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About ten minutes later a young woman wearing an impossibly small tomato-red cocktail dress manifested there before me.
“Hi,” she said, climbing up on the stool next to mine.
“Hey.”
She was somewhere around twenty and long. She was definitely pale-skinned, maybe white, maybe there was some of the Far East flowing in her veins. Her arms and legs were shapely but slender. Her eyes were a shade of gray that wanted to be blue. Her face was lean and yet somehow languorous. The whole package hinted at a beauty that was hiding somewhere behind my eyes.
“I’m Emma.” She held out a hand for me to shake.
“I’m Joe.”
Smiling briefly, she asked, “You want a date, Joe?”
“More than anything,” I said.
She smiled, then moved her body in a way that somehow imparted the suggestion that we should leave.
“But,” I said, “I have an urgent meeting that I cannot miss.”
“That’s too bad.” The smile did not fade from her lips. “You would have had a great time.”
Forty-eight minutes passed before a handsome and blond young man came through the entrance door. He wore a short-sleeved medium-blue tee and black trousers.
The young man walked up to me.
“Is this seat taken?” he asked of the stool that Emma had tenanted earlier.
“Not at all.”
He settled and smiled.
“Travis Woller,” he said.
“Joe Oliver.”
The bartender walked down to our end of the bar.
“What can I do you for?” he asked Travis.
“Scotch, neat, whatever you got on the second shelf from the top.”
After the mixologist went off to pour this drink, I asked, “You from around here, Mr. Woller?”
“No, I’m Chicago bred. You?”
“New York.”
“Manhattan?”
“Brooklyn.”
After taking in the environs around the bar, the young man said, “I like the city.”
Just then the bartender delivered his drink.
“Different than LA,” I said, running out of conversation.
I didn’t know if this guy was just friendly, looking for some kind of pickup, or if he was somehow there for the same reason I was.
