Chapter 2 #4
I had no business being inside that place.
I had jeans on. I had a wool coat from a thrift store on Belmont and a bag full of everything I owned in the world.
I had eight hundred and four dollars and forty cents, minus the four-fifty I had spent on Wendell's coffee, minus the two-fifty I had spent on coffee at Intelligentsia.
I had grey knitted gloves a homeless man had washed in someone else's sink.
I had nothing to lose that I had not already lost.
Iwalked toward the queue like a woman who belonged in it.
This was, like the watermark, mostly a matter of commitment.
The people in the line ahead of me were the kind of people who paid a doorman three hundred dollars on a Tuesday because they could, and they were wearing the kind of clothes that announced this fact ahead of them as a courtesy to anyone who might mistake them for ordinary.
I was wearing jeans, a coat I had paid eighteen dollars for, and boots I could run in.
My hair had been cut by me in a gas station bathroom in Indiana three months ago and had grown out into something that, on a better day, could pass for intentional. This was not a better day.
I walked past the back of the line at the unhurried pace of a person heading for the front of it. I did not make eye contact with anyone in the line, because eye contact would have invited a question. I let my gaze land on the bouncers ahead of me as though I had been expected.
There were two of them. The one on the left was younger, taller, and had the carefully neutral face of a man who took the job seriously and was waiting to be promoted out of it. He was the wrong choice. He would go by the list.
The one on the right was wider, older, bearded.
His eyes were doing the constant slow scan that good bouncers’ eyes did, picking up the line, the street, the cars, the line again.
There were soft lines at the corners of his eyes that did not entirely go away even when his face was doing nothing, which was the leftover architecture of a man who had spent a lot of his life smiling. He was the gamble.
I made eye contact with him from six feet out and did not look away.
He clocked me. I watched him clock me. He took in the coat, the jeans, the bag, the absence of a woman in heels next to me, the absence of a partner behind me, the absence of the small confident swagger that came with belonging.
His face did not change. The neutral was professional.
He was waiting for me to declare myself.
I stepped to the rope. I did not stop at the back of the line. Someone behind me said something to a friend that I did not quite catch.
I leaned across the rope toward him. Not close enough to be touched. Close enough that he could hear me at a volume the people in line could not.
I had thirty seconds. I had less than that. I had whatever this man’s tolerance was for one sentence.
“I’m being followed,” I said.
It came out steadier than I expected.
I kept going.
“Brown coat. Dark hair. Half a block back. I’ll pay whatever the cover is. Please.”
I did not say more than that. More than that was begging, and begging would have told him a different story than the one I needed him to hear, the story of a drunk girl avoiding an ex, or a woman in a domestic situation she had walked into of her own volition.
I needed him to hear it as what it was, which was something else.
I held his eyes.
He looked past me.
He did it without moving his head. Just the eyes, the slow scan continuing the way it had been continuing, only now it picked up the half a block behind me with a slightly longer pause than it had on the previous pass.
I did not turn. I could not turn. Turning was what amateurs did.
I held his eyes when they came back to mine, which they did after maybe two seconds.
His face did something I had not been prepared for.
It softened.
He lifted the rope.
He did not say anything that the people in line could parse as a decision. He just lifted the rope and tilted his head, very slightly, toward the door.
“Inside, miss,” he said. Quiet. “Straight to the bar. Tell them Mick sent you.”
The man at the front of the line said something with the word “what” in it. Mick did not look at him. Mick did not break eye contact with me. The younger bouncer registered the handoff and went still in the way a well-trained dog went still when its handler had taken over the situation.
“Thank you,” I said.
I stepped through the rope.
He let it drop behind me.
“Go on, now,” he said, quieter still, almost to himself. “We’ve got it.”
I walked the six steps to the door. The door was opened from the inside by another man whose face I did not have the bandwidth to register.
The noise hit me like water—bass first, in the chest, then the higher layers of it, glassware and laughter and a voice over a speaker laughing at something, and the smell, cologne and bourbon and something darker underneath that I could not place.
Warm air. So much warm air. The kind of warmth that hit you when you came in out of the cold of a Chicago February and made your eyes water for the first ten seconds whether you wanted them to or not.
I stepped inside.
The door closed behind me.