year, and being her girls was an education in what could be done to a man in a single evening with very little effort and a great deal of dress.

Her name, for the purposes of the evening, was Caroline. By Tuesday it might be something else. She was twenty-three years old and had been since she was eighteen, and intended to be for some time yet.

The first young man came over at one. He had inherited his shoes, his watch, and his confidence, and he gave all three to her inside an hour. The second was a married banker from Hartford who told her, with the wet solemnity of the very drunk, that she reminded him of a girl he had known before the war. She had not been alive before the war. She thanked him anyway and took the cash from his clip while he was looking at her mouth.

The third was the one who almost mattered. He was younger than the others, and quieter, and he did not buy her anything for nearly forty minutes, which she found interesting. He asked her what she did. She said she ruined people. He laughed. She did not. He stopped laughing.

She let him kiss her once, in the corridor by the cloakroom, where the light was the colour of weak tea. She let him put his hand on her waist. She let him believe, for the space of perhaps ninety seconds, that he was the exception. Then she took the billfold from his jacket without changing the rhythm of the kiss, tucked it into the top of her stocking, stepped back, and smiled at him the way one smiles at a child who has done something very nearly clever.

“Bear cat,” she said, almost kindly. “You’ll know it next time.”

By three she was gone. The two girls went with her. The cloakroom attendant said later they had been laughing in the lift, but not the way girls laughed — more like men coming off a winning hand.

The three young men stayed at the bar. The young one, the quiet one, sat at the end where the light was worst and ordered the drink she had been drinking. He paid with the loose change from his trouser pocket, which was all she had left him. He tasted vanilla. He tasted peach. He tasted, at the back of the throat, something sharp and tropical and entirely without mercy, and he understood, for the first and last time in his life, what had happened to him.

He ordered another. He ordered a third. He sat there until the bartender turned the lights up, hoping the drink would taste, eventually, of her.

It never did. It tasted of itself, which was the trick. She had only ever tasted of herself. He had simply been unprepared, as all of them had been unprepared, for a woman who arrived already finished — already her own ending — and who left the room exactly as bright as she had found it, less three pairs of very good shoes.