It was raining outside and Stock Bar’s door hung open. I watched silver stripes pelt past the lamp posts on Saint Catherine, rose-coloured balloons strung up and neon-lit the length of the Village.

A few city saplings lowered their gowns and as I watched their leaves drip and smelled ozone shift in the night air, and as street air swirled in to us carrying its fragrance of drenched sidewalks, Sophie said, “Your pupils just dilated a bit.”

“I love the rain,” I said. “I’m charged by wet bark and shining leaves. By a wet street. By the thought of getting out of this sad place and walking down that street alone.”

“No, you’re having a response here, with men, that you never had when we went to watch women.”

“You are not correctly observing the evidence.”

“I’m trying to get you to admit something about why you’re clinically depressed and why you can’t even begin to function in the real world. Did you or did you not hire me to investigate?”

Sophie and I watched the next dancer whilst turned away from each other with our arms folded. I liked this one least. His face wore an expression I found irrelevant to his movements, incongruous. He had an agenda outside this room, beyond this world, but I knew as I watched his face that he’d never reach a place where he might fulfill that agenda. He knew it too, I think. He hated every last man of us in the room.

The old man at the front took this in. He was interested. He had been similarly disillusioned, but long ago. Love, or beauty, or tenderness, or whatever it was, had gone. The old spectator now blew the dancer a kiss and laid a hundred-dollar bill on the boards. Some entity had replaced the thing he had lost. A new animal had replaced it. I knew that animal. I knew it from London. I knew it from back rooms of certain houses that I had visited during my worst vapours. They were rooms to which I’d vowed not to return.

“You find men well-made,” insisted Sophie, “but not women.”

“Women’s bodies are less firmly held together,” I admitted. “But how many times do I have to tell you it is not these dancers’ bodies I find informative or arresting? Can you not decipher their faces? What’s real up there now, with that one? His anger or his innocence? Are both true? Is one a fable? Has any of us ever owned innocence? Help me look at him and decide—the constant changing of his face fascinates and unsettles me—who is he?”

“You want me to read his face?”

“Yes! I’m trying to…”

“You’ve been looking at the dancers’ faces this whole time.”

“Yes.”

Sophie took a swig of her screwdriver and thumped back in her seat. “Jimmy B, no one cares about their faces.”

—