268
PARTISAN REVIEW
"I've been everywhere and I've seen everything," said Gabriel
the bartender. He was big and almost fat and he had a broad
heavy face. His remark, an opening gambit, had been directed at
Tobias, a young man who looked at once seedy and boyish.
"Are you twenty-one?" Gabriel called out to the gray-haired
middle-aged ladies who had just ordered Martinis at ten o'clock
in
the evening. The ladies who looked like schoolteachers were delighted
so much by this gallant query that they blushed.
"Where are you from?" Tobias asked Gabriel. Gabriel looked
sharply at Tobias to make sure that the question was a friendly
one.
He
saw that
it
was.
"I was born in Boston
Mass,"
Gabriel said. "When I was six–
teen, my father threw
me
out of the house for running after women.
I went to Australia, China, Japan, England, and France. I was
in
World War One, and then I came back here. I've had more women
than you have hair on your head!"
Tobias, impressed, brushed back his thick mop of hair with
the flat of his hand.
A customer at a table called to Gabriel, asking for two Tom
Collinses.
"Go get them yourself!" said Gabriel as he began to prepare
them. He poured the gin into a jigger with a false aplomb, spilling
it over each time.
"You ought to get bigger bottles so that you will have enough
to spill," said a
customer
at a table near the bar.
"You're right," said Gabriel. "That's a good idea. I'll tell the
Greek. He'll jump at the idea." He looked at the wetness and
decided to ignore it.
"This bar has not been wiped since Noah built the Ark," he
remarked in general. Then he served the two drinks he had just
made and returned to Tobias.
"Here I am," he continued as if he had not stopped, "forty–
five years of age, turned down by the army, too old. But let me
tell you something, to this day I wear silk underwear and I have
a hundred suits."
"What are you trying to prove?" asked Tobias, but in a gentle
tone.
"What do you want me to prove?" Gabriel thought that his
