3b.

Thomas sat alone, gripping a tall glass of orange juice with vodka between his two hands. He stared down at an angle towards the floor behind the bar, and his lips moved, mouthing a certain phrase that I couldn't hear. I was sitting four seats away from Thomas, and I held my head up with my right hand, my elbow resting on the bar, staring directly at his face. There was one woman sitting in one of the seats between me and Thomas, who occasionally glanced nervously in my direction, assuming possibly that I was staring at her.

But forget about that for a moment; there was something else that, as I thought to myself, I should mention before I got into the details. Not long before Thomas began his muttering, he and I had been talking amicably. The woman, whom I just mentioned, was rehearsing lines for a play, sitting at the bar with a script in one hand and a bottle of beer in the other, making wild gestures that sent small spouts of liquid shooting from the mouth of the bottle. She was intoxicated, I could tell, and I ignored her while Thomas and I raised our voices over the issue of filmmakers.

'Kurosawa,' I had said, before slamming my heel with swift force onto the tops of his toes. Thomas had shrieked, of course, before shouting 'you fucker! You only watch that bullshit because you're fucking a Japanese guy' to which I had replied 'well fuck you, and fuck Fellini too,' before stomping on his foot for a second time and downing a glass of rocks with Jack Daniels and seltzer.

The woman in question, the one who was busying herself with the silver stage, had shambled in not fifteeen minutes before Thomas had hurt his feet. At the time, of course, I was sitting right next to my friend and doing my best to recite the words to a famous poem about a black bough. He was competing with me in volume, his melodic voice tracing out the libretto to Pierrot Lunaire, even though his German was clearly not up to snuff. The woman, in her own way, had taken a series of footsteps, none of which looked like they logically followed the step that had come before, on her way to the seat directly adjacent to mine. She had then perched there for a few moments, getting her bearings, before reaching into her lavish and exaggeratedly oversized red wool coat and presenting a copy of the script to something or other by Arthur Miller. "It's for a class," she had said, before we had even had the chance to ask, or in fact before we had even stopped our shouting to gaze in her direction. Upon her exclamation, however, we had stopped for a moment, examined the script with decided disinterest, and then begun our conversation about film directors, a bad idea because I knew from experience that Thomas is a man who is not only very defensive of his tastes (a fixation on romanticism), but also oblivious of his propensity towards offensive behavior.

The fact is, I was fucking a Japanese guy at the time. But I was offended more by his brevity than by the truth or untruth of his statement. (The fact is, when he said it, he did not even know for sure, other than hearsay based on snippets of phone conversation he had heard through the walls, whom I was fucking or how.)

I stared at myself in the bathroom mirror for a little while, losing myself in thoughts like "are those really my eyes? Is that really my face?" before returning to the bar and deciding, against my better judgement, to sit four seats away from my friend. The woman in question had begun reading aloud at this point. From the sound of it, she played the part of a man in the play, and a very down-and-out one, at that. It was while she was reading, competing with James Brown, who was playing over the bar's speakers, and with the fifteen or so other people who were walking aimlessly about on this Tuesday night, filling up the space behind my head in what I imagined resembled a room full of balloons slowly drifting and bouncing about, that Thomas began to mutter a phrase to himself. And the more I examined his face, (ignoring, mind-you, the woman sitting between us, as many times as she glanced nervously in my direction,) the more certain I became that he was, in fact, repeating one phrase again and again. Again and again.

'Thomas,' I called out, and he looked up from the floor and stared me in the eye, all the while continuing to mutter this certain phrase again and again, and thus we sat, the woman rattling off one-sided dialogue, for close to a minute, before I raised my glass of rocks and seltzer and Jack Daniels and he raised his glass of orange juice and vodka, and we each tilted our heads back and drank them.