A Small Indiscretion by Jan Ellison

seven.
    “I hate to leave you.”
    “I’m fine.”
    His voice would become throaty and tender. “Are you certain you won’t allow me to give you a lift?”
    “I’ll stay for one more beer.”
    “Let me give you money for a taxi home.”
    “I can take the tube.”
    Then as soon as he was gone, I was bereft. I told myself there was no sense staying on drinking alone and waiting for something to happen. I told myself, each time, I would finish just the one pint. But when I finished, it was difficult to leave the comfort of the pub, the guarantee that the hours of the evening would pass without any conscious effort on my part to fill them. I’d order the pint, and drink it, and the by-now-familiar curtain would drop, cutting me off from worry and fear and pain. The matter of why I was so far from home. The situation with Malcolm. The question of college. All that was swept behind the curtain, and the present moment became whatmattered. I grew confident in my own intelligence, and wit, and beauty, and I often simply stood up and took a stool at the bar and talked to whoever was next to me, and the night went on from there.
    Sometimes, the curtain failed to drop, and the drinking backfired, sharpening my awareness of being alone instead of softening it, and making me hungry for human contact—for just one man, or a woman, even, to sit down beside me. But that hunger crippled me, and on those evenings I did not have the courage to speak to anybody at all.
    One night, still feeling the effects of a hangover from the night before, I vowed to myself I would not drink after Malcolm left. My father was an alcoholic, after all. I, more than most people, needed to watch myself. I told myself I would let the unfinished pint of beer sit on the table in front of me, and if I could do that, I would have won, and there would be no need for further vigilance. I made a little game of it. I watched the minutes passing. I made it four minutes without taking a drink, then five, six, seven. I gained strength with each full rotation of the minute hand on my watch. Ten minutes passed, then fifteen. The foam began to flatten. The pub filled up. I began to feel silly taking up a whole booth alone, so I moved with the untouched beer to a stool at the bar. The foam in my glass was thinning but the bubbles were still rising, propelled by some mysterious private force, like waves beating the shore.
    The man sitting on the next stool spoke to me. He began to tell me about a problem he was having with his tooth, which was crumbling, causing him pain when he drank something too cold or too hot. He went so far as to hook his finger in his mouth and pull his lip back to show me the damage.
    “Do you need a filling?” I said. “Or a root canal?”
    “Dunno,” he said. “Haven’t been to a dentist.”
    “Why not?”
    “Dunno,” he said, laughing wildly.
    I turned away. I did not want to become involved with him, and I was intent on not drinking my beer, which required all my concentration. I waited in silence until I had been sitting not drinking for exactly an hour, and I told myself now I could go. Now I would take the tube home and walk the blocks from the station to Victoria House alone. But what sort of reward was that for having won?
    I took a deep drink from my glass and turned again to the man next to me. A few of his friends arrived, and they all took an interest in me. There were three or four of them and they made sure there was always a beer in front of me. Eventually I found they could make me laugh, and a breezy camaraderie rose among us. When the pub closed, we went on to a “club,” which seemed to be only a name for a pub licensed to stay open when the rest shut at eleven.
    Hours later, when the club closed, we all stood outside in a taxi queue, the idea being that I would come along with them to wherever it was they were headed, a flat where we could continue to drink. But when we reached the top of the queue, I found myself