10 #3
The blond glanced at his smartwatch. “My God… it’s late!”
His friends caught the lifeline instantly and began patting their pockets, pretending sudden urgency. “Yeah, super late!”
“What time was Bruce’s flight landing?”
“Half an hour ago, I think.”
“Crap, we gotta run.”
The blond shot to his feet, shoved the chair back under the table with fake haste, and, in one last theatrical flourish, kissed the back of Tess’s hand. “Sweethearts, I hate to leave you, but a friend’s waiting.”
And just like that, with a diplomatic press-conference smile and a trail of cologne, he evaporated. All three of them, in sync, like a special ops unit on strategic retreat.
Tess followed them with her gaze, unmoving.
“Well,” I said, looking around smugly, “at least it’s a great way to score the best tables in the house.”
Tess turned to me, amused, and burst into laughter. Not the slightest dent in her ego. If anything, she seemed… energized.
“And now?” I asked.
“I’m not finished with my human test subjects,” she replied serenely.
She rose with calculated slowness, as if stepping onstage for the next act .
At the bar, a man sat alone. Mets cap pulled low over his forehead, slightly wrinkled plaid shirt, a glass of whiskey in hand.
He sipped it slowly, with the look of someone who’d had a long day, a long week, or maybe just a long life.
His eyes carried Monday afternoon energy—dropped right into the middle of a trendy Thursday night.
What was he even doing in a place like this?
Tess slid onto the stool next to him, crossed her legs, and, pretending to address me, spoke in a tone perfectly calibrated: loud enough to be overheard, but not so loud as to seem intentional. “There’s a sharp odor here.”
She let a couple of seconds pass, with the timing of an actress. Then she casually turned toward the man. “Would you care for a hint of lavender?”
And as if it were the most natural thing in the world, she offered him a handkerchief—embroidered, and reeking of something that seemed to have crawled out of a grandmother’s dresser drawer. Maybe linen spray. Maybe incense. Maybe something that should’ve gone extinct around 1983.
The man took it between two fingers, hesitant, the way one handles a damp tax notice. He placed it gently on the counter, then gave her a polite smile—the kind reserved for people who might be armed.
Perhaps the suggestion that he smelled had… thrown him off a little .
So Tess, with the instinct of a pilot correcting mid-flight, tried to recalibrate. “Your profile has such noble geometry,” she said, “it makes me want to sketch it in charcoal.”
She delivered the line while gazing at him sideways, with the rapt expression of a bohemian painter who’s just spotted a tormented soul inside a tired bartender.
The embroidered handkerchief—the one saturated with eau de great-grandmother’s closet—still lay on the counter, ignored, perhaps slightly feared.
The Mets guy, still uncertain about what tone of conversation he’d stumbled into, made an attempt: “Can I get you a drink?”
It sounded less like an offer than a plea for an armistice. Maybe he hoped that, with a glass in her hand, she’d stop speaking as though she were performing a theatrical monologue on the existentialism of aquiline noses.
But Tess, of course, would not bow to such banality. “I’m sorry,” she replied softly, “I don’t drink with strangers. Only with kindred spirits.”
He stared at her for half a second.
Then he stood up.
He didn’t even finish his beer. Left it there, still half full, and walked away quickly—as though he’d just realized he was part of something he’d end up telling his therapist about .
Third attempt.
She locked onto a man sitting alone near a column: hipster-barber mustache, loud floral shirt, and Christmas socks. Unfazed, Tess glided toward him like an apparition. At first, he smiled. Polite. Open. Maybe even hopeful. But it didn’t last.
“Have you ever felt watched by a ghost?” she asked, voice low, almost hypnotic.
“Excuse me?”
“I get that feeling with you,” she continued, staring at him as if she were reading something ancient and painful in his aura. “As if you died in another life… and I came here to reclaim you.”
His eyes widened, stunned, as if he’d just been dragged into a live episode of Ghost Whisperer . He faked a phone call with the acting skills of a C-list commercial audition, then hurried away with his phone to his ear and his gaze lost in the void.
Meanwhile, I was sipping my gin and tonic with the slow, methodical pace of someone downing a liquid sedative. I wondered how much longer New York’s male population could withstand this before sounding the alarm.
Fourth attempt.
A film student, the kind who thought Fight Club was a life philosophy. Tess slid onto the seat next to him with the natural ease of someone who’d been cast for the role.
“Your eyes are full of unspoken regrets,” she began, her voice velvety and dramatic.
He stared at her, struck. “Really?”
“Yes. Like… you once wrote a poem, and then burned it. Didn’t you?”
He thought for a moment, rummaging through his memories for something tragic enough. “No, but… I did make a short film once, and then deleted it.”
Tess nodded gravely.
“It’s the same thing. I felt it. I read your creative scar in your posture.”
He looked spellbound. Ready to open up, to confess, to reveal his full artistic pain. But right then, like a last-minute rewrite of the script, a friend showed up: baggy jeans, self-cut bangs, pure indie muse energy.
She grabbed his hand and, with a complicit smile, whisked him away.
“Sorry,” he said with a half-shrug. “I was waiting for her.”
Game over.
Tess returned to the bar without the slightest hint of frustration. Heels still perfect, makeup untouched, dignity polished to a mirror shine.
“Well?” I asked, as she tapped her fingers lightly against her glass with serene composure .
“I’m incredibly pleased with the outcome of my test,” she replied.
“As in…?”
She looked at me. “Bea, it should have turned out this way! This is a manual for conquering Doomed Artists, not submissive office drones! An opium poet downing wine from a golden chalice doesn’t react the same way as an accountant from New Jersey!
The ego of a visionary demands a higher challenge. It’s pure alchemy.”
“So the warm-up test with the men is… over?”
Tess raised her glass in a ceremonial gesture, as if consecrating a magic potion under the full moon.
“Splendidly over, I’d say!”
And she toasted.
To herself, naturally.