Reverse Vesper

She was lying about her name. She had been lying about her name for the entire affair.

He had known from the second week. A letter had come to the hotel for a woman with a different name, and she had taken it without flinching, and he had watched her not flinch, and he had decided, then, not to mind.

There was nothing about the affair that was true. The city was not her city. The work she said she did, she did not do. The husband she said was dead was, he suspected, alive in a small green country he had never been to. The drink she liked was the one he had taught her to like on their first night, which had also been a lie, because he had not invented it, and the bartender who had invented it had been dead for six years, and he had told her the bartender was his uncle, and the bartender had not been his uncle, and she had said, “How lovely,” and had meant nothing by it, and had known he meant nothing by it, and that had been the beginning.

The drink was pale. It tasted of pandan, which she had not known the word for, and of cucumber that had been sitting in vinegar long enough to forget what it was, and of gin underneath everything the way gin is under everything in a certain kind of life.

“Tell me your real name,” he said once, in the fourth month, in a room above a square in a city neither of them was from.

“No.”

“Why not.”

“You wouldn’t like it.”

“I might.”

“You wouldn’t. It is a small name. It is the name of a girl in a small town. You did not come here for a girl in a small town.”

“No.”

“Then.”

He did not ask again. He poured her a drink. She drank it. She watched him over the rim of the glass with eyes that were, he thought, the only thing about her that had never lied, and that was possibly because eyes could not, and possibly because hers had simply forgotten how, somewhere in a childhood she would never tell him about.

When she left him, she left a note. The note was on the table by the window in the apartment in the city he was renting under a name that was also not his. The note was three lines. The note was signed with the name she had never used outside of bed.

He kept the note. He did not show it to anyone. He did not, for some weeks, read it again, and then he read it once, and then he did not read it again.

He went, after, to the bar. The bar was a bar he had taken her to twice. The bartender was a small man with very clean hands, and the bartender did not ask any questions, and did not need to.

“The usual.”

“For one.”

“For one.”

The bartender made it. He made it the way he had made it the two times before, with the gin first and the pandan vodka after, and the bianco cool and round in the middle, and the slice of pickled cucumber laid on the rim like a small green lie a man tells himself in the morning.

He drank.

“She’s not coming,” the bartender said.

“No.”

“Was that her name.”

“Which.”

“The one you used to call her.”

He thought about it. He thought about it for the time it took to finish the drink and to order another and for the second drink to arrive in front of him, pale and cool and faintly green and faintly sweet and faintly nothing at all.

“It was a name.”

“All right.”

“It was the only one I had.”

The bartender nodded. The bartender wiped a glass that did not need wiping. Outside, the square was filling with the early evening, and the lamps were coming on, one and then another and then another, and somewhere in a small green country a woman with a small true name was sitting down to a dinner he would never see, and he raised the glass, once, to nobody, and he drank.