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so desired, you could stroll out and gaze at the scenery while waiting for the chef to drown your lobster in cheap sherry before boiling it to death so as not to leave the look of horror and shock on its face.
    Another bopping waitress came over to take our drink order. Janine ordered a Dewar’s on the rocks, as she had when we met. Why break tradition? I thought. “Tanqueray and tonic, with lime please.”
    “You’re a purist, aren’t you?”
    “When it comes to that, yes. Although I’ve been known to indulge in chick drinks under circumstances of extreme duress.”
    “A good Rum Runner on the rocks is hard to come by.
    You should have one of those. Although, I assume you would seek out a bartender whose experience ranged beyond that of a sixteen year old.” She nodded in the direction of our waitress 28
     
    who would someday make stewardess.
    “So, tell me a story.” She lit a cigarette and leaned forward on her elbows, took a drag and handed it to me. I took a drag and thought about what I should say. There was a story there, in that place. It carried with it both wonderful and horrific connotations. I was such a creature of habit. I was already well on my way to baring my soul a bit further, but didn’t know if she wanted to know how fucked up I really was when it came to women.
    “Maggie, I have no delusions about your past,” she said.
    There she was doing it again.
    “Okay.” I was a writer, after all. I figured I’d tell a story, embellish here and there, and she might not even think it was true; she wouldn’t have been the first. Just then the sixteen year old came, bearing drinks and a tray of a dozen raw oysters on ice. The Sandbar was infamous for their oysters. It wasn’t even necessary to have them on the menu. You were automatically given a dozen as an appetizer unless you requested otherwise.
    “An aphrodisiac,” Janine said matter-of-factly and quite intentionally while the waitress was still within earshot.
    I weaved a tale I’d relived in my head over and over for several years.
    “I came here once many years ago when this place was one of my top five most visited haunts. I didn’t live far from here at the time, I was renting an apartment in Belmar with a woman I thought I would grow old with.”
    Janine slurped an oyster and looked into my eyes as if to verify what I’d just said was true. That part was; it still made me flinch a little to bring it up. “Needless to say, we broke up.”
    Thoughtfully she said, “All for the best, I assume.”
    “Well, I wouldn’t be sitting here with you, now would I?” I still wasn’t sure if that was actually all for the best. I doubted it, but continued.
    “I went into a deep depression that lasted for months. It was all I could do to show up for work every day. My days were filled with a variety of pills that ironically kept me alive instead of killing me. After about six weeks, I stopped taking pills and going to work and drank to stay drunk twenty-four hours a day. I came 29
     
    here one night with a load on already, and sat at the bar with a tattered notebook that held every line, thought, and fragment I’d ever written for her or about her.”
    The hard part was over. Switching gears to the much better part of the story, I paused a moment for the oyster Janine held out to me like a ritualistic offering. When I went to take it from her hand, she pushed me away with a finger and held the oyster up to my lips with her own hand. I let it slide down my throat without chewing, and sucked the juice from her fingertips, feeling the eyes of the stewardess bore into the back of my head. I took a long draw from my drink and continued.
    “I was young then, and didn’t have the sexual history I regretfully have now. She was one of only two women I’d ever been with, barring an affair I had when I was seventeen that I try and erase from memory.”
    Janine tilted her head to the side, questioning without speaking.
    “Another story for