STELLA BY STARLIGHT by Carol Ghiglieri
Stella is sitting in a basement bar wrapped around her third vodka gimlet. She loves the number three, with its magical connotations and its open asymmetry, almost a figure eight, infinity. Three, lucky three, the third one’s always the charm. The third drink delivers her to a near perfect state. It is quiet, absolute, revelatory.
The man on the next stool notices Stella’s on her third gimlet. Is he counting? She wouldn’t put it past him. Or else, he has no idea what gimlet she’s on but instead he’s what might be called a Student of the Vibe, a decoder of gesture and body language. Or maybe it’s simply that he recognizes an opening when he sees one, not rationally but instinctively, like an athlete or a killer.
He turns to her and introduces himself, and Stella, nicely lubricated, welcomes him, accepts him with a warm extended hand. She calls him by his name, which is Steve.
Steve takes the hand and instead of shaking it turns it palm-upward and gazes into it, absorbed. His palm-reading come-on, Stella observes. So unoriginal, she could think, but she doesn’t.
She watches as he does his very well-rehearsed shtick and she thinks he is handsome in a dark bar sort of way. He isn’t someone she grew up to marry, that much is plain. He smokes unfiltered cigarettes and spends his nights belowground where there isn’t nearly enough light to read by.
Steve has large, sad eyes, which Stella always goes for, maybe because they remind her of her first love, Mr. Lincoln, the family’s yellow Labrador retriever. Her mother brought him home as a pup when Stella was five, six months after her father died. Mr. Lincoln was going to grow up to be big and strong, her mother told the children. He would be their friend and protector. They could always feel safe with Mr. Lincoln around. And how right her mother was! Nobody in that family ever understood Stella the way Mr. Lincoln did.
Steve lowers his head inches from her palm as if he’s going to smell her hand or eat it. Stella laughs. She is both light and heavy now in that way three gimlets make her feel. She thinks she wouldn’t trade this feeling for anything, but that’s just the vodka talking.
With her free hand she grabs the stem of her glass and downs the last of her drink. The small wedge of lime tumbles forward, hits her in the face, then falls back down to the bottom of the glass. She plucks the tangy piece of fruit and sucks it. When it comes to her gimlets she is assiduous and thorough.
“Tell me what you see,” she says. “But only if it’s good. Don’t tell me I’ll die young, or that I’m going to end up penniless without any teeth. I don’t think people should be given information like that. I really don’t.”
“It’s fascinating.”
“What is? Tell me.”
“Well, right here, you see, right here?” He points to a spot an inch or so above her wrist. “These lines form perfectly the Chinese character for hope.”
Stella is unimpressed and wants her hand back.
“Buy you another drink?” Steve asks, noticing her empty glass.
She contemplates this question. She does not feel as heartily enthusiastic about a fourth drink. If three is a charm, four is a little desperate. Four is makeup smearing and your skirt on sideways after a trip to the ladies’ room. Four is the slippery slope. There are many things Stella can’t bear, but first among them is her own desperation. She may have what’s known as a problem with alcohol, but her problem is modest, observes limits.
She looks at her watch. It’s still early, if she wants to call Philip. “All right,” she answers after a long pause.
Already she senses the evanescence of her three-gimlet bliss. On some nights that’s her cue to call it quits and go home to bed. She’ll wake in the morning with a fuzzy head and queasy stomach, and these will give her day a recognizable shape and focus. Other nights, though, she will have a fourth, a fifth, even a sixth drink, all in the hopes of finding her way back to the promise of the third.
She vows she will slowly sip the new gimlet that’s placed before her. She will pretend she’s in the desert and the gimlet is the last of her water. She is drawn to this image, with its searing relentlessness, its imposition of hardship, both of which feel true to her, accurate, though unacknowledged by most.
“You haven’t told me your name,” Steve says. “I’ve read your palm and I don’t even know your name.”
“Stella,” she tells him.
“Stella,” he repeats. “Stella by Starlight. You get that a lot, I bet.”
She nods and thinks, but only in bars. She thinks that people in bars are different from everybody else. They hum “Stella by Starlight” when they meet you, as if it were an inbred trait. They yell at you like Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire. People just don’t do that in the light of day. She thinks that aboveground people could stand to learn a thing or two from the people down here, that the denizens of taverns have something to teach. They are poets, scholars of woundedness and blight.
There is a lapse in conversation and they both fall silent. Stella is used to being talked up in bars. It’s an occupational hazard, but there are worse things. Not being talked up might be worse – loneliness that stretches on and on. Her mind jumps to Philip, and she wonders if she’ll call him. All day, all week, Stella has been debating whether or not to call Philip tonight, on the occasion of his thirty-fifth birthday. They haven’t spoken in six months, but they were together for ten times that long, or longer, just over six years. The thought of actually speaking to him makes her stomach clench, and she tries to think of something else, but her mind gravitates back to him. Try not to think of a pink elephant, somebody once dared her. She has read somewhere that thoughts are only energy blips. But that too is a thought, an energy blip, nothing. The infinite regress of this makes her head spin.
Philip. She will allow herself to think of him for three minutes – the time it takes to soft-boil an egg. She recalls two scenes between them; the recollections have become fused, and she remembers them frequently, habitually, as if together, like bookends, they contain the whole of her life. In the first, they are standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon. They have been driving for days, all the way from San Francisco, simply to see this sight. They are no different from the zillions of other Americans who’ve more or less made the same trek. They are innocent and normal. They hold hands and kiss, the great gorge yawning before them. In the second scene, Philip is sitting on their bed, leaning forward on his knees, crying. Years have passed – three and a half, four. She has gone home with a strange man she’s met in a club, and Philip knows this, knows this is not the first time. He repeatedly asks why, and the question strikes her with its startling unanswerability, like a zen koan. She doesn’t know, she tells him. But if she doesn’t, then who?
The bar she’s in now is named Moriarty’s. The name is big and expensive-sounding but the bar is small and forgettable. Stella has been here dozens of times, but the bartenders always switch. There are a few tables in back where there is almost no light at all, but Stella always sits at the bar, where the different-colored bottles shine bright like a patchwork quilt. Several stools down, there is a couple deep in conversation. Their drinks are red, like a child’s birthday punch. The only other person at the bar is a man who appears ageless. He could be sixty or he could be thirty-five. Stella really cannot tell. He has been staring at her on and off, and she is glad that she’s sitting beside Steve, who seems about forty years old and harmless.
There is a jukebox in the bar which the couple has pumped full of quarters. They chose pop tunes, standards; they seem to have spent a small fortune so that the bar will never run out of music. Music in a bar is essential, Stella knows.
Steve picks up his pack of cigarettes and offers Stella one. She doesn’t decline though she isn’t a smoker. She wants to say yes to him. He gives her a light and they both sit, elbows on the bar, on fire.
“Smoking feels very primitive,” she says, and Steve, after a deep inhalation during which smoke enters his body, and then slowly exits, nods in agreement.
He tells her that he tried to quit once, that he went to a hypnotist with an excellent track record. “But I was one of his failures.”
“You didn’t want to quit,” Stella tells him. “You have to want to quit. You have to believe there’s life on the other side.”
“The other side,” Steve says with a laugh.
Just then the door opens and a man walks in with snowflakes dotting his jacket. This is the first new arrival since Stella’s been here, and when she came in over an hour ago it wasn’t snowing. The man takes the empty stool beside Steve and orders a Johnny Walker. He has broad shoulders and his forehead is large, and Stella is sure that that brow portends something, though she can’t think of what. She wants to ask Steve, the chiromancer.
Stella went to a palm reader once. She has gone to all kinds of things. A couple of months ago she even tried AA, but she couldn’t get with the program. It wasn’t that she objected to all the Higher Power stuff. She was fine with Higher Powers – the higher the better. For her, the sticking point was the abstinence. It wasn’t an idea she could get excited about. Just thinking about somebody sponsoring her, investing in her, urging her to go without, made her feel lonely and in need of a drink even more, and once after a meeting, which turned out to be her last, she went straight from the church basement to a bar a few blocks away. “You’re not ready,” one of the members had told her in a preachy, know-it-all way. But it was true. Sometimes the truth is delivered from the lips of preachy know-it-alls. Stella wants to tell Steve this, but she sees he is in conversation with the man who’s just sat down.
After a moment Stella realizes that the two of them know each other. She feels a pang of exclusion, so she puffs on her cigarette and takes a sip of her gimlet. Having things in your hands, lifting them to your mouth, is always somewhat of a help.
Stella went to the palm reader when things first started to go bad with Philip. She’d been on her way to visit an old friend who lived in the mountains north of Truckee, and she pulled over at the giant cardboard palm on the side of the road. Maybe a palm reader could tell her what she needed to know – if she and Philip were destined for each other, or not. Maybe the answers were encoded somewhere in the groove of her lifeline. The palm reader took Stella’s hand roughly in hers and scowled. She said that what Stella needed was a spiritual cleansing. This would take weeks and entail several visits, but upon completion she and Philip would be in harmony, aligned. But Stella was four and a half hours from home; she had to be back to work on Monday. The spiritual cleansing, however necessary, wasn’t feasible. The palm reader listened and revised herself accordingly: she took a second look at Stella’s palm and predicted a long, happy life for Stella and Philip, which is what she divined Stella had paid fifteen dollars to hear.
Feeling mildly abandoned by Steve, Stella catches eyes with the ageless man. He smiles at her and she looks away. She doesn’t want to encourage him. All she wants is to sit here and drink. All she wants is to be left alone. But if that’s true, she wonders, if that’s really what she wants, then why doesn’t she just go home after work and drink at her kitchen table where there’s nobody to make eye contact with, no one to witness as she slowly comes unhinged. But Stella never drinks at home. There isn’t even liquor in her cabinets. At home she drinks chocolate milk or Pepsi.
Steve leans back on his stool and introduces Stella to his good friend Nate. Stella reaches across the bar and shakes Nate’s gigantic hand.
“Is it snowing outside?” she asks. She thinks of snow, and then of snow globes, liquid and crystalline and vaguely sentimental.
“Shit, yeah, Stella, it’s really coming down. There’ll be half a foot out there in no time.”
Stella looks down and sees she’s wearing boots. Apparently she has heard something about the storm, but she can’t remember that now.
“It wasn’t supposed to hit until tomorrow,” Steve declares.
“Yeah, well, tell that to Mother Nature, my friend.”
Stella is spending her first winter in a snowy climate. She hails from a state known far and wide for its seasonlessness. That’s what everyone comments on when she tells them where she’s from. There is reproach in this observation, Stella has come to think. In the beginning she thought it was envy, but now she’s almost certain it’s scorn. People who have seasons are proud and look down on places that lack them.
In the spring, after the palm reader, after the scene in the bedroom, crying, after a stint with a couples therapist, she decided on relocation. The couples therapist had been Philip’s idea: an attractive, large-boned, olive-skinned woman in her fifties named Daisy Jaramillo. She herself was divorced, which Stella took as a bad omen, but Philip had heard good things. He believed in the therapeutic model; he believed in the capacity for change, in Stella’s capacity for change. It was clear from the start, however, that Daisy was not impartial, that she was clearly on Philip’s side. Stella was the one with “intimacy fears.” Stella was the one with a “compulsion to reenact old traumas.”
“You’re angling for abandonment, Stella, only Philip isn’t your father and he won’t play along.”
“My father didn’t abandon me, he died.”
“Same thing,” Daisy said smugly.
Finally Stella refused to see Daisy anymore, which, Philip said, just proved Daisy’s point. But it was all so circular it made Stella crazy. Who wanted to talk about trauma, anyway? Philip, Daisy – let them talk about that crap. What she had wanted to say, but could never figure out how to, was that going home with those men had made her feel alive, had proven to her, in some real way, that her life wasn’t finished but that there were still new things left waiting to happen. With Philip, a dreary sort of sameness had set in, in the apartment night after night, like listening to the same record on the stereo over and over, past the point of appreciation, until you wanted to throw it against the wall and smash it to pieces.
When she quit couples therapy, Philip moved out, and her response was to pack her car and head east until she could drive no further. Almost immediately, she began to miss Philip. That’s when she started drinking the way she drinks now, earnestly, purposefully.
Stella clinks glasses with Steve and Nate and says, “To snow.” She laughs and feels slightly giddy. Nate’s presence draws her out. He is bear-like and friendly and she likes him on the spot. He seems uncomplicated, as unthreatening as a snow globe. Steve explains to Stella that he and Nate were in business together. Restaurateurs, he tells her, savoring the word. “Nate here is one hell of a cook.”
“What happened to the business?” Stella asks.
“We each made our million so we figured it was time to move on.”
Nate howls an outraged cry and slams his hand down on the bar. “Don’t believe it, Stella. Not for a minute. He’s right, though, I am a hell of a cook.”
“But what happened to the restaurant?”
“Ah,” says Nate, “the restaurant business. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. If somebody offers you the entire world to run his restaurant, turn him down, Stella, turn him down. Everybody thinks it looks so easy. We thought it looked so easy. Like having a party every night!”
“We sold it,” Steve says. “Two, two and a half years ago.”
“And then you took up palmistry and Chinese ideography.”
“Oh, no, no. That was before.” He is so sincere-sounding she almost believes him.
The bartender sees that Steve and Nate are empty and asks if they want another round. He manages this communication completely without words, using a graceful language of the hand and eye.
Nate looks at his watch and then at Steve. “They’re waiting,” he says.
Stella feels herself pull away slightly. She stares at the ashtray and pictures the short walk home, the nightly pre-bed rituals she sometimes abandons because the repetition wearies her. It’s repetition she cannot abide. Sameness, over and over, ad nauseam. She knows now it wasn’t Philip – the tedium and deadness. They have followed her all this way.
“Right,” Steve says. “Better not keep them.”
“They’ve been soaking for twenty-four hours,” says Nate.
“How many of them are there?”
“Four luscious beauties ready to go.”
“Stella, could you eat?” Steve asks. “Nate has come to town with venison steaks.”
“Sure, sure, you’re welcome, Stella. There’s plenty. And none of this dry, stringy leather that passes for meat. You have to know how to handle it every step of the way.”
“It’s true. Nate is a genius with game.”
“I use just a pinch of nutmeg in the marinade.”
“So you’re a hunter?” Stella asks. It is the one thing she knows about her father. There was a photo of him atop the piano nobody played. He wore waders and held a rifle, on the lookout for ducks or geese – she never did ask.
“Yep,” Nate says. “Been hunting ever since I was a boy.”
“You?” Stella asks Steve.
“Me? Never. I just eat the spoils.”
“So what do you say, Stella,” Nate asks. “Are you hungry?”
She looks down at the palms of her hands and thinks that if there’s hope in them, a fat lot of good it’s done her. Is she hungry? She can’t feel hunger as a presence anywhere, but when she tries to remember the last thing she ate, all she can come up with is half a turkey sandwich almost ten hours ago. She always skips food on the days she’s going to drink. Eating strikes her as such a contrary impulse. But she is hungry. She’s terribly hungry. There are a thousand hungers and Stella is prey to them all; they’d finish her if it weren’t for the vodka and limes.
Her fingers tap rhythmically on the countertop. Nate has wandered off to the men’s room, and only Steve is left at the bar. “It’s my ex-boyfriend’s birthday,” she says.
“Ex? Why ex?”
Why ex? She translates this to y x, reconfiguring the question as an algebraic expression. She has a fondness for math, though she was never any good at it. She wants another drink. Philip. It is getting harder to see him. Harder and harder to imagine actually speaking to him, harder to imagine that he will be happy to hear her voice, to imagine that he could possibly forgive her. She is back at the edge of the Grand Canyon, staring into the dizzying chasm, her failure of imagination.
Steve leans forward and kisses her, and she thinks yes, this is how everything happens. Even the novel experiences have begun to strike her as similar, routine. Even the new things are starting to feel yellowed and frayed at the edges.
Stella is not prepared for what awaits them outside. She has forgotten all about the snow, all about the first storm that will usher in the season. The ground was covered with pavement when she was on it last, but now it is heaped with white. A soft, powdery, barely believable substance that simply doesn’t occur where she is from.
They climb up to the sidewalk, poking holes in a Styrofoam carpet.
“Holy Mother,” Nate says, his large voice muffled by the white.
Snow drops placidly from the sky; there appears to be no end to it. The whole street is blanketed, quiet.
“Never,” Stella says, because she’s never seen anything like the snow’s magical beauty. Steve puts an arm around her and hums a few bars of “Stella by Starlight” even though the cloud cover has obscured the stars tonight.
“But it will all melt, won’t it?” she asks.
“Do you want it to?”
“No.”
“Then no. It won’t.”
She holds out her palm to him beneath a streetlight. “Now what do you see?”
“You will have an adventure with a tall, handsome stranger.”
She looks over at Nate who is already in the car, warming the engine. “And then?” But before Steve can answer she pulls back her hand. She examines the lines like ancient gullies, creases of time-worn folds. Snowflakes fall onto her open palm. She has never seen snow. She has never eaten a deer. She has never called Philip and told him she was sorry, so sorry she hoped she could find the words.
Carol Ghiglieri has been a recipient of the Writers Voice New Voice Fiction Award.