Week 2

      As I stepped through the threshold of the dive bar, I feel a certain unpleasant wetness in the toe of my right stocking.  The eyes of at least ten patrons made their way up and down my body as I awkwardly sidestepped the pool of lager gathering in a divot just past the door.  The shoes were Chanel, hand made for me at the atelier in Paris.  They were simple black tweed slingbacks- nothing flashy from a sartorial perspective, but they cost an arm and a leg and now the right one was soaked in foul-smelling liquid.  I was out of my element and out of the Upper West Side.

      "What's good pussycat?" echoed across the small bar from a particularly round and hairy man with exceptional vocal projection sitting at the corner of the counter.  Laughs rippled down the bar, and I caught a shake of the head from the mustachioed bartender.

      I didn't care.  Conrad was out of town on business, which of course meant he was doing God-knows-what with some poor, naive 20-year-old in Chicago.  Again, I didn't care.  He was a good enough man when he was home, and not every woman in this city could say that.  

      I ran a freshly manicured hand through my hair and marched up to an empty seat at the bar.

      "Gin and tonic," I muttered cooly as the bartender approached me.  He nodded and started fiddling with the bottles laid out in neat lines against the mirrored back wall.

      "I'm telling you Dean! There's no way that interpretation of Zarathustra is in any way aligned with the modern understanding," I heard the man occupying the seat next to me enthusiastically posit to the gentleman to his right.  In the dark room, I could barely make out their features in the reflection of the dirty mirror, but their conversation was the most interesting thing I had encountered that day and I was transfixed.